The Shining Stallion (9 page)

“Cade, my dad used to tell me stories to try to help me understand my roots, my heritage, you know? I kind of understand the old way. In fact, I think that stuff is cool, but you still wouldn't get me—even now—to stay in any cave all alone at night, let alone one with the bones of the ancestors.”

Darby felt a warmth for Megan she hadn't before. Even though Megan didn't like Cade for some reason, it was clear she sympathized.

“Anyway,” Cade said, “I got scared and sneaked out of the cave before whoever was coming for things got there, and that's when Manny beat me up pretty good.”

“Pretty bad,” Darby corrected, without meaning to.

Cade gave a
whatever
shrug, but Darby sat close enough to see the bulge in his cheek as his tongue probed the spot that had been broken and swollen.

“But then Jonah had a talk with Manny.” Cade sounded proud that his adopted father had defended him.

“So, if Manny's out of the business now,” Darby said briskly, “that necklace probably fell there a long time ago. Maybe because it was broken, they left it behind?”

“It would still be worth plenty,” Cade said. “But I guess it could have happened that way, or maybe a bird got into a cave and pecked at the shiny shell, then flew away with it and let it fall to see if there was food inside.”

All at once the mourning voices from Darby's dream came back to her. She thought of the sad women sitting in a cave, holding their hands out to her.

They'd been reaching for the necklace.

Darby bolted to her feet.

Of course she wanted to see the wild stallion, but he was obviously hiding. Since he was, she wanted to get away from that necklace. Far, far away, as fast as she could.

“Let's get out of here,” Darby said.

“We will,” Cade said resolutely. “Just as soon as we put that necklace back where it came from.”

“W
hat are you talking about?” Darby asked in bewilderment, but Cade spoke right over her.

“Some people feel awfully strongly about this,” he said to Megan. “I say we put it back until it can be blessed by the proper religious leader, and then it can be moved to a museum.”

“That's an okay plan. All except that last part,” Megan said. “Once it's blessed and returned to the
ali'i
, the cave should be sealed.”

“So someone can just come
un
seal it all over again?” Cade demanded.

“Stop! Couldn't it be like a replica or something?” Darby turned toward Megan. “You said yourself tourists and hikers come into Crimson Vale. Besides,
I don't want to keep it. Let's turn it in to the police or something!”

Megan's head tilted to one side as if she was considering the idea.

“You girls ride back to the ranch,” Cade said. “I'll take care of it.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.” Megan stood with her hands on her hips and feet wide apart. To Darby, she looked like an Amazon warrior. “Should we put on white gloves and have a little tea party, too?”

Cade burst into laughter that seemed, to Darby, totally inappropriate for the mess they were in.

But Cade kept laughing until finally he cleared his throat to say, “You are such a jock. I suppose
you
want to put it back.”

“No, I don't. The idea scares the heck out of me—not the climbing, but the cave. And I'm not too crazy about carrying that thing, either.” Megan flashed a doubtful look at the necklace. “But it's the right thing to do, so I'll help.”

“What about me?” Darby asked. Megan and Cade stared at her with such astonishment, she had to explain. “I'm the one who got us into this in the first place, and I've already climbed down there before.”

“Yeah, I know,” Megan said, pointing to Darby's bruised cheek.

“One slip. Except for that I did fine,” Darby insisted.

Cade stood with both hands on his saddle, mut
tering about his rope.

He must have forgotten it, Darby thought. Maybe he'd give up on this foolhardy plan.

“Too bad you don't have it,” Darby said.

“Have—my rope? I've got my riata,” he said, lifting a braided leather coil. “I don't go anywhere without it, but I don't think we'll need it from here.”

Cade and Megan decided they were going down a path he remembered, leaving Darby at the base of the waterfall with the horses.

“Why don't I get any say in this?” Darby tried not to sound like what she was, the youngest of the group.

Megan gave Darby's shoulder a gentle punch.

“We know the territory better. That's all,” Megan said.

“
I
know the territory,” Cade contradicted her. “But I've seen Mekana go like a gecko up the side of a waterfall.”

Divided over whether she should yell at Cade for using her dad's name for her, or acknowledge his compliment about her climbing, Megan hesitated, which gave Darby an opening to distract them.

“You two are stronger and in better shape than I am,” Darby conceded, “but if you get in trouble, I'm smart enough to get you out of it.”

“Of course, there's that, too,” Megan said, smiling.

And so they left her, bickering as they followed a
maze of thread-wide trails and tiny handholds that Cade remembered from his childhood.

At first Darby watched over the edge, but it didn't take long before they vanished from sight. Listening to the crunch of their boots on the rocks and watching the cascades of sand plummet hundreds of feet to the beach below just made her nervous, anyway.

After she had walked from horse to horse, loosening Joker's breast collar, rubbing under Conch's headstall until he groaned with pleasure, then working her hand between Navigator's saddle pad and his withers to knead his muscles, Darby decided to take her boots off and dangle her feet in the waterfall pool.

Darby caught her breath. Surprised, she yanked her feet out of the pool, which was definitely the coldest substance she'd felt in Hawaii. Gradually, though, she rolled her jeans up to her knees and soaked her feet some more.

She gazed into the silver curtain of water, noticing white streaks where it touched the rocks behind it, black streaks where it appeared to plummet past darkness. Could there be a cave behind the waterfall? She tried to picture such a thing and decided she must have seen it in a movie.

She'd been sitting poolside, trying to decide if the waterfall had been in
Peter Pan
or
The Little Mermaid
, when she heard a rustling noise.

Darby thought of the black boar Megan had seen when they'd ridden up here before, but it was proba
bly just a breeze in the flapping ti leaves. Auntie Cathy had told her they were sometimes used to make hula skirts and they were pretty easy to recognize.

But would that sound make all three geldings break off their doze to stare across the valley and up to a ridge?

Good,
Darby thought.
Whatever was moving was far away
.

Without Megan and Cade, she didn't feel so brave.

Navigator uttered a shivery nicker that carried across the clearing and out over the valley to the far ridge. Something had been moving, but now it stopped to listen.

It was then that Darby spotted the wild stallion.

He was so far away, her hand could have blocked him from view. But she wouldn't have done such a thing. The black horse was amazing.

From here, Darby couldn't see his blue eye, but his sleek coat and sturdy conformation gave him away. He moved with a stallion's bravado, and though he'd been still when she'd spotted his face among the ferns on her first day on Wild Horse Island, she recognized him. And she'd bet he was the same horse that had stood in the shadows of the candlenut tree, the same stallion who'd killed Old Luna and survived to run free.

He was running now, and though Darby knew
that horses sometimes galloped for the sheer joy of it, she didn't get that feeling. Desperation charged each of his strides.

Conch pulled back against his tether. Megan had tied the grulla up short, because he was young and reacted to everything, but now he'd turned his attention to a figure behind the wild horse.

Darby wished she had binoculars. She tried to puzzle out what was behind the black horse, but only one guess made sense: a man.

Darby couldn't have said why she was so certain it was Manny, but something—location, of course, and all the talk about Manny and wild horses—told Darby it was him.

A small avalanche slid and tumbled nearby.

Darby had always thought “I nearly jumped out of my skin” was a silly, exaggerated expression. Until now.

Megan's voice soared up from the face of the pali, shouting “We're fine!” and knocking Darby breathless.

Darby dropped to her knees and scuttled over to the edge. She didn't want Megan attracting Manny's attention.

“Shh,” Darby hissed, over the edge.

Waves broke on the beach below, and if they covered her voice, Darby thought, they'd definitely hide Megan's. And though Manny couldn't possibly hear from where he was, unless he had radar like a bat,
Darby didn't want to take a chance.

“I said, don't worry your pretty little head, because we're safe,” Megan yelled even louder.

Megan was in great spirits, Darby thought.

“Okay,” Darby whispered back.

“Guess she can't hear me,” Megan called to Cade.

Darby heard Cade mumble something in response and she crossed her fingers that Megan wouldn't use her soccer-field shout to announce her whereabouts to Darby again.

If she did, Darby didn't hear her. Gradually the tension drained out of Darby's muscles.

By the time she edged back to the pool, the geldings had lost interest in the ridgeline. It was empty of horse and man, and so were the rows of taro planted between channels of blue water. Darby hoped it would stay that way.

Then she heard something nearby that didn't sound like Megan or Cade. It was moving this way too fast to be them.

Darby closed her eyes to concentrate on what sounded like high heels going up a parking garage stairwell. Since that was ridiculous, she stood up and walked around barefoot, tilting her head from side to side, using her eyes as well as her ears as she tried to locate the source of the sound.

No bushes were waving from an animal's passage. No branches bounced under the weight of a bird. And the wind was taking a break.

The tapping sound stopped, but Darby felt the tension of something focused on her awareness. Whatever it was hadn't gone away. It was waiting for her to move.

Darby shivered, wishing she had a less vivid imagination.

I won't think about that,
she told herself. Don't remember that some civilizations sacrificed beloved horses to go along with their masters into the netherworld.

Could the Shining Stallion story have grown out of such a tradition? Could one of the stallions that had been sacrificed, have refused to go easily into the darkness? And what if he lingered here, making spooky stallion sounds inside the soaring cliffs?

Get real,
Darby scolded herself.

Nothing like that was possible, of course, but Darby decided she'd feel more comfortable alongside the horses. Three tons of living horseflesh should be able to protect her from a ghost.

Darby didn't stop to pull on her boots. Barefooted, she picked her way across the red dirt. She'd only taken a few steps, but if she'd stayed where she'd been standing, the blue-eyed stallion might have crushed her.

A haunted scream burst from the stallion's mouth as he plunged through the waterfall, surrounded by a ring of rainbows and crystal spray.

As a group, the geldings shifted away from him,
slamming shoulders and stirrups against one another, leaving Darby exposed to the stallion's fury.

“I'm not the one,” she told him shakily. “I won't hurt you.”

Vibrating with fury, the black horse bared his teeth and rose in a half rear. As he came down, just feet from Darby, dripping feathers showed on his trim legs and the ground quaked under hooves that left wet prints like blood in the red dirt. Knots and tangles studded his mane. Thorns and a twig of green berries hung snarled in his wet tail.

He was a wild beast, Darby thought, glittering with water from the fall named for him, but she tried to encompass him with all her horse charmer's instincts.

He was magnificent, screaming his outrage that she'd followed him here. This place of wild beauty belonged to those with wings or tails. Not to her.

Navigator whinnied, and he couldn't have told Darby to flee more clearly than if he'd shouted “Run!”

The stallion answered Navigator's defiance with a sound her ears couldn't take in. The neigh's shrill thunder drowned out the rush of the waterfall.

Should she back up, or go forward? Darby didn't know how to obey the stallion. She pictured Hoku, charging the fence with flattened ears when Luna passed by.

But I'm not a horse,
Darby thought.
I don't know how
to deflect a stallion's attack.

The geldings did.

Brown, gray, and bronze heads bowed to the screaming stallion and he went silent. The geldings lowered their muzzles to brush the ground and rolled their eyes, telling the black horse he was the unquestioned ruler of this place.

At last the stallion settled on all four hooves. He snorted as rivulets ran off his onyx shoulders and down his legs, turning the dust into scarlet mud.

With the three geldings' submission assured, the stallion turned back to Darby.

One brown eye and one blue fixed on Darby's. The stallion's stare was hypnotic. If he could read her mind, he'd find only awe.

And confusion.

Should she lower her eyes as the geldings had?

No. Darby jerked her chin up to the height of her neck and strained each vertebra away from the next. Instinct told her not to cower before the mighty horse.

Just then, rocks slid and stones ricocheted off the cliff. Cade and Megan were coming back up.

Before she could shout out to her friends she glimpsed hands, and Cade's face came into view.

As the stallion turned on this new challenge, Darby caught the sapphire flash of his eye. With a seesaw buck and a deadly lashing of his hind hooves, the stallion threatened the intruders and bolted past
Darby and the geldings.

His hard wet hooves clattered, seeking balance on a slick rock shelf, and Darby ran after him, dreading a fall for either of them.

Safe and out of reach of human hands, he galloped with slanting steps down the path and toward the ravine, a shining black mustang in a halo of red dust.