Dead Heat

CHAPTER 13

The arena they had been in, despite its size, was not a tenth of the Scottsdale show grounds. Their program guide promised them more than two thousand horses, and Anna supposed that many horses could not be contained in a small area.

And Charles was interested in them all. Anna soon gave up watching horses for the pleasure of watching her husband watch the horses. Once in a while he’d grunt in approval, and she knew he’d found something he really liked.

They stood for a while by a covered arena (there were lots of arenas) where people were doing some last-minute training or warming up or whatever. English horses with big shoes trotted rapidly around, lapping the western horses whose oh-so-slow gaits seemed almost Zen-like. Women riders outnumbered men, but not by a huge margin except in the ten-to-eighteen-year-old crowd, which seemed to be mostly girls. One horse was foaming with sweat, and his mincing western gait was stiff and uncomfortable looking. His rider kept pulling back on the bit and spurring at the same time. Charles grunted and walked away from the arena.

“What was she trying to do?” asked Anna.

“I don’t know,” Charles said unhappily. “And I can tell you that poor horse didn’t know, either.”

They stopped for a bunch of young horses crowded in front of yet another arena, clad only in narrow-banded halters designed to show off their exotic heads. They sidled and snorted and looked pretty. A few of them were frightened—Anna could smell it—but most of them were just bouncing around with happy energy, preening when they noticed someone looking at them.

Charles bought Anna an ice cream cone, taking a good-humored lick himself when she offered it to him.

And nowhere did they smell fae.

The buildings where the horses were stabled were set in parallel lines along the outer edge of the show grounds. Some of them were strewn with banners belonging to one stable or another. They found the Sani stables more by luck than because they were looking for them.

A crowd of children were gathered around the horse Michael had ridden in the lead-line class. He was bare of tack except for his halter and stood half-asleep while one of the Sani handlers held him so that the children could pet him.

Kage stood by the horse’s hindquarters, gently directing the kids toward the front of the horse instead of the rear and patiently answering questions. Mackie seemed to be helping, showing the younger children how to pet gently. She was dressed in a white button-up shirt tucked into dark gray stretch pants that were tucked into tall English riding boots.

“Anna, Anna,” caroled Michael, breaking free of the crowd and running up to her. “I won, I won, did you see me?”

She smiled. “I did. Did you have fun?”

“I like riding Nix,” he said, bouncing happily in a way that reminded her of the bunch of young horses they’d just seen. “He is Grandpa’s horse and he likes kids. The kids from my school are here. They saw me win, too. I’m letting them pet my horse.”

“I see that.”

Ms. Newman was mostly too busy admiring Kage to look their way, though she managed one sly look at Charles that stopped as soon as Anna caught her eye. Ms. Edison smiled sharply, an aha smile, but didn’t leave her post at the rear of the herd of children.

Anna didn’t know if it was good or bad that the principal had figured out just who had clued them into the trouble at the day care. None of them, children or teachers, smelled of fae magic, either. She could smell Ms. Edison’s perfume and Ms. Newman’s shampoo, and one of the kids had a cat, but she didn’t smell fae.

Charles walked them around the kids, nodding to Kage as they passed, and into the stable building. Hosteen was drinking from a bottle of water and chatting with Wade. Beside them, sitting hunched over on a straw bale, Chelsea had her eyes closed.

Anna left Charles’s side and sat down beside Chelsea. She finished the last of her ice cream cone, licked her sticky fingers, and tried to radiate calm. She was rewarded by Chelsea’s gradual relaxation, though the other woman didn’t open her eyes.

“Too many people,” Chelsea murmured. “Too many sounds, too many smells.”

“Yeah,” Anna agreed. “It hits all of us like that once in a while. Do you need to go home?”

Chelsea shook her head, took a deep breath, and opened her eyes. “Not until after Mackie’s class. Then a whole bunch of us will go back to the ranch. All the kids and me. We’ll take Nix, too. He’s twenty-eight, ancient of days. One day of excitement is enough for him.”

“How long until Mackie’s class?” Anna asked.

Hosteen said, “About an hour.”

“Then why don’t I wait with you here?”

Chelsea smiled tensely, but it was Hosteen who said in a gentle voice, “I think that would be very useful. Thank you.”

About then Ms. Edison came into the stables to thank Chelsea for letting the four-year-olds pet Michael’s mount. She was smiling, gracious, and brief.

Mackie’s class was a lot smaller than the lead-line class had been. There were three girls, one of them nearer to ten and the other girl about Mackie’s age.

“This is English pleasure,” said Joseph for Anna’s benefit. “The horses have more elevated gaits; that means they pick their feet up higher and are generally more excitable. There aren’t a lot of horses who can be English pleasure horses and be safe enough for someone under ten to ride.”

The riders rounded the ring at a trot, Heylight looking a lot bigger with Mackie riding him. Anna leaned forward and paid attention. The other younger girl looked a little off balance, and her horse, a sweet-faced chestnut, didn’t have the action of the other two horses.

This time, Anna noticed, the family was tenser than they had been for Michael, leaning forward in their seats. The horses walked for half the arena, reversed, and trotted.

Max groaned and Maggie sat up straighter. “Change diagonals, Mackie,” she said under her breath. “Come on, notice what’s going on. Quit paying attention to the crowd and watch what you’re doing.”

Anna leaned toward Charles in silent query.

“When you’re posting you rise and fall with one front leg instead of bouncing with every footfall,” Charles said.

It was like music, and Anna understood music. “Like cut time instead of four-four.”

“Right, it’s easier on the horse and on the rider. But when you are riding in a circle, you want to rise and fall with the outside leg; the inside leg on a circle is already taking more weight. Mackie is on the wrong leg. She’ll have to bounce a beat to change. There she goes. Good girl.”

“She’ll make reserve,” said Joseph. “That’s just fine. Not the first mistake she’s made in the ring, and it won’t be the last.”

“Any class that you end up still on top instead of eating dirt is a good class,” said Max, deadpan, but obviously quoting someone.

“She’s got the hands and the seat,” said Maggie. “Just like her grandfather. She’ll be one of the good ones.”

“If she wants to be,” said Chelsea.

She’d come to the stands with Wade, Anna, and Charles to watch while her husband was in the paddock behind the in-gate to make sure Mackie got into and out of her class okay. She was, Anna noticed, doing a lot better with the crowded arena than she had earlier. The hour in the quiet of their section of barn with Anna radiating calm had given her the respite she’d needed to regain her control.

Max laughed. “No one is capable of making Mackie do anything she doesn’t want to, Mom. You know that.”

The riders lined up in the middle, and the places were announced. Mackie did indeed take reserve, which apparently was second place. The horses trotted one more time all the way around the arena and then out of the gate.

Chelsea stood up as if she had springs. “I’ll go gather the children. Max, can you help your grandparents get home when they are ready?”

“Will do,” he said.

Charles got up, too. “Let’s take a break from the horse show. If there is someone who is fae here at the show grounds, we aren’t having any luck finding them.”

They ended up eating at a Chinese restaurant that was fairly decent—better than anything in Aspen Creek, anyway. It was late for lunch and early for dinner—so there was only one other couple in the place. Charles relaxed and listened in on Anna’s phone call with Special Agent Fisher.

Leslie sounded frustrated and unhappy. “Our expert was in with McDermit for two hours this morning, but he wants another crack at him this afternoon. Sorry.”

“Tell her,” Charles said thoughtfully, “to see if she can figure out if Mr. McDermit was gone for a couple of weeks in November, when the fae all disappeared into the reservations. He shouldn’t be one of the ones who hid out like the wearden in Ms. Jamison’s garden. If she’s checking the background of the other people associated with the day care, she should look at that for them, too.”

When Anna relayed the suggestion, Leslie sighed. “Already working on that, but it was right around Thanksgiving. A lot of people left to visit relatives. We are, my flunkies are, confirming that people actually went where they say they did. So far we found one wife who was supposed to be visiting her parents who was actually sleeping with a married man. And another who was in rehab. It is understandable that he told his work that he was taking an extended vacation. I promise I’ll call when I get something, or if I can get you in to talk to Mr. McDermit.”

They drove back to the Sanis’ ranch about two hours after they left the show, only to find it deserted. Anna called Kage.

“Chelsea’s hanging out with Michael, Mackie, and the girl who was last place in Mackie’s class,” Kage explained, a smile in his voice. Charles wondered why no one had called them to let them know that everyone was staying at the show. But Hosteen had his family well guarded, even without Anna and Charles.

“Mackie was feeling pretty bad until she saw that the little girl on the chestnut was crying,” Kage said. “She gave her the same pep talk Hosteen gives everyone. Did you do your best? Well, okay then. Any class where you don’t end up on the ground is a good class.” Charles could hear the smile in Kage’s voice. “Chelsea took them both to get ice cream with Hosteen.”

“I told you not to worry,” Charles said after she hung up.

“If I were a fae trying to steal children, that horse show with all of its distractions would be just the place to do it,” she said.

“He’ll have to get past Hosteen, Wade, and the handful of werewolves working the crowd because they aren’t going to be distracted from their job. And it’s pretty public. So far this one has gone out of its way to avoid detection.”

“Handful?” Anna frowned. “I only spotted two.”

“They mostly stayed out of range of your nose,” he said. “No use them running over the same places in the crowd where we were already looking. If we didn’t pick up on any fae, neither would they. But I know most of the people in Hosteen’s pack by sight.”

Charles settled in with his laptop on the only chair in their room to work on pack finances. Just because the fae were out terrorizing Scottsdale didn’t mean the rest of his work stopped.

Anna pulled out a paperback novel with a half-naked man holding an improbably long sword. He wondered if the sword was meant to be metaphoric. Then he wondered if he should be concerned that his mate was reading a book with a naked man on the cover. Anna stretched out on her stomach to read. Her feet were toward him. Her position gave him a nice view when he needed a break from studying numbers, and he quit worrying about naked men.

A couple of hours later they heard a car drive up and the front door opened. The chatter of happy voices told Charles that the younger children were home—and so was Max. He didn’t sound as happy as the kids. Charles was already logging off and shutting down his laptop when there was a quiet knock on their door.

Anna hopped off the bed and pulled the door open.

“Um, excuse me,” Max said. “But Granddad is down in the car and he’s too tired to get out. Grandma sent me up to get you.”

Charles brushed past him and leapt down the stairs. He was worried, though he knew that was ridiculous. Joseph was dying. He might die tonight, waiting for someone to help him out of the car. He might die a week from now in his bed.

Ridiculous or not, Charles rushed out to the car, where Maggie stood with the door open.

“Don’t you die on me, old man,” she said. “We have some fighting left to do.”

“And arguing, too,” Joseph said, the humor coming through the breathlessness just fine.

“I told you we should go after Mackie’s class,” she snapped.

“But we needed to see how good that stallion Conrad’s been bragging about really is. And then Lucy was riding in the amateur class on that filly she bought from us two years ago.”

“I know why you stayed,” Maggie said. “And it had nothing to do with Lucy’s filly and everything to do with stupid pride. You couldn’t admit you were feeling poorly.”

If she was yelling at him, Joseph was all right. As Charles bent down to lift his old friend, Maggie put her hand on his arm and leaned her head against his shoulder; he could all but feel her pain himself. Maggie was always sharpest when she hurt.

“Let’s get you inside,” Charles said.

“If I die after a day of watching beautiful horses, that would be okay,” Joseph said.

The spirits that seemed to be always hovering around Joseph, even if Charles was the only one who could see them, hit Charles so hard he could barely breathe. Their impact forced him to hesitate, stop walking altogether, and spread his legs a bit to keep his balance.

“You have a task yet,” he murmured when he could. He headed for the house. “Let me see if they’ll give you a little more strength to do what is necessary.”

“Tell those spirits that if they want him so badly, they might cure his cancer,” said Maggie tartly.

“It’s worth my life to tell the spirits anything,” Charles said. “You know better than to ask.”

He was starting to get an odd notion about those spirits. The spirits who petitioned him were not human, they were spirits of the earth and air. That didn’t mean there weren’t spirits of the dead. Usually the dead had a weight to them, a feeling of wrongness. The spirits surrounding Joseph burned with purpose, a heat that made Charles’s heart pound in his chest and called to Brother Wolf. There was nothing twisted or wrong in them.

Still. This incident he and Anna were unraveling involved so many dead innocents: children killed before they had a chance to decide who they were going to be. Unfinished.

The innocent dead … he’d only met one of those and if Mercy, who could see ghosts better than anyone he’d ever met, had not been with him, he’d never have connected that spirit to the child who’d been killed on that stretch of road a dozen years before. Mercy had seen the boy quite clearly, but Charles had only felt a hot sizzle on his skin, like a sunburn, only deeper.

Maybe this heat he felt from these spirits was like that child, only multiplied by all the dead who were owed balance because of the loss of their chance at life. Not rage, but vengeance.

Still, what service could an old man dying of cancer provide for dead children?

“Charles?” Anna asked hesitantly. “Are you going to keep Joseph out here all afternoon?”

He wondered how long he’d been standing still. Without replying he carried Joseph into the house.

“Anna?” he asked. “Could you come with me?” He thought again. “Maggie, it would be best if you stayed with Mackie and Michael.”

“Where do you want me?” asked Max. “I know how to hook up all of Granddad’s machinery.”

Max was like Samuel, Charles thought, a good man to have at your back. And he brought nothing with him that might change the nature of what Charles wanted to do.

Maggie … he didn’t quite trust what Maggie wanted. Maggie was never happy where she was, always looking elsewhere for happiness, for fulfillment. As much as she loved Joseph, and she did, she was not a restful person.

“Yes,” he told Max. “Come with us.”

Maggie looked at him with stricken eyes, and he felt as though he’d struck her.

“Strength and purpose are useful qualities,” he told her. “But for what I’m going to attempt, we need quiet souls.”

He didn’t know if it was enough, but he left Maggie and the kids in the living room and headed up to Joseph’s rooms.

He and Max helped Joseph into the bathroom to take care of the necessities of living, while Anna pulled back the bedding and generally made herself scarce so as not to embarrass Joseph. Charles hadn’t had to say anything to her. His mate was one of the most perceptive people he’d ever met.

They laid the old man, who had once been one of the toughest men Charles had ever met, on the bed, and he struggled to draw breath enough to talk. It made Charles’s heart hurt to see him this way.

“Shh,” said Charles.

He looked around the room for … something. “I don’t suppose there’s still a cello around here someplace, is there?” There used to be. Kage had played cello.

Max frowned. “Actually, I think there is. Kage’s old cello is still in his room here. Grandma makes him play it every Christmas. He starts sneaking practices in along about November. He says he doesn’t take it home because it just sits there and makes him feel guilty for not practicing an hour a day like Grandma used to make him do. Hold on.”

As soon as he was gone, Anna said, “You want me to play?”

“We need music,” he said, knowing it was true. “I think I need you to start it, and the cello is where your music lives.”

“They’re talking to you today,” she said. “The spirits. What are they saying?”

“That’s the problem,” he said. “Usually I know exactly what they want me to do. All I have to do is decide if I’m going to accommodate them or not. This time … all I can do is follow my instincts.”

“Good enough for me,” she said as Max came back into the room with a cello in a canvas carry bag.

Anna took the instrument, stripped away the wrappings, and gave it a cursory examination. “New strings,” she said as she tuned it. “Not a bad instrument.” She took the bow, rosined it briskly, and drew it across the strings.

Her eyebrows rose at the tone. “Better than I thought. Not as good as the one you got me, but it’s better than most student instruments. Do you have a song in mind?”

“Something … beautiful, but still upbeat.” He tried to put his feelings into words.

She nodded and then started playing.

“Lord of the Rings,” said Max, startled.

Charles closed his eyes, listening, and it was all right. He raised his voice in answer to the cello. No words, just music, until the words became necessary. By that time he was so lost in music, which he and Anna had morphed into their own song, that he didn’t even know what language he sang in, let alone what the meaning of the words were. They were just a shape in the music he and Anna made together.

The music built and the power burned down his arms into his hands, so he placed those hands on Joseph. When it was over and the heat was gone, Joseph slept comfortably. The heat, the fire in his veins, was gone. The room was silent, and he knew that his earlier theory was right.

For some reason, the dead, the children killed by the fae who’d attacked the Sani family, were very interested in Joseph. That was something he wasn’t going to share with Maggie and her very Navajo view of the dead. Maybe he should tell Joseph.

He covered the sleeping man while Anna put the cello back in its case. Max took it without a word and they all left, shutting the door quietly. Max started down the hallway farther into the depths of the house and stopped.

He turned back to them and met Charles’s eye.

“Anyone hearing that,” he said, “has to believe in magic.”

He left them. Anna took Charles down the hall in the other direction, toward the main part of the house.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he told her. “I find that somewhat unsettling.”

She took a deep breath, like an actress going onstage, pasted a big smile on her face, and said, “I find it somewhat reassuring that I’m not the only one who feels like I should be running around shouting, ‘Where’s the script? Where’s the script? If only I had a script I’d know what the freak I’m supposed to be doing.’”

While Charles had been making magic, Maggie, Mackie, and Michael had made sandwiches for everyone, since Ernestine had the day off. Maggie had also made a huge effort at cheer for the sake of the children.

“Where’s Chelsea?” Charles asked. Anna remembered that Chelsea was planning on coming home with the kids.

“Teri ate something that disagreed with her, so Mom borrowed an outfit and she’s going to take over Teri’s ride in the western pleasure futurity elimination round,” Max said.

“Ánáli Hastiin said she should,” added Mackie.

“Eat,” said Maggie, setting a giant plate of sandwiches down at the table where she’d already set a stack of dishes.

“What are your plans for the rest of the afternoon?” asked Max. “If you aren’t busy, Hosteen suggested I take you for a ride around the ranch. He said to remind you that you are guests, not guards. He had two of his pack follow us from the show grounds. They’re patrolling the grounds.”

Anna looked at Charles.

“Fine with me,” he said.

“What horses is Hosteen having you look at?” Max asked.

“I left the list upstairs,” Anna said. “Let me go get it.”

Anna and Mackie did the dishes while Max looked over the list with a pencil he used to make notes.

“We could go out for a ride, Anna,” he suggested when he was done scribbling. “Merrylegs is here. We’re not showing her at the big show this year. She’s more of a trail horse than an arena horse, though she’s not nearly as bad as Portabella that way.”

And, Anna thought, it would get them out of the house and her out from under Maggie’s glower. It was Charles who’d made her stay downstairs. So why was Anna getting the cold shoulder? Maggie hadn’t so much as looked at her since they’d come down the stairs.

Okay, she had to be honest. She understood. She didn’t like it, it upset her sense of justice, but she understood. Charles had explained his reason for leaving Maggie downstairs, which Maggie could accept. But Anna had gone up with him and with Joseph. Anna, young and werewolf Anna, had taken Maggie’s place.

“A ride sounds like fun,” Anna said, and Charles nodded.

“Can I come?” asked Michael.

“Sure,” said Maggie.

Mackie started to say something, but she looked at her grandmother and hesitated. Anna saw the moment she made the decision.

“Grandma? I’m tired of horses today. I don’t want to go for another ride.”

“You can stay with me, then,” Maggie said. “We’ll go play some Candy Land.”

This time they tacked up their own horses while Max found saddles that fit and bridles that would work.

“First time I ever rode a horse, I was eight,” he told them, helping Michael brush the horse he’d picked for him, a short, stout, brown-and-white-spotted half Arab named Romeo. “Kage was dating my mom and he was like, ‘Come ride some horses.’ When she and I got home that night I said—”

“‘You gotta marry him, Mom,’” said Michael. “‘He has horses.’”

Max laughed. “That’s right, pipsqueak. Maybe if I didn’t like horses so much, Mom wouldn’t have married Kage. And then you wouldn’t even be around.”

“Yes, I would,” Michael answered. “Because Daddy says I’m his penance for past sins.”

Anna hid her grin as she picked up Merrylegs’s foot to clean it. Merrylegs was a seven-year-old mare of indifferent breeding (Max’s words) who’d come to the Sanis as a training prospect. When her owner discovered boys, she’d turned over the mare’s registration and ownership in return for back board and training fees.

“She’s sweet as pie,” Max said. “Not a show horse of any kind. But she’ll try her heart out for you and take care of you. Mackie rides her a lot on the trails.”

For Charles, Max brought Portabella.

“She’s on your list,” Max said. “And she’s a fun ride on the trails.”

Merrylegs, as promised, was sweet and responsive. She also had a trot that made Anna glad she’d inherited her mom’s teeth and not her dad’s because if she’d had any fillings they’d have been gone by the time the ride was over. Merry’s canter was better and her walk was brisk, but that trot was horrible.

“Yeah,” said Max, though Anna hadn’t said anything. “It’s those really short and straight pasterns. She’s like riding a jackhammer. But she’ll canter forever, and her canter is lovely.”

They rode past the hill where Anna had turned Portabella around the day before. Max led them on by it and out into the desert.

“Okay,” he said. “You might as well see her strengths, right? And she’s best out here where common sense and willingness mean more than pretty.”

So they rode, and as a sort of camaraderie settled over them, Max gave Charles a half-shy look. “How did you meet Granddad?” he asked.

Anna wondered if he was going to answer Max. He didn’t often speak about the past unless it was important to something going on in the here and now. It was, Samuel had told her once, how the old wolves coped with the passing of time. Samuel was a lot older than Charles.

But the magic of riding in the last of the afternoon sun, the smell of horses, and the rhythm of the ride had, she decided, caught him up in the magic of the shared experience. Or maybe he didn’t have the heart to shut Max down with one of his usual conversation-killing two-words-or-less answers.

“I first saw him when he was about Michael’s age,” said Charles. “Really met him when he was barely a teenager in a bar fight in Phoenix—it can be a hard thing to be a different color when men get together and get drunk. I was walking by and I heard a war cry.” His horse snorted and shook her head; Charles patted her. “And then a whole lot of cursing and glass breaking. But it was the war cry that made me wade into that bar fight and start clearing it out. At the bottom of a pile of battered veterans—it was just after World War Two—was this skinny little Indian kid of about twelve or thirteen.”

Charles’s face lighted with the sudden grin he had sometimes. “I said, ‘Takes a real man to hit a kid.’” His grin widened. “One of the guys—he was sporting the start of a real beauty of a shiner—he said, ‘Hell, mister, all I said was that he should get his butt out of here because he was too Indian to be safe with all the rough stock in here drinking like fishes. And the kid lit into me like I punched him.’”

Charles ran his hand down the shiny long neck of his horse and then said, “Joseph never did have any quit in him. Though he learned, eventually, to pick his battles. I’d been up conducting my father’s business with Hosteen when someone told him that Joseph was missing. His mother had found out what Hosteen was and picked up and left. I guess Joseph overheard one of the hands saying that she’d probably run down to Phoenix to earn a living on her back in the bars there, which she hadn’t. Hosteen had followed her all the way back to her sister’s home out in the Four Corners area to make sure she was safe. But he told Joseph he wouldn’t talk about her to him, and Joseph took him at his word, so Joseph didn’t know where she’d gone. When he overheard the cowboys, he decided he couldn’t leave his mother in trouble. So he stole one of the ranch trucks and drove it into Phoenix with the intention of finding his mother if he had to go to every bar in town to do so. When Hosteen figured out what happened, and those two cowboys never worked on the Sanis’ ranch again, he took the whole pack, and me, to Phoenix to find Joseph.”

Charles was quiet for a little while, and Anna thought he’d finished the story, but he picked it up again. “So I looked down at that boy and said, ‘Are you Joseph?’ He got to his feet, dusted himself up, wiped the blood off his chin, and said, ‘Yes. I got twelve more bars to go.’ I said, ‘You need to be more careful who you get your information from. Your mom is living with her sister over near Monument Valley.’ That gave him pause. While he was still thinking, I said, ‘You need to remember one other thing. If you’re going to face someone bigger and stronger than you, kid, make damn sure you are better armed.’ I gave him my knife and sheath. We stopped to give the bartender Hosteen’s address so that Hosteen could settle the bill, because by my reckoning it was Hosteen’s pride that had caused the whole mess.”

“You used to run around with him,” Max said. “Kage said you and he got into a lot of trouble.”

“That was later,” Charles said. “Started, I suppose, when your grandfather was about seventeen. He’d run away again and was punching cows for a Navajo rancher. He and Hosteen locked horns over every little thing in those days. Hosteen asked if I’d stop and check in on him and see if I couldn’t talk him into going home. Might not have worked, but he sent me out with an Arab Hosteen had bought from a breeder in California. Joseph could resist almost anything except pretty mares.”

“That would have been in the fifties, right?” asked Max. “Why were you on horseback?”

“The ranch was out in Navajo country,” Charles said. “I don’t think there was anything with four wheels that could have made it there. I had a truck and horse trailer parked about twenty-five miles from the ranch.” He paused. “My da and I were having trouble seeing eye-to-eye about then. It gave Joseph and me something to talk about on that trip back. I didn’t go home. We worked Hosteen’s ranch until the next fight. Then Joseph and I went out on our own. Mostly working cows and increasing our cash flow with the occasional rodeo. Your granddad could ride anything with four hooves. On one memorable, almost-fatal occasion, that included a moose. I think I have a photo of that one somewhere; if I find it I’ll send you a copy.”

“That’s when he met Maggie, right?” Max said. “Granddad says he was working at her ranch.”

Charles huffed a laugh. “Her ranch was two hundred acres of the nastiest country I’ve ever tried to run cows on. It had a spring, though, pure and clean and cold at high summer. We were at the nearest town … I don’t remember the name of it, though it might come to me. Joseph and I had just finished up the fall roundup and were flush with money and time, because we’d been let go like most of the other hands after the drive. She’d come into town driving a beat-up old truck to buy supplies and ran into trouble at the store.”

“Because she was Navajo—I mean, Diné?”

Charles shook his head. “Most of the people there were Navajo—Diné if you’d prefer. No. It was that she was a woman trying to be a man. That kind of attitude about women wasn’t very Navajo, really, but it was very 1950s. Anyway, Joseph and I stepped in. Joseph being Joseph, it wasn’t long before fists were flying, and Maggie was pretty good with her fists. She was smarter than the rest of us, though, because she hiked back to her truck and pulled out her shotgun. And that was the end of that fight. We worked for her all that winter.” He looked at Anna. “Not that winter in Arizona, except for the really high country, is very cold compared to Montana. I lit out that spring, but Joseph stayed and married her. I think she still owns that patch of ground, but they moved back here after a few years when Hosteen’s dedication to the Arabians started to pay off and he really needed more help.”

“Why a moose?” Anna asked. She’d seen a few moose since moving to Montana. Even the werewolves were wary of them.

“You’d have to be male, eighteen, and trying to impress a girl to understand,” said Charles.

Max laughed. “Sixteen works,” he said.

First Anna’s phone rang and then Charles’s.

“McDermit was a fetch,” said Leslie as soon as Anna answered the phone. “I’m looking at a pile of sticks sitting in the chair where he was sitting not ten minutes ago.”

Charles, his attention caught by Leslie’s conversation, answered his own phone, and though Anna could hear the voice on the other side, she couldn’t understand a word he said.

“English,” said Charles. “My Navajo was never that good and I’ve hardly spoken it for twenty years.”

“The fae,” said Joseph, “the fae can look like anyone. She’s here.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Anna told Leslie, and ended the call.