9. Eight
There were too many damn people on that ranch.
By noon, every sound had started landing directly behind my eyes.
Boots crossed the porch. Chairs scraped across the kitchen floor.
Somebody hammered at the equipment shed while two men argued over a motorcycle engine near the barn.
Ransom kept asking if I was okay. Cruz wanted to know if I needed anything.
Sierra checked the bandage on my ribs every time he passed, as if the answer might have changed since the last time.
None of them meant any harm.
That almost made it worse.
I found Coyote beyond the second barn, driving in a new fence post. He had his shirt off despite the sun, Nimue looped around his shoulders, and a line of sweat running down his spine.
He heard me coming and looked over his shoulder. "You're supposed to be resting."
"So I've been told."
He set the hammer against the post. His eyes moved over my face, then dropped to the hand I had braced over my ribs. "Something wrong?"
"Can you take me somewhere?"
His whole body stilled. "Where?"
"I don't care." I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck. Even out here, the hammering at the shed reached me. "Somewhere quiet. Somewhere nobody needs anything for a few hours."
He breathed out and nodded. "Yeah, I know somewhere."
He gathered his tools and called Sierra on the radio while I waited in the shade.
"North cave," he said. "John's with me."
The radio crackled. "You tell Rafe?" Sierra asked.
Coyote looked toward the house. "You can tell him."
Sierra didn't answer right away.
"He won't like it," Sierra said. "Two of ours past the fence with him. That was the rule, and it hasn't been a day since the shed."
"I know what the rule is."
"And?"
"And I'll answer for it at the turquoise table when we're back."
More silence.
"When are you coming back?" Sierra asked.
Coyote looked at me.
I shrugged. "Tomorrow?"
He smirked. "Tomorrow," he said into the radio. "Maybe."
"Keep the radio on. And don't let him pull those stitches again."
Coyote clipped the radio to his belt without answering.
He brought two horses from the barn. His mare was a narrow little thing with her ears half back, white broken over brown. Mine could have pulled farm equipment.
"La Pintada," Coyote said. "Rafe calls her something else. I don't use it."
"And this one?"
"Bors." He shrugged. "Rafe reads."
"You ever ride?" Coyote asked.
"No."
"Thought so."
He didn't laugh. He led the gelding beside the fence and showed me how to use the bottom rail as a mounting block.
Getting my boot into the stirrup pulled at the puncture in my thigh.
Swinging the other leg over the horse dragged fire across my ribs.
I sat there breathing through it while the gelding turned his head and looked back at me.
"He's judging you," Coyote said.
"He should mind his business."
"He thinks you're too big."
"He's not alone."
Coyote adjusted the stirrups as far as they would go. My knees still rode higher than they should have.
He loaded the saddlebags next. Two full canteens. Jerky. Dried fruit. A blanket. More food than two men needed for one night.
"How far is this place?"
"Not far."
"How long are you planning to keep me there?"
His hands stopped on the buckle. "As long as you want." He looked up at me when he said it.
"Tomorrow's fine," I said.
Coyote nodded and pulled the strap tight.
We kept the horses at a walk, and the ranch dropped behind us a little at a time. First, the house disappeared. Then the barns. Then the fence posts stopped cutting the land into pieces, and nothing lay ahead but red dirt, scrub, and low rock rising out of the heat.
Coyote rode beside me instead of ahead. Every few minutes, he looked at my face.
"My ribs are holding," I said again.
"I didn't ask."
"You were about to."
He looked away.
The gelding's gait rolled through my hips and pulled at every injury the boar and the javelina had given me. It wasn't pleasant, but the pain belonged to my body. I understood it. Nothing outside me needed an answer.
Coyote pointed at a hawk over the ridge. Later he pointed at tracks in the wash. Neither one needed anything from me. He pointed, I looked, and my shoulders came down another inch.
It had been a long time since a silence felt shared instead of empty.
We reached the rocks with the afternoon still ahead of us. Coyote tied the horses in the shade and loosened the mare's saddle. He crouched beside the gelding and drew his knife.
The blade rested against the leather cinch.
"What's wrong with it?" I asked.
His eyes came up. "Nothing." He ran his thumb along the stitching where the buckle joined the strap. Then he folded the knife and put it away. "Checking for wear."
The cinch looked fine to me, but I didn't know much about horses.
He removed the saddle intact and carried it beneath the rock overhang.
We covered the rest of the trail on foot. Coyote stayed close on my injured side without offering an arm. I appreciated that.
The cave sat back between two slabs of red stone, dry and cool, the mouth wide enough to let the afternoon light in. Tiny bones hung from wires across the opening and turned whenever the wind changed.
A bedroll lay against one wall beside a fire ring. Canteens, tins, rope, ammunition, and enough other supplies to suggest Coyote could stay up there a long time if he decided not to come down.
"This where you disappear to?" I asked.
"When the ranch gets loud."
I looked at the bones ticking together over our heads. "What animals are those from?"
"Human." He didn't blink.
"I'm a doctor, little one."
"Could be a bad doctor."
I stepped closer. "Rabbit. Bird. Lizard. Javelina here, and something larger. Small cat, maybe."
"Wildcat." He touched the wire with one finger. "They tell me when the wind changes."
"Useful."
"Most people think they're strange."
"They can be useful and strange."
Coyote looked at me for a moment. "You think I'm strange."
"I watched you tear a man's throat out and then argue with Sierra because he wouldn't let you eat before washing the blood off your face."
"I was hungry."
"You're strange."
He grinned at me.
I eased myself down onto the bedroll. Pain caught beneath the new stitches and held until I found a position against the wall.
Coyote saw it. He crossed to the tins and came back with a canteen and two tablets before I could object.
"Acetaminophen," he said.
"I don't need it."
"I can manage the pain."
"I know. Take them anyway."
I held out my hand. Coyote dropped the pills into it and watched until I swallowed. Then he sat beside me.
For a while, we did nothing. Nimue slid down his arm and moved out through the cave mouth. The little bones turned above her. Wind crossed the opening and carried away most of the heat.
Nobody shouted for a doctor. Nobody bled. Not one man needed a decision out of me. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the cool wall of the cave.
Coyote put a hand on the back of my neck. "Better?"
"Yeah."
"Good."
His thumb moved once beneath my hair, and I sighed.
I should've felt content, but there was something eating at me, a secret I hadn't told Coyote yet.
I'd needed to tell him since the river, maybe before that.
Each time I reached for the words, Coyote touched me, and I let myself forget them. I couldn't keep doing that.
He shifted. His nose came in under my ear, along the jaw. "You smell like something you haven't said."
"Little one."
His hand stopped. "You'd tell me if you were planning to go somewhere, wouldn't you?"
I opened my eyes. Coyote was watching the mouth of the cave instead of me.
"Where would I go?"
"That isn't an answer."
"No." I turned toward him. "I wouldn't disappear on you."
"Even if you thought I wouldn't like where you were going?"
"Especially then."
His fingers tightened against my neck.
I covered his knee with my hand. "There's something I should have told you."
His eyes snapped to mine. "Are you leaving?"
"No."
"Then tell me."
"There was somebody before you."
Coyote's nails pressed into my nape.
"His name was John Horner." Five years without saying his name to another person, and it came out unchanged. "Everybody called him Little John because I was already Big John when we met."
Coyote's fingers tightened.
"He was my husband."
The bones turned above us with a dry little click.
For a second, Coyote looked at my hands. Maybe for a ring. Maybe for some mark a dead man should have left where everybody could see it.
"How long?" he asked.
"Twelve years."
His eyes came back to mine. "Where is he?"
I shook my head and tried not to let my eyes water. "Dead."
The word was too small. One hard syllable for a man who used to sing badly while he cooked and leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, and laugh so loudly I could find him anywhere in a crowded room.
Coyote's hand loosened at my neck.
"Five years ago," I said. "COVID took him."
I rubbed my thumb over the same place on his knee again and again. The skin beneath it grew warm. I couldn't make myself stop.
"He got sick. Then he got worse. I watched every number on the monitor fall and knew exactly what each one meant. Didn't give me a goddamn thing I could do about it."
I looked through the mouth of the cave until the rock outside steadied.
"When he stopped breathing, I had my hand on his chest. I kept it there waiting for the next one." My fingers curled against Coyote's knee. "I knew there wasn't going to be another. I was a doctor. I knew. But I kept waiting anyway."
Coyote came closer and pressed two fingers to the pulse in my throat, as if he needed to feel it.
"I tried to save him. I did everything that I could, but there weren't enough respirators or medications. There weren't enough masks or gloves. Hell, there weren't enough of me to go around."
My chin dropped. For one ugly second, I was back beside that bed with my hand on a chest that had already stopped, bargaining for one more breath from a body that had nothing left to give me.
"Did you love him?"
"I still do."
His face tightened.