Chapter 11 #2
She snapped to attention, ignoring the insane notion that had briefly crossed her mind.
She pressed her fingers to his wrist, felt his strong pulse thrumming.
“He’s alive.” Then she turned his arm to more closely examine the bracelet he wore, just to assure herself that it wasn’t, that it couldn’t possibly be…
It was the same.
It was the same.
Willow tipped back her head and cut loose a cry that should’ve summoned every Comanche in the area as her cousins gathered around her, staring at that bracelet and then at the man in absolute wonder.
Wolf
Wolf opened his eyes. There was a woman kneeling over him, holding up his arm by the wrist and keening. She was Native, and she had tears streaming from her eyes when she looked down at him again. He realized there were others around her, but he could only see her.
Why did she look happy? Didn’t she know? “He—took her,” Wolf managed.
The Native woman’s eyebrows bent together. “The man who shot you?”
“He took my…Camellia. On the river.” He pointed. God, his chest hurt. He brought a hand to it, but someone pulled it away. A woman with wild red curls and vivid green eyes said, “Relax, I’m a doctor.”
“You’re a vet,” said a small blonde.
“Well, we left the people-doc back home, so I’m what you’ve got.” The redhead pulled a backpack from her shoulders and started going through it, kneeling on the round opposite the other two.
“The shooter abducted a woman,” said the one who’d keened, informing the others. And then, more softly, to him, “I’m Willow.”
“Wolf,” he said, and she choked on her breath, and he didn’t know why. “I have to go after her.”
He tried to move the other one’s hands away from his chest. She was peeling off his shirt and pressing at the wound, which was higher than he’d thought, and farther left.
“Hit the front of your shoulder,” the redhead told him.
“A few inches south it’d’ve been your heart.
Looks like the bullet passed right through, which is good.
Can you make a fist? Yeah, good. Raise your arm?
” She nodded as he did so, though it hurt.
“I don’t think it hit anything vital. I can patch you up.
” Then, “This is gonna sting,” as she poured what he thought was alcohol over the hole in his body.
There were others, men, four of them, two his age but a lot bigger, two younger and closer to his size. All of them were looking at him with way more in their eyes than We found a wounded stranger in the woods.
“I have to go after her,” he said again. He was hurting bad.
“That’s what any one of us would say in the same situation,” said one of the bigger guys, the lighter one. “Go figure.”
“We passed some boats back a little ways,” the Native woman said. “Orrin, Trevor, go back and get them. Hurry.”
“Bring a boat for me,” Wolf called, but his voice wasn’t very loud.
The Native woman looked at the redheaded animal doctor. “Can he come with us to rescue his, uh…Camellia?”
“Camellia?” the little blonde asked. “Really? That’s a pretty unusual name.”
“She’s a…PI. Helping me.”
“You don’t say,” the little one said. “What’s her last name?”
“Rio,” he said. “I have to go after her.”
“We need to make sure you don’t bleed out when you do,” said the redhead, pressing bandages over the wound she’d cleaned and taped together. “You move too much, and that bleeding’ll start right back up.” She closed his shirt.
“I have to go after her.” God, it couldn’t end like this. Not like this.
Why hadn’t he just told her that he loved her? Why hadn’t he realized it sooner?
Willow said, “They’re coming with the boats.” She reached down a hand. He clasped her forearm and she pulled him to his feet. It hurt to move even that much.
He looked where she was looking and saw four canoes in the distance. The younger guys, Orrin and Trevor, were each paddling one and towing another behind.
Willow said, “I know you’re going through a lot right now, Wolf.” She swallowed hard after saying his name. “But I have to ask—where did you get that bracelet?”
Wolf looked at her again. There was something familiar about her face, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. Maybe it was just because she looked like him. He hadn’t been raised around many Natives.
He looked toward the boats. They were taking forever. “I was wearing it when my mother found me.”
She made a sound like she’d choked on a breath, then swallowed hard and whispered as around her, the others gathered closer, hanging on his words.
“Found you?” Willow asked.
For some reason, he didn’t feel like lying. “Yeah, right over there, as a matter of fact. Where the garbage washes up.” He just wanted to get the hell out of there and rescue Camellia.
The woman had stopped talking. The canoes were close.
He glanced at her, then got stuck on her face, because there were tears sliding over her cheeks.
She said, “It seems weird to you we’re all so emotional.
You see, we’re family. Cousins. Close kin.
We just found out that my brother was lost in a flash flood before I was born.
” Her voice was unsteady, broken every now and then by soft breaths.
“The river tore him from our mother’s arms. He was only two weeks old. And he was…wearing that bracelet.”
Everyone around them went silent. The two with the canoes had arrived, pulled their boats up onto the bank, and had come closer to listen in.
Wolf stared at Willow, then at the others, knowing they must be his blood. His family. “What was his name?” he asked, because he didn’t know.
“Jonathon Wolf Brand,” she said. “My brother.”
She slid her arms around his neck and hugged him very gently, and he whispered, “My sister?”
And nearby, the littlest blonde muttered, “Camellia freakin’ Rio. Well, ain’t that a kick in the ass!”
Camellia
Camellia fought for consciousness, clawed her way back, and forced her eyes open to look for Wolf. But he wasn’t there. He’d been shot with her gun. He’d been on the ground bleeding when Earl had knocked her senseless. All alone, back there. Nobody would find him. He’d bleed to death!
She tried to move her body, to sit up, to turn and look back. Maybe she could still see him. She pushed herself onto her side, twisting, and the canoe rocked hard.
A dripping wet paddle pressed into the center of her chest. “You stay still now,” Earl said. “Don’t make me hurt you again.”
“I didn’t make you hurt me the first time.”
“We just need some time, Camellia. That’s all we need is some time. You just got confused. You’ll come around. I know you will.”
“You shot him. You shot him and just left him there.” She got herself into a sitting position. Her hands were tied in front of her with a length of rope, and her feet at the ankles with duct tape.
“I didn’t shoot him,” Earl said. “Gun went off. That’s not on me.”
“Leaving him to die is on you!”
He faced front, because he couldn’t look her in the eye, and she knew it.
“Send help back,” she pled. “Stop somewhere, anywhere, and tell someone. I won’t run away, just—”
“There were folks heading his way,” he said. “I heard ’em coming before we left.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.” He looked back and met her eyes when he said that.
His eyes weren’t right. They were off, not like he was on something, but like the person looking out from behind them was someone else. Someone she didn’t know. She said, “You wouldn’t do this if you were all right, Earl. Some part of you must know that. Stalking me, kidnapping me, shooting Wolf—”
“I didn’t shoot him.”
“And what about Mary Jo?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t do that to Mary Jo.
She did it to herself. That’s why I’m here, don’t you get it?
I don’t want you to end up like that, too.
You women, you get this idea about independence and you can’t handle life alone.
You’re not meant to. You were never designed to be by yourselves. ”
Something skittered down her spine when he said that. Earl was having some kind of psychotic break, she thought.
“Untie me. Right now, Earl, you pull this boat up and you untie me, or I’ll throw myself over the side and drown. I mean it!”
“All right, all right.” He set the paddle down and pulled a huge knife from a sheath at his waist. She stiffened and braced when he brought it close, but he only sliced through the duct tape at her ankles.
Then he looked up at her wrists and shook his head.
“That was a show of good faith. I’ll untie your hands after we get a little farther if you behave. ”
“You can untie them now.”
“No, Camellia. You just be thankful I didn’t use the zip ties. Cause I could have.” He pulled one of the plastic loops out of his pocket to show her. “They’re way less comfortable.”
“Gee, thanks.” She needed to slow him down. If someone had found Wolf, then they’d know by now that she’d been taken. Help could be on the way, and she wanted to give them time to catch up.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said. “You have to stop.”
“No.”
“Fine.” She turned around as if in a huff, so she was facing backward in the canoe.
That way she could watch for rescuers and work on the rope without him seeing.
She looked over one shoulder to see him facing forward.
The water was picking up speed, so he needed to pay attention to steering them around rocks and such.
The idiot didn’t even know enough to steer a canoe from the back.
She’d be lucky if he didn’t capsize it and drown them both.
She started picking at the knots with her teeth, and didn’t take long to free her hands. She kept the rope wrapped around them loosely, though.
A slender strand forked off the Rio Grande, and Earl paddled them into it.
She watched the main river fall away behind them and looked around for something to leave as a clue.
The duct tape he’d cut from her ankles was wadded up in the bottom of the canoe.
She quickly tossed a piece of it toward some branches, like leaving a breadcrumb behind.
Ignorant of her actions, Earl paddled into a shallow inlet only a few yards farther, then right up to the shore.
He grabbed her arm to help her out of the boat, then pulled the boat behind them with his free hand, until he could tuck it into some dense growth where it wouldn’t be seen from the river.
While his back was turned, she tossed the rope from her wrists toward the spot where they’d landed. Then she pulled her hands up under her shirt a little.
“We walk from here,” he said.
He couldn’t seem to look her in the eyes, as if he knew on some level that he was doing wrong.
They hiked into a sparsely wooded no-man’s land that was mostly rock and hardpack as the sun blazed down from an ever-higher angle.
She wondered how the hell anyone would ever find her.
Yanking some hair from her own head when he wasn’t watching, she draped the strands over branches at eye level along the trail.
She dug her feet into the ground wherever it was soft, ensuring her shoe left an imprint and stomped or stumbled into branches by accident, to break their ends off and leave a sign.
She was terrified Earl was going to hurt her or kill her. He was big, which was why it got so scary when he’d become controlling and violent. And she knew of his love for guns. He had hers, now, tucked into the back of his jeans.
He was nothing like Wolf.
God, they’d been so close to finding the answers! The photo in that pile of stones was going to lead them straight to Wolf’s birth family. She’d felt it right to her toes.
And the way he’d been looking at her just then, just before the end…
And now, did it even matter? What if Wolf didn’t survive? What if he was already gone?
She gulped back a sob, tripped on a stone, and landed on her knees, and then she just let her head fall forward and sobbed. It had been so perfect between them, and then all stupid this morning. Then just when it started to get good again—maybe really good—this idiot had to show up and ruin it all.
“Why would you do this to me?” she moaned. “Why did you have to come back and ruin my life all over again?”
He took her by one arm and dragged her to her feet and onward through the wilderness, still not noticing her unbound hands. Or not caring. They moved into a huge ring of rock formations, and then he pulled her into a narrow opening behind one of them.
“What the hell is this? No, we won’t even fit back there. What are you—?”
She pulled, but he pulled harder, and instead of bashing into a solid rock wall in the darkness, she was pulled through it into a pitch-dark cave.
“What is this place?” she whispered, but her only answer was the echo of her own voice.