After five minutes or so of silence, Hosteen gave a jerky nod as if in answer to some question only he heard. Then he put an end to any image of the laconic Native American; an image that Charles, for instance, could have been the poster boy for.
“There is a long story to how I ended up here, away from the lands of the Diné, the Navajo,” he told her. “When I was Changed, a hundred years ago, more or less, I thought I must be a skinwalker. I had never heard of werewolves, you see, and neither had anyone I knew. You know what a skinwalker is?”
Yes, but she’d learned that it was better to plead ignorance because sometimes what she thought she knew about the supernatural world was wrong or incomplete. “A little.”
“Skinwalkers are evil witches who take on the shape of animals—usually it is animals—they skin. They delight in destruction, suffering, and pain. They spread illness and evil. I thought that was probably what I was—though I didn’t feel more evil than I had before I was attacked.” He smiled at her, inviting her to enjoy the joke on the young man he had been. She thought it was more horrific than funny—too close to her own experience.
When she didn’t smile back, he regarded her thoughtfully, then turned his eyes back to the rough dirt track they were following.
“I didn’t skin an animal for its shape. But even an ignorant boy such as I was could see that changing into a wolf, a monstrous wolf, gave me something in common with the witch people,” he said. He seemed to relax as he settled into the story, his voice drifting into a cadence that made her think that he had told this story more than once. “Those who follow the witchery way are evil, so I figured I must be, too. My parents loved me, but I was dangerous to them and to my family, so I left. This is where I ended up.”
“California is where you went first,” said Charles, and the way he said it made Anna think that he was encouraging the other man to tell stories. “Hosteen is a movie star, Anna.”
Hosteen smiled—and it changed his whole demeanor. Anna saw that she had been wrong when she’d thought he was a little grim. There was delight and innocence in that smile.
“You’ll see my face in a few movies,” he conceded almost shyly. “But only if you like the old silent movies. No real parts, just Apache number two, Hopi number eight, that sort of thing. When they found out I was good with horses, I moved pretty quickly into horse wrangling. Worked on The Son of the Sheik.”
And Anna realized that Charles had prodded Hosteen because he knew that she’d enjoy this story.
Charles kept telling her that just because a wolf was old didn’t mean that he’d ever met a famous person from the past. She and her brother had spent a lot of Saturday afternoons eating popcorn and watching movies with her father. He liked either very old black-and-white movies, though usually with sound tracks, or kung fu theater.
One afternoon, her father had rented a whole bunch of Valentino films and they’d watched them, one after another. The finale had been The Son of the Sheik.
“Rudolph Valentino’s last film?” Anna asked.
“Yes,” Hosteen said. “I wrangled horses for a few of his movies. Valentino was a horseman. He was famous, but he didn’t mind stopping to talk to the Indian who was handling the horses. I liked him.”
Hosteen had answered her question, but he kept talking. Either he sensed her continued interest, or he liked to tell stories. Maybe a bit of both.
“They brought in a small herd of Arabian horses for the movie. Rented them from Kellogg, the guy who invented cornflakes.” Hosteen laughed to himself as if something about the deal amused him. “Anyway, they brought in a number of Arabians—prettiest horses I’d ever seen. Valentino liked this big gray the best. But Valentino was too valuable and Jadaan, he could be unpredictable. The producers were worried Valentino would get tossed, so he mostly rode other horses for the film. Valentino was furious and insulted.” He pursed his lips. “They were idiots, those producers; Valentino could ride.”
Hosteen fell silent, and Anna tried to think of a question to get him going again. Before she did, he said, “That Jadaan. He had terrible front legs. But he was as good as Valentino himself at striking a pose. Cameras loved him.”
They bounced on over the rutted dirt road.
“They brought in a stunt double to do the dangerous stuff,” Hosteen said after a while. “Carl Schmidt, he was a good horseman. Later, he changed his name to Raswan and wrote a lot of books about the Arabian. A good horseman, but a ridiculous person—like that singer who changed his name to a symbol instead of a word. Carl Raswan.” He snorted. “Raswan was a horse. Still, Carl was a good rider, did most of the shots with Jadaan and anything that required more speed than a canter. No one on the set, except perhaps Valentino because he was a nice guy, would have missed Carl if he’d broken his fool neck, so he was a good choice for a stunt double.”
He laughed a little to himself again. “Now you see. Just ask me a question, any question, and it all comes back to horses. But you asked what I am doing here. I met Fowler and Annie McCormick, big money people, in California when they brought a couple of their horses to me to train. They had a place out here and were willing to guarantee me some work. I wanted to breed Arabians, and so I moved here. Bought a hundred acres next to their ranch and started my own operation.” He glanced at Charles. “About the time we first met, eh? Just before the Second World War.”
“How’s Joseph?” Charles asked, in an apparent non sequitur, and Hosteen sobered.
“Still human, and will apparently die that way. Eighty-two, stubborn as a mule.” Hosteen looked at Anna and then the road. “I wish you would change his mind about that.”
“I’ve offered before,” Charles said.
“Yes,” said Hosteen. “I know.” He kept his eyes straight ahead. “Maybe you could do more than offer.”
The atmosphere in the truck chilled to below zero, even though, Anna was pretty sure, it was close to seventy degrees outside.
“No,” said Charles.
“You go see him,” said Hosteen with a sudden growl in his voice. “You go see my son, that bright spirit who is trapped in a body that is dying around him. You see him—and then you look me in the eye and tell me that again.”
“Hosteen,” said Charles carefully. “If Joseph had at any time in the last twenty years changed his stance on the matter, he would have asked you or me. I will not, and you will not, force him. A wolf who Changes an unwilling victim must himself die, by the Marrok’s word.”
“Your father would not kill you for it,” said Hosteen, but the fire of his anger was gone. “He would kill me—have you kill me—but you he would spare.”
“If you think that,” Charles said, “then you don’t know my father very well.”
Chelsea tried not to look at the blood when she called her husband.
“Kage, Kage, Kage,” she chanted in time with the rings.
“This is Kage Sani,” his voice said in her ear, and she could have cried. “I can’t answer right now. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“The children,” she said. “Kage. The children.” She wanted to tell him about the children, but she screamed instead. When she caught her breath, and silence fell, she could only whisper, as if another loud noise might wake something evil. Again. “I was so angry, Kage. This knife. Blood. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry. Blood.” When Kage’s phone beeped to signal that it had stopped recording, she was still chanting into the mouthpiece.
CHAPTER
2
The road switched from dirt to blacktop without warning. Anna couldn’t figure out why there was a paved driveway in the middle of nowhere, but then the house suddenly appeared.
The lines of the house blended into the surrounding sand and various desert plants and backed into a small rocky formation too big to be a swell and not big enough to be a hill. Between shape and sandy color, the house seemed to grow out of the desert.
Charles, seeing her surprise, said, “The Badlands of the Dakotas are like this, too. Things are hidden pretty easily out here. There’s a lot more relief to this land than your eyes tell you—that’s one of the reasons the landing strip is so far away. That’s where they had to go to find flat land without bringing in bulldozers.”