I closed my eyes and listened to his heart for a moment, the slow, calming rhythm.
“Bridger?”
“Hmm?”
“Who is Angelene?” I know this sounds crazy, but I was more interested in her than I was in the things trying to kill me—at least for the moment.
“Angelene was my girlfriend. Last year, I thought she was the one for me. I thought I loved her.”
I tried to suppress the sudden jealousy that sprung to life inside of me. “What happened?”
“Well, the summer after junior year, I went to France and lived with my parents’ friends. Angelene is their daughter. She and I got incredibly close that summer. I would have sworn then that I loved her. But now I know I never did. Love is so much more than making out and liking how she looks beside me.
“I didn’t mean to fall in love with you, Maggie. I even tried not to. I thought if I never touched you and stopped flirting with you, nothing more than friendship could grow between us. I was wrong. From the first moment I saw you, I haven’t been able to get you out of my head. When I realized I was hopelessly screwed, I made the mistake of confiding in Katie. She called my dad and told him, in exchange for a plane ticket back to France. My dad told me I was an idiot and Angelene was on a plane for Silver City. My dad said I had to be sure I didn’t still love Angelene before I changed my mind about her. She would have been the ideal match for me, in my parents’ eyes. So my father and I made the deal I mentioned earlier. I wouldn’t see you for two weeks, and during those two weeks I would resume my relationship with Angelene where it had left off. Boyfriend and girlfriend. At the end of those two weeks, if I wasn’t madly in love with Angelene again, which my father was certain I would be, I could pursue … you.”
He looked down at me, searching my face. “Maggie?”
“What?” I whispered.
“Will you forgive me? For not telling you what was going on? For not telling you about Angelene?”
I stared into his dark eyes and nodded. How could I not forgive him?
“Maggie?”
“What?”
“I never want to be away from you again. Does that scare you?”
I looked away from his face, fighting against a sudden shortness of breath. “I’m more scared of losing you than keeping you around.”
He sighed and sank onto the sofa. “Good. Because, like it or not, I’m bound to you until one of us dies.”
“Wait. You’re what to me?” I asked.
He shook his head and clamped his lips shut, and then he sighed. “It has to do with my nah-e-thlai, my guide. If I fall in love, I can’t fall out of love. If you die before me, I will live with a broken heart for the rest of my life. So you’ll be stuck with me loving you until the day I die. Does that scare you?”
For the first time in my life, someone who would love me forever? I smiled. “No. Actually, that’s pretty cool. But I want something to change between us.”
One of his eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“Can I kiss you whenever I want to?”
For an answer, he kissed me. “I’ll be upset if you don’t,” he whispered, leaning his forehead against mine and tangling his hand in my loose hair.
A long, mournful wail echoed outside, shattering the sense of safety that had been forming around me. I sat straight up, clutching Bridger’s hand.
“They’ve found me. They’re here,” I said, turning my haunted eyes to him.
“They won’t come in. They can’t.”
“How do you know?” I peered out the tall, wide windows into the dark night and glimpsed a shadow darting into the trees.
“The security system. I turned on electric shock wires when we drove in.”
“Why do they want me?” I whispered.
“Because of me.”
I whipped around to look at him, absolutely shocked.
“What does this have to do with you?”
Bridger’s face hardened. “They are trying to find a way to hurt me because of who my father is—because of who I will become. I am truly sorry that you have been dragged into my problems. I can’t believe it has come to this.”
“Come to what?” I asked, fighting the urge to grab his shoulders and shake him.
“Remember I told you I agreed to date Angelene?”
“Yeah, that was two minutes ago.”
“I had my own reason. I hoped if I pretended to lose interest in you, they would stop hunting you.”
“Wait a sec. You thought if you dated some French blond hottie, those … things would stop hunting me? I don’t understand what you have to do with any of this. I thought they were after me because—” My jaw snapped noisily shut before I could finish my thoughts. I had the sudden compulsion to look at the array of guns decorating the room. There were hundreds of guns: big, small, some ancient and tarnished, some high-tech and shiny. But all of them, without a doubt, deadly.
When I looked back at Bridger, his eyes held the faintest shadow of uncertainty. “You were saying?” he asked.
“They aren’t attacking me because of you. They came looking for me before we ever met. Before I moved to Silver City.”
His eyes narrowed the slightest bit. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I need to know what the heck you are talking about so I know how much to tell you! How is it you know all about these things that are following me, and what are they?”
He stood from the sofa and started pacing around the room. “Yea-naa-gloo-shee,” Bridger whispered. “That’s Navajo for ‘With it he goes on all four.’ ”
I opened my mouth to ask him what the heck he’d just said, but his face was so pale, so lost in another world, I didn’t make a noise.
“The Navajo call them witches. They steal the skin of an animal and become that animal. They are Skinwalkers.” He brought his dark eyes up to meet mine. “I can feel the evil in some of them, and it is the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced in my life.” A shiver racked his body. “They do horrible, malicious things in exchange for the power they gain by becoming an animal. And they are smart. Very, very smart.” His dark eyes seemed to suddenly grasp something. He clenched his jaw and stared at me as if I had made him do something he didn’t want to.
“How have you survived four attacks, Maggie Mae?” A light seemed to burn behind his dark eyes. “And how did you kill three men that night at the mine? Did you have a gun? A knife? Are you trained in hand-to-hand combat?”
I swallowed the sudden apprehension filling my throat and took a deep breath, about to tell him my secret. The lights flickered and the house went pitch black before a word left my mouth.
It lasted only a heartbeat, that blackness, for the lights flickered back to warm life. A sudden ringing shattered the silence. I jumped from the sofa and leaped to Bridger’s side.
“It’s all right,” he said, voice shaky. “It’s just someone ringing in from the gate.”
He walked to the front door and I followed on his heels, but instead of opening the door, he pushed a button on an intercom.
“Who is this?” he demanded.
A sharp jolt of static cracked from the intercom; then a silky smooth female voice came on.
“Release the girl to us,” the voice said.
Bridger’s eyes turned hard. “Over my dead body,” he barked into the intercom.
“Well, wouldn’t that be a lovely bonus,” the woman said with a laugh. In the background I could hear the chortling and braying of animals. “Bridger, the odds are set highly against you. Don’t think we will spare you because of who your father is. You are one; we are legion. You can’t keep us at bay forever.”
Bridger’s voice was steely cold when he spoke. “I will give you a warning. But only one. I won’t be alone for long. Leave now or you will all die.”
There was a pause before the woman’s voice crackled to life. “Those are big words coming from a lone boy, Bridger.” She had an accent, something much smoother than the typical American accent. Maybe British. “Now it is my turn to give the warning. We have disarmed your security system. You have ten minutes to decide what to do before we come in and kill you.”
Bridger’s breath quickened. The small muscles of his jaw flexed and released over and over. His eyes met mine.
“I will not hand her over so that you can murder her,” Bridger insisted. He reached for my hand and pulled me into a one-arm embrace.
“Murder her?” the woman asked lightly. “Who said anything about murder? You’re the only one who’s going to die. We just want her back.”
35
His hand jerked away from the intercom as if burned, and his body tensed as hard as steel against mine. Slowly, his eyes met mine. Doubt and despair battled across his face. “No, please no,” he whispered. “Please say you aren’t one of them, Maggie.”
I looked down at my bare feet, unable to answer.
“You are one of them, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. A realization. I looked at him. Obviously my silence was answer enough, for he closed his pain-filled eyes and shook his head slowly back and forth. When he opened his eyes, they were full of repulsion.
Faster than I thought any person could move, Bridger was at a gun case. He opened it and removed a weapon before I had time to wonder what he was doing. And then the cold muzzle pressed against my temple.
In that instant everything became clear. Prom night, Bridger disappeared. I shifted. I heard gunfire. I almost died.
Graduation night, Bridger disappeared. I shifted. Danni, wearing my jacket, almost died.
The night at the mine, I shifted and barely escaped with my life. Bridger was there. With a gun.
The choker, the heishe beads he wore, were the same as those worn by Rolf Heinrich. Rolf Heinrich had been hunting me.
Was Bridger hunting me, too?
I closed my eyes and waited for my brain to be blasted out of my skull. The metal trembled against my skin, and Bridger’s ragged breath moved noisily in and out of his throat.