A Wolf In The Desert

She felt sick, her eyes burned in the unrelenting blaze of lights pouring at her from the darkness. She was afraid, but, oddly, fear had become a source of false strength. Like a spotlighted doe she was paralyzed, frozen in place, too frightened to tremble or cry for their pleasure.

The rider on Beauty’s hood squirmed and turned, sliding his massive body over the glass, craning his neck to see inside. “I don’t care what she wants,” he declared with a lecherous grin baring broken teeth. “I’m in love. Sweet Red has skinny hips. I love red-haired women with skinny hips.”

Patience clung to the steering wheel. Her palms were sweaty, her throat dry as she fought dread and despair. There was no way out. If she had a chance, it was to outlast them.

“Hear that, Sweet Red?” Custer’s voice was soft, cajoling. “Blue Doggie loves you. Why don’t you come out to play with him?”

Patience sat as she had from the first, rigid, unresponsive.

“Hot damn!” Blue Doggie giggled and pounded the hood. “I love it when a skinny-hipped woman plays hard for me to get. Makes it so much better when I do.”

“Sweet Red,” a new voice wheedled. “Come out, come out.” The singsong wheedle took on a hard edge. “If you don’t we’ll just have to come get you. Be nice, save us the trouble and save yourself the wear and tear on this nice shiny car.”

A fist slammed the car. “Dammit, Red, do you hear me?”

The vicious undercurrent in their banter was surfacing. Her time was running out. Feverishly she thought of the derringer in the console at her side. It was loaded and ready. The rifle lying in its case beneath her luggage would be better. The bikers wouldn’t expect a rifle, but she hadn’t a prayer of getting to it, taking it from the case and loading it before they got to her.

Maybe she hadn’t a prayer, but she would fight. As hard as she could, for as long as she could. But not until she had to.

Blue Doggie squirmed on the hood, trying to catch her attention. She stared blankly, her vision focused on a distant point through and beyond his bulging belly. Angrily he reared over her, arms spread, bare chest filling her vision, a snarl hissed through jagged teeth as he planted an obscene kiss on the glass.

Patience bit down on her lip to keep from turning away. He hadn’t touched her, yet she felt as soiled as the sweat-smeared glass. A coppery taste of blood was on her tongue. She ignored it, returning her stare to that distant point in her war of wills.

In frustration or anger, she didn’t care which, the giant slammed a ringed fist into the glass. Cracks radiated from the point of impact in a crazed star. The ruined glass held. Blue Doggie snarled a coarse promise and swaggered away for another beer.

She saw him then.

The seventh rider.

An ebony shadow caught in a swirling haze, etched against the paler darkness of the night. A remote figure, as watchful and mysterious as the desert. Only the bike he rode gave back the light of the rising moon. Not even the churning dust of ancient and forgotten trails could dim the subtle gleam of the excellently maintained Electra Glide. Were it not for that reflection, a small light in the blackness of the moment, she wouldn’t have seen him.

Riding alone a distance behind, the sound of his single engine masked by the throb of paired riders, his coming had been virtually silent. In her panic and in the frenzy of maniacal heckling she’d neither seen him nor sensed his presence.

Seeing him now, a rider apart, a man on the fringes and uninvolved, sent a frisson of something she could only call hope rushing through her. Like a blush it bathed her cold body in a glow of warmth. It made no sense, one more rider would not alter her fate. She was still a woman lost and stranded on a little used desert track. A woman with evil tearing at the door of her last sanctuary.

No, she thought as cold reality swept foolish hope from her heart, there would be no help from that quarter. No help from anyone or anything but herself.

Gripping the steering wheel tighter, without regard for cramping fingers and the mounting ache in her elbow, she stared vaguely ahead, denying her tormentors the pleasure of panic.

She didn’t intend it, didn’t want it, but he was there in the line of her unfocused vision. The seventh rider.

She couldn’t see his face, nor his eyes. But she knew he watched her. She felt the power of his stare keeping her from the oblivion she sought, forcing her to focus on him. Caught up in the erratic moods of terror, she hated him then. More than the others. More than anything. For the frisson of hopeless hope, for watching dispassionately and uninvolved. For engaging her emotions, intruding on her thoughts, and stripping away her one refuge.

She hated him most for destroying the last precious moments of sanctuary before the wolves tearing at her fortress destroyed her.

The slap of a palm against the windshield should have torn her from her bitter thoughts, instead she discovered newfound hate brought with it newfound strength. She was done with hiding. Tearing her gaze from the shadowy apparition, she stared coldly at Beauty’s assailant, her eyes seething with anger.

“Hot damn!” a new heckler crowed. “There’s life here, Blue Doggie. She may be dumb, but she ain’t deaf or blind. She moves, she hears, she sees. If looks were lethal, I’d be road kill.”

Wearied by his prancing and crowing, Patience turned away, her attention drawn again to the source of her strength.

As the moon chased across the sky, beneath its canted light the desert came alive, shifting, hiding, revealing, leaving nothing ever the same in the eye of the beholder. Only he hadn’t changed. Only he was as before, sitting astride his bike, legs bent, feet braced in dust. His hands lay lazily across chrome handlebars, his shoulders were back, his head up. Eyes hidden in shadow were turned to her. Watching.

“Hey.”

Patience didn’t react to Blue Doggie’s return.

“Hey! Look at me,” he demanded.

She didn’t turn.

“I said look, damn you!” Spreading his feet and bracing his hands on the top of the door, he rocked the car as he spoke. “You look at Hogan, you look at me.”

Which was Hogan? Was he the dwarf? The silent one with the scarred throat? She didn’t know, she didn’t care as she clung to the steering wheel to keep her balance.

Abruptly Blue Doggie stepped back, hands raised in an air of surrender. Startled by the conciliatory gesture and mistrusting peripheral vision, she turned to him in time to see his face contort into a rictus of rage. That slight turn saved her eyes, her face, perhaps her life, as a chain crashed down on the damaged windshield.

Glass cracked, breaking free at the point of impact, sending great deadly shards flying into the car. Before the chain whipped down again she scooped the derringer from the console, palming it with cool-headed expertise.

Curbing his swing, Blue Doggie deflected the path of the chain, letting it fall in a clatter over Beauty’s hood. He peered through the gaping hole. First he scowled, then he laughed. “The lady’s packing. A two-shot peashooter, no less.”

“Back off!” Patience warned, ignoring his mockery. As threat became true peril, fear gave way to unshakable resolve. The derringer was steady in her hand and aimed precisely at the center of the hole in the glass and the point between Blue Doggie’s eyes. “You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to crawl back on your hogs, or whatever you call them, and disappear.”

“Now, why would we go away and leave a pretty young thing like you alone in the desert?”

“Maybe because it’s the wiser thing, Blue.” The answer was low, the masculine voice composed. A voice of reason drifting out of the night.

“Wise?” Blue Doggie wheeled around, speaking to the darkness. “What’s wise about leaving now?”

“Because the lady asked.” A reasonable argument, a reasonable tone, lacking the indifference Patience would’ve expected. “Because even you would lose an argument with a derringer.”

“Hell, Indian.” Blue Doggie gestured impatiently, the chain dangling from a leather band at his wrist glinted in the headlights of the circled cycles. “She won’t shoot.”

Muttered agreement and more catcalls rose from the others, urging Blue Doggie on.

“If you believe that, you’re bigger fools than I thought.” In a cultured tone so unlike the others, he might’ve been dressing down a troop of Boy Scouts, not a band of cutthroats with wolf heads tattooed on their arms.

Shocked by the calm ridicule, Patience turned instinctively toward him, probing beyond the lighted circle, seeking to know what manner of man waited and watched in the dark.

“That’s what you think, huh? That I’m a fool?” Blue Doggie snarled. “Then we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

She recognized the threat too late. A murderous backhanded swing brought the chain down over the glass again, an instant before she turned and fired. The bullet went wide, creasing the top of her attacker’s ear, fueling his rage rather than ending it forever. The glass imploded, shattered splinters became minute daggers. Patience only had time to shield her eyes and face. The derringer slipped from her grasp and tumbled to the floor. Even as her hands were stinging from minute cuts, she whirled, reaching between the bucket seats, groping for the rifle case.

Another second and she would’ve had it, but there wasn’t another second. A fist buried in her hair, lifting her through the open door of the car. Through a haze of pain she watched as Blue Doggie smiled down at her. He shook his head as if he were dislodging a worrisome fly, a halo of blood arced from his torn ear. His fingers closed tighter, drawing her neck to an impossible angle. “You’ll pay. Before I’m through, you’ll wish your aim had been true.”

Grabbing his wrists, her hands slick with her own blood, she clawed at him, trying to break his hold. One nail broke, then a second; his grip tightened. “Let go, you cretin,” she demanded, too wild with pain and anger to fear retribution. “Let me go, I say.”

“Whooee!” Blue Doggie shook her like a terrier might shake a kitten. “The Wolves has got theirselves a redheaded wildcat, and I got a nicked ear and claw marks to prove it. She marked me,” he said with no little satisfaction. “That makes her mine.”

His claim sent up another rumble of protest. The loudest among them, Custer, Snake and Patience.

Catching Blue Doggie in an inattentive moment, she hacked his wrist with the side of her hand and pulled free of him. But her freedom was short-lived.

A second pair of hands seized her shoulders. Beer-laden breath was hot against her skin, a moist kiss missed her mouth as she was jerked away. She spun in the dust. Hands clutched, fingers clawed. Like starving creatures quarreling over a bone, bikers pushed and shoved. Each staking claim. Each challenged by the next.

Patience was fondled and kissed, pinched and bruised, and tugged from the grasp of one by the next. On and on, in a circle, still spinning, still turning until she was disoriented.

Snake, the youngest, pulled her from the crowd, drawing her hard against him. His body molded hers, leaving no room for question of her effect. “You’re beautiful, Red. Play your cards right and I’ll spend some time with you.”

“Play my cards?” Patience wedged an arm between them to gain breathing space. “You have to be—”

“Kidding.” Custer finished for her as he snatched her from Snake to repeat an embrace that threatened her ribs. “He’s kidding himself. Snake always kids himself.” Custer buried his face in her neck, biting the tender flesh, ignoring her flinch of agony. “You’re mine, I found you first.”

“You found her.” Blue Doggie peeled Custer away, the look in his eyes signaled the banter had ended. Custer led with cunning and quick wit. But cunning and wit, quick or slow, were no match for the assurance of the giant’s brutish strength. “But we ain’t playing finder’s keepers.” His grin reminded Patience he had a score to settle with her. “No, sir,” he mused. “Not today, and not for a while.”

There were protests, the most vocal from Snake. A look from Blue Doggie cut them short. He had just enough beer in him to be crazy. No one in his right mind challenged the giant when he was sober, and certainly not when he was drunk and hurting.

One by one the protesters drifted away. Some to their bikes, some to Beauty to plunder and steal. Patience stood passively in Blue Doggie’s grasp, wondering what to do next. When he rocked back on his heels enough to stagger, and listed to the side as he righted himself, she realized just how drunk he’d become.

She knew then she would try to escape. Her chances of making it were slim, but she’d rather face an inevitable fate knowing she’d tried, rather than regretting that she hadn’t. And if she made it? Being lost in the desert was better than being found by these creatures. Snakes that crawled were preferable to those who walked and called themselves wolves.

Her chance came sooner than she expected. In the flush of victory Blue Doggie’s confidence bloomed, making him careless. His hand rested at the nape of her neck, his fingers curled only loosely around the slim column. As he herded her into the darkness he stumbled again, losing his tenuous hold as he fell to one knee.

A second taste of freedom spurred Patience into action. Before he could climb to his feet, she planted her feet, locked her hands in a club of flesh and bone, and swung with all her might. The double-fisted blow that shattered her watch caught the kneeling Blue Doggie under the chin, the fragile bones of his throat absorbing the brunt. With a quiet wheeze he went down face-first like a felled ox.

Patience waited only long enough to strip the chain from his wrist and cast a quick glance to be sure no one had seen. No one had. They were too interested in plundering the Corvette. She turned to run, and had taken three steps when a hand captured her arm in an iron grip.

“Leaving us so soon, Red? When the party in your honor has just begun?” a familiar, melodious voice inquired.

The seventh rider. The one she’d forgotten.

She opened her mouth to scream, then clamped it shut. Scream? For whom? Who was there to help her? Silently, counting surprise as her best weapon, she launched herself at him. Battering with her free hand, scratching, biting, she fought wildly and desperately to escape the imprisoning hold.

“Stop. You’re only going to hurt yourself.” The command was a quiet entreaty. When she didn’t obey, she found herself enveloped in a close embrace. Her captor held her surely but gently against his bare chest. His arms were taut, his body hard and lean. He smelled pleasantly of wood smoke and evergreen. For a moment Patience was lulled by a strange sense of security.

“I have you now,” he murmured against her hair as she quieted. “I mean you no harm.”

“Liar!” she snarled, rejecting the kindness she heard. She could trust no one, would trust no one. In a resurgence of angry desperation she clawed at his chest and kicked his shins, taking bitter satisfaction in his nearly silent grunt of pain.

“Dammit, wildcat.” He caught her in a rib-crushing hold. To take a deep breath would crack bones. “Do you want me to give you back to the others?”

Patience couldn’t move, couldn’t breath, still she wouldn’t surrender. Lifting her head, she glared up at her captor. In moonlight he was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. But even evil could be pretty. “Let me go,” she demanded. “You’re hurting me.”

“Only because you make me hurt you.” He bent nearer, eyes that could only be black bored into hers. “Listen to me, believe me. I mean you no harm.” He searched her face. “Will you believe me?”

She was off-balance, unsure. “I don’t know.”

“If I let you go, will you not fight me?”

Patience didn’t answer. She looked at Blue Doggie lying in the dirt, at the others squabbling over her possessions. What choice did she have but to give a conditional agreement. “Let me go, I won’t fight you.”

He didn’t release her. “Tell me your name.”

“My name?” She looked once more into the handsome face. “What does it matter?”

“Tell me your name,” he insisted softly.

“Patience,” she snapped. “Patience O’Hara.”

“Give me your word you won’t fight me, Patience O’Hara.”

“What is this? Honor among scum?”

“Honor, yes, between you and me.” His gaze was a black laser, leaving no hint of expression undiscovered. “Your word, Patience?”

Her ribs hurt, she couldn’t catch a deep breath. In another minute she would be swooning in his arms. Even a stubborn O’Hara knew when she’d lost. Patience shrugged and agreed. “You have my word.”

Once again the dark eyes searched her face, seeking the lie. “Good,” he said, and released her. “I think you’re a woman who keeps her word.”

She stumbled away from him, folding her arms around her ribs as she sucked in hungry breaths. He made a concerned move toward her. When she jerked away he stepped back, murmuring, “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“Think nothing of it,” she flared. “I knew there were snakes in the desert, until now I didn’t realize one was an anaconda.”

He didn’t smile. She hadn’t meant it as a joke. For a long moment he stared at her, his arms hanging at his sides. A trick of the moon painted his face in sadness. “I won’t hurt you again.”

Patience straightened, her breathing an even rhythm. Her head was back, her chin tilted at an angle. “Do you have a name?”

“I am called Indian.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“Mine.”

“Indian and what else?”

“Just Indian, no more.”

It wasn’t his real name, she realized, nor his only name. But, perhaps, it was enough. Certainly it was fitting, even too fitting among this cabal who found anonymity in flamboyant and garish aliases. Custer was no soldier, and Snake no reptile that crawled. Blue Doggie was an animal, but not blue until she’d battered his larynx. This man, who walked the desert as if it were his home, looked the part of his name. With silvery black hair clubbed at his nape and his chiseled features, he could have stepped out of the pages of history.

“All right,” she said when her study of him was done. “If that’s all there is, it will have to do.” Her eyes narrowed, her gaze locked with his. “Give me your word, Just Indian.”

He smiled then, a smile that did wonderful things to his striking features even in the garish shadows of the moon. Another time, another place, another person, Patience would have been astounded, but not now. Not here. “Give me your word.”

His smile vanished. “I think you will prove a formidable adversary.”

“Count on it.”

“In that case, you have my word.” He offered his hand, when she took it his fingers closed over hers in a strong clasp. A flash of anger crossed his face as he looked down at broken nails and bruises and the drying blood of cuts from splintering glass. But when he spoke again the anger was hidden. “Come, there is more we have to do.”

“What might that be?”

“You’ll see.” When she resisted, jerking away from him, in the same quiet voice he’d used to reason with his companions he said, “You have a choice. Indian, or the rest of them, which will it be?”

She hesitated, weighing choices that weren’t choices. When she put her battered hand in his again, it was her life, as well.

“No matter what I say, no matter what I do,” he said softly, “remember I will never hurt you.”

He led her then to the center of the road, waiting in silence for the revelers to attend him. Slowly, one by one, they turned, curious looks on their faces. When all was quiet he spoke. “Blue Doggie lies there in the gutter, felled by the woman. She would have escaped, I stopped her. By our law that makes her mine to do with as I wish.”

“Law! What law?” Patience whirled on him, her protest lost in the roar of complaint from the bikers.

Indian ignored them, he ignored her. Keeping her hand firmly in his, he addressed Custer, the leader, with the stilted formality of a declaration. “She is a woman befitting a warrior. From now and for as long as I wish, she will be my woman.”

Patience stared at him, for once she was speechless.

Turning to her, meeting her stunned gaze, into a hostile hush he declared, “Only mine.”

Two

“All right, Just Indian, what the devil was that all about?”

As they moved beyond the hearing of capering, beer-guzzling revelers, Patience ripped away from the grasp that guided her over a nearly hidden stretch of rough terrain that separated his bike from the others. A grasp, if she could believe her own muddled perceptions and trust this man called Indian, that was solicitous rather than restraining.

But she didn’t trust him. She wouldn’t trust anyone until she walked out of the desert, free and unharmed.

Spinning around in front of his bike she faced him, bootheels digging into crumbling soil, fisted hands at her hips. “What was that gibberish about laws?”

“Sticks in your craw, doesn’t it? Being called my woman,” he asked quietly. Before she could lash out again, he added just as quietly, “It isn’t gibberish.”

“It isn’t gibberish when a pack of lawless morons prattle about laws?” The moon was fully risen. A perfect leviathan ball hanging in the sky, half as bright as the sun, painting the desert in sharp silvered edges and inky pools. In an eerie moonscape he loomed over her, as somber as the land in the night shade of a saguaro. More than half a foot taller and an easy sixty pounds heavier, he was an intimidating figure, but she was too indignant to be intimidated. “Law,” she snarled. “From creatures who give themselves animal names and play at being human?”

His hands shot out of shadow, catching her shoulders in a firm hold. “I brought you out here to talk to you, not quarrel, you hotheaded little fool. So shut up and listen before you make matters worse than they are already.”

“Worse!” Patience flung back her head, her eyes blazing. “What could be worse? Stranded in the desert. Harassed, attacked. Pawed and fondled. Fought over by mad dogs. Parceled off like a...” She cast about her mind, searching for the ultimate insult.

“Like a squaw?” Indian supplied.

“Exactly.” Patience’s breath hissed through clenched teeth. “Why don’t you explain what could possibly be worse than being your squaw.”

“Hush! Now!” He shook her, just once, but it was enough to signal how near he’d come to the end of his tolerance. “Put a check on your Irish temper and shut that pretty little mouth or I’ll...”

“You’ll what? Hit me? Ravish me? Or do you plan to threaten me to death?” Her chin lifted a notch, her voice was laced with contempt. “So much for Indian’s word.”

“Damn you!” His fingers bit into her shoulders, driving closely trimmed nails into her flesh as he moved closer and into the light. His chest heaved in controlled anger, his body was as unrelenting as stone. “I’m not going to hit you, or ravish you. And anything I say will be fact or promise, never threat. Yes, I gave you my word on it before. I’ve kept my part of the bargain.”

“And I didn’t?”

“You promised you wouldn’t fight me.”

“I’m not Cochise.” She pulled away from him then and was surprised that he let her go. Crossing her arms at her breasts in a belligerent attitude she glared up at him. “I didn’t promise I would fight no more forever.”

His look moved over her in grudging admiration for her defiance, her courage against impossible odds. “No, you didn’t, did you?” Something akin to a smile ghosted over his lips and vanished. “It was Chief Joseph.”

“So?” Patience shrugged her indifference, neither understanding nor caring to understand the cryptic remark.

“You were quoting Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. The correct phrase is ‘From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.’”

“That’s just lovely.” Her drawl was saccharine. “I doubt there were six bikers and one Indian threatening him with every conceivable indignity.”