“Thank you for coming here. It is late, and I know you are tired. Forgive me for calling you.”
Longarm frowned. Calling him? Damned if that was so.
Angelica smiled. Longarm felt something inside his chest spin around in circles, and there was a hollowness in his belly that he hadn’t noticed before now.
“No,” the girl said calmly, “you did not hear in your ears. Only in your heart.” As if that explained something.
“You, uh-“
“Yes. It was I who called you here. I and this wolf who will help you when the spirits decide the time is come.”
“Wolf,” Longarm repeated slowly. He looked down beside his feet. There wasn’t a wolf anywhere around. Just this big white dog. He wasn’t sure what kind of a dog it was, except that it looked like the furry, heavily muscled dogs he’d seen up in the north country. The Canadians liked to use those dogs to haul sleds and sledges and such during winter. But those dogs were mostly dark-colored and smaller than this one. Otherwise this dog had the right shape and coat texture. He reached down and the dog licked his hand, its tongue warm and wet, and he scratched behind its ears, then again at the base of its tail. It liked that just fine, pointing its muzzle high and wagging its tail while he scratched. “Wolf,” Longarm repeated.
“Yes,” the girl said agreeably.
“Not a dog.”
“No, Long Arm. A wolf. A spirit wolf.”
“Uh, huh.” Hell, he wasn’t going to argue the point with her. It was commencing to look, though, like the girl was a tiny bit daft. Mighty fetching to look at. But her basket seemed to be a couple pecks shy of full. Angelica laughed. “Something funny?” he asked.
“You.” She laughed again. It sounded something like little bitty silver bells tinkling. Or that was the impression he got. “You think I am touched by the spirits.” He didn’t say anything. “I am, of course. But not in the way you think,” she said.
“How are you … touched?” He figured it would be safe enough to use her own word for it.
Angelica smiled and laid her fingertips gently on his wrist. “I have been given sight and knowledge of things that are not of this world and of some other things that are.”
“And these things will help your tribe, I take it?” Longarm asked.
“If they would be of harm, Long Arm, I would turn my face from them and throw away the gifts the spirits have given to me.”
“You could do that?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And you called me here so’s I can help you help your tribe or, uh, somethin’ like that?”
“Yes. See? You do understand. Even though you do not know how you have come to understand this.”
“It’s confusing,” he said.
“When you accept the truth of it, it will no longer confuse you,” the girl told him.
The dog—wolf, if she preferred—lifted its head, its ears pricked, and bounded to its feet. It acted like it was straining to hear something far away to the north, something perhaps in the Piegan camp that lay in that direction. The girl stood too. “We must go now, Long Arm.”
“But I thought-“
“It is enough,” she said. “We have met. We will talk more at another time.”
He looked at her and felt an almost overwhelming impulse to grab her and kiss her and press her onto the ground where he could take her with the scent of crushed grass and wildflowers surrounding them.
The girl gasped and shivered so violently he could see it. “No,” she said quickly. “Not that.”
“What?”
“Not … what you are thinking. You tempt me, Long Arm. Please do not … do the thing you wish.”
“No,” he said, embarrassed to’ve been caught at being so randy. “Not without you wanting it to happen.”
“But do you not see? That is what frightens me. I do want this to happen. And it must not. Not ever.”
“I don’t underst-“
The dog huffed, a sharp exhalation of breath that was not an audible bark but which caught the attention as if the slight sound had been as loud as a howl.
Without another word of goodbye or of explanation Angelica spun away, the diaphanous cloth of her robe swirling.
The dog bounded swiftly away to the north and the girl ran after it, her movement so light and smooth that the appearance was as if she floated, even though Longarm knew damn good and well that she was just running over the hills.
Once more the two, the dog and the girl, looked ghostly and pale in the starlight.
And once more a chill chased its tail up and down the length of Longarm’s backbone while he watched them fade out of sight.
“Jesus,” he muttered aloud as he stood and took a moment to compose himself before starting back down the hill toward Tall Man’s lodge.
