Dead Heat (Alpha and Omega) - Patricia Briggs Page 0,30
told you, I know. But I didn’t want to make you come if you didn’t want to. Or I didn’t want the only reason you came to be because I was dying. Pride, you know.”
He spoke in rapid groups of words with pauses between to breathe. Charles didn’t say anything, but fathomless sorrow gathered in his eyes. Anna knew that Joseph really was his friend because he saw it, too.
The old man smiled. “I intended to be one of those sweet old people, you know the kind, who do exactly what they’re told and eventually they lie down and die when it’s convenient for everyone.”
“I remember,” said Charles, and his face softened into a reluctant smile. “As I recall, it was when you were getting on that rank stallion at the Half Moon on a dare. I told you that I’d feel bad burying you the next morning.”
“I rode that horse,” Joseph said.
“And herded cattle with him the next week,” Charles said. “It was still a stupid thing to do.”
Joseph started to speak, but he had to stop and breathe for a minute. Then he said, “Too much pride and stubbornness, you said.”
“More than once,” agreed Charles.
“You’ll be”—Joseph grinned—“happy. I’m proud and stubborn, as always. Won’t go to the hospital as Maggie wishes—too many evil spirits from all the dead people. I will die here and haunt this house until the old man lets Maggie burn the place down.”
He coughed lightly. “In the old days they’d have kissed my cheek and then left me in the desert to die. Then my family would hire some Hopi or white man too stupid to know the dangers of handling the dead to go deal with the body. Now we’re caught between modern ways and the old. If I die here, only fire will keep my evil ghost from making everyone miserable, and they are too rational to do that.” He laughed, a sound that tried hard to be a cackle, but he didn’t have the air to make that much noise.
Charles rocked back on his heels. “I could take you out to the desert, Joseph, but I don’t know about the kiss.”
Joseph laughed again. Then he started coughing and suddenly all sorts of equipment squealed and beeped. Charles gave the machines an irritated look and they all shut up. Anna, half-horrified, hoped that they had just gone back to their jobs of monitoring Joseph and pumping him full of medications for whatever he needed. But she was afraid not; their silence felt very permanent.
Charles waded through the wires and tubes to put his hands on Joseph’s chest. Joseph stiffened as his eyes met her mate’s, not a gentle stiffening, but like a person who’d stuck a table knife in a wall socket. All that was missing were the sparks and the smoke.
Charles narrowed his gaze and started chanting softly in a language that no one except for him had spoken for nearly two hundred years, a dialect of the Flathead tongue that had died when his mother’s tribe had succumbed to one of the sicknesses that the Europeans had brought with them to the New World, when he was a very young man.
He could have been saying anything, but Anna’s wolf stirred, called to attention by the sharp ozone breath of the sacred that Charles occasionally could tap into when, as Charles put it, the spirits so moved him.
Joseph stopped coughing eventually, leaving Charles’s soothing voice the dominant sound in the room. There were no plants here, but Anna could smell pine. Some impulse urged her to touch Charles, so she did. The back of his neck was the easiest skin to reach, so she put her fingertips there. She closed her eyes and felt his voice sink into her bones. Unable to resist, she lent her song to his.
She didn’t have the language, so she hummed an alto descant to his bass almost-song. The chant was Native American, so it didn’t follow European chords or patterns. But that didn’t bother her. She’d accompanied Charles when he played or sang the songs of his childhood before, though never had it summoned magic. As she found the right notes, it seemed to her that the chant grew stronger.
Charles stopped singing abruptly, and she fell silent at the same time. She may not have understood what he was doing, but the connection between them had told her when the song was finished. On the bed, Joseph’s breathing was no longer labored. He was relaxed