Page 12 of Ransom
I let the silence answer for me. The pines thickened ahead. This was Coyote's territory. I could smell his fire and the animal musk that clung to everything he touched.
Winston pulled Faye to a stop.
I turned. He sat straight in the saddle now, both hands on the reins, hat pushed back, those pale green eyes on mine and reading me the way he had read the rifle.
"I'm going to need you to turn around," he said. The easy tone had gone, and what replaced it was the voice of a man who carried a badge and knew what it was worth. "Because right now you're a person of interest escorting an officer of the law into the middle of nowhere with a dead body, and I'd hate for this to become a different kind of conversation."
I stopped walking and closed my eyes.
I'm sorry about this, I thought. For what that's worth.
Something hit Winston out of the saddle like a bolt from God.
I took a step toward him with my hand going for the rifle on Galahad's saddle, and I had the stock in my palm before I registered the move. I let go of the rifle and stepped back. My boot scuffed in the dirt, and that was the only sound I made.
Faye screamed and bolted. Winston and Coyote rolled in the dirt, and Coyote came up on top with his knees pinned on either side of Winston's chest, hair hanging wild past his jaw, teeth bared, a sound coming out of him that was not a word in any language. The last of the light caught him from behind and turned him into edges and angles and bare bronze skin. Winston got a hand up, and Coyote caught it and slammed it into the dirt and hit him once in the temple with the heel of his palm.
Winston went limp.
His hat had come off in the fall. The lips that had been on me three hours ago hung a little parted in the dirt.
Coyote crouched over him, breathing hard, and cocked his head to the side like a dog listening for a sound only he could hear. A long, reddish snake slithered down from around his shoulders and wound down his arm toward Winston's face, tongue flicking. Coyote followed her with his eyes and didn't blink. His stillness made the back of my neck go cold.
"Coyote."
He didn't answer for a beat. Then his head came up and his eyes found mine, and the feral thing in his face folded back into the face I knew.
"Took you long enough," I said.
Coyote looked up. His eyes were black and bright and half-crazy. That was his resting state. "The wind was selfish."
"The wind."
"She wanted to tell the horse I was coming. I had to wait until she got bored." He said it like a news report. "Horses are gossips. Wind is worse."
"You literally just jumped out of a tree."
"And it was beautiful. Did you see it? Tell me you saw it." He sat back on his heels and looked down at Winston's face. "Oh. Pretty."
"Don't start."
Coyote lifted the snake off Winston's face and draped her around his neck. He stood, stepped over the unconscious Ranger like he was a log on the trail, and walked straight to me. He leaned in, put his nose to my throat, and inhaled.
I stood still and let him do it because stopping Coyote from doing anything was like stopping the weather.
He pulled back and grinned at me wide enough to show every tooth he had.
"You fucked him."
The accusation landed like a boot on my chest. Part of me wanted to hit him. Part of me wanted to sit down in the dirt and rest.
"Shut up."
"You did. I can smell it." He leaned in again, sniffed my collar, my jaw, circled behind me and sniffed my shoulder. "You fucked him and you liked it. You smell like guilt and cum and that thing you do when you're pretending you don't feel things." He came back around to my front and stopped. The grin dropped off his face the way weather changes on the high desert, all at once. "You fucked him and now he's yours and you don't know what to do about it."
"That thing I do has a name. It's called being a professional."
"That's not what it's called." He circled back to face me. Nimue tasted the air between us. Behind Coyote, Winston was a long shape in the dirt, his hands above his head where he had fallen. "Does Rafe know?"
