Page 99 of Coyote

It took longer than the run had. My hand was shaking, the bone of his skull hard and stubborn, but I didn't stop until I had three of them out.

The human teeth were long and white, capped with gold at the back.

I took the wire necklace of boar tusks from my neck, and I threaded the wire through the roots of Zaroff's teeth, wrapping the copper tight until they sat right in the middle of the tusks.

He got to keep the name. It was the only thing he took with him.

I left him there in the deep sand of the wash. The real coyotes of the ridge were already calling, their high, yipping voices carrying over the flat on the midnight wind. They knew the smell of blood.

"He's yours," I said to the desert.

I turned my back on the wash and started the long walk back to the pass. The walk was harder. The adrenaline was gone, leaving my body to feel the full weight of the cold and the pain. I limped through the scrub, my bare feet bleeding into the caliche, my splinted arm held tight against my ribs.

But I didn't stop.

The mouth of the pass was still there, a gray gap between the black walls of rock. They'd built a small, quiet fire of mesquite roots behind the flatbed, the yellow light dancing on the iron wheels.

John was sitting on a flat stone near the fire, his rifle resting across his knees.

He didn't stand up when I walked into the light. He just reached out. His big hands came to my face, palms rough and warm against my cold skin, fingers catching my jaw, pressing into my cheeks.

"Coyote," he said.

I let my head fall forward, my forehead resting against his chest, right over the scar. "It's done," I said. "Take me home. I'm not letting you out of my sight ever again."

We brought him home in the flatbed with his head in my lap.

Cruz drove like the truck bed was stacked with eggs, and the road still found every rut it had. Coyote slept through all of them. In the shed, I hung a headlamp on a nail and cut away the ruined tape. Sierra carried the saline in from the barn refrigerator and stood over us holding the bag at shoulder height.

I slid the needle into the vein, and Coyote surfaced enough to pull against it.

"You're home," I said. "The line stays in. I told you I'd sit on your chest, and I will."

"Big man." His good hand crossed his body and closed on nothing at the base of his throat, where a snake should have been. His eyes stayed shut.

"She's in the cave. She's safe. When you can ride, we'll go get her."

The hand slid off his collarbone, and he sank back into sleep. I splinted the hand properly, and then I started on his feet. My knees ached after kneeling for so long, but I ignored them.

I woke him twice before dawn. The first time, he threatened to bite me. The second, he asked if Zaroff was dead, and I said yes, and he said good, and fell asleep again before the word ended. Both times his pupil came back level, faster on the second check.

Near dawn, I stretched out on my own bedroll, put my hand over the mark his teeth had left on my chest, and matched my breathing to his until sleep took me.

I reached across the bed and closed my hand around Coyote's shoulder, drawing him back against me. For five years, I'd been reaching across that space, braced to find it empty. Not anymore.

I lay there and breathed him in, eyes closed, and waited for the guilt. I gave it a full minute. I counted it out the way I'd count a pulse. Nothing came up but a voice, so pleased with itself that heat spread under my sternum. Told you, you big idiot.

I stretched my legs down onto a mattress that finally let my ankles rest on cotton instead of dangling in the draft. Three days ago, this bed hadn't existed. The room still smelled of raw pine and fresh sawdust. Cruz and Mateo and the rest had spent the last few days expanding the shed into a proper building that'd serve as the ranch's clinic and now our home.

Coyote lay heavy and loose on the mattress beside me, one knee hitched warm against my thigh, his splinted hand resting empty where his knife should have been. Sierra had lifted it out of the dirt on that ridge and carried it down in his own belt. Coyote hadn't had it in his hand since. The swelling had come down off his cheekbone and brow enough for his lashes to show again.

The fingers past the splint were pink and warm. I checked anyway. The nail blanched white under my thumb and had its color back in two seconds.

His feet were the worse job. I'd spent the first night on them with forceps and a headlamp, pulling cactus spines out of both soles, and I'd stopped counting somewhere in the left one. The cracks across his heels had finally closed enough to quit weeping.

"My fingers are fine," he said without opening his eyes.

Then he rolled over and buried his face in the hollow of my neck, breath hot on my throat, shifting his hips to keep his knees clear of my ribs. His hair tickled my nose.