She cut me off with a stately shake of her head. “Not mine. I am only the instrument of God's will.”
“Of course.” Old-school, Zeke had said. He asked us not to upset his grandmother with superstitious stories, but that promise seemed moot, given his abuela's psychicness and all. The chupacabra was out of the bag. “But if you've Seen us, then maybe you've Seen the other thing, too? A strange creature that's been killing livestock?”
She rose to her feet. Her walking stick was elaborate, dark wood carved with dragonflies down its length. The design distracted me for a moment, and I thought about the weather vane. If dragonflies were good luck, it seemed an oddly superstitious thing for her to carry, unless she just thought the design was pretty.
Her straight, cool posture drew my gaze back to her. “There is nothing strange on the land. The coyotes are growing bold because of the drought, that is all.”
So Zeke hadn't been able to keep her completely in the dark. I wonder how he thought he could, even if he didn't know about her abilities.
I rose automatically, still full of questions. “But if you know about the cattle—”
“Enough.” She rapped her cane against the floor, an old-fashioned but impressive gesture. “This land is under my protection.” The statement was both a fact and a warning. “Nothing happens on this land without my knowledge. For one hundred and fifty years my family has been here, and I am tied to this place like a mother is tied to her child.”
She spoke softly in her richly textured voice, her accent a grace note. But her words reverberated like an oath, and I saw a flash in her black eyes.
You're wrong. I pressed my lips together, swallowing the words. It wasn't good manners that held my tongue. It was the power of her belief and my complete lack of ammunition against her denial. “El chupacabra” isn't much of an argument against “God has shown me the way it is.”
“Now,” said Doña Isabel very pleasantly, “Ezekiel is waiting for you in the foyer. I hope you enjoy your afternoon.”
The dismissal was so complete, Lisa and I were outside in the hallway before I even realized I was moving. I caught sight of my face in an ornamental mirror, and my gobsmacked expression snapped me back to reality. “Wow. I feel like I've just left the principal's office.”
In contrast, Lisa's expression was grim. “I don't know what that does to your chupacabra theory, Mags. Even the witch of Velasquez County doesn't think there's anything going on.”
“Well, she's wrong.” I glanced toward the door we'd just exited, then lowered my voice. “Do you think Zeke knows?”
“About her denial?” Lisa folded her arms. “Or that his grandmother is a witch?”
“I'm not sure she's a witch.” There was a particular feel to magic like Lisa did, and even to the charms we'd found in our room. But the vibe that I got from Doña Isabel was different. “I think she's like me. A Seer.” One who didn't seem to be Seeing the whole picture. Granted, that was how I operated most of the time, but at least I was looking for the missing pieces.
Zeke waited in the foyer, where Doña Isabel had said he'd be. He looked a little anxious, but smoothed his features as we appeared. “Ready to go?”
Who was he worried about—her or us? “Your grandmother is very interesting, Zeke.”
His brow knotted warily. “How so?”
I chose my words carefully, to judge his reaction. “She's very protective.”
He let his guard down, smiling sheepishly. “Well, I'm the only grandson still around.”
Lisa slid her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, hips cocked to the side. It was a deceptively casual posture. “I'll warn you, we probably didn't pass inspection.”
He grinned. “If you hadn't, I'd already be hearing about it.” Holding open the front door, he gestured to the bright afternoon. “Let's go saddle up.”
“Yee-haw,” Lisa said, and led the way out and to the truck.
I brought up the rear, resisting the urge to glance over my shoulder one more time.
12
Horses are nothing like in the movies.
Maybe it's the way they focus the camera, or maybe because when I watched Hidalgo, I was really paying a lot more attention to Viggo Mortensen. But once you're standing next to one, you can't help but realize, horses are freaking huge.
“Go ahead and pet her, miss.” The stable boss—Zeke had called him Lupe—tied the lead rope for a dark brown mare around the top rail of the barn's fence. Already saddled, she shifted placidly from hoof to hoof, clomping in the sawdust.
Tentatively, I ran my hand down her neck to her shoulder, a wall of muscle under warm skin and sleek coat. My hand came away dusty, with sweat-damp hairs clinging to my palm.
Horse sweat smelled better than I would have thought, blending with other smells of the stable yard—leather and oats, hay and manure. It wasn't exactly perfume, but it wasn't that bad, either.
“Here.” Lupe handed me half an apple. The mare's head followed the fruit, nostrils widening in interest. “Hold it like this.” He showed me his open palm, held very flat.
“O-kay.” I did as he said. The horse stretched out her lips to investigate the offering, then deigned to accept it, leaving my palm coated with green-flecked saliva.
Lovely.
The mare watched me with an indifferent eye while she chewed her treat. “Does she have a name?” I asked.
“Sassy.” Lupe patted her affectionately on the rear end.
“I'm not sure I'm up to a Sassy. I think I'd be much happier on a Gluefoot.”
The cowboy grinned, his face a map of sun-weathered years. “Short for Sarsaparilla, miss.”
Because she was the color of root beer. Duh. I touched the white mark on her hip—the double-armed cross of the Velasquez ranch—and her skin twitched like she was shooing a fly.
Zeke had brought out his horse—a pinto with artistic splotches of reddish brown on his white coat—and a long-legged black mare that Lisa was brushing as they chatted. She and Zeke, not the horse. Though between the charms in my room, the chupacabra, and meeting Doña Isabel in my dreams, not much else would surprise me today.
I'd never gone through a horse-mad phase as a girl. Any terminology I knew came from reading about Nancy Drew and The Secret of Shadow Ranch. I eyed the stirrup, which was about at the level of my shoulder. The saddle was way above that.
“How am I supposed to get up there?”
“Get your foot in and jump up,” said Lisa. She checked the length of the stirrups by measuring the leather against her arm, then tucked her foot into place, and with an effortless hop, swung her long leg over the horse's back.
“You're just showing off.”
Lupe moved to hold the mare's bridle as Zeke came over to help me. “I'll give you a leg up.”
That sounded slightly indecent, but I went along with it, putting my foot in his knit hands. “Now, grab the front of the saddle for balance. When I say three, jump with your standing leg, and I'll toss you up.”
“Wait, toss? What?”
“One, two, three.”
I landed on my stomach across the horse's back. Zeke somehow got my foot in the left stirrup, and I used it for leverage while I wrestled my right leg over. Finally, I was upright in the saddle. As long as I didn't look down, I'd be fine.
Zeke handed me the reins, positioning them between my thumb and palm. “All you have to do is hold them in one hand and move them the way you want to go. Right, left, stop.”
I copied his movements timidly. Rather than obey, the mare bent her neck to cast me a disdainful eye.
Zeke's grin flashed white against his tan skin. “Don't worry. All you really have to do is follow me, and she'll do that automatically.”
“If you say so.” He returned to his own horse and I tried to find a more comfortable position in the saddle, which was difficult with the torque on my knees and the pressure on my hip bones. Not to mention the really long way down.
Lupe corrected my grip on the re
ins. “Not so tight, miss. You'll communicate better with her if you're not sitting like a poker. Relax. Not that much,” he added, when I slumped in the saddle.
“Sorry.”
“This is Doña Isabel's horse.” He stroked her neck, and the mare regarded him much more kindly than she did me. If she was the grande dame's mount, that explained the disdain.
“Ready?” called Zeke. Lisa gave her mare a nudge with her heels and brought her alongside his horse, and they both looked at me expectantly.
I sighed, feeling even more out of place. “Ready as I'll ever be.”
Zeke reined in at the top of a rise; the land ebbed and flowed gently, but you couldn't tell until you were actually riding it. Like an ocean, it seemed to stretch on and on, until it faded into the blue-gray haze of the horizon.
“There you go,” he said. “The Wild Horse Desert.”
There was a stark kind of beauty to the place—the bleached tan of the ground and the dark umber of the shrub oaks and mesquite. Cacti bloomed with bright yellow flowers, and the irrigated places—cotton fields, stock ponds—were sparse but vibrant green. And everywhere was scattered the dark red of the cattle.
“It's kind of gorgeous, isn't it.”
“Yeah. My great-great-grandfather saw the potential here. Got to know it pretty well while he was gun-running up the Rio Grande during the Civil War.” Zeke flashed that grin. “We weren't always such a reputable lot.”
“I'm not convinced you're reputable now,” Lisa drawled, too sardonic to be flirting. Lisa and flirting— there were two words that had never shared a sentence before.
Easing my right foot out of the stirrup, I tried to straighten my knee, expecting to creak like the Tin Man. From the waist up, I was getting more comfortable with Sassy. From the waist down was a different story.
The horse shifted, maybe smelling the stock pond that I could see about a hundred yards away. “How come some of the ponds have windmills and some don't?” I asked. “Is there electricity run out here?”
“No.” Zeke followed my line of sight. “Depends on the well, and the water pressure underground. The reservoir under the ranch has mostly artesian wells—ones that don't need a pump.”
“That's how the Artesian Manor got its name?”
“Right. The artesian springs used to be a novelty. The hotel was built by a land developer who used them as a selling point, trying to get people from back east to buy land here.”
Lisa scanned the empty horizon with an arched brow. “I can see how well that worked.”
Zeke grinned. “Actually, he was moderately successful before a hurricane wiped out half the town.” He nudged his horse with his heels and it ambled forward. “Ready to go?”
Lisa clicked her tongue, and her mare started walking. Sassy fell in alongside, trying to get her nose in front. “So, between hurricanes, desert, and drought, why would anyone settle here?” I asked.
“See that cactus?” Zeke pointed to a plant with broad, fat sections covered in spines. “When you boil it down, it makes great feed for cattle. This place was full of untapped resources when my great-great-granddad bought it.”
We were passing an oil pump—a contraption that looked like it had a horse head bobbing up and down on one end as cranks turned on the other. “And plenty of tapped ones,” Lisa added.
Zeke's smile turned rueful. “Yeah, that, too.”
“So if that's an oil well,” Lisa said, pointing to the nodding pump, “then what's that thing?”
She indicated an arrangement of pipes sticking out of the ground like a metal cactus, but covered with spools and plumbing fixtures. Zeke answered, “It's also a well. Just like with the water, how you get oil out depends on how much pressure is in the reservoir. Sometimes you need a pump, like one of those nodding donkeys.” He gestured to the horse-head contraption. “And where the pressure is higher, you just need to control the flow into the pipeline. If you don't control the pressure, you could have a seep or a gusher.”
“A gusher would be bad, right?”
“Thousands of gallons of petroleum lost,” said Zeke. “Or worse, it could catch on fire. And that would be very bad.”
“How do you know so much about this?” I asked.
He laughed. “It's genetic. Cattle and oil. That's what Texas is about, little lady.”
“Please,” said Lisa, letting her horse speed up. “You round up cattle with a helicopter.”
I protested. “You're ruining my mental image. I'm already disappointed that Zeke doesn't wear a six-gallon hat.”
“Ten-gallon hat,” he corrected.
“Whatever.”
“You mean six-shooter, maybe.” Zeke spoke conversationally, to the rhythm of the horses. “I don't wear one of those, either.”
I pointed at the pistol in the leather holster attached to his saddle. “You're packing something.” I'd done an article on gun-control legislation for the school paper, so I could tell a revolver from a semiautomatic from a machine gun, and that was about it.
He shrugged. “It's a little big for snakes and vermin, but you never know what you'll find out here.”
For the record, I'm pro–gun control. The way I see it, if someone has a problem that can't wait for a background check, they're the last person who needs to be armed. And the only reason you'd need an automatic weapon for hunting is if you expected to get attacked by a battalion of mule deer. But if I lived where snakes and vermin might mosey up to my front door, I'd beat a quick path to Big Bob's Guns and Ammo.
Zeke nodded to the stock pond. “Let's give the horses a drink and then head back. Up for a canter, Lisa?”
“Sure,” said pod person Lisa. “Maggie? You okay to follow at a walk?”
“No problem.” As if I didn't feel like a third wheel before. “Don't let me hold you up or anything.”
“Hold your horse,” said Zeke.
“What?”
Before he could explain, Lisa gave her mare a jab with her heels and leapt across the dune. Zeke and his gelding were off a second later. Sassy wasn't happy to be left behind, and I had to put my crash course in riding to the test, sitting back in the saddle and flexing my legs as I held her back.
I watched the two riders crossing the pasture at a gentle lope, puffs of dirt rising from the dry ground with each thud of their horses' hoofs. The afternoon light painted everything in stark colors, and the air smelled of sun and salt and sweat.
“Are you going to behave?” I asked Sassy, my voice as stern as I could make it. She tossed her head, then dropped it and settled into a sulk. “We might as well start our walk.”
As soon as I slackened the reins and shifted my weight, she started forward, dragging her hoofs through the sand. I nudged her into a normal walk, gritted my teeth against the pain forming where my butt met the hard leather of the saddle, and turned my thoughts to Doña Isabel.
I pictured her in the portrait, young and willowy, posed with Sarsaparilla's great-granddam, or however many greats made fifty years in horse generations. What must it have been like to be a woman in the fifties—a young widow with two babies—and in charge of all this land? No wonder she had a will of iron.
Sassy changed gaits, and I adjusted my weight without thinking, taking the impact of the trot with my knees and thighs as if I'd been doing it all my life.
But Doña Isabel's connection to the land wasn't just about being its worldly heir. It was a bond of guardianship. That was how she spoke of it, and how I saw her in my dream.
That said, if she was psychic like me, why had she dreamed of me and Lisa but not of the red-eyed creature that I'd seen? She seemed to know about the livestock deaths, even if Zeke thought he was sheltering her. And what was up with that? Didn't he think she could handle it? Even without the mojo, Doña Isabel was obviously a woman to be reckoned with.
Then I ran out of questions, and realized Sassy and I were almost at the watering hole. I also realized that I was now riding at a gentle canter, moving in synch with the horse.
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My body tensed, breaking the rhythm, and I started bouncing around in the saddle like a paddleball. Sassy reacted immediately to my alarm; maybe she'd fallen into the same trance I had, thinking about her mistress. She bolted from a canter into a gallop, as if trying to outrun the stranger on her back.
My legs clamped to the mare's ribs and my fingers knotted in her mane, which only made things worse. I remembered Lupe telling me to stay relaxed. Unfortunately, trapped and “relaxed” on a runaway horse, I was getting a big 4,04 error. The only thing accessible was panic.
The desert whipped by in the corner of my eye, a merry-go-round blur. It hurt to hold on, but hitting the ground would hurt even more.
What would Doña Isabel do? Think, Maggie.
No, wait. It wasn't thinking that got me into this. I'd been doing fine going on instinct. Use the Force, Maggie.
I reached down with my right hand and grabbed the reins low near the bridle. The scarred tissue in my wrist sent lightning bolts of pain up my arm, but I clenched my fingers and pulled hard to the side. The steady pressure drew the mare's head around, and where the head went, the horse had to follow.
Sassy spun on her own axis, and I felt myself coming up out of the saddle. Pressing my foot into the stirrup, I rode it out—one turn, two, slowing like a top. Finally she stopped, and gave a whole body shudder, like a car that clanks and sputters after you turn off the ignition. I unlocked my fingers from the rein, cradled my aching arm against my chest, and let myself breathe again.
There were flecks of white foam on Sassy's chest, and her coat was now more the color of coffee than root beer. Perspiration soaked my bra and trickled down my back, and the pain in my arm had progressed to burning numbness when I flexed my fingers. But I would recover.
“It's okay, girl.” I leaned forward to stroke her neck with my left hand, which was shaking almost as much as my right. “We're okay.”
She blew out a breath and dipped her head. We had come out of warp speed in a maze of mesquite trees. The mad rush had turned my sense of direction upside down. Everything looked bewilderingly familiar; the scrubby trees were identical to the ones I'd seen on the entire ride. The cacti looked the same, the cows on the horizon looked the same. It was a flat, open canvas of dry desolation.