The creature was too big for a dog, its head a trifle too wide, the tail too bushy, the posture too feral. It was a wolf, watching his every move with a hypnotic intensity. Though very large, probably tipping the scales at close to one hundred sixty pounds, the wolf wasn’t one of the mutie strains that prowled the Rockies.
Ryan carefully unleathered his blaster. Then a soft voice spoke from the darkness behind the animal.
“He will not harm you. He is afriend,” a soft woman’s voice said.
She came toward him out of the dusk, past the crouching wolf. Her movements were light and lithe, with a grace that reminded him somehow of Joe. She wore the combination of homespun and buckskin clothing of the Amicans, and at first he took her for a Cheyenne. Her waist-length hair was sleek and black enough, but the face it framed wasn’t ruddy and her eyes were a brown so light they were almost tan or a shade of gold. She didn’t look more than eighteen years old.
There was a pride and a touch of arrogance in those eyes, though there was something oddly childlike in them, too, almost an innocence.
“I am Sisoka,” she said softly, her glance tilting to meet his. She was only a few inches over five feet tall. “It means Robin’s Wing. His name is We’-mna. It means Blood-sniffer.”
“I’m Ryan Cawdor,” he replied.
“I have seen you here in Amicus, before the battle.”
“I don’t recall seeing you,” he said. “Or your friend. I think I’d remember you both.”
The instant he said it, he regretted it. With a chilly sensation at the base of his spine, he realized the wolf did indeed look familiar.
Sisoka stepped closer. “You fought well. You saved Amicus.”
Ryan only grunted.
“You look tired,” she murmured, “and a little sad. Is it because you are leaving us?”
Ryan glanced again at the wolf. It was still watching him with that fixed, faintly luminous green-gold gaze.
“If you’ll pardon me,” he said, making a move to step around her and the beast.
“You look,” Sisoka continued as though she hadn’t heard the dismissal, “as if you’ve had some bad dreams.”
Ryan stopped. “What did you say?”
“Touch-the-Sky offers you only another bad dream, Ryan Cawdor.”
Something in her tone, even the sound of her voice, set off a warning vibration in his brain. The caution and instinctive suspicion that had kept him alive for two decades in the Deathland hellzones came up to triple red. The SIG-Sauer fairly leaped into his hand.
Towering over Sisoka, he asked, “What do you know of Ti-Ra’-Wa?”
Sisoka barely glanced at the bore of the blaster. Her eyes flicked to Ryan’s glaring blue eye, and she said softly, almost sadly, ” Kte .”
It was a Lakota word Ryan understood. It meant “kill.”
The wolf was a dark thunderbolt that sprang from the ground, and it struck Ryan full in the chest, knocking him sprawling. He felt razor-keen fangs on his right forearm, keeping his blaster hand immobilized.
Ryan knew that before he could switch the weapon to his left hand or even draw his panga, his throat would be ripped out. He squeezed off a shot, hoping the blaster’s familiar cracking report would draw Krysty or one of the others.
Blood-sniffer’s paws tore rents in his shirt as he struggled, and the jaws increased their pressure around his arm. Cursing, Ryan gathered a handful of furry hide at the beast’s ruff and tried to wrench it backward and off balance. He wrapped his legs around the wolfs body and rolled to the left in an effort to outmuscle the animal long enough to un-scabbard his blade.
The wolf resisted his maneuver, shifting its weight without voicing a growl or a snarl. As he strained and wrestled, Ryan received the strange impression that despite the young woman’s command, the wolf had no intention of killing him, as though it were acting on its own agenda.
“Ryan!” Krysty shouted.
” We’-mna, inankni yot” Sisoka called.
The wolf released its grip on the arm and bounded away, its hind feet springboarding from Ryan’s chest and slamming him to the ground, the back of his head striking hard. He rolled to his feet, dazed and bleeding.