Angrily Krysty shouted one of the few Lakota words she knew. “Leave!”
The shaman affected not to have heard. She grabbed him by one arm and, with rather more force than she intended, dragged him toward the door. “Leave,” she repeated.
The man stopped hopping and shouting. He gave her a lingering look of reproach, then spit a mouthful of chewed-up flower petals in her face. Sunlata moved aside respectfully as the shaman exited the room in a huff.
Doc gazed after him, remarking, “He provides bedside service, and this is the thanks he gets.”
Krysty fingered the flower petals from her cheeks.
“I can’t worry about hurt feelings now. We’ve got to go after Ryan and J.B.”
“Don’t know where are,” Jak said. “Wolf lead them.”
Mildred bit her lower lip, ran a hand through her plaited hair and said, “Jak’s right. We’d be tearing off into the dark, both literally and figuratively.”
Doc nodded in agreement. “Under the circumstances we should wait for word or for one of them to return. Or at least until daybreak.”
He glanced sideways at Sunlata, adding quietly, “Besides, I suspect our hosts wouldn’t allow us to depart without an armed guard. They’re relying on us, remember.”
“On our weapons, you mean,” Krysty snapped. She glared at Sunlata, who blinked back at her uncomprehending.
She sighed. “All right. Let’s wait until dawn. Then we go after them.”
“And if our hosts would rather we did not?” Doc inquired.
“Then get demonstration of weapons,” Jak growled.
Though she earnestly tried, Sunlata couldn’t revive their interest in the game. Nor could she arouse Jak’s interest in leaving the room with her. Around two o’clock she left quietly.
Jak and Doc sat around the table, sharpening and honing their blades with a whetstone the teenager always carried. Mildred and Krysty took turns, every half-hour or so, pacing to the window and peering into the darkness, looking for a sign of the sun. All of them knew they should catch some sleep, especially if they intended to undertake a rescue or investigative mission in a few hours. Adrenaline kept them alert.
According to Krysty’s chron, it was half-past four when Jak’s head swiveled toward the door. “Riders coming in,” he whispered.
As one, all four people got to their feet and rushed out, none of them wanting to surrender to either the hope or dread battling for dominance in their hearts and minds.
Outside they circled the great tree, heading for the horse compound. They had taken only a few steps when Joe emerged from the darkness. The right sleeve of his buckskin tunic was ripped, and his hand showed a speckling of blood. The barrel of his blaster drooped toward the ground. In his left hand he held a small, blocky object.
When he saw the four friends, he stopped in his tracks. None of them spoke. With eyes clouded with fatigue and the bitterness of defeat, he swept his gaze across their faces, pausing at Krysty’s, then finally settling upon Mildred’s.
Joe stepped forward and extended his left hand. Gripped within it was J.B.’s fedora. The crown was battered, the brim notched and stained with a squiggly pattern of dried blood.
“I’m sorry” was all he said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
J.B. had slept for a time, but he had dreamed and the dreams were full of anthropomorphic shapes, obscene blendings of beast and man. He awakened suddenly, and his surroundings reminded him that his nightmares weren’t all that removed from his reality.
He lay alone in the depths of the nighted forest and suffered. He had lost a fair amount of blood from the fang-inflicted gash across the base of his throat. The back of his head was swollen, and it throbbed in cadence with his pulse. He figured he was suffering from a mild concussion.
J.B. knew he had gotten off lucky, though. When the wolf had slashed his throat with razored teeth, missing his jugular by a fractional margin, he had fallen and struck his head against a stone. The animal had apparently believed him dead and left him.
The Armorer had awakened alone in the shadows, and his wrist chron told him that only a few minutes had elapsed. He had also awakened weaponless, his Uzi, his scattergun and all the spare ammo missing. He heard voices approaching from the direction of the village and so had climbed back into the cramped passageway.