“He won’t be waking up for a few hours,” said Jackson. His pale blue eyes were keen.
She took a deep breath and stepped outside after him. She drank her Heineken and looked around the scene as Jackson smoked. She could see the back end of the modest row houses that lined the sandy two-lane street. To the north, rising foothills provided an elevated horizon. The brown land was sprinkled with dots of sagebrush, cacti and yucca trees. A few of the houses had small landscaped areas of improbable green.
Jackson’s backyard didn’t. It was the same brown as the rest of the desert. A small, battered trailer that rested on concrete blocks instead of tires took up most of the space in his yard. Bare concrete steps led up to the trailer’s door. The window coverings were raised. The trailer looked uninhabited, the parking space beside it empty.
A large part of the evening sky had darkened. She nodded toward it. “Weird.”
Jackson glanced in that direction. “Sandstorm’s blowing in. It’ll probably hit in another hour. Looks like we’ll lose cable again.”
She raised her eyebrows. “That happen often?”
“A fair amount. Cell phone reception is spotty here anyway, and it goes out completely in one of these storms. Sometimes we lose the phone lines too. If the phone lines go, it’ll take at least a day before we get them back.”
“Damn.”
“The storm might blow over in a couple of hours, or it might go all night. I knew one once that lasted a couple days, although that’s unusual. People watch DVDs, hang out in the bars, and there’s always a poker game somewhere.” He shrugged. “You get used to it.”
The storm didn’t look that far off. She guessed it would be blowing in very soon, but for the moment, the heat of the early evening pressed against her skin. Spring hadn’t officially arrived yet; the vernal equinox was in just a few days. She liked the summer and winter solstices, and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. They added a cadence to the year and made it feel balanced.
The heat would go out of the day quickly, especially now that the sun had begun to descend. She imagined the spring nights would get quite cold, but for now she was still comfortable with bare arms.
Jackson finished his cigarette, stubbed it out and tossed the brown butt into a coffee can by his back door. “I’d say you don’t talk much for a girl,” he said. “Except you don’t talk much, period. Those five words were the most you’ve said in a couple hours.”
She took a pull from her beer. “Ran out of things to say a few years back.”
Jackson grunted, tapped out another cigarette and lit it. He drew deeply on the cigarette and with evident pleasure. The glowing coal at the end flared bright red. “Why’s that?”
She lifted a shoulder. Too much blood, too much death. Her unit got shot at one too many times, and the last time almost none of them survived to walk away. Sometimes, she thought, things happen that are so bad you go deep inside, down past the point of screaming, into silence.
She finished her Heineken.
Jackson smoked. She liked the smell of the cigarette smoke. It was comforting. It reminded her of people she had cared for more than her own life, people she would never see again this side of death.
He asked, “So what’s the real story? You know that dog?”
“Nope,” she said. “I found him, just like I said.”
He said, “He should’ve died on that table couple times over.”
“I figure,” she said. She stretched her neck again, first one way then the other.
“Thought you might,” said Jackson. “You know, it could just mean he’s one hell of a stubborn dog. I’ve seen animals with a kind of will to live you wouldn’t believe.”
“It could.” She waited. She thought she knew what might come next.
Jackson did not disappoint. “Or it could mean something else,” he said. He pushed his hat back with the tip of his bottle. “Which is why you watched me so damn close the whole time I was working on him, wasn’t it? Why you wanted to help. And why you wanted to make sure about the drugs I was giving him. He could just be a stubborn dog that won’t die. Or he could be Wyr. In which case, what happened to him wasn’t just animal cruelty but attempted murder.”
“I figure,” Claudia said again.
Chapter Two
Hearth
“But the healing capabilities of the Wyr are famous,” she continued. “Wouldn’t we have seen some of his injuries heal by now?”
“Maybe we did, which is why he didn’t die. You don’t have the magic sense to tell whether he’s Wyr or not,” Jackson said. He didn’t phrase it as a question.
She answered him anyway. “Nope.”
“I don’t either. Nor John, or he would have said something.”
“Would he?”