Page 102 of Coyote

Inside smelled of snake and wet stone. Something papery rattled in the crate. A shed skin lay folded back on itself in one whole translucent piece, still holding her shape. Beside the water pan, Nimue raised her head, and her eyes were black and clear all the way.

"Hey," Coyote said.

She came out of the crate, over his offered knuckles, up his arm, and settled at his collar. He shut his eyes. His shoulders relaxed for the first time since the pass.

I picked up the crate and knocked the dirt out of it. The hasp was still torn out of the wood, and the cut friction tape hung off the lid in strips. Two screws and a new hasp would fix it. I put it on the list.

At the cave mouth he stopped and worked Zaroff's necklace out of his jacket, tusks and three gold-capped teeth wired in among them. It took him a long time one-handed, wiring it into the strings with the rabbit and the bird and the wildcat bones at the mouth of the cave. I didn't offer to help. When he let go, it turned in the draft with a small, dry click, one more set of bones moving in the wind.

"Zaroff finally became useful," he said.

The flat rock under the overhang held the afternoon heat. We sat on it with the horses dozing below us.

"I was in your pen," he said. "I read the walls. Ten rows of fifty. Then eleven. Then nothing." He held his jaw so tight that it shook. "Five hundred and eleven what, John?"

My throat went dry. I looked at my hands. "Times I wanted to break one of them," I said. "And didn't."

He kept his eyes on the side of my face.

"Every time it came up in me, I held still until it passed, and I put it on the wall so it would live somewhere that wasn't my hands. Five hundred and eleven times I chose. Then they took the ninth man out through the gate and he didn't come back, and I got two more marks into the steel before one of them came in through the gate and took the nail out of my fingers. I never got another one."

His fingers clamped around my left hand and dragged it hard against his chest, flat over his shirt, over the scar my own teeth had left, and he held it there until the heavy knock of his heart came up through my palm and my own pulse settled to match it.

He kept it there a while.

We rode back down at dusk.

After dinner, I took the rifle from the clinic corner where it had leaned for three days, and carried its cold, familiar weight to the kitchen and put it in Sierra's hands.

He looked at it, then at me. "You're sure? A clinic out here might want one. Snakes."

"The snakes out here are family." My arms felt lighter the moment I let go. "It's yours. I was only borrowing it."

He stood it by the back door to take to the barn in the morning and turned back to the sink.

"Mind if I use the landline phone?" I said.

Sierra gestured to it and went back to the dishes. I walked over to it and dialed Sarah's number.

"It's late," she said instead of hello.

"I noticed."

She snorted. "How are the ribs? Don't lie."

"Stitches came out this morning. Sierra says I'm a whole man."

"Sierra exaggerates. Listen, I'm going to make dinner in two weeks, and I expect you here. You and that wild man of yours."

I smiled. "We'll be there."

"Good. Now put him on. I need to know if he likes pot roast."

I held the receiver out to Coyote, who had been not-listening from the doorway with the fidelity of a court stenographer. He looked at it, then took it and held it a careful inch off his ear.

"Yeah." A silence. "He's healing. I check." A longer pause, and partway through it his eyes came up to mine and stayed. "You don't have to thank me. He's mine." A beat. "I don't know what that is, but if it's meat, I'll eat it."

He pushed the receiver back into my hand and went out to the porch, done with telephones, possibly forever.