Tribal Ways

“You didn’t forget already?” Ten Bears asked.

“No,” Annja said slowly. “I didn’t.”

“Let us professionals handle him. We do a bad enough job without any help.”

She wasn’t sure quite how to take that. He seemed like a man who, for all his cockeyed banter, took his job very seriously. She also didn’t think his tongue was more than halfway in his cheek, and wondered just who wasn’t doing their job quite so well.

“One more thing before you go,” he told her as she started for the door of his small office. “We got us some young South Plains braves here in western Oklahoma who don’t much like white-eyes. And they play rough. Tempers are extra short right now since some of them don’t like it that we got us a great big new casino opening up in a few days.”

He laughed at her expression. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They can’t fire me for calling them braves. Any more than they can make us Indians call ourselves Native Americans. That fight we won, anyway. Maybe it’s a trend.”

She had to laugh. She found herself liking the lieutenant. “Maybe it is.”

But as she left she found herself thinking, I don’t believe in werewolves.

But there are plenty of things I don’t believe in that have a nasty habit of turning up anyway….

Titles in this series:

Destiny

Solomon’s Jar

The Spider Stone

The Chosen

Forbidden City

The Lost Scrolls

God of Thunder

Secret of the Slaves

Warrior Spirit

Serpent’s Kiss

Provenance

The Soul Stealer

Gabriel’s Horn

The Golden Elephant

Swordsman’s Legacy

Polar Quest

Eternal Journey

Sacrifice

Seeker’s Curse

Footprints

Paradox

The Spirit Banner

Sacred Ground

The Bone Conjurer

Tribal Ways

THE LEGEND

…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.

The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade. The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.

Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.

Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn…

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

Prologue

Standing in the open door of the RV with a mug of coffee steaming in his hand Paul Stavriakos cursed the freezing wind and wondered why he’d ever moved to the Great Plains.

“Either go or stay, but shut the damn door,” Allison York called from the bed. “That wind is freezing.”

Paul sighed and stepped down to the grass, still dry and tan from winter. He shut the door behind him. The wind howled around him.

Dawn was still a drizzle of red along the horizon. Clouds hid the stars overhead.

The land was all tilted planes. It was flat, in a way, but flat that tipped this way and that in big plates furred in yellow-brown grass. There wasn’t much relief; but it was deceptive land, with more hollows and heights than first struck the eye.

“Not enough to cut the damn wind, though,” he muttered to himself.

Lights appeared in the trailer that Donny Luttrell shared with TiJean Watts. The battered Toyota pickup with the camper shell belonging to Dr. Ted Watkins from the State Archaeological Division was rocking on its suspension more than the wind’s buffeting would account for. Paul hoped he was pulling on his jeans. The muffled swearing coming from inside seemed to support that thesis.

“Ever wonder why those old Indians picked a miserable spot like this to make their camp?”

Paul turned. Eric James was swinging off the back of his old buckskin gelding. He wore a sheepskin coat and a battered felt cowboy hat. The hair hanging in thick braids to either side of his head was gray as slate. The wide face between, the color of Oklahoma clay, had a tough and weathered quality but was barely lined. A full-blooded Comanche and full-time rancher, he owned the land where they stood.

He returned to his saddle for a moment, then turned back to Paul. He held white bags with a colorful logo in each hand.

“Brought doughnuts for you kids,” he said. “Hope you make decent coffee. Wasn’t carrying that in my saddlebags.”

Paul smiled. It felt as if ice was cracking off his face. The digging season seemed to start earlier each year. The ground wasn’t fully frozen. That was about all you could say for it.

Then again, he thought, it’s getting harder and harder to beat the protestors out here. Digging in colder and worse weather was one way of keeping them at bay as long as possible. Even so, they’d be out there with their signs and their shouting as soon as the day warmed up.

The trailer door opened. TiJean started down the steps wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He let out a yelp and popped back inside like a startled prairie dog. The door banged behind him. A second-generation Haitian from Miami, he didn’t quite get winter. Even if it was supposed to be spring on the Great Plains.

Like an unlovely butterfly from its cocoon Ted emerged from his camper. Unlike their host his face looked as if each of his fifty years had stomped it hard on the way out the door. He was skinny, with long dark-blond hair hanging out from his grimy Sooners ball cap, white stubble sticking out of his long chin and gaunt cheeks. He wore a drab plaid lumberman’s jacket. He completed his ensemble with faded blue jeans over pointy-toed cowboy boots.

“Another lovely day in western Oklahoma,” he muttered. “Christ.”

Paul winced as the older man unwrapped a piece of gum and popped it into his mouth. Ted was trying to quit smoking. Apparently gum was his designated substitute crutch.

Allison started out from the RV. Like the trailer it was owned by their employer, the University of Oklahoma at Norman. Unlike the trailer it was at least relatively modern. Since Paul and Allison were the assistant professor and graduate student on the dig, they claimed it by right of rank. Allison had a red wool knit cap pulled down over her long, straight blond hair and a white Hudson’s Bay blanket with big bold stripes of blue, yellow, green and red wrapped around her slim frame. Gray sweatpants showed below the bottom of the blanket above fleece-lined moccasins.

“Hey, Ally,” Paul called softly. “Could you make more coffee?”

He didn’t speak loudly, partly out of consideration for Allison, but mainly to keep his own head from cracking open. They probably shouldn’t have drunk quite so much last night, he thought. Indeed, they shouldn’t have been drinking inside the RV at all, since it was contrary to university policy.

Not that it’s the only rule we’re breaking, he thought. And what the hey? We have proud archaeologist traditions to uphold.

Allison scowled. The spanking of the cold wind was making her cheeks red and her blue eyes water. “Why me?”

“Because you’re still mostly inside where it’s warm,” he said, “and we have the only coffeemaker that works.”

“Chauvinist,” she said. “Did your girlfriend who’s coming to visit make you coffee?” She turned and went back inside, banging the door.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he shouted at the door. “She’s just an old friend.”

Actually, Annja Creed was a young friend. She was a year or two younger than Paul. They’d met on a dig four years ago. Sparks had flown; the fire they kindled flamed up and flamed out. The end.

Now she was a semifamous cable-TV personality and globe-trotting archaeologist, coming out at his request to touch bases and look the dig over. Inviting her hadn’t even been his idea. It had been at the department’s request, in the probably unrealistic expectation that the resident expert on Chasing History’s Monsters might bring some good publicity their way.

“Women,” Donny said. He had emerged from the trailer to stretch and yawn, like an outsize nearsighted cherub with his dark curly hair and beard, his thick-lensed glasses and his belly sticking out between his green-and-white University of North Dakota T-shirt and sweatpants. He was a cold-weather guy and liked to show off his indifference to low temperatures. He wore sandals on otherwise bare feet. “You can’t live with them, you can’t—”

“We Numunu have an old tradition,” Eric said, interrupting him, using the Comanche word for his people. “We kill anybody says a cliché. Scalp ’em, too.”

Paul tried not to wince. Native Americans on campus usually believed, or at least said, all the right things. Outside the university those he met almost to a man and woman defiantly called themselves Indians and expressed contempt for political correctness in any form. You just had to get used to it. And for what it was worth Eric seemed genuinely friendly.

For one thing he let them dig his land—invited them to, when he accidentally unearthed the paleo-Indian site—in the face of rising rumblings of opposition from some of his people. For another he brought doughnuts. Even if they were bad for you.

Paul looked to Eric. “Really nice of you to be okay with us diggin’ up your ancestors, dude.”

“Not my ancestors,” their host said. “We didn’t live here then. Either we or the Kiowa ran off the people whose ancestors these were around three hundred years ago.”

He shook his head. “Well, one good thing about this damn cold wind—it’ll keep the professional Indians inside by their space heaters for a while. As much money as I give to the Nation every year the loafs-about-the-fort got nothing better to do than send me death threats and try to trespass so they can picket me on my own land.”

“Are you crazy, man?” TiJean’s voice, muffled by the layers of clothing he had donned before venturing forth again, rose perilously near to cracking. He was a freshman, only nominally out of adolescence. “Why don’t you got nothin’ on your feet?”

He was staring in horror at his roomie’s feet.

“Jesus, TiJean,” Donny said. “What, are you dressed to scale Everest?”

“For Sweden,” Ted added. The Floridian undergrad wore a blue-and-yellow parka with the fur-clad hood over his head.

Allison emerged from the RV bearing a tray with a pot of coffee and an assortment of chipped and colorful mugs. “All right, you big, strong, helpless men. The woman comes to the rescue.”

“Ah,” Ted croaked. “The stuff of life itself!”

Allison held the tray while the rest crowded around.

“Best leave some for me,” she said ominously, “if you don’t want to wind up wearing it. Whoa, does anybody hear a hissing?”

“Wow! Doughnuts!” Donny exclaimed, his eyes belatedly lighting on the two paper bags Eric had left on the grass.

“Yeah,” Paul said after a beat. “I do. Strange.”

Midway to the doughnuts Donny froze. “Don’t tell me there’s a snake?”

TiJean crowed laughter. “Who’s a wimp now, Eskimo Boy? Afraid of a little bitty old snake.”

“Whoever heard a snake hiss that continuously?” Allison asked.

“Or that loud, to hear it over this wind,” Paul said.

“Wait,” Donny said. “Did you guys see a shadow move? Off there to the left—”

“Shadow?” Paul said, feeling an inexplicable chill that had nothing to do with the wind.

“Yeah,” Allison said. “I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Like a dog or something.”

“Shit,” Donny said, “that’d be a big dog.”

They were all turning and staring around. Paul felt a little woozy. Maybe he was turning too fast, getting dizzy.

“We should all chill,” he said. Then he noticed that Eric James had drawn the slab-sided .45 automatic he wore on his hip and was holding it two-handed with its muzzle tipped toward the unfriendly sky. His face was the consistency of stone.

“This is starting to freak me out—” Donny began.

Allison’s scream, sharp as glass, made Paul spin toward her. As he did something hot splashed across his face.

For a moment he thought she’d thrown scalding coffee on him.

Then the darkness hit him.

1

It was all over the flat-screen TVs hung from the rafters and tuned to CNN when Annja entered the airport terminal. Five dead and one gravely injured in an inexplicable attack on an archaeological dig in western Oklahoma.

It’s so tragic about those other poor people, she thought as she headed to the baggage claim. Does it make me a bad person that I feel glad that Paul’s the one who survived?

She hadn’t been coming to rekindle any old embers. It had been good with Paul while it lasted. And when it was done, it was over. He was still a sweet guy, if a little bit of a player, and a good archaeologist on the tenure track at the university.

Now she just hoped he was still on any track at all.

She collected her single black bag. And I thought I was due for a little relaxation here, she thought as she walked briskly through the crowds toward the car rental desk.

Because of the severity of his injuries, Paul had been taken by helicopter from the site west of Lawton to the trauma unit in Norman, right outside Oklahoma City.

Finding the trauma center wasn’t hard. Once inside amid the bright lights and muted sounds and quietly purposeful traffic of the hospital, things got a little dicier. The staff initially tried to keep Annja from seeing Paul in intensive care.

It seemed to be a well-run facility, so Annja didn’t even try playing her journalist-cum-TV-personality card. It was never her first choice in any event. But Paul’s family had yet to arrive, given that the crime had actually occurred while she was in transit from New York to Houston. His next of kin, it seemed, would only arrive late that evening. Though the nurses wouldn’t say so, Annja got the sickening impression they didn’t expect him to live long enough to see them.

In the meantime, Paul was asking incessantly for Annja Creed so his doctors and the police officer in charge of the case agreed to let her in.

Sunlight streamed through the window. The early online weather reports had showed clouds over western Oklahoma, but they’d dissipated by the time her flight touched down.

Paul was all tubes and bandages and taped-on wires. Half his face was obscured by a bandage. But his good brown eye was open. It turned toward her as she walked in the door.

“Annja,” he said. His voice was a croak. He tried to sit up.

“Paul.” She stopped in the doorway, momentarily overcome.

The nurse who had escorted Annja to the room—a short, wide woman—moved past Annja. Though a head shorter she was heavy enough to push Annja aside as if she were a child. Annja frowned, but held her temper. She’s doing her job, she told herself.

“Now, Paul, calm down,” the nurse said. She turned and glared back with narrowed blue eyes. “Ms. Creed, I’m afraid you’re going to have to cut short your visit, after all.”

“No,” Paul said. Alarms shrilled as his heart rate spiked. “Please, Roslee. Please! I have to talk to her. I have to tell her.”

The nurse gave Annja a speculative scowl. The businesslike amiability with which she had initially greeted Annja was long gone.

“Okay,” she said. “He seems to really need to get something off his chest. It may be good for him to have company. I’ll give you five minutes. And I do not want you stressing my patient. Please tell me you understand.”

Annja took no offense at the woman’s words or her tone. A good nurse had the same outlook on anyone or anything that might prove detrimental to her patients as a mother grizzly bear toward potential threats to her cubs.

“I understand,” Annja said. And she did. Perfectly. Herself a chronic defender of innocence, she could only approve of the nurse’s protectiveness.

The nurse looked at her a beat longer. Then she nodded. “All right. Call me if any changes happen. I’ll be right outside.”

The nurse left. Annja sidestepped to give her plenty of clearance. Then she moved forward and took Paul’s unbandaged hand.

“Paul, what happened?”

The torn lips quirked into a painful smile. “Something right up your alley, Annja.”

“What’s that, Paul?”

Suddenly his fingers clenched hers in a death grip. “A monster,” he said.

For a mad moment she thought he was making a joke well beyond good taste. But his lone visible eye showed white all around, and a tear rose in the corner of it and rolled down his cheek. His whole body seemed to tense.

“Paul,” she said, trying to keep her own voice low and steady. “Please calm down.”

“No! There’s no time. There’s something out there, Annja. Something awful. It killed them.”

“What did?”

His fingers dug into her hand. “I told you. That—creature.”

“Paul, please. Settle down. You’re getting upset and not making any sense.”

“Annja! I saw it. It was a wolf, but it wasn’t. Sometimes it seemed like a man, sometimes like an animal. And it killed and killed.”

“That’s just in the movies,” Annja said.

“No! It looked like a wolf but didn’t move like one.”

He shook his head from side to side so violently Annja was afraid he’d pull something loose. “No! No! It was terrible. Oh, God. It killed them. It was so fast. So strong. Not anything natural—”

“Why would a wolf attack such a large group of people?” she asked. It made no sense to her that a solitary member of a pack-hunting species would attack multiple human beings. It totally reversed the whole mathematics of wolf predation.

“It wasn’t natural, I tell you. Wasn’t an animal!” His eye rolled. “Annja, listen. It wasn’t an animal. It wasn’t. And it’s hunting me!”

He sat up and grabbed her arm with his good hand. Alarms began to shrill.

“It was a skinwalker! A Navajo wolf! I saw his eyes—those glowing—”

The frantic cry ended.

Paul seemed to shrink, then fell back onto the bed. His one visible eye stared at the ceiling.

The keening of the flatline alarms was barely audible through the roaring in Annja’s ears.

2

“What’s your interest in this poor deceased fella, Ms. Creed?”

Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol sat down behind the plain wooden desk in his office. He had the unmistakable look of an officer who’d spent many years with the force. Not a tall man, he was built strong and low to the ground, short in the legs, wide around the middle, suggesting still both strength and a certain agility.

Annja sat across from him in a not very comfortable wooden chair. It reminded her way too much of being called before the Mother Superior back at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. She suspected the visiting-the-principal effect wasn’t entirely accidental.

“We’re friends, Lieutenant,” she said. “Uh, were friends.”

The highway patrol officer’s round, pockmarked face, beneath a salt-and-pepper military cut, was set in lines and contours of grave compassion. He probably gets a lot of practice with that look in his line of work, she realized. It also didn’t mean he didn’t feel it.

The office walls were wood paneling. An Oklahoma state flag hung behind him, along with a plaque in the arrowhead shape of the OHP patch, certificates of completion from training courses and numerous citations, including a commendation from the Comanche Nation. From his features and body type, which would have been burly and bearlike even if he hadn’t been carrying a certain excess above the belt, Annja suspected he was a member of the Nation himself. She gathered they hadn’t named this Comanche County for nothing.

“My condolences,” he told her. “I know that don’t help much. All the times I’ve offered condolences over the years, I never yet figured out a way that actually does a body any good. I keep trying.”

“I appreciate it, Lieutenant. Really.”

“It was unusual for them to let you in to see him. But the ICU staff tell me he kept asking for you so insistently they figured it was better for him to let him see you.”

“Maybe that was a mistake,” she said, faltering.

He shook his head. “No point second-guessing something like that, Ms. Creed. That poor boy was pretty torn up. I don’t reckon he could’ve lasted long regardless of anything you did or didn’t do.”

“Thanks,” Annja said.

She drew in a deep breath and tried to ignore the stinging in her eyes. “I was coming out to visit him,” she said. “He was also kind enough to want to consult with me on the dig, even though pre-Columbian North American archaeology is way outside my area of study.”

“You’re doin’ me a favor, Ms. Creed, by comin’ out here to see me,” he said. “I was needing to interview you, anyway.”

He put on a pair of heavy-framed reading glasses and moved his mouse around on the pad, peering at a flat-screen monitor set at an angle so as not to intrude between him and a visitor. Aside from an in-box stacked with papers, the only other objects on his desk were a picture of a grinning young and handsome Indian man wearing an Army uniform, a much younger girl, maybe twelve, with pigtails, both built along much more aerodynamic lines than the lieutenant, and another picture of a young man in BDUs and combat gear with a bullet-pocked adobe wall for a backdrop. The soldier held a CAR-4 assault carbine decked out with the usual array of sights and lights. He looked like the same person as the grinning kid in the other photo, only older. Not so much in years, maybe, but still much older, Annja thought.

“So you work for a television show,” he said.

“Yes. I’m kind of the resident skeptic—the token voice of reason. I suspect Paul’s superiors hoped that by inviting me out they might put their department in the way of some free publicity.”

“The anthro department at OU wanted to get on something called Chasing History’s Monsters?”

She shrugged. “The hope of getting on TV can have a strange effect on people. Even intelligent, well-educated ones.”

He made a face, took off the glasses and looked at her. “Maybe the monster thing’s actually appropriate now. Is that what brings you to see me, Ms. Creed?”

“I want to learn everything I can about what happened to my friend,” she said. “Also his colleagues. And the poor man whose property the dig site was on.”

“Old Eric,” Ten Bears said. “Pretty righteous guy. Did well for himself and his family from leasing natural-gas rights on some of his land out there south of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. Always quick to help out a fellow Nation member or crack a joke. Even if he did have lousy taste in ’em.”