Willow missed Jeremiah like she’d miss a limb. Maybe she should let the gang off the hook, and the two of them could come back here. Bring Frankie along, camp out in the park. She wondered if dogs the size of small horses were allowed as she walked down across the backyard to the riverbank, where a well-worn trail meandered right alongside. Something compelled her to walk it.
“Will?” Drew called. Because, of course, the little worrywart had followed.
Willow was about to ask for some privacy when sunlight picked out something in the water about a hundred yards further downstream. She frowned, then arched her brows. “Hey, Drew, look where we are!”
Drew looked. “Is that?—?”
“The spot with the garbage,” Willow said. “What are the odds my friend’s cabin would be that close to that spot? I’m telling you, something is—” Her words were cut off by the sound of a gunshot.
Willow froze, her gaze shooting to Drew’s.
“You armed?” Drew asked.
Willow shook her head side to side and a second shot rang out. “Get the others,” she said and she took off running, leaping roots and boulders, dodging brush and ducking limbs.
A long way down the trail, she spotted someone lying on the ground up ahead, right in the spot where they’d done the ceremony for Wolf. Her heart pounded even harder when the blood on the ground beneath him became visible, too. Racing closer, she saw the man was Native, like her, with sun-kissed brown skin and long black hair.
When Willow finally knelt beside him, she smacked his cheeks, then tore open his shirt and saw that the blood was coming from a hole high on his chest, more like the front of his left shoulder. She asked if he was all right and got no response.
“He’s been shot!” she cried, looking up and back, knowing there’d be family on the way.
Her cousins were coming, Drew in the lead, sprinting like a tiny blonde gazelle.
“Is he alive?” Drew shrieked as she landed on her knees near Willow.
“I don’t know.”
Ethan stopped a couple yards away, and kept his back to her, watching for threats, while the others followed suit, except for Maria, who arrived several steps behind the others, a small first aid kit in her one hand.
Willow reached for the man’s wrist to check for a pulse and saw the dark brown bands of a bracelet tied around it. Her hand stopped moving, and she just stared.
Drew glanced at her. “What is it, Will?”
She snapped to attention, ignoring the insane notion that had briefly crossed her mind. She pressed her fingers to his wrist, felt his strong pulse thrumming. “He’s alive.” Then she turned his arm to more closely examine the bracelet he wore, just to assure herself that it wasn’t, that it couldn’t possibly be…
It was the same.
It was the same.
Willow tipped back her head and cut loose a cry that should’ve summoned every Comanche in the area as her cousins gathered around her, staring at that bracelet and then at the man in absolute wonder.
Wolf
Wolf opened his eyes. There was a woman kneeling over him, holding up his arm by the wrist and keening. She was Native, and she had tears streaming from her eyes when she looked down at him again. He realized there were others around her, but he could only see her.
Why did she look happy? Didn’t she know? “He—took her,” Wolf managed.
The Native woman’s eyebrows bent together. “The man who shot you?”
“He took my…Camellia. On the river.” He pointed. God, his chest hurt. He brought a hand to it, but someone pulled it away. A woman with wild red curls and vivid green eyes said, “Relax, I’m a doctor.”
“You’re a vet,” said a small blonde.
“Well, we left the people-doc back home, so I’m what you’ve got.” The redhead pulled a backpack from her shoulders and started going through it, kneeling on the round opposite the other two.
“The shooter abducted a woman,” said the one who’d keened, informing the others. And then, more softly, to him, “I’m Willow.”
“Wolf,” he said, and she choked on her breath, and he didn’t know why. “I have to go after her.”
