Double Blind. Hannah Alexander

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СКАЧАТЬ doesn’t know the way.” She was still serious; no teasing here. “I left after sunrise this morning, so he couldn’t follow me.” She believed what she was saying.

      “But he can follow your tracks tonight, and your parents are gone,” Canaan reminded her. “What if he knows you, and knows where you live?”

      Tanya stepped to the long window that overlooked a cactus-and-rock garden. With a stiffened spine, she stared out across the plain, her chin raised defiantly.

      “Come back with me now, Tanya, and you’ll be safer.”

      “You can’t protect me from everything.”

      “I didn’t say I could, but do you really want to stay alone here?”

      Her chin lowered a fraction. A tremor shook her. “I don’t want to stay at that school. He’s there, Canaan.”

      “Who, exactly, is he?”

      Tanya jerked around, dark eyes wide.

      “Have you forgotten that my great-grandfather was a hataalii, a medicine man?” Canaan asked.

      She shook her head. “I haven’t forgotten. That’s why I trust you.”

      “I know of the spirits we have always feared,” he said. “The only way to fight this evil is with a more powerful spirit. You’re safer from the skinwalker at the school than you are here.”

      Tanya’s eyes narrowed in disbelief.

      “This skinwalker you fear,” he said slowly, “what animal form does he take?”

      Tanya stared at him and did not answer.

      He hazarded a guess, hoping he was wrong. “The wolf?”

      A quick intake of breath.

      “I know about your fear.” The wolf was one of the most terrifying characters in Navajo lore, a destroyer. Canaan felt another chill of foreboding. “My Christian grandfather taught me special prayers to keep the Navajo werewolf away when I was afraid. He taught me when I was very young, and I still remember.”

      Some of the tension eased from Tanya’s face. “You mean Johnny Jacobs?”

      Canaan nodded.

      “How much do you remember of these prayers?” she asked.

      “All of them, but it isn’t the words alone that protect us. It’s where we keep our hearts and minds.”

      Tanya hesitated. “What…what about that woman?”

      “What woman?”

      “The one who’s coming. The biligaana who’s going to be there today. The white doctor.”

      “You mean Sheila Metcalf. She has nothing to do with any skinwalker, and she isn’t a doctor, she’s a nurse.”

      The girl pressed her lips together, obviously refusing to hear his words.

      “Sheila lived here with us for five years.” His voice was sharper than he intended. “She and I grew up together. I knew her.”

      Tanya searched his expression. “You…you knew her?”

      “Yes. She was a good friend. She was also a good friend to the Hunts.”

      “She’s white. Look what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Hunt.”

      “I’m half white, my grandfather, the school’s owner, is not Navajo, but that hasn’t stopped your father from sending you to our school.” Tanya’s father was a selective bigot, but his bigotry would overtake his daughter, too, if Canaan allowed it. Sheila’s arrival might be good for the children, if they would respond sensibly.

      He stepped toward the door. “You coming with me?”

      Tanya’s jaw slackened. “You’re leaving? Now?”

      “I have work to do at the school.”

      Tanya paused, then nodded her head. “Okay. I’ll come. But you teach me that prayer before it gets dark tonight. Okay?”

      Canaan bowed mockingly. “Yes, boss.”

       Chapter Four

       S heila tightened the final lug nut on the wheel, tested to make sure all was secure, then released the jack, glad she hadn’t taken Preston up on his offer of his Jeep. With her own vehicle, she knew where everything was and had been able to change the tire in ten minutes.

      After heaving the equipment into the back, she cast a wary glance across the desert for at least the twentieth time. All that moved was the undulating air above the ground, dancing in the unseasonably hot weather. A green line of cottonwood trees to the south told her there was a stream of water nearby. To the west, the plain seemed to stretch all the way to the foot of the towering Twin Mesas, at least two miles away.

      She glanced back down the road and saw a sizable boulder a couple hundred feet away that she must have struck with the tire when she allowed the vehicle to wander so far off the road.

      “Dumb, dumb,” she muttered to herself.

      It wasn’t until she was again behind the wheel, pulling onto the road, that she realized her heart had been racing, her hands sweating, and her breath doing double time all the while she was outside the Jeep.

      She drove barely a half mile, checking the rearview mirror several times, when she saw the sign for Twin Mesas School and turned off Route 77 onto a gravel road.

      Piñon and juniper trees bordered each side of the road for a mile leading to the school. The campus was set in the middle of what appeared to be a flat plain, but she knew that hidden hollows and rocky arroyos mottled the topography.

      The trees along the road cast little shade. She’d forgotten how sparse shade could be out here. Everything looked hot and dusty.

      As she approached, Sheila’s gaze darted back and forth across the road, searching for another phantom, even as she scolded herself for allowing her imagination to run wild. No more specters materialized, of course. By the time she reached the school building, she also reached the conclusion that the heat had affected her. An overactive imagination didn’t help, nor did the headache that pressed along the back of her skull.

      She loosened her death grip on the steering wheel and studied the place. Simple, large adobe buildings with rounded corners formed a courtyard around a playground partially shaded by piñon trees. A small garden of rocks and petrified wood ringed the first building, a pattern that repeated all through the courtyard. It would have looked peaceful to her, if not for the apprehension that she couldn’t shake.

      Sheila didn’t recognize this place.

      During her last phone call with Johnny Jacobs, he had mentioned that most of the buildings were new. He’d also asked her if she was sure she wanted to come.

      She would bet her Jeep that СКАЧАТЬ