Homecoming

Chapter One

Texas, 1873

G unshots echoed in the distance. The acrid smell of smoke and blood and burning flesh poisoned the evening air. In the sparse, brittle grass growing on the bank of a dry creek bed, a young woman lay facedown, clinging to handfuls of dirt, anhoring herself to the land.

Pebbles cut into her cheek as she pressed closer to the earth. Barely breathing, she feared the attackers would find and kill her, just as they’d killed the others—her mother and father, the old ones. White Painted Shield had just brought her father fifty fine horses as a bride price. Tonight he would have become her husband—and now he was dead.

Moments ago, when the first shots rang out, confusion and panic sent everyone grabbing weapons and children, scattering for cover. Her husband-to-be was one of the first to realize what was happening. He’d grabbed her little brother, Strong Teeth, and shoved the boy into her arms. Then he pressed the hilt of his own knife into her hand and commanded her to run.

She hesitated, confused and reluctant to leave. It was the way of the women to fight. They had been trained to battle as ferociously as the men. Then the Blue Coats were bearing down on them all and suddenly her instinct to save the child sent her running for cover. White Painted Shield lifted his carbine and fired.

He was cut down before her eyes.

Heart pounding, her head filled with the cries of the dead and dying, she clung to her little brother’s hand and sprinted away from the echo of gunshots, the thunder of hooves, the destruction.

She thought her heart would burst before she reached the open plain. Gasping for every breath, she expected the white-hot pain of a bullet to rip through her flesh.

As they ran toward the creek bed funneling through a shallow ravine, Strong Teeth suddenly crumpled, his little legs bending like broken twigs as they folded beneath him. She pulled his lifeless body into her arms.

His blood smeared the front of her beaded clothing, ruined the garment it had taken her mother, Gentle Rain, weeks to bead. She stared down into the six-year-old’s unseeing eyes, knew there was no hope yet clung to him a moment longer.

Chaos erupted around her, but she took precious time to gently lower him to the ground before she ran on. She gathered speed, fueled by fear so intense it became all consuming. As she ran, she found herself thinking not again and was haunted by the notion that she’d somehow lived through this all before.

With each footstep she heard Gentle Rain’s voice in her mind.

Keep your head down. Never let them see your eyes.

So the young woman kept her head lowered when she slid down the dry, sandy bank. She hit the ground hard, bumped her cheek against the dirt with such force that her lip split. She tasted blood. Flinging her left arm up, she covered the back of her head with the crook of her elbow and tucked her right arm beneath her, hiding the knife she still clutched in her hand.

Tonight I was to become White Painted Shield’s wife.

The dream she’d cherished for so long had become a nightmare.

As the onslaught wound down, single gunshots rang out here and there in the distance. Except for fires crackling as dwellings burned, the world became deathly silent. The sky was filled with billowing spirals of smoke drifting like flocks of black vultures, obscuring the late-afternoon sun.

She thought she was safe until the ground began to shake as mounted riders thundered near. Their shouts drifted to her, strange words in a language rough and foreign and yet the words haunted her, conjuring flashes of nightmarish memories. Images that confused and frightened—flames and smoke and blood—much like everything she’d seen today, but different somehow.

Hide your eyes.

A few of the riders passed by, but then there came a shout. Nearby, a horse whinnied. She recognized the creak of a leather saddle before she heard heavy footfalls above her. When the sandy soil gave way beneath a man’s tread and a rain of pebbles and dirt sifted down on her, she didn’t dare look up.

More shouts as the man called out to the others. Though she couldn’t understand him, he sounded excited. She bit her swollen lip, swallowed a scream when he roughly jerked her to her feet.

Refusing to look up, she trembled as she stared at the bloodstains on her beaded moccasins and was ashamed of her cowardice. The front of her long doeskin shirt was stained with blood, the blood of her little brother.

He died bravely today.

So would she.

My marriage day.

A good day to die.

The man in front of her stank of sweat and fear and hatred. He grabbed her chin. Forced her to raise her head.

Never let them see your eyes.

She tried to keep her eyes closed, but what did it matter now? What did anything matter? Her family, her betrothed, were dead. Everyone she loved was gone.

Filled with anger and defiance, she raised the hidden knife, intent on plunging it into his heart. But he was bigger, stronger. He grabbed her wrist and twisted. She cried out at the shock of pain. Her fingers uncurled and the hunting knife fell to the ground at her feet.

She raised her head at last and stared into his cold, hate-filled eyes and willed the bearded white man to take her life. There was fury in his gaze, along with an anger that left no doubt that he wanted to kill her.

Do it now, she thought. Kill me, Blue Coat, so that I can join the others.

Suddenly, the hatred in his eyes turned to shock and he began shouting to the others. This new excitement in him frightened her more than his hairy, sun-burned face, his foreign scent, his rough hands.

Three men on horseback watched as he struggled to drag her up the shallow ravine. His fingers bruised her upper arms and his grip twisted her shoulder, but she refused to cry out.

The smell of death tainted the air. The Blue Coats had killed her family—her mother, her father, her husband-to-be, her little brother. Her many friends, the wise elders, Bends Straight Bow, her grandfather.

The Nermernuh, her people, were scattered, dead, dying.

The Blue Coats had captured her.

It was a good day to die.

Chapter Two

S pring was Hattie Ellenberg’s favorite time of year. A time of beginnings when the snow and ice turned to warm rain, trees swelled with the buds of new life and God’s promise of a bountiful fall harvest was evident everywhere. The coming of spring tempered the bleak, desolate bite of winter with its dark memories and images of bloodstained snow.

Hattie took joy in the small gifts of spring, the way the birds sang with riotous pleasure at the break of day, the early morning sunlight that flooded her bedroom. Somehow the puddles of sun, warm as pools of melted butter, made her feel more alive and less isolated.

Each year, as the first spring wildflowers bloomed, she asked her son, Joe, to move the old kitchen table out of the barn and onto the shade of their wide covered porch. There, they would take their meals beneath the roof of the low, wide overhang, even through the dog days of summer.

When she woke this fine morning, she had no idea Jesse Dye would be paying them a visit. Now here she was, sitting on the porch at that very table with the former Confederate soldier and seasoned war veteran.

She smoothed her work-worn hands across the faded gingham tablecloth, absently wished she’d mixed up a sage-scented salve to smear into the reddened cracks around her knuckles. She’d never been a showy woman and her looks certainly didn’t matter anymore. Certainly not to Jesse, a man in his late thirties who had been raised on a ranch a few miles south of their own Rocking e Ranch. They’d known Jesse forever. Now he was a U.S. Army captain fighting the fierce Comanche, a plague on the Texas frontier for nearly a century.

The sight of her chapped hands embarrassed her almost as much as the wide scar above her forehead. The minute she’d seen Jesse riding into the yard, she’d grabbed her poke bonnet off a hook by the back door and wore it to hide the puckered swath of baldness.

“Will you do it, Hattie?” Jesse leaned back in his chair, casually resting one booted foot over his knee and propping his wide-brimmed hat atop it. A wisp of warm breeze barely ruffled the hem of the tablecloth as he added, “Will you take her in?”

“You know what you’re asking, don’t you?” She couldn’t believe one of the few friends they had left was laying this challenge at her feet.

“If I didn’t think you were exactly what she needs—if I didn’t think you could do this, I wouldn’t be here.”

Her pulse accelerated and a wave of dizziness assailed her. Hattie closed her eyes for a heartbeat and waited. As always, her panic eventually abated.