Stealing Thunder

“C’mon, let’s get you away from here,” Tiernan said, leading her back the way they came. “I’ll get you to headquarters, then call the authorities. Let them handle this.”

“I—I have a cell—”

“As do I, for all the good it’ll do us in this area. I’ve never been able to scare up a signal in this part of the mountain.”

“The grandparents—they’re expecting me.”

“You can call them on a land phone, can you not?” When she nodded, he said, “The authorities will want to take our statements.”

Ella knew that to be true, even as she knew she couldn’t be completely truthful. If she told anyone other than the grandparents about the raven’s track she’d seen in the earth, they would laugh at her, treat her like she was primitive. Foolish.

Maybe, but memory told another story.

The last time she’d seen that sign Father had been burned to death!

Despite Tiernan’s trying to take care of her, Ella insisted on driving herself to refuge headquarters. She hated feeling out of control. When they arrived at the refuge, he jumped out of his truck and was at the door of her SUV practically before she could open it.

“Come on, let’s get you inside,” he said, trying to take her arm.

This time she avoided him. “Thanks anyway, but I’m fine on my own.”

Reception was a large room that held a seating area on one side, a work area on the other. The place was empty, so Ella crossed the planked floor and threw herself into one of the chairs with a leather base and upholstered cushions just to steady herself.

“Are you all right?”

“As all right as anyone can be after finding a body, I guess.” She looked over to the desk and noted the telephone. “Do you want to call the authorities or shall I?”

“A deputy and an ambulance are already on the way here. I was able to scare up a signal on my cell a half mile back and so called it in.”

“The sheriff’s office?”

“Who else?”

He hadn’t been around long enough to know the politics of crimes dealing with the Lakota. The tribal police would be called in when one of her own was involved, the FBI when it involved murder.

Let the sheriff’s deputy sort it all out, she thought, wishing she had never stopped to take in the scenery. All she needed was to be involved with another murder.

HOURS LATER, AFTER the body was retrieved, after they both gave their stories to a sheriff’s deputy who’d sounded skeptical when Tiernan suggested murder, after a medic had checked over Ella and had drawn her blood to test for drugs, Ella was then free to head to her grandparents’ home.

Tiernan was sorry to see her go. Though he didn’t reason it out, he watched her SUV drive off until it disappeared in the distance.

At which point, he realized Kate was studying him. She balanced her little girl—eight-month-old Maggie, otherwise known as Magpie—on her hip and just gave him a look that went right through him.

“What?” he asked, concentrating on Maggie, who was cooing at him and staring, too. Smiling into her bright green McKenna eyes, he brushed her chubby cheek with his thumb and got a peal of laughter from her.

“You have a thing for Ella Thunder,” Kate stated.

Tiernan sobered. “And here I was thinking your psychic abilities were reserved for your horses.”

He turned away and went inside, planning on getting himself a mug of coffee.

Headquarters was really part of Kate and Chase and Maggie’s home. Their living quarters, other than the kitchen, took up the second floor, a log addition to the original stone single-floor building. A balcony fronted the second floor, an enclosed porch and patio backed the first. The spare room and bath that would be his for the summer were just off the kitchen.

Kate and her family had to come downstairs for meals, which was just as well since Kate and Chase ate, slept and lived their jobs anyway. Maggie spent as much time with her grandmother as she did at home. Though Chase had been here, as soon as the sheriff’s men left, he went to check on the herd, to make sure no one had messed with his mustangs.

Kate caught up to Tiernan. “I don’t need to be psychic to see the way you were looking at Ella the whole time she was here.”

Heading across the reception area, he said, “I felt sorry for her is all.”

“Maybe. But there’s something else.”

“I have no interest in women.” Realizing what he’d just said, Tiernan stopped dead in his tracks and clarified. “That is, in pursuing a relationship with one.”

“Because you’ll go back to Ireland and you fear she won’t want to go with you?”

“Because I cannot ever fall in love.”

Kate snorted. “Is this some kind of impairment you’re claiming?”

“More like a dark legacy. You should understand that since your side of the McKennas have had to deal with a legacy of your own.”

He entered the kitchen. Kate followed, quickly set Maggie down in her corner playpen, then got in front of him.

“Whoa.” Green eyes wide, red hair seeming electrified, she said, “You can’t just make such a provocative statement and then walk off. Explain!”

Now he’d gone and done it. Tiernan hung his head. He’d only ever discussed the secret with immediate family, his brothers mostly, because they were all at risk. He supposed Kate was family and it wouldn’t hurt to tell her.

“Can I at least get coffee first?” He needed something to bolster himself before getting into it.

Kate stepped aside. “Pour one for me, too.”

As Tiernan picked up the pot, he said, “My great-grandfa-ther Donal was something of a ladies’ man. He involved himself with the wrong woman, then left her to marry the one he fell in love with. The wrong woman claimed to be half faerie and all witch. And it must be true, because she put a love curse on all Donal’s descendants. We are destined to love…but if we act upon our feelings—physically, that is—we will somehow put the one we love in mortal danger.”

“Sounds like the ravings of a woman scorned.”

“Except ’tis a prophecy that’s come true many times over the decades.”

“Oh, come on,” Kate said, though she didn’t sound as skeptical as one might think she should be.

“Truly. My grandfather lost my grandmother to a horse-riding accident soon after she gave birth to my da. My great-aunt lost her beloved in a bank robbery. My uncle lost his new wife to a speeding car…”

Though he’d only been seven at the time, Tiernan could still see the whole incident in his mind, a scene that he couldn’t erase, because he’d been with Aunt Megan—she’d traded her own life for his. Nightmares of her death had followed him all his life. That he couldn’t put the incident behind him after so many years made him think it was because he needed to atone for what happened. This more than anything had convinced him the prophecy was true.

“And the list goes on,” he said through the lump wedged in his throat. “I can do without that kind of doom hanging over my head.”

“But those could have been coincidences,” Kate argued. “They all had children, right?”

“Eventually, because they settled for someone who wouldn’t invoke the witch’s curse. Unfortunately, though the spouse may survive, the prophecy doesn’t depend on love to infect the next generation.”