Blood.
“Koda!” she screams, and throws herself against the door.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
KODA SHIVERS AS she stands on the bathmat, the breeze that stirs the curtains ghosting over her skin. Despite the morning’s brightness, it leaves no warmth behind it, and she feels the gooseflesh rise and tighten along her arms. More out of habit than conviction, she turns on the hot tap and lets the water run while she collects towel and washcloth from the tall, narrow cabinet above the clothes bin. The stench of blood is on her still, mingled with sweat and dirt and the oil-and-metal smell of the APC. She is used to blood, and used to smelling of it. You cannot, after all, turn a breech foal or perform emergency field surgery and remain clean. It goes with the job.
Killing a man in a duel and taking his warband for prize does not go with a veterinarian’s job. It does not go with a warrior’s job, either, she reflects. Or it has not, at least for the last thousand years or so.
Yet there was nothing in it that was strange, or unfamiliar to her. There had been a pattern to the encounter that revealed itself as the fight played out, a choreography. It was as if she had been thrust out in front of the footlights in riding boots and a complete innocence of Tschaikovsky, and had danced a perfect Swan Queen. Tacoma had called it the warrior spirit waking within her, growing. He should know. As she had been called to the life of a shaman, he had been born a warrior. Strange, that like as they are, each has been given the other’s heart’s desire.
Koda steps into the shower and pulls the curtain to keep off the draft. The water hits her like a rush of snowmelt, so cold it burns. Gritting her teeth, she stands still, shivering, watching as the brown stains on her skin liquify and sluice down her body, swirling crimson around the drain at her feet. She unwraps the length of cotton around her arm and lets her own blood join the flow. As if, she thinks, we were making relatives in the Hunkapi. At that moment, her enemy seems as close as her own brothers and sisters, as her own lover.
Her hand, half numb, closes on the soap, and she begins to work it into a lather on the bathsponge. Just as she turns off the frigid water pelting down on her, Asi’s deep bay sounds in the hall, and the door shakes on its hinges. The dog’s howl comes again, with a second battering against the door, and with it Kirsten’s voice, high pitched in fear. “Koda!”
*
Kirsten’s weight hits the door for the second time, and suddenly its solidity is gone, giving way before her and carrying her straight into Dakota where she stands wet an naked on the bathmat, her hair streaming down her back and over her breasts like dark floodwater, water and blood running red in branching rivulets down the length of her legs, dripping from a long, shallow cut visible on her forearm.
The cold water soaks through her own thin shirt, chilling her. But it is the fear that causes her to shudder as she pushes Koda away, holding by both arms as her eyes run the length her body, searching for the source of the blood on the clothing still lying in a heap on the floor. But there is only the single wound, clearly not lethal, only a crimson thread against the copper of Dakota’s skin. Kirsten’s heart, lodged in her throat, slips back into its accustomed place, and she begins to breathe again. “All that blood,” she gasps. “It isn’t yours.”
“Not mine, no,” Koda echoes. “I killed a man.”
Her fingers tighten on Dakota’s arms, making small white marks where they dig into the skin. “At Minot? They fought you?”
“Not ‘they.’ Just one.” Koda’s eyes are on hers, a light in them that is part triumph, part desire, part something else she cannot name. “We took his men from him.”
“We?” Kirsten asks carefully. “You mean ‘you.’”
“I challenged him. None of our soldiers was killed, none of his. Just him.”
Once again, she sees the tall figure racing ahead of her onto the shattered bridge at the Cheyenne, dark hair streaming behind her like smoke. Once again, the fear strikes through her, this time without the hum of adrenaline in the blood that had drawn her out of herself and propelled her across the pile of tumbled concrete after the other woman. She is still not sure whether she acted from blind trust or blind panic. “How dare you,” she says softly, the words hissing between her teeth. “When so much depends on you.”
“When what depends on me?” Dakota steps closer, so that Kirsten can hear her breathing, not quite steady now. The light from the open window, glancing through the blowing curtains, shimmers over Koda’s wet skin, slipping over her shoulders and breasts like silk.
She is made lean and hard, lithe muscles stretched over long bones. The form of the hunting animal, elegant in understatement—long-legged cheetah moving with harsh and angular grace through the high grass, gerfalcon stooping on her prey like a meteor out of the blue heaven.
“I depend on you, goddammit.” A tremor runs through her, part fear, part not. “You have no right to risk yourself alone.”
“I wasn’t in any danger. No greater than we face here, every day.”
Kirsten opens her mouth to make the obvious retort, but instead looks away, silent. I risked as much, myself. Hypocrite.
But if she died, I would be so alone. So alone.
Again.
Intolerable.
Her breath catching, Kirsten runs her hands up Koda’s arms, over her shoulders and up into her hair, pulling her head down. Dakota’s mouth meets hers, hot and open, and Kirsten’s tongue traces the austere lines of the other’s lips, savoring the heat and the acerbic tang of salt. Koda pulls back abruptly, lowering her head to Kirsten’s throat to trace a line of hard kisses from her ear to the hollow of her collarbones.
She can feel the heat of Dakota’s skin through her clothing, the hardness of her nipples through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. Fire begins in the cleft between her legs, licks down her thighs and up her spine, knotting in her belly. “Bedroom,” she gasps, pulling back just enough to move, drawing Koda after her by the hand.
Dakota growls deep in her throat. The scent of blood on the clothes at her feet stirs her; a primal, animal sensation that is equal parts rage and lust.
The lust of the battle she’s fought.
The lust of the blood she’s spilled.
The lust of the woman who stands before her, so open and so ready.
It all coalesces within her, a spiral of red and black, pulsing with the beat of her heart, growing more acute as the scent of blood mingles with the scent of Kirsten’s need, and the scent of her own. It pulls each muscle taut, tension thrumming like a live wire, threatening to burn out of control with the tiniest of sparks.
Pausing only to kick the pile of bloody clothing out of view into the bathroom, Kirsten leads Dakota into the bedroom that has become theirs. Like a distant drum, Koda feels the pounding of her blood in its hidden channels, flowing hot as molten earth from the veins of Ina Maka. As she moves, Kirsten’s free hand claws at the fastening of her jeans, pushing them down around her ankles where she can step free of them. Her sandals follow, and she looses Dakota’s hand just long enough to pull her shirt over her head, flinging it unheeded onto the floor.