inside her knee popped. When she tried to stand up, she couldn’t.
Mad with fear, Buttercup circled them frantically, got too near and stepped on Roque’s arm.
The bone snapped, but Roque didn’t utter a sound. He lay in a broken heap like a doll thrown down by an angry child, his dark face as white as bone.
“Sunny!” Benny shouted. “Are you crazy? He was trying to kill you! How many times do I have to tell you to stay away from him?”
Caleb ran to Roque. “You shot him—deliberately! There’s…there’s blood on the dark grass.” Caleb drew back a hand, wet with the stuff, and began to cry.
Ritz knelt over Roque and choked on a sob. “Roque! He’s not moving.”
Through her sobs Ritz heard Caleb’s muted pleadings. His father stalked toward them, his Winchester lowered now, his expression grim.
“Move, kids.” Benny sank to his knees and examined Roque. When he was done, he stroked Roque’s black hair for a long moment. “He’ll be all right.” His voice was strange, hoarse. “Take more than a fall to kill a devil like him. Broken arm. Let’s hope it’ll teach him a lesson. He shouldn’t have charged me. Run get a blanket, Sunny.”
When Caleb loped off, Benny fiddled with his radio, shaking it and cursing. In a few minutes Caleb was leaping back through the tall grasses with the blanket. His father took it and threw it over Roque.
“You’d better git,” he said to Ritz.
“My knee—”
“Damn. I can’t get anybody on the radio. I’m going to have to call the ambulance from the house. Can you stay here with him until I get back? I’ll phone your parents and tell them what’s happened. If he comes to, don’t let him move—”
Her eyes widened. “You can’t call my daddy! When you come back…if you’ll just put me on Buttercup and leave the gate open….”
He shook his head. “I’m liable for you. You stay here. Roque’s just crazy enough to hurt himself if he comes to alone and is disoriented in the dark.”
She looked at Roque’s crumpled body and then at the black sky. Then she rubbed her burning eyes and nodded. “Daddy’s going to be so mad.”
Benny stood up. “Come on, Sunny.”
“I want to stay with Roque, too!”
“This wouldn’t have happened, if you’d stay away from him.”
Benny Blackstone seized Caleb by his collar and pulled him, his boots scuffling across the rocks, all the way to the truck. They roared away in geysers of white dust.
Ritz swallowed a hard lump in her throat. Roque lay so still. He was very white, and his hair spilled like rich black chocolate across the rocks and grass.
“Roque?” Leaning closer, she caught his scent, which was musky, and clean, all male. “Roque!” she yelled.
When he didn’t answer, she brushed a lock of his hair from his brow and gasped. His beautiful face was swollen and out of shape.
“Oh! No!” She pressed her hand to his temple. When her finger came away sticky, she didn’t dare shake him. “Roque! Please…Please wake up!”
High above them, the evening star twinkled like a lonely sentinel in an opalescent, purple sky. Then a gray owl swished low over their heads toward the oak mott, melting into the dense shadows of the brush. A chorus of night bugs began to sing.
His pulse! That’s what she was supposed to check for!
At the thought of laying even a single fingertip on that dark throat, she sucked in a quick breath. With an eye on his still, white face, she lowered her hand and ran it along his warm skin all the way to the base of his throat.
Finally, when her fingers were still, she felt a flutter. She pressed harder, and the pressure of his heart’s slow, steady thudding, made her own heart leap.
“Don’t die,” she whispered. “Please…please…”
She lifted her St. Jude medal and said a fervent prayer to the saint. And then she looked up at the new stars and the moon and prayed to God, too.
Hardly knowing that her fingers unfastened the silver chain, she removed the medal. She caught her breath. Aunt Pam had given her Uncle Buster’s medal at his funeral. Ritz had promised to treasure it always.
With a heavy sigh, Ritz fastened the medal around Roque’s dark neck.
“Save him,” she murmured. “Please, Uncle Buster and St. Jude, and you, too, God.”
Roque’s eyes remained tightly closed.
After that, time passed in slow motion. Ritz rubbed her neck, and felt all alone and scared as she thought of the puma and those pointy ears she’d seen earlier.
When a pack of coyotes began to yip off to the north, she began to shake as hard as a rabbit or whatever little animal they were terrorizing. The sky and brush blackened ominously.
Aloud Ritz said, “Roque, I’ll stay out here all night long—in the dark, no matter how scared I get, if you just, please…please…don’t die…. I’ll even take back every mean thing I said. You’re not nasty…or…or pure sin…just ’cause you wear tight jeans. I’m sorry I watched you pee. It was fun flying with you. The most fun I ever had in my whole life…until you charged—”
Clasping his lifeless hand, she bent closer, so that she could broadcast straight into her powerful medal.
“You won Buttercup—fair and square. You can have her, too…if you’ll only wake up. And…and…you’re not stupid, even if you flunked a grade. Nobody but a rare, genuine genius could talk horse…could learn it from a book…when you can hardly read. And…and it wasn’t Jet last night…. It was me! I watched you dance, so don’t you dare die.”
Horror mingled with delight when he stirred and she felt his gaze.
“You’re just scared there won’t be anybody to teach you horse if I die,” jeered a thready voice that made her heart leap.
4
Its wings spread wide, a hawk circled low over Roque. Talons curling, the bird hurled itself at the highest branch of a tall live oak, stilling the roar of the cicadas’ night chorus. In that brief silence, the dark field felt warm. Then the humid wind licked his skin, bringing with it the sweet, familiar smells of grass and salt and sea, and the cicadas began to sing again.
Not that Roque noticed any of those things on a conscious level. The hot little daggers of pain that spiked up his arm were so fierce they dulled his awareness of all else. He couldn’t move his arm or feel his fingers.
The hollow beneath his right eye felt stretched and itchy. His temple throbbed. Half of him was numb; the other half burned. He wanted to twist and writhe and howl like a wolf at the bright sliver of moon hanging straight over him. But the ragged whisper he uttered cost him so dearly, he bit his lips.
“Roque? Did you say something?”
Had he? He tried to speak again.
He heard her gasp, felt her fingertips on his mouth. Then pain blurred everything into nightmare again. He was in the wire mesh round pen. Caleb was begging him to teach him to ride, and since their father was gone for the day he’d said yes. But suddenly his father, who’d looked shorter and squattier than usual in baggy jeans and custom-made boots and yet unreasonably terrifying, was stomping toward him, yelling and swearing nonsense that he was trying to kill Caleb again.
Pausing to grab a chain off the nail outside the tack room, he’d pushed Pablo and two cowboys out of his way.
“Nobody had better interfere with me—y’all hear!” When the cowboys lowered their