Bone Walker: Book III of the Anasazi Mysteries Read Online Free PDF Page A

FOLLOWED CATKIN and Stone Ghost across the plaza in Dry Creek village. Night had settled over the crowded village, and with it, the chill of late autumn. Low fires cast muted light on the knots of people who huddled under feather and cloth blankets, nursing the flames that cooked their evening suppers. Steam rose from pots of corn gruel on the coals.
    The look of the people wounded his soul: vacant-eyed, listless, dwelling on the horrible memories locked in their heads. Two weeks ago they had abandoned their old home, Longtail village, and the tragedy they had left buried in the burned kiva. There, by the basket-load, they had carried dirt to bury the charred corpses of more than half of their children, torched by Two Hearts’s rage.
    What possessed a witch to hate so much that he would incinerate innocent children? Was it that they believed in different gods, or was there something so evil and twisted in Two Hearts’s souls that he was nothing more than a malignant darkness that walked the land?
    Browser touched the angry pink scar on his forehead. That scar, people could see. The one that had scabbed so poorly on his breath-heart soul remained invisible to all but him. From the moment he had married Ash Girl, he and the witch, Two Hearts, had been tied as tightly as a knotted cord. For that entire time he had unwittingly lived with the shadow of Two Hearts’s evil. His wife, Ash Girl, had been Two Hearts’s daughter. A woman tainted by incest, driven to madness by
her father’s crime until a monster soul had inhabited her.
    And I was too much of a fool to see what was right before my eyes, what shared my bed.
    Browser unknowingly had killed Ash Girl outside of a ruined house in Straight Path Canyon—and killed part of himself with that same arrow. For moons afterward, he had been lost, drowning in guilt and grief.
    He studied Catkin from the corner of his eye. By killing Ash Girl, he had saved Catkin. He could finally admit to himself that had it been different, had he known what face lay beneath the wolf mask that Ash Girl wore, he would have still driven the arrow through Ash Girl’s heart—through his wife’s heart, the heart of the woman who had borne his dead son.
    Gods, had he gone mad? Did the ancient crimes of the First People run in his blood?
    Browser checked the position of his guards around the village. He nodded at Straighthorn, the young warrior who stood watch on the low line of rooftops overlooking the plaza, then turned to Jackrabbit, barely visible on the rim above the spring.
    In the fires’ glow, Dry Creek village looked peaceful, the cracked plaster-coated walls gilded by the light. Small windows reflected the warming fires within. How had it come to pass that this shabby little village could have become a beacon for the remnants of a people who had once lived in splendor?
    As if to make the point, firelight gleamed on pendants of turquoise, copper bells, jet bracelets, and beaded breastplates.
    The sight of it brought a twist to Browser’s stomach. This broken people wore wealth looted from a hundred graves. Some of this same jewelry had been worn by his ancestors. Two Hearts had stolen it from the bones of the dead, and these people had stolen it from Two Hearts.
    The weight of the little turquoise wolf in his belt
pouch tugged at him. It had belonged to Night Sun, his great-great-great-grandmother, the last of the powerful Matrons of Talon Town. She had been the first Matron to believe in the katsinas. For that, her people had hated her. After she’d left Talon Town, the First People had declared her an outcast and decreed that her traitorous name never be forgotten.
    Browser grasped the wolf, feeling its shape through the fabric. He deserved to own it more than the man who had stolen it from her mummified corpse. At the touch of the wolf, a tingle ran through his fingers.
    Stone Ghost hobbled over to the ladder that protruded from the kiva roof in the middle of the plaza. He grasped the