Dark Warrior: Kid (Dark Cloth Series Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

father since the time he’d left him at that wagon train massacre to die.
    But McCandle had known of him. He’d known of him—and he’d hunted him.
    Kat concentrated on these memories, as she tried, again, to shift her position. She concentrated on these memories, to block out the pain—to keep her from losing consciousness.
    When Hawk’s father had gone on to marry again—and had another son—and Ashley McCandle had been raised, following his father around while he’d searched for his firstborn son, he’d been kidnapped and tortured by some Sioux renegades. He’d hated Hawk for that childhood, but also for the things that had happened to him while he’d remained in their hands, all because his father had dragged him about the country—and all of these things of which Hawk knew nothing about.
    Kat realized that she hadn’t told Kid, back then, when she’d rescued him, that she could have escaped the ropes that had held her beloved captive. It had been bad enough that he’d had to be freed by her . She never told him that she could have saved herself— as easily as she’d cut him loose.
    In spite of her pain, she almost chuckled at the thought.
    Almost.
    But the pain knifed hard on her heels, raking its ugly claws through her skin, leaving fire in its wake. She had to concentrate on Kid to keep her sane—and alert.
    She found it ironic that she should be here now, just a few short months later, facing a similar predicament, forced to prove that she could really escape from her bonds. Yet, even so, the path to freedom lay in doing something that would prove to be excruciating.
    Sweat ran into her eyes, trailing a stinging path. She shuddered as she tried to flex her muscles, making her first attempt at dislocating her shoulder, fail. The fire, smoldering in its bed, and the men, lumped in their eerie gray mounds, slid away in a haze, as the stuff of nightmares.
    The first time she’d accidently dislocated her shoulder, as a child, she’d passed out too. Sometime later, she’d woke, screaming, to the sound of children—laughing. She saw herself as a child, when it had happened, running around the fire, twirling, with her blond ringlets flying. Then, she’d fallen.
    Kat groaned through her rag, remembering an old man who’d come over and examined her shoulder, and her screaming as he bent her arm.
    That day she’d learned that she could fold her arms around like wings. Remembered, too, that playing around with this ability had been what had caused her arm to come out of its socket—not the fall. She’d been just ten years old. She’d never known such fire. She’d been extremely fortunate that that old Asian man had realized what she’d done.
    He’d been the one to tell her that she had dislocated her shoulder. She’d screamed to the heavens when he put it back in place, but then she’d known an immediate relief. He’d shown her a way to put it back into place herself, telling her how to fix it when it happened again because, he’d said, she had very flexible joints.
    He’d been right. And the first time she’d had to do it herself—she had thought she’d never succeed. She’d had to try several times—and passed out twice along the way. People had taken the opportunity to steal all of her possessions. And when she came to, she had known she’d been lucky they’d only stolen her belongings, since she’d been powerless to protect herself.
    She hadn’t hunted them down because she’d found the lesson in what had happened.
    Well—she thought. She hadn’t hunted them down—except for the young man who’d stolen her knife. No one got away with stealing her knife. Still, she hadn’t killed him when she caught up with him—had only roughed him up a bit—glad now that she hadn’t.
    Imagine if she’d had to tell Mandy she’d killed him.
    No. She had learned a valuable lesson that day—and she knew it. And, since then, she’d hidden this ability from others, no longer playing around