CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The snow continued to fall. Large flakes built up along the bottom of the ravine, layering over ice, making each step treacherous.

But Deer Woman propelled Starr forward.

I’ve really fucked up now, Starr thought. I must be dead, and maybe this is the spirit world.

She squared her shoulders against the wind, the pain. She was not going to leave this world fully without finding the girl. Find the girl. It echoed in her head with every footfall that crunched on the frozen shale.

Deer Woman was a dark shape ahead and to her right, where the walls of the ravine shifted to some new direction Starr couldn’t identify in the moonlight. Instinct kept her reaching for her gun; then she remembered she no longer had it. She was cycling through her own personal version of hell.

Starr continued her slow and aching progress. Steady, measured. She was living out a predetermined ending, a life heading toward this destination all along. Starr could see it clearly now, the trajectory that had brought her here.

She concentrated on each step. And when she looked up again, the antlers were gone.

Deer Woman was gone.

Maybe she’d only imagined her. It was getting harder and harder to know what was real; it had been since the moment she set foot on the rez.

She thought she heard voices on the wind that whipped and tore at her ears. Low and certain. Had she found Holder? Was she hearing Chenoa negotiating for mercy?

Starr was half-frozen. When had she fallen into this crevice, lost her gun, lost her mind?

Deer Woman appeared before her once again, and Starr reached out a slow hand to caress the fur of her cheek. Her hand went right through, touched the coarse surface of rock behind where Deer Woman stood. Starr peered more closely, just to the left of her hand, and into the blackest pitch she’d ever seen. Darker, somehow, than the night that had closed in around her.

A cave, she realized. She was standing at an opening in the rock wall. Where did she know this from? Red lines, ranging apart and knotting together, looping into circles and cascading across paper, swam through her mind. Red. Women with raven hair, their mouths blocked with red handprints. Red. Beetles that raised their young.

Manitou.

Deer Woman had led her to the spot circled on Chenoa’s map, to the final place where Chenoa planned to look for a beetle colony, to the woman determined to preserve them for the future. Would Starr be able to preserve her?

The knife. She carried a knife in her boot. Starr caught the edge of her glove between her teeth and pulled it off her freezing hand so she could feel for the folded blade. The voices from inside the cave were becoming clearer, closer. She got low, put her weight on her haunches, ignoring the burning in her ankle. She listened, trying to gauge the distance. No telling how deep the cave might be. She might be dead, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be smart about confronting Holder. For the girl’s sake.

After several shivering minutes, Starr could not make out what the voices were saying, could not tell whose they were.

She put a hand down for balance, concentrating on the snatches of conversation she could pull from the wind. She inched closer.

“Sherry Ann, oh, Sherry Ann,” came a man’s voice in an oddly lilting singsong. “When I met you at the creek bonfire, I knew you were the one. But now I have a new love. See this?”

Silence.

“Do you see this?” the man screamed. Then he laughed. “Oh my my, you can’t really answer me now, can you? Here. Let me loosen that naughty ol’ gag in your mouth, poor dear.”

Starr heard muffled, panicked sounds, then a woman’s voice.

“Please, just let me go. I won’t say anything. Please.”

“Pay attention! What is this?”

“I don’t know. A plastic baggie?”

“And? What’s in it?”

“I don’t know. Powder?”

“Stupid girl. This white soil is how I protect myself from their spirits when I’m done. I fill their mouths with this, which I gather right here, in this very cave.”

There was the stamping of hooves behind Starr, a warning. She tried to rise and felt the hot burn of a blow to the head.