“When he was a human.” Chumani considered her. “He’s never told me it’s a secret, and he told me straight enough when I asked. Pillow talk, you know.”
Elisa nodded, trying not to get distracted by the intimate idea of Chumani lying in Mal’s arms, with him making “pillow talk” against that shining wing of ebony hair. Chumani currently had it braided, but Elisa had seen it loose and flowing in the dawn hours, right before they turned in. The other men teased her, but the woman’s sculpted face and pouty lips, as well as dark, thickly lashed eyes, were any man’s ideal of beauty, no matter her six-foot height and the fact she’d obviously been strong as an ox even before being given two marks. Maybe because Elisa ran up against so many obstacles with her not-overly intimidating stature, she saw everything to admire in the smooth muscles in Chumani’s arms, the architecture of her shoulders and proud bosom. She emanated a warrior’s confidence.
Because of that, despite her sour reaction to Chumani being Mal’s lover, her compliments flattered Elisa deeply. It amazed her that the woman could see such admirable things. It must have shown in her face, for Chumani gave her a pinch. “You don’t value yourself enough. You don’t see anything remarkable in convincing your vampire Mistress to let you bring six vampire fledglings across an ocean, particularly after one of them damn near killed you? Or that you’ve stood up to Mal every different direction, even when he’s set you back on your heels, time and again? You don’t intimidate. Your jaw wasn’t the only one that about dropped on the table when he agreed to let you do this. You just tunnel under, around and wear holes through your opposition until it gives way out of pure resignation.”
Elisa found a smile. “It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.” Dev had said it once when she’d insisted on something to the point he’d given her a smart slap on the buttocks with his hat . . . before going to do as she’d asked.
“Well, it’s impressive. I’m not sure anyone other than Kohana would go up against Mal like that. And that includes me.”
“You could take on any of these blokes one-armed.”
Chumani chuckled. “Not Mal. But I admit, I’ve beaten a couple of the others arm wrestling. Male pride is a tricky thing. I don’t get caught up in it, but every once in a while, I wouldn’t mind being short and cuddly like you.”
“Cuddly?” Elisa echoed.
“Cuddly.” Chumani gave her a poke in the belly and pinched her cheek before Elisa slapped her away good-naturedly. “Sometimes a tall, strong girl would like to have that advantage. You know, ask a man to get her something out of a cabinet because she can’t stretch far enough.” She batted her eyes, making Elisa bark with laughter. “You ever see the way a man looks when you do that? For just a minute, he’s your hero, and he likes that. Not saying I want to tease or put on feminine wiles.” Chumani shrugged. “But it’s hard to convince a man you’re interested in him if he thinks you can wrestle him to the ground.”
“I think Kohana could take you in a fair fight.”
Elisa bit back a smile as Chumani jerked the wheel in surprise. She gave Elisa a narrow look, made that noncommittal Indian grunt. “That one doesn’t see the forest for the trees, for all his putting on airs that he’s some great shaman’s son. Old coot.”
Kohana covered it well under his gruff teasing, taking her barbs and cracks about him being an old man, but in truth Elisa didn’t think there was more than about a decade between them. Willis had been nearly ten years older than her, and Mal . . .
She stopped herself with a fierce shake. That wasn’t the same at all, and no good would come from her mooning about it that way. She cleared her throat. “I think you should challenge him to a wrestling match one night. You know, there’s that pretty glade near the house. Private, and lots of soft ground if he puts you down hard.”
Chumani’s eyes narrowed further, the long lashes becoming a bristling frame for glittering coal. “So confident of that, are you?”
“Just depends on how much you’re hoping that you’ll lose.” Elisa slanted her a grin.
After a weighted silence, where Chumani made an obvious effort to hold her aloof expression, she relented, letting out a snort. “You are one hell of a maid.”
“I was second to Mrs. Pritchett,” Elisa said proudly. “When she retired, I was going to . . . Well, I guess I still can.” Clearing her throat, she changed the subject. She wasn’t able to imagine herself on the station, wanting the things she’d wanted before, so it would be too difficult to paint that picture for another. “What did you mean about Mal . . . before?”
“I know he’s told you some basics. He’s Cherokee, and his people were getting Westernized, even had a newspaper and a church. Then the settlers got greedy for their land and figured out ways to steal it from them. He was part of the thousands forced to walk the Trail of Tears. Did you read about that in your history book?”
Elisa shook her head, and Chumani’s lips tightened. “They took most of them out of their homes at gunpoint, with little more than the clothes on their backs. Put them in camps where a bunch died of disease. Then they walked them over a thousand miles to a new reservation. Nobody knows for sure how many of the sixteen thousand died; probably about three or four thousand.”
Elisa thought of the things in her own history, the Aborigines fed poisoned bread by settlers or hunted down like vermin, and closed her eyes. “Mal was six,” Chumani continued. “His white father died in a hunting accident a year before, else he might have been able to give them an option to go elsewhere. Instead, they were forced to go. His mother died on the trail, and something happened after that where Mal got separated from the others. Ended up on a farm.”
She came to a stop on one of the elevations that provided an ocean view, whitecaps and rushing noise coming through the night. It was a steadying reminder of where Mal had ended up, what he’d built. It helped Elisa remember she was in the present, not Mal’s past. But there was still a cold feeling in her stomach as Chumani pressed on. “A few decades later there would be a real hard-core attempt to ‘whitewash’ Indian children.” Chumani’s voice tightened with sadness, a history she’d not experienced but that connected to her blood. “Unfortunately, Mal became one of the early experiments. They put him in a mission school with a bunch of orphans.
“The guy who ran it was a real fire-and-brimstone kind of bastard. They cut his hair, gave him the name Malachi, wouldn’t let him speak his language. He was young, but he was rebellious. They had to beat him a lot, and they’d tie him to his bed at night like a prisoner to keep him from running away. Eventually he was broken, trained to do manual labor, gardening. As he got older, he was sent back East as an indentured servant to serve in the house of a rich Boston woman. Filthy streets, noise, too many people. That’s how he remembers it.
“He couldn’t figure out how to leave all that maze of streets, so he ended up being there for ten years, until he was a young man. Then another woman bought his contract to serve in her house. She was a vampire. He won’t say more than that. That’s always the way of things. The things that don’t matter, you spit those out right fast. They’re the unpleasant truths, straightforward. But the things it made him, he doesn’t talk about that. This is what he is now.”
Elisa gazed out over the night terrain. “So he does know what it’s like to be a servant,” she said quietly. To be insignificant. “I did him an injustice.”
“He’s a long way from that, and sometimes we have a tendency to put the painful past behind a heavy door, to the point we forget some of the things it teaches us. But he’s definitely different than the few vampires who’ve visited this place. Maybe that’s because he’s ‘young,’ or maybe he’ll always be that way. I’m hoping he’ll always be that way.”
Elisa couldn’t help but agree, and she understood better now why he and Danny were linked. With her Outback frankness and practicality, Danny, too, was hard to define within vampire standards.
“Tomorrow, you be ready an hour early,” Chumani said abruptly. “I’ll show you how to handle this rig. We can practice on the straightaways and maybe even some hills. That’ll give you something to be really nervous about, holding a clutch on these hairpin drop-offs.” Giving Elisa a tight smile, she put the Jeep in gear and rolled on down the hill.
Elisa was glad the darkness hid her face, because it gave her the courage to speak her next words. “He confuses my heart. I know that’s stupid, because I’m just a human to him. I like what he does to me, but it hurts, too. Like it’s supposed to mean more, like I’m supposed to want it to mean more, and yet, since I can’t have that, it’s pointless. Which sometimes makes everything seem pointless. But I don’t want him to stop. I can’t stop him. I’m not strong enough to resist what he is, what he does to me, no matter what it turns me into.”
Chumani pulled into the enclosure area and cut the lights. Elisa saw William, in the cell nearest the Jeep, step out of his small cabin.
“You need to tell him that,” Chumani said quietly. “He’s a vampire, but Mal has a good heart. He wouldn’t want to hurt yours.”
“Well, he can read all that from my mind, can’t he?” Sadness swept her. Her feelings never really mattered, did they? It was senseless to indulge in thoughts otherwise, because she could trap herself in a melancholy that served no purpose. It merely took the joy out of the other blessings in her life.
The woman gave a laugh that cut short Elisa’s self-pity. “He may be a vampire, he may be able to read your mind, but child, he’s a man. Sometimes they don’t understand anything unless you spell it out like one of those alphabet books you have. Maybe you could take those plastic letters you give to the fledglings and make him a sign.”