A Wolf in the Desert Read Online Free

through her. Like a blush it bathed her cold body in a glow of warmth. It made no sense, one more rider would not alter her fate. She was still a woman lost and stranded on a little used desert track. A woman with evil tearing at the door of her last sanctuary.
    No, she thought as cold reality swept foolish hope from her heart, there would be no help from that quarter. No help from anyone or anything but herself.
    Gripping the steering wheel tighter, without regard for cramping fingers and the mounting ache in her elbow, she stared vaguely ahead, denying her tormentors the pleasure of panic.
    She didn’t intend it, didn’t want it, but he was there in the line of her unfocused vision. The seventh rider.
    She couldn’t see his face, nor his eyes. But she knew he watched her. She felt the power of his stare keeping her from the oblivion she sought, forcing her to focus on him. Caught up in the erratic moods of terror, she hated him then. More than the others. More than anything. For the frisson of hopeless hope, for watching dispassionately and uninvolved. For engaging her emotions, intruding on her thoughts, and stripping away her one refuge.
    She hated him most for destroying the last precious moments of sanctuary before the wolves tearing at her fortress destroyed her.
    The slap of a palm against the windshield should have torn her from her bitter thoughts, instead she discovered newfound hate brought with it newfound strength. She was done with hiding. Tearing her gaze from the shadowy apparition, she stared coldly at Beauty’s assailant, her eyes seething with anger.
    â€œHot damn!” a new heckler crowed. “There’s life here, Blue Doggie. She may be dumb, but she ain’t deaf or blind. She moves, she hears, she sees. If looks were lethal, I’d be road kill.”
    Wearied by his prancing and crowing, Patience turned away, her attention drawn again to the source of her strength.
    As the moon chased across the sky, beneath its canted light the desert came alive, shifting, hiding, revealing, leaving nothing ever the same in the eye of the beholder. Only he hadn’t changed. Only he was as before, sitting astride his bike, legs bent, feet braced in dust. His hands lay lazily across chrome handlebars, his shoulders were back, his head up. Eyes hidden in shadow were turned to her. Watching.
    â€œHey.”
    Patience didn’t react to Blue Doggie’s return.
    â€œHey! Look at me,” he demanded.
    She didn’t turn.
    â€œI said look, damn you!” Spreading his feet and bracing his hands on the top of the door, he rocked the car as he spoke. “You look at Hogan, you look at me.”
    Which was Hogan? Was he the dwarf? The silent one with the scarred throat? She didn’t know, she didn’t care as she clung to the steering wheel to keep her balance.
    Abruptly Blue Doggie stepped back, hands raised in an air of surrender. Startled by the conciliatory gesture and mistrusting peripheral vision, she turned to him in time to see his face contort into a rictus of rage. That slight turn saved her eyes, her face, perhaps her life, as a chain crashed down on the damaged windshield.
    Glass cracked, breaking free at the point of impact, sending great deadly shards flying into the car. Before the chain whipped down again she scooped the derringer from the console, palming it with cool-headed expertise.
    Curbing his swing, Blue Doggie deflected the path of the chain, letting it fall in a clatter over Beauty’s hood. He peered through the gaping hole. First he scowled, then he laughed. “The lady’s packing. A two-shot peashooter, no less.”
    â€œBack off!” Patience warned, ignoring his mockery. As threat became true peril, fear gave way to unshakable resolve. The derringer was steady in her hand and aimed precisely at the center of the hole in the glass and the point between Blue Doggie’s eyes. “You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to