Unknown - The_Growing_589064

Tea made, Kirsten drifts reluctantly back to her worktable. More than once the thought has come to her that the answer is not in the materials she has salvaged from Minot after all, that her frozen trek across the Northern Plains might as well have been cut short at Shiloh, might as well never have been ventured at all.

Except that, had she not pressed on, not made the attempt, she never would have come to this place, where Dakota is. And with that thought comes a feeling of unease, clear and present as her earlier conviction that Koda had returned safely from her raid. It has been there at the back of her mind for hours, unformed, unacknowledged, no more than half-conscious, inescapable. Kirsten has never credited the idea of intuition—a matter, clearly, of unconsciously processed subliminal clues—much less admitted to having any herself. Yet the certainty that something wrong has been worming its way inexorably into her attention all morning. A forboding.

She makes a determined effort to set it away from her. Shades of the banshees, King. Next you’ll be conjuring up your great-great-great-to-the-twenty-third grandma-the- druidess and prattling about the Sight.

Or worse, you’ll be paying attention to run-off-at-the-mouth raccoons who think they’re the freaking Oracle of Deliphi.

The rationalizing does no good. The feeling persists, focuses. Something to do with Dakota. Not physical danger, not violence, but a threat nonetheless.

Kirsten does not know which is more unsettling; that the feeling exists or that she cannot quite pin it down. She toggles the data files up onto the plasma screen again, attempting to lose her unease in the inexorable march of figures scrolling down from the top into useless oblivion.

Numbers, numbers. All of them useless.

Halfway through a set, Asimov whines and levers himself up from the residual warmth of the hearth, making for the front door at a trot. His high, sharp bark comes at the same instant as the knock. Kirsten follows him into the hall, sudden fear drying her mouth. She flings open the door before the knocker can descend a second time.

“Dakota?” She blurts the name before she can think, knowing full well that, like herself, Dakota has a key. Knowing that, bred to country hospitality as she is, the veterinarian-cum-rancher seems to regard the front door as the ‘company’ entrance.

“Is Koda here?” The words stumble over her own, echoing her own anxiety.

Kisten stares up at Tacoma, whose face registers confusion as well as apprehension. Her voice sounds high and strained in her own ears. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t find Koda.” Tacoma says. “I was hoping she was here.”

Kirsten opens the door wide, inviting him in. ‘What is it?” she repeats. “What’s happened.?”

Tacoma moves past he, into the living room, Asi on his heels. “Nothing, yet. But I need to talk to her.”

“She’s not at the clinic?”

“I’ve just come from there. She’s not with the Colonel, she’s not at the Base hospital, she’s not at the Judge Advocate’s Office. I thought she might be with you.”

“Oh.” I thought she might be with you. For some reason, she cannot quite get past that assumption to ask the obvious questions. It makes a small warm spot somewhere around her solar plexus; spreads, rising into her face. Hastily, before he can see, she says, “I’ll get you something to drink.”

When she comes back with a second cup of tea a moment later, Tacoma has taken off his jacket and is sitting on the couch. His head is bowed, the cool light picking out his profile against the pale sky framed in the window. Asi, as comfortable with him as with his sister, sprawls at his feet, one big hand absently ruffling the fur on the dog’s neck. For some reason, that strikes her with a force greater than anything Tacoma has said. She has never seen him with an animal before when he was not entirely present, his attention as fully engaged as with a human. The chill is back.

He hardly notices her when she sets the cup down in front of him, forcing her voice to calm. “What is it? Tell me.”

Tacoma picks up the cup in both hands but does not drink. “I need to talk to her,” he repeats. “I’ve done something she—” He breaks off, and for a moment Kirsten thinks has said all he will. Then, “It’s something I had to do. But it’s going to hurt her.”

For a moment, the image of the woman asleep with the wolves flashes across Kirsten’s mind. She knows that Dakota had gone to them for healing; but she knows, too—no, dammit, she feels—the pain that had driven her to it. “I’ll help if I can,” she says carefully. “But I can’t help with what I don’t know.”

Tacoma shakes his head, his hair coming lose from its thong at the nape of his neck and spreading across his shoulders like a mane. After a moment he says, “You were with her when she found Igmu Tanka Kte.”

“Who?”

“The wolf. The one caught in the trap.”

“The pup’s father.”

“The pup’s father. You’ve probably heard that a lot of Native American people have special relationships with certain four-legs or winged ones.”

Try a raccoon with an attitude problem. But this isn’t about her, and aloud she says, “I’ve heard about it.”

“Most people call them totems.” A wave of his hand dismisses the word and the idea. “Sometimes they just come to us in dreams, or visions. Sometimes there’s a living animal that is the embodiment of that dream spirit.”

“And that wolf was—“

“Koda’s friend. Not a spirit, not Wolf-with-a-capital-W, but a living companion as individual as you are. A person.” He takes a sip of the tea. “Most whites wouldn’t understand that. I think you do.”

Running her own hand over Asi’s ruff, she speaks around the lump in her throat. “Yes. I think I do.”

“So you see, what I did—what Manny and Andrews and I did—we brought his body back when we went out to check the traps.”

“But what’s—” She breaks off. “Dakota doesn’t know that.”

“She doesn’t know that.” Tacoma confirms. “She doesn’t know he’s in the freezer at the clinic, either.”

A shiver passes over Kirsten’s skin. She knows, having lost her first shepherd to dysplasia and her second to a drunken bastard speeding down the street at Thirty-Nine Palms, that veterinarians routinely freeze the bodies of their deceased patients if the owner wants to bury the animal at home. She had helped carry the cold, cold box containing the body of Flandry into the small garden behind the family house at the Marine base the year after she lost her hearing, the silence as dead in her heart as in her ears. “You brought him back to bury?” But she knows that is wrong as soon as the words leave her lips.

“No.” Again a shake of his head, and again it strikes Kirsten how much he reminds her of a big cat. “I brought him back because he—his body—is witness to what Dietrich was.”

“To save Manny’s butt,” she says bluntly.

“To save Manny’s butt,” he confirms. “And to show exactly why we have to keep enforcing the laws against the trapping and indiscriminate killing of other living nations, even when we’re in the middle of a crisis that could wind up destroying us all. It’s about how we survive, not just if we survive.”

“Look,” Kirsten says sharply. “I understand what you did. I understand why you need to tell Dakota before she forgodsake opens up the freezer and finds him without warning. But you’re sounding like someone who’s going to be shot at dawn. Give me some help here. What’s the real problem?”

“The real problem—the real problem is that it’s a desecration. A desecration of the body of someone my sister loves.” He pauses, glancing at her face to see if she is following him at all.