Free Susan Johnson by Silver Flame (Braddock Black)

wrapping Trey in the blanket.
    Empress had been unceremoniously brushed aside when Blue ran into the room, and she now stood at the foot of the bed watching his capable hands gently cover Trey’s torn body. “Where are you taking him?”
    He looked at her, a brief cursory glance. “Home.”
    “You can’t,” she exclaimed softly. “Those wounds! He’ll bleed to death if you—”
    “Not in this cold he won’t.”
    “I’ll go with you. I can help.”
    “No,” he said. He didn’t ask why she hadn’t been in bed with Trey. Why Flo had been instead. He only worked feverishly to swathe Trey completely, oblivious to the dead woman sprawled across the bed. He didn’t care what had happened in this room with the women. He only knew Trey was in peril here and had to be taken out. “We’re going home.” Blue said it very low in Absarokee, his mouth near Trey’s ear. The whole side of Trey’s face was smeared with blood. To anyoneelse no visible response would have been apparent, but Blue was watching closely and saw the trace of movement under Trey’s closed eyelids. “Home,” he repeated in his native tongue, and picked Trey up in his arms like a child, calling on all his adrenaline-flushed strength to lift the man as large as he.
    Trey was covered in buffalo robes downstairs, and against Lily’s frantic, impassioned pleas, they left with him. “Call the train,” she’d argued, but they both knew the Arrow Pass drifted first in a storm, and the train wouldn’t get through until the tracks were shoveled clear. “I’ll get Doc McFadden,” she’d insisted, but neither of them trusted white men much.
    Mounted on their strong ponies, they rode north, Blue holding Trey, and Fox breaking trail through the heavily drifted snow. It was a superhuman effort by both men and beasts, forcing their way through blizzard winds, subzero cold, and mounting snow. They stayed on the high ground although the wind was fierce, cautious to avoid the dangerous, hidden ravines and coulees where loosely piled snow could bury a horse and man.
    They ignored the strange girl from Lily’s, dressed in her range clothes again, struggling behind them on her cow pony, too intent on their own urgent passage through the angry, swirling storm.
    But at the ranch house it was she—small, snow-covered, blue with cold—who gave orders how to carry Trey upstairs. They left dark, melting puddles of snow up the Turkish-carpeted stairs and down the long corridor to Trey’s bedroom.
    Her name was Empress Jordan, she announced softly to the horror-stricken inhabitants of the house, although no one asked, with Trey’s white face and bloody, ravaged body near death. The last name, Jordan, she pronounced with a French inflection. Trey had bought her that night, in Helena, she shocked them by saying, the faint trace of Gallic accent lending even more incredulity to her calm statement.
    They didn’t have time to heed her—Trey’s lifeblood was draining away. But hours later, when the ranch doctor gave up, the delicate girl with tawny, tumbled hair and worn clothes moved out from the shadows of the upstairs hallway and said into the hushed mourning sadness, as palpable as orchestraldirges, “I know folk medicine from my mother and might be able to save him.”
    All eyes riveted on the fey young girl; shock, disbelief, and chrysalislike traces of hope illuminated in varying degrees on the faces assembled before her. She saw the heartbreaking look of yearning pass between mother and father and saw Hazard’s brief nod.
    Blaze spoke first, “He’s our only child. If you can do anything—” Her voice broke, and fresh tears spilled over. Beseechingly she looked at Hazard, who folded her in his arms. Then his eyes came up and held Empress’s in a dark, direct gaze.
    “Whatever I have,” he said quietly, “is yours, if you save him.”
    She was in there now, desperately working over Trey.
    The doctor didn’t expect him to live through the