The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [64]
Like a dark bird, something fluttered on the edge of Travis’s vision. He looked up.
The woman stood no more than thirty feet away across the park, in the center of a bare expanse of concrete. She was tall and lithe, her body clad in tight-fitting black leather, her legs apart and high-heeled boots planted firmly. Short, dark hair was smoothed sleekly against her head, and she wore a solemn expression on the bronze oval of her face. She stood without the slightest motion, gazing at him with gold eyes.
Travis started to draw in a breath. Who are you? he wanted to say. However, before the sound left his lips, the air around the woman rippled and folded, and she was gone.
21.
Mitchell Sheridan Burke-Favor sat up in bed aµnd stared into the stone-colored light between night and morning, waiting for the alarm beside the bed to go off.
It wouldn’t be long now. Life on the ranch started well before dawn, no matter the time of year. The hired hands would be showing up soon, clattering into the kitchen, wanting breakfast. Then there were horses to feed and saddle, cattle to be moved between pastures and watered, and miles of fence to mend. The earlier they started, the earlier they’d be done.
Not that Mitchell would have minded a few more minutes of sleep. God knew he was tired enough. While the years seemed to be getting shorter, somehow each workday seemed to be stretching out longer. But weary as he was, he was damned if he could sleep an entire night anymore. He was always thinking about the price of cattle, how many they’d have to sell to make it through the winter, and the cost of hay. But then, didn’t they say folk slept less the older they got?
We’re not young men anymore, Mitchell. There are no kids running around to remind you, so you can almost forget about it. But we’re not thirty, and we haven’t been in a whole herd of years.
Motion in the bed beside him. Mitchell turned and let his eyes ride over the planes of Davis’s body stretched out beneath the sheet, as sharp and windswept as the high plains. Sleep had smoothed out the lines carved by years of wind and sun, but Mitchell knew they would return the moment Davis woke up and smiled.
All the same, with his thick wheat-brown hair, Davis didn’t look all that different than when they had first met twenty-five years ago. Davis had been working the amateur rodeo circuit then, and Mitchell had been an announcer at the fairgrounds in Billings, Montana. Davis had lasted only four seconds on the bull. Even before he hit the ground, Mitchell had known their life together was going to last a whole lot longer.
While Davis was leaner than ever, Mitchell had gotten bulkier with time. A few years back his size 32 Wranglers had quietly given way to 34’s. Then, last month, after some serious complaining on the part of his waistline, he had broken down and bought his first pair of size 36’s down at McKay’s General Store. He was still strong, though—the ranch work saw to that—and his thick, black handlebar mustache did a good job of hiding the creases around his mouth. And as for his balding head—well, only God and Davis ever saw him with his hat off.
Besides, there were other ways of staying young. That was why he and Davis had taken up two-stepping a decade ago. They had gotten good enough to win a few prizes at the national competition in San Francisco a while back. When you were dancing, it was impossible to feel old.
Except now there was nowhere in town to dance anymore.
Mitchell sighed, and he knew it was not thoughts of horses, cattle, and fences that had kept him awake. Where the hell had Travis Wilder called from?
Mitchell hadn’t asked when the phone rang two nights ago. You never asked a man where he was from or where he was going; that was the cowboy code. If he told you of his own free will, you just nodded, and that was all. But Travis hadn’t said where he was, or where he had been. All the same, the question had bucked and kicked in Mitchell, and it had been all he could do to rein it in.
No one knew who had dug the