Page 73 of Wind Called

“You’re not seriouslykeepingit, are you?”

“Of course I am,” Marc replied. “Look at it as compensation for having the guy throw knives at our heads and do his best to kill us.”

That argument seemed to get through to her, because she looked down at the pile of rocks at her feet, rather than staring at him like he’d just suggested they knock over a bank or something. “Okay,” she said. “I mean, it’s just a worthless piece of paper, right?”

Considering the odds of winning the lottery were just slightly lower than getting struck by lightning in the same place at the same time two days in a row, he couldn’t really argue too much. “Probably,” he replied. “But let’s get this finished.”

She went off to gather more rocks but returned only a moment later, something silvery dangling from her hand. “I found this. I think it’s that whatever-it-was he was using to mess with your magic.”

Up close, the thing looked smaller than Marc had expected, about the same diameter as a half-dollar. It wasn’t all silver, either, but instead was bisected around its equator, so to speak, with the lower half glass, or maybe rock crystal. Both the silver and the crystal were smooth and unmarked, with none of the runes that Bellamy had told him were engraved in the amulet Devynn Rowe and Seth McAllister had brought back from the past.

Remembering how it had affected his powers, Marc was loath to touch the artifact, even though it looked harmless enough. “I suppose we can figure out what to do with it later. Can you put it in your backpack?”

“Sure,” she said, and coiled up the chain before depositing the thing in one of the pack’s outer pockets.

With that handled, he supposed they should return to the task at hand. Now that the man’s body — still invisible, and apparently planning to stay that way — was now lying safely on the ground, Marc ventured out to gather his own pile of rocks. It took quite a bit more than he’d thought to have enough to create a cairn that would cover the dead man and protect his remains from wild animals and the elements. They were sweating and tired by the time they were done, but at least they’d made sure to treat the body with as much respect as they could.

“Should we say a few words?” Bellamy asked. She pulled off her hat so she could wipe some perspiration from her forehead, then set it back in place.

“I guess so,” Marc replied, although he wasn’t sure of the best way to handle this. He’d attended enough funeral masses that he could probably fake some kind of prayer, but he had no idea whether the dead man had been Christian at all, let alone Catholic. It seemed kind of disrespectful to lay him to rest using the words of a religion that wasn’t his. “I’m not sure what to say, though.”

Bellamy was silent for a few seconds, expression somber as she gazed down at the cairn that concealed the man’s remains. “Be at peace, wherever you were,” she murmured. Then she looked back up at Marc, face a little too pale for someone who’d just been laboring in the heat for the greater part of an hour. “I killed him, didn’t I.”

It wasn’t a question…but Marc knew he was going to answer it anyway.

At once, he went over to Bellamy and pulled her into his arms. “You didnotkill him,” he said fiercely. “You called the winds to protect us, which is exactly what they did. And you wouldn’t have even done that much if it hadn’t been a matter of life and death. It was self-defense, nothing more.”

She held on to him tightly for a moment. Then she let go and stepped away, face still pale but now almost resigned. “Maybe so. I still hate the idea of just leaving him out here.”

“I know.” Marc paused, wishing he could think of the right words to reassure her that there was nothing else they could have done, not when they couldn’t possibly tell the authorities that an invisible man’s body was lying somewhere in the depths of the Secret Mountain wilderness. “But you know his soul has moved on, right? This is just a…shell. That’s all.”

“That’s what I’ve been told,” she replied, then shook her head. “Okay, it’s probably a little more than that, just because I know an afterlife exists, or Angela wouldn’t be able to talk to ghosts.”

Well, hopefully the man’s spirit wouldn’t see any need to linger in this desolate spot, and instead would move on to a new life with a new set of lessons to be learned.

Or, considering how he didn’t seem to have done much good with this one, maybe a life where he needed to learn the lessons he’d ignored here.

Marc went over to Bellamy and took her hand in his, then squeezed it gently.

“Let’s go home.”

21

But what was home,really? Bellamy knew Marc had probably just been talking about getting back to home base, which in this case would be the ranch where she was playing caretaker, but she thought she needed to examine the question more deeply than that. Sooner or later, her current gig would be over, and that meant she’d have to make some hard decisions about where to go once the ranch was no longer an option.

First, though, she probably needed to find a new job.

Or maybe burn as many candles to Brigid as possible as a way of assuaging her guilt.

Deep down, Bellamy knew Marc was right. If the man in the cave had turned visible again after he died, then maybe they could have thought of a way to report his death without involving either of them directly — say, by telling the authorities that they’d stumbled across his body while they were out hiking. There wouldn’t have been any real physical evidence to connect them to him, not when it had been the winds that had made the man fall to his death, so she supposed that plan probably would have worked.

But with his body remaining stubbornly invisible the entire time they’d been gathering the rocks to build his funeral cairn, they hadn’t been left with a whole lot of options.

Also, it wasn’t as if the guy had seemed too worried about knocking off the two of them. No doubt he would have buried them in shallow graves and counted it a good day’s work.

Just as they reached the parking lot, the clouds that had been steadily gathering overhead finally decided to let go. Thunder crashed, and rain began to pour down so quickly that Marc barely had time to unlock his truck before they both got soaked.

“Good timing,” she said, knowing how breathless she sounded.

---