Smoke was a phantom that clung to her, a bitter ghost in her lungs and a greasy film on her skin. Every step Beatrice took was a testament to a will she hadn’t known she possessed.
The game trail Wes had once pointed out, a barely-there impression in the undergrowth, had become her lifeline out of the burning canyon. Her scientific mind, usually occupied with the delicate structures of stamens and pistils, had been brutally repurposed for survival.
Crush the leaves of the Agave lechuguilla for moisture. The inner bark of that juniper, chewed, will settle your stomach. Avoid the berries of the nightshade.
Lessons Wes had taught her, not in a lecture hall, but under the searing Texas sun. They were lessons that had saved her life.
Her satchel, containing her precious journal and the carefully wrapped Ghost Lily specimen, banged against her hip—a painful, precious weight. But her overriding thought, a frantic drumbeat against the inside of her skull, was of Wes.
Left for Croft’s cruel mercy. Left for the fire. The image of him, falling, his body absorbing the brutal blows meant to protect her, was a fresh wound in her memory.
She stumbled through the scrubland, guided by a ragged map in her mind and the position of the unforgiving sun. The landmark she sought—a trio of mesas shaped like a coyote’s teeth—finally rose against the horizon.
Running Water’s camp was near. Hope, a fragile and exhausted thing, flickered within her.
When she finally staggered into the small clearing, she must have been a terrifying sight. Her dress was torn and blackened, her face smudged with soot, and her hair a wild tangle of twigs and ash.
Running Water looked up from the fire where a pot of herbs simmered, her ancient face calm, yet her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. She rose without a word, her movements fluid and certain, and caught Beatrice as her knees finally gave way.
“He is here,” the old woman said, her voice a low balm.
The words didn’t register at first. Beatrice’s mind, thick with smoke and fear, struggled to parse them. “Who?” she croaked, her throat raw.
“The Black Fox,” Running Water said, guiding her toward a shaded lean-to.
“He found his way home. As did you.”
And then she saw him. He lay on a pallet of soft furs, stripped to the waist.
His body was a horrifying canvas of deep purple bruises and angry red gashes. A crude splint was bound to his left arm, and a poultice of crushed green leaves covered a vicious-looking wound on his side.
He was still, his breathing shallow and labored. He was alive.
The fragile flicker of hope within Beatrice erupted into a wildfire. It burned through her exhaustion, incinerated her despair.
The terror of the last day was replaced by a new, focused fear—the fear of a physician facing a critical patient.
“Let me see,” she said, her voice finding a strength she didn’t know it had.
Running Water nodded, stepping back with a quiet grace that was both an invitation and an assessment. Beatrice knelt beside Wes, her hands hovering over him, trembling slightly before they stilled.
The botanist gave way to the scientist, the woman to the healer.
“The poultice is good,” she murmured, recognizing the yarrow for its styptic properties.
“But this wound on his side… it’s deep. We must be certain it is clean, or the fever will take him.”
She looked at his ribs, her fingers gently probing the discolored skin. He groaned, a low animal sound, but didn’t wake.
“Two, maybe three are broken. And his head…” She carefully examined a cut near his temple, caked with dried blood.
For the next several hours, the two women worked in a silent, intuitive partnership that transcended language and culture. Running Water brewed a willow bark tea, a natural analgesic.
Beatrice, using whiskey from a flask in her satchel and a needle from her sewing kit sterilized in the fire, meticulously cleaned and stitched the gash on Wes’s side. Her hands, usually so steady when dissecting a flower petal, were just as precise now, closing the torn flesh with small, neat sutures.
She used strips of her own petticoat, boiled clean, to create fresh bandages.
She worked with a fierce, protective concentration, her world narrowing to the man on the pallet. This was a different kind of knowledge, a different kind of cataloging.
Not the classification of species, but the assessment of damage. Not the study of life in the abstract, but the desperate, hands-on fight to preserve one singular, irreplaceable life.
Days bled into a feverish haze. Beatrice rarely left his side, sleeping in short, dreamless bursts and waking to check his temperature, change his dressings, and spoon broth and the bitter willow tea between his cracked lips.
Running Water moved around them like a quiet spirit, providing food, fresh water, and a steadying presence that kept Beatrice from shattering.
On the third day, his fever broke. She was wiping his brow with a cool, damp cloth when his eyes flickered open.
They were unfocused at first, clouded with pain, before they found her.
“Bea,” he rasped, his voice a dry whisper.
Tears she had refused to shed sprang to her eyes. “Wes. You’re awake.”
His gaze roamed over her face, taking in the scratches and the exhaustion etched there. A muscle in his jaw twitched. “The fire… I thought…”
“I’m safe,” she said quickly, her hand finding his uninjured one. His fingers, calloused and strong, curled weakly around hers.
“I used the game trail. I remembered what you taught me.”
A flicker of something—pride, relief—danced in his pained eyes. “Good,” he breathed out.
He tried to sit up, but a sharp intake of breath and a grimace of agony stopped him.
“Don’t you dare move, Wesley Callahan,” she ordered, her tone a strange mixture of scientific authority and raw emotion.
“You have three broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder that your grandmother somehow managed to set, and a cut on your side that I had to stitch myself. You will lie still.”
He sank back, a ghost of his usual cynical smile touching his lips.
“Stitched me yourself, did you? Knew that book learning would be good for something practical eventually.”
The familiar barb held no sting. It was simply him. It was the sound of him being alive.
“My world is full of practical applications, I’ll have you know,” she retorted softly, her thumb stroking the back of his hand. “Including the identification of poisonous flora, which I trust you won’t be sampling anytime soon.”
They fell into a comfortable silence, the unspoken horrors they had both endured hanging in the air but robbed of their power by the simple fact of their shared survival. He had fought for her.
She had healed him. The bargain they had struck, so full of thorns and conditions, had been stripped down to its essential, undeniable core.
“When I was in that canyon,” Beatrice confessed, her voice barely audible, “and the fire was closing in, I wasn’t thinking about my father, or the university, or my name in some academic journal. I was thinking of you. That I might never… that you wouldn’t know…”
She couldn’t finish, the words catching in her throat.
Wes’s grip on her hand tightened. He turned his head on the pallet to look at her fully, his dark eyes clear and intense.
“I know, Bea.”
He tugged gently, and she leaned closer, her heart pounding a heavy rhythm against her ribs.
“When Croft’s men had me,” he said, his voice low and gravelly with effort, “the only thing I could see was your face. The only thing I could think was that I had to get back to you. I left the Rangers, I left the world, because I didn’t think there was anything left worth fighting for. I was wrong.”
The space between them, once a chasm of cultural and personal differences, had vanished. There was no Boston botanist or cynical half-Comanche guide.
There was only a man and a woman who had walked through fire for each other.
“I love you, Wes,” she whispered, the words feeling as natural and true as the Latin names of the flowers she so cherished.
“I love you,” he answered, the admission costing him no pride, only the release of a pain he’d carried for years. “God help me, Beatrice, I do.”
Their two worlds—her structured, empirical world of science and his intuitive, ancestral world of tradition—had converged in this small, quiet space. They were not opposing forces.
They were two halves of a whole, two sets of knowledge that, when combined, were more powerful than either could be alone. His grandmother had seen it.
Now, finally, so did they.
After another day of rest, the tenderness of their new reality was tempered by the cold steel of the old one. Croft was still out there.
Propped up against a willow backrest, Wes listened intently as Beatrice spoke, her voice regaining its crisp, intellectual fire.
“He thinks he’s won. He thinks he destroyed the evidence and left us for dead.”
“He’s not one to leave things to chance,” Wes cautioned, his face grim. “He’ll be back to make sure.”
“Then we must be ready,” Beatrice declared. She reached for her satchel and pulled out her leather-bound journal.
She opened it, the pages filled with her elegant, precise script, detailed drawings of the Ghost Lily, maps of the canyon, and notes on the creek’s water levels.
“He thinks my research is just about a flower,” she said, a spark of defiance in her eyes.
“He’s wrong. This journal is a legal document. It’s a meticulous record of his illegal dam. It contains hydrographic data, soil composition analysis, and a timeline of the environmental damage. I documented the survey markers on your land. I documented the threats from his men. In Boston, this would be irrefutable proof in a court of law.”
Wes looked at the book, then at her. The awe in his expression was profound.
He saw it now not as a collection of notes, but as a weapon—a weapon as potent as any rifle.
“There’s a federal marshal in Redemption,” he said slowly, an idea taking shape.
“Comes through once a month. He’s a hard man, but fair. He won’t be in Croft’s pocket.”
“I’ll present this to him,” Beatrice said, her resolve hardening. “I will use the law—your white man’s law—to dismantle his empire.”
“And while you do,” Wes added, his eyes glinting with a dangerous light she now recognized as the Ranger he once was, “you’ll need a distraction. Croft is arrogant. He’s a predator who likes to see his prey run. If he gets word I’m alive, he’ll come for me himself. He won’t be able to resist finishing the job.”
He looked out from the lean-to, his gaze sweeping over the familiar lines of the canyons and mesas.
“I’ll lead him on a chase. But this time, it will be on my terms. In my land. He thinks he owns these canyons. I’m going to teach him what it means to be a guest.”
The plan settled between them, a perfect synthesis of their strengths. Her mind and his might.
Her science and his instinct. Her proof and his trap.
Their two worlds, no longer separate, were converging to forge a single, sharp edge of justice. The thorny bargain had bloomed into an alliance, and it was ready to cut Silas Croft down to the root.