Blackwolf's Redemption

Sienna’s head was spinning. If she’d dreamed it all, why had someone just found papers making the canyon and the surrounding land forever wild?

And yet—and yet, such a thing was feasible. Lawyers and scholars were always turning up old documents.

But she couldn’t have dreamed Jesse. He had been so real. His kisses. His smile. His love.

Tears rose in her eyes. She dug in her pocket for a tissue, found none and wiped her arm across her face.

“Hey,” Jack said, “nice!”

She blinked. “What?”

“Never noticed that before.” She looked at him blankly. “The bracelet. Must be a few hundred years old. Didja get it in Bozeman?”

Sienna looked at the beautiful bracelet that encircled her wrist. Horsehair. Sterling silver. Pipestone.

“Jesse,” she whispered.

Her heart filled with joy. What had happened had been real—but it was over. She had lost Jesse, she would never lie in his arms again.

Burying her face in her hands, she began to weep.

“What?” Jack said, but she didn’t even try to answer.

After a while, they all walked away. Trauma, she heard one of them say. Stress.

Let them think what they wished. There was no possible way to explain what had happened…

Or to explain her broken heart.

Time slipped past.

It didn’t rush backward or gallop relentlessly forward. No holes swallowed Jesse up. Time just kept moving, and so did he.

He spent days searching the canyon, the mountain, every inch of his land, looking for Sienna, even though he damned well knew he wouldn’t find her.

Something had torn her from his arms. Something more powerful than any enemy he’d ever encountered. This was an enemy he could not see, could not describe, could not touch.

Could not defeat.

The realization half-killed him.

His woman was gone. God only knew where she was, and he—he was helpless to find her.

His men treated him with caution. They thought Sienna had left him. He didn’t try to explain. How could he? He couldn’t explain it to himself.

When he ran out of places to search, he flew to San Francisco, to New York, to half a dozen universities where scholars knew all there was to know about astronomy and time and physics. When he ran out of universities, he walked the streets of dangerous neighborhoods, sat through the nonsense of séances and tarot-card readings. He was willing to try anything, everything.

It did no good.

Sienna was gone.

It was his fault.

If only he hadn’t brought her to the canyon…

He tried not to waste time on self-pity. All he wanted was to figure out what had happened, come up with a way to find his Sienna and bring her back.

Was she in her own time again? Maybe. He tore up the sale papers for his land, had his bewildered attorney draw up documents that would instead protect it forever.

Maybe she would know about it.

It was like putting a message in a bottle and tossing into a vast, uncharted sea, but it was, at least, something.

And, finally, when there was nothing else left, he buried himself in work. He sweated and toiled alongside his men, rebuilding fences, herding, branding, doing whatever he could to keep from thinking of what had been taken from him forever, what he would never find again.

Days became weeks, weeks became months. The heat of summer gave way to the chill of autumn. Winter was fast approaching. The weather, like Jesse’s heart, was cold and bitter.

Nights were the worst. You couldn’t do much on a ranch once darkness settled over it. He took to going through the old books and papers his father had collected.

Maybe, just maybe, he might discover something in them that would help him understand what had happened.

The books were full of legends. The papers were mostly notes that spoke of things Jesse no longer believed but could not so easily dismiss, not after what had happened to him and the woman he loved.

Then, one night, he stumbled across a map. It was old, older than the bracelet he’d given Sienna; it had been drawn on a piece of tanned deerskin. It took less than a minute to see what it depicted: the canyon, the ledge, the sacred stone.

A sheet of paper was clipped to it. Jesse recognized his father’s handwriting.

The old ones believed the passageway above the sacred stone was more than an entrance for the summer sun. Some believed it was a portal between worlds, that when proper conditions existed, one could travel through time.

Jesse’s heart began to race. He sat down at his desk and read the rest. At first, the words erased any faint hope he might have harbored. Some ancients had apparently gone through the opening between the stones to another time. None had ever come back.

But every four hundred years, his father had written, there would be a very special summer solstice. It was said that on that day, one chosen by fate could slip through the opening. The portal would remain open until the sun could no longer climb to the top of Blackwolf Mountain. Then, months later, at the moment when the shortest day became the longest night, it would close and remain closed until the four-hundred-year cycle repeated.