Читать книгу Stealing Thunder - Patricia Rosemoor - Страница 6

Bitter Creek Reservation, South Dakota

“Come out and meet your accusers, sorcerer!”

The deep voice rumbled through the crowd. Thirteen-year-old Ella Thunder felt a cold lump in her chest as her father jerked her away from the window and the sight of angry faces surrounding the house. Half the people who lived on the rez awaited him.

“Go to your room, Ella!”

Trembling, Ella backed into the doorway of her bedroom, but she refused to go inside. She wouldn’t abandon her father!

A rugged man with features as craggy as the South Dakota Badlands, Joseph Thunder radiated power as he stepped toward the front door. Ella only hoped his power was strong enough to save him.

“Joseph, no,” Mother said, her delicate white hands catching on her husband’s muscular bronze arm. “They’re beyond reason! We should have left once the rumors started.”

Ella had heard the disgusting rumors. How her shaman father was secretly doing bad things. How he’d taken Nelson Bird’s mind from him because Nelson had caught him.

Lies!

“Out, sorcerer!” thundered the voice. “Before we burn down your house!”

As Father reached for the handle, Ella rushed past him and threw herself against the door. “No!” Her heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. “Let me go. I’ll tell them they’re wrong!”

“Ah, Ella. There was never a braver girl.” Father’s dark eyes filled with sadness, and he kissed the top of her head. “Someday you’ll have great need for that bravery, to get you through a journey of terrible danger. But not this day. This day is mine alone to suffer.”

She fought him, but she couldn’t stop him from pulling her away from the door. A lump in her throat threatened to choke her, and her eyes burned.

Mother’s blue eyes filled with tears as she pleaded, “Joseph, please do something. Use your power to stop them!”

The request shocked Ella and made her recognize the depth of Mother’s desperation. Her mother believed in Christian teachings, not in the mystical powers of the Lakota.

“Some things are predestined and no power is strong enough to stop them.”

Ella knew her father never used his power for himself, but only to help others—and wondered if that was a personal decision, or something not of his choosing, that he was bound to.

His forehead drawn into a scowl, Father stepped out onto the dirt road and spoke to the crowd. “Don’t let wild talk overcome your good sense!”

Seeming as if they were struck speechless by this horror, the grandparents huddled together at the kitchen table, holding on to her younger sister, Miranda, as if waiting for the judgment call of the crowd.

Ella wasn’t going to wait. She ran out into the street in time to hear Roderick Bird, Nelson’s older brother, accusing her father.

“What you did to Nelson is proof enough for me that you practice sorcery!”

“I did no evil to Nelson—”

“Liar!” came a chorus of voices.

“You’ve brought disease and poverty to the rez,” one woman yelled, “so we have no future!”

“The future is in the earth beneath your feet,” Joseph said. “You must believe—”

“Get him!”

The crowd surrounded her father and dragged him toward the church. “No!” Ella screamed, trying to reach him. “No!”

“Leave Joseph alone!” Mother yelled. “He is innocent!”

But the crowd was too frenzied to listen. Wearing a venomous expression, Ami Badeau shoved Ella out of the way, and an elbow to her chin from another woman made her see stars. She tripped over a rut in the road and fell to her knees. Dazed, she saw Mother chase the crowd.

This wasn’t happening, Ella thought, her chest squeezing tight. Their neighbors…people who’d come to Father for help when they were sick or needed spiritual or practical advice…they weren’t themselves. Their faces had changed, their eyes burned with madness. Only her father’s apprentices Leonard Hawkins and Nathan Lantero, who was also her cousin, appeared sane.

“Let him go!” Leonard yelled.

“Stop and think what you’re doing!” Nathan added.

Jimmy Iron Horse, Father’s third apprentice, was part of the angry crowd. He shoved Nathan out of the way. “We know what we’re doing! Getting rid of a sorcerer who is bringing his evil to the rez!”

Nathan and Leonard physically tried to get to Father, to stop the mob, but they were only two and were easily shrugged away.

It was up to her to do something! Ella thought, vaguely noting the green tinge to the sky. She scrambled to her feet, but the earth itself seemed to have shifted, and the air felt thick, as if it was trying to hold her back.

As if someone had cast a spell…

Concentrating on parting the dense air like she would a curtain, she plunged into the crowd. Voices rose into a chant, and she smelled smoke. She shoved one dancing woman out of the way and squeezed past another who was singing a death chant. Then she stumbled into the open circle where her father was already bound to a post, his hands behind him, wood stacked around his legs, the track of a raven—a long line intersected with an upside down V—drawn on his forehead in black. Father appeared stricken at her presence.

Ella locked gazes with him. What should I do? Tell me!

Go, Ella, get out of here!

No, I won’t!

Her heart thumped with a strange beat. As men with burning torches approached, Jimmy Iron Horse among them, her head went light. The flicker of something powerful and scary blossomed inside her.

Ella let go and felt her mind opening…

The sky darkened…the clouds stretched…the earth rumbled…

“No, Ella!” Father yelled. Even hunted and bound he was aware…one with the earth as was she. “It’s not time! You’re not ready for this! Nathan, stop her before she is destroyed!”

Hands gripped her hard and whipped her around and the earth tilted. She looked up into a distorted face and blinked to make her cousin come into focus.

“Nathan! Help me free him!”

“We’re not strong enough to stop this, Ella.”

She kicked Nathan hard. His grip loosened just enough to let her pull away from him. She turned to see the kindling already burning. Flames licked her father’s body. The smell of flesh and hair scorched her senses.

“Nooo!”

Ella launched herself toward him, bare hands beating at the flames, ignoring the heat shooting up one arm as her sleeve ignited. Nathan tackled her and rolled her along the ground, smothering the flames.

Father!

The word echoed over and over in her mind as Nathan covered her eyes so she couldn’t watch her father burn.