Wild Blood by Nancy A. Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

his parents once she had the proper memory cues. Besides, if he didn’t believe there might be a chance of anything coming out of all this, he wouldn’t be sweating his butt off and risking sunstroke.
    He spotted the midwife’s shack from atop a small rise; it was little more than a two-room shanty with tarpaper sides and a corrugated tin roof covered with loose gravel. There didn’t seem to be any electricity, and an old-fashioned hand-operated well pump was located a few steps from the rickety front door. No doubt there was an equally vintage outhouse in the backyard as well.
    But what caught his attention was the fact that the outlying area surrounding the shanty was littered with leaning posts, sticks and other pieces of salvaged wood, each holding up what looked like a circular shield. As Skinner drew closer, he could tell they were made of animal skins stretched over carefully bent sticks, the outer rims decorated with bits of metal, crystals, feathers and bits of bone. Skinner was reminded of the aluminum pie-plate mobiles his mother used to hang in her garden to keep away the crows.
    As he winded his way through the field of spirit shields, a sudden movement caught the corner of his eye. Skinner turned to see what, at first, he mistook for a large dog watching him from behind a small cottonwood tree. Then he saw the cautious, yellow eyes and the sharply pointed snout. The coyote moved fast, running close and tight to the ground like a cat. It zipped past him and headed around the far corner of the shack. Skinner watched it go, his heart beating faster than it had a minute ago. It was the same sense of exhilaration he always experienced whenever he had a chance encounter with something wild.
    â€œYou looking for something, stranger?”
    Skinner jumped at the sound of the old woman’s voice. He turned and found himself staring down at what looked like a walking, talking apple doll. Standing before him was the oldest living human Skinner had ever seen before in his life. She barely stood five feet tall, with skin the color and texture of a well-used catcher’s mitt. Her eyes shone like volcanic glass set within a spider’s web of wrinkles. She had snow white hair, which was parted down the middle and pulled into a pair of wrapped braids that hung down to her waist. She wore a loose-fitting print housecoat, a pair of broken-in cowboy boots and a Diamondbacks baseball cap.
    â€œAre you Root Woman?”
    â€œI reckon I am. Who wants to know?”
    â€œMy name is Skinner Cade.”
    â€œThat right? Well, come sit in the shade, Skinner Cade, before you boil away what little sense you got.”
    Root Woman may have looked like a stick figure wrapped in leather, but she moved with the speed and agility of a young girl. She led Skinner around the back of her shack to a shade porch, the exposed rafters decorated with bundles of dried herbs and peppers.
    Root Woman seated herself on a bentwood rocker, motioning for Skinner to follow suit on a knock-kneed kitchen stool. She produced a briar pipe from the pocket of her dress. “What do you want, Mr. Cade?” she asked, eyeing him as she stuffed the bowl with a mixture from a pouch on a small table. “No one comes out this way unless they need something from me.”
    â€œI was told by Miss Small that you might know who my mother is.”
    Root Woman stopped rocking but continued puffing on her pipe. The smoke that issued from its bowl smelled distinctly of marijuana. “Is that so?”
    â€œI was adopted almost twenty years ago from the foundling home in Butter Junction. Miss Small claims you were the one who placed me there. None of the documents I found in their records said anything about who my birth parents might be, but it’s assumed one, if not both, were Native Americans. I came all the way out here to see if you remembered anything about my natural mother …”
    â€œMr. Cade, I am a very old