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Rising, she hurried downstairs and booted up her computer, wanting to record her memories of Runs With Thunder while they were fresh in her mind.
“Have you sought a vision?” I asked. We were sitting on a blanket out on the prairie, away from the dust and distractions of the fort.
Runs With Thunder nodded. “When I was sixteen summers, I went to the Paha Sapa. I had been there for three days, fasting and praying, when a red-tailed hawk landed on a tree branch above my head. He spoke to me, telling me to beware of a white woman with hair as dark as night and eyes like greening grass. I know now he spoke of you.”
“Me? Why would he warn you about me?”
“He told me you would bring change to my life.”
“What kind of change?”
“Not in a good way. He said you would kill me but I would not die.”
“This bird really spoke to you?”
“Ai.”
“But you don’t believe what he said?”
“My spirit guide would not lie.”
“If you believe him, what are you doing here, with me?”
“I do not know. You are wasichu, and yet . . .” He lifted a hand, as though to stroke my cheek, then curled it into a fist. “I should not be with you, but I cannot stay away.”
I knew it was my vampire glamour that drew him. I wondered if he would feel the same if I were human, and knew he would not. He was Lakota, I was a white woman, his enemy. But he wanted me, and that was all that mattered. Because I desperately wanted him. He was beautiful, with his long black hair and tawny skin. Clad in a buckskin shirt, trousers, and moccasins, he looked every inch the warrior that he was.
“What change will you bring to me, chikala?”
“Perhaps one day I’ll tell you. What does chikala mean?”
“Little one.”
“Little one,” I murmured, smiling. “I like that.”
“Are you going to change me?”
“Do you want me to?”
He regarded me through serious black eyes for several moments, his expression thoughtful and then worried. “How can you kill me and yet not kill me?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Ai.”
“Your people believe in spirit guides. Do they also believe in vampires?”
He nodded. “There are stories of those who drink the blood of the living and walk in the night, but”—he stared at me, his eyes wide—“you cannot be one of them.” He shook his head. “They are skeletal creatures, with long teeth and hairy palms, and they smell bad.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Perhaps there are vampires like the ones you describe, but I’ve never met any.”
“This is a bad joke, Mara.”
“It isn’t a joke.”
“Show me, then.”
“Some other time, perhaps.”
Now it was his turn to laugh. “I knew it was not true.”
I saw him often in the next few weeks, and then, one night, he told me he was leaving the fort.
“Why? Where are you going?”
“Long Hair Custer is going to the Greasy Grass to battle against my people. I must go home to fight with the Lakota.”
I tried to dissuade him, but, like Jeffrey Dunston, Runs With Thunder was a man of honor. His people were going to war, and he was determined to fight alongside them. I thought of forcing the Dark Gift on him, but I remembered Dunston’s reaction all too well. The thought of Runs With Thunder meeting such a horrific end was more than I could bear.
After Runs With Thunder left the fort, I contemplated leaving as well. Instead, I followed Custer’s regiment from a distance. What a grand sight they made, with Custer riding proudly at their head while the band played “Garry Owen.”
I had met Custer at a dance at the fort shortly before he left. I had thought him an arrogant fool. He was so sure of victory, so certain that he was indestructible.
I trailed the Seventh by night and burrowed into the welcoming arms of the earth by day. Resting in the ground on June 25, 1876, I heard the sounds of battle as white man and red man met on the banks of the Little Big Horn. I heard the war cries of the Lakota and the Cheyenne, the bugle calls of the Seventh Cavalry, the gunshots and the sibilant hiss of arrows flying through the air, the screams and sobs of the wounded and the dying. Even buried deep in the earth, I smelled the blood as it soaked the ground. So much blood.
And later, I listened to the silence.
And then came the high-pitched keening of the Indian women as they grieved for their dead.
I rose with the setting of the sun. The battlefield was littered with corpses. The Indians had carried their dead away, but I prowled the battlefield, looking for Runs With Thunder.
I had been about to abandon my search when I found him, badly wounded. He had crawled away from the battlefield and lay in a shallow ravine, hidden behind a clump of sage. He smelled of blood. And death.
“Runs With Thunder.” Calling his name, I sank to my knees beside him, shook him when he didn’t answer. “Thunder, answer me!”
Slowly, his eyes opened. He looked at me blankly for a moment, and then his lips formed my name, though no sound emerged.
“I can’t let you die,” I whispered, stroking his cheek. “Your spirit guide was right. I’m going to change your life. I hope you won’t hate me for it.”
He tried to speak, but it was beyond him. His heartbeat was sluggish, heavy. His eyes filled with horror when I bent over him, my fangs extended. And then, smiling faintly, he closed his eyes.
His blood was warm and sweet as I drained him of what he hadn’t lost in the battle, drank until he was a breath away from death, and then I bit into my wrist. When I held it to his lips and bid him drink, he did so greedily.
When I felt he had taken enough, I carried him away from the Little Big Horn into a cave high in the Black Hills. In the nights that followed, I taught him what it meant to be a vampire—how to feed, how to shut his mind to the barrage of sound that assaulted him on every side, how to call his prey to him.
I took him to New York and Rome, to London and Los Angeles. We hunted the nights together, and it was wonderful. But, after a year or so, he began to long for the Paha Sapa and his own people.
“I must go home,” he said. “Back to the Lakota. Come with me, chikala.”
I considered it, but in the end, I knew that as much as I cared for him, I would never be happy living in a hide lodge. Selfish creature that I was, I wanted to wear the latest fashions, not a buckskin tunic and moccasins. The Dakota sky at night was beautiful, but I wanted the bright lights of Paris. The Great Plains were quiet, the Black Hills majestic, but I favored tall buildings and city streets, all the better to get lost in.
