Excerpt of
STEALING THUNDER
       

June 22, 1919

    Donal McKenna,
        Ye might have found happiness with another woman, but yer progeny will pay for this betrayal of me. I call on my faerie blood and my powers as a witch to give yers only sorrow in love, for should they act on their feelings, they will put their loved ones in mortal danger.
                                So be it
                                Sheelin O’Keefe


Prologue

Bitter Creek Reservation, South Dakota

“Come out and meet your accusers, sorcerer!”
    The deep voice rumbled through the crowd surrounding the house. Thirteen-year-old Ella Thunder felt a cold lump in her chest as her father jerked her away from the window and the vision of angry faces. 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 onto 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!”
    A request that shocked Ella and made her recognize the depth of Mother’s desperation. Her mother believed in Christian teachings, not in the mystic 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 craggy features drawn into a scowl, Father stepped out onto the dirt street 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 onto her younger sister Miranda as if waiting for the judgement call of the crowd.
    Ella wasn’t going to wait. She ran out into the street in time to hear Roderick Bird accusing her father.
    “What you did to Nelson is proof enough for me that you practice sorcery!” Roderick was Nelson’s older brother.
    “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!”
    Ella ran outside as the crowd surrounded her father and dragged him toward the church. “No!” she 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 dirt street 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 though it were 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. 
    “No-o-o!” 
    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.                                    

Chapter 1

Black Hills, South Dakota, 15 years later   
   
A wave of homesickness as wide and deep as the Irish Sea swept through Tiernan McKenna as he sat his roan gelding Red Crow and studied the Bitter Creek Mustang Refuge—grassy meadows amidst winding rugged canyons, ragged rock spires backing pine and cedar forest.
    The trees gave the Black Hills their name, because from a distance, the foliage made the mountains look black. Missing the rolling land and lush green valleys of the Emerald Isle, Tiernan gazed out over the valley below, where mustangs grazed. Nothing like the Thoroughbreds he’d worked with all his life, horses he’d trained and ridden, these horses were feral.
    He’d thought this was what he wanted—a complete change from his old life, a way to get out of his brother Cashel’s shadow, a chance to cowboy. He’d grown up watching old American Westerns on the telly. Cimarron, The Magnificent Seven, High Noon, Billy the Kid—those were only some of the cinemas that had entranced him. So here he was in the American West and ironically, an historical Western film called Paha Sapa Gold was just starting to shoot in the Black Hills, mostly on refuge land, thereby infusing the organization with sorely needed money.
    Longing seared Tiernan as he gazed out on the film’s camp in the distance. There were trailers for the production people and the stars behind the supposed Main Street, though mostly facades like cardboard cutouts represented the town. The only interior sets here were the jail and the saloon. The remaining interior scenes would be shot in an L.A. studio.
    On adjoining reservation land backed by ragged pinnacles of rock, a dozen tepees made up the Lakota Sioux village set. And up in the hills—Tiernan wasn't certain if it was reservation land or refuge—was the sealed off entrance to an old gold mine. He’d heard the film company was planning to use that, too, since Paha Sapa Gold referred to the Custer Expedition investigating reports that the Black Hills held gold despite the fact that it was still Sioux land.
    And in the flat below were two side-by-side fenced pastures, empty now, that would hold the horses to be ridden in the film. They would come both from the MKF Ranch where he worked and from the reservation. Even the refuge mustangs would be used as a wild herd in a couple of scenes.
    Too bad he wasn’t part of that—the old films had fascinated him, had enticed him to make his move from Ireland to America. Well that and not wanting to answer to Cashel anymore. Whether it was horses to train or psychic abilities to control or women to woo, Tiernan didn’t want to be second best to his older brother any more. He needed to be his own man, wherever that would take him.
    So, after considering long and hard, Tiernan had left Ireland to make a life of his own. Second cousins had taken him in, had allowed him to test himself, to see if this life really was for him. While satisfying, the reality of it—the hard, dirty, unromantic work of cowboying, the answering to yet another relative if not a brother—took the luster off those films he’d loved so much. He’d thought that, like the cowboys of the films, he would find a way to make his own mark where he would be answerable to no one.
    Now he realized he’d been telling himself a fairy tale.
    Now a confused Tiernan didn’t know what he wanted.
    Now, missing his brothers Cashel and Aidan despite himself, missing Ma and Da, missing the green and near-daily rains that brought life to Ireland’s estates separated by hedgerows and limestone fences and paved roads, he wasn’t so certain.
    Had he made the biggest mistake of his life in leaving behind everything he knew and loved?
    McKenna pride wouldn’t allow him to admit it, to go crawling back—he had to make a go of it here. He had to prove himself and hope that somehow he would find that elusive something that would give him the mantel of responsibility—impossible working with his older brother Cashel—and make him feel like his own man.
    Riding out on the Bitter Creek Mustang Refuge run by his cousin Kate and her husband Chase Brody, alone on his day off, Tiernan felt even more lost as he was swept up in a timeless, borderless land without end. Nothing but raw nature in every direction, not even a road in sight. The sensations filling him were simply overwhelming.
    For all he knew he could be days—weeks, months—from civilization...he could simply imagine it...
    Below, the feral horses stirred, then were instantly on the move. Flight instinct kicking in, they roared down the valley as one unit—greys and chestnuts and bays and sorrels and Pintos and Paints. His own mount danced and squealed, and a wave of psychic energy that nearly obliterated his vision engulfed Tiernan as he fought to keep the gelding under control. He shook away the dark, sought the reason in the opposite direction, looking to the forested red cliffs, expecting to see a mountain lion, the only real predator to threaten the herd.
    Nothing jumped out at him, neither man nor beast, but once infected with the fear, he knew something—or someone—was out there.
    About to take his mount down to the valley to look for the danger, he was startled to hear his name yelled from behind.
    “Tiernan, wait! I want to talk to you!”
    He turned in the saddle and saw Kate Brody riding straight for him. Kate was one of his second cousins, her mother being a McKenna, and them having the same great-grandparents. Feisty and outspoken, she was a veterinarian, able to sit a horse or doctor it as well as anyone he’d met.
    The smothering sensation of a moment ago flitted away like the morning mist. “A good afternoon to you,” he said as Kate drew alongside him, her freckled face wreathed in a smile, her wild red hair poking out from under her brimmed hat.
    “I have great news. It’s Quin—he just got the call. He’s going to be Chief of Police of Blackwood, which is only thirty-some miles north of here. Everyone’s so excited!”
    “How grand for him.”
    “For us all. That means he’ll stay and not disappear again.”
    Tiernan was closest in age to Kate’s youngest brother, Quinlan Farrell, who’d been a federal agent working mostly undercover until he’d recently returned to his home state with his wife-to-be, Luz Delgado. The Farrells were throwing a big engagement party for the couple at the end of the week. Quin had been hoping for a lawman’s job in a smaller venue and now he had one. Well, good for him. Tiernan could appreciate a man wanting to cut his own path rather than follow the one his family set out for him. Quin was lucky his family was so supportive of his choice.
    “What about the film?” Tiernan asked, suddenly thinking of the responsibility Quin had taken on. “Surely Quin can’t still work on it in addition to handling a new job.”
    Since Chase and Kate were too busy keeping the refuge going, they’d hired Quin to be their liaison with the film company—a temporary stopgap until he landed something more permanent. The film company had barely taken up residence. Filming would begin in the next few days.                   
    “Of course Quin can’t do both jobs,” Kate said. “So Chase and I were wondering if you would consider taking over on the film for him.”
    “Me?” Even as he questioned her, his pulse quickened. “I know nothing about film-making.”
    “But you do know how to wrangle horses. That and acting as a buffer when the crew needs something from us is basically all you need to do.”
    Somehow Tiernan didn’t think the job would be quite so simple, but he didn’t care. This opportunity seemed heaven-sent.
    “What about your parents?” Tiernan had been working on the MKF Ranch since arriving from Ireland. “They will be counting on me—”
    “Already taken care of,” Kate assured him.
    His enthusiasm for coming to South Dakota renewed, he said, “I’m your man, then.”
    “Good. I need to check on the volunteers—they’re out mending fences. We’ll talk more this evening. Dinner at our place. You can move in with us. We have a spare bedroom and bath. Pack your things and bring them over about six.”
    With that, Kate turned her mare and moved off.
    And a smiling Tiernan turned back toward the red cliffs where he’d sensed the threat that had panicked the herd and decided to investigate.