From Jennifer Ashley, With Love

by Jennifer Ashley

  But the slayer was human, and that changed the game. I had rules, I had scruples, not to mention gods to answer to if I killed innocent humans with the magic I’d inherited from my crazy, evil-goddess mother.

  This particular innocent human was busy punching my face at the same time he tried to shove the stake between Ansel’s ribs.

  I tackled the slayer. My small body couldn’t bring his down, but I at least deflected the pointed wood from Ansel.

  The slayer tossed all five-foot-four of me aside and went for Ansel again. Ansel’s mouth opened wide, the spittle that ran from his fangs glistening in the starlight. That mouth came down, forcing my choice. I gathered a ball of Beneath magic and threw it between them.

  The magic exploded with the intensity of a small grenade, flinging Ansel and the attacker apart. Ansel landed on his back halfway to the hotel, and the attacker rolled through thorny grasses between the parking lot and raised railroad bed twenty yards away.

  Ansel sprang to his feet. His eyes burned red in the darkness, his blood frenzy erasing every vestige of Ansel my antique-loving boarder.

  I ran at him. “Go back inside! Back to the basement. Now!”

  Might as well scream at a rabid dog. Down, Killer. Bad boy!

  Far gone in the frenzy, Ansel sprinted around me faster than I could see and went for the slayer.

  The slayer had already leapt to his feet and was sprinting for the abandoned railroad bed that led south into town. He scrambled up the bank, Ansel right behind him.

  I scrambled after them, slipping and sliding in the gravel until I reached the hard-packed top where railroad tracks used to be. I ran down the bed, arms and legs pumping.

  The slayer easily outpaced me, and Ansel, being a Nightwalker, was faster still, his lean, runner’s body and long limbs closing the distance. I was too far away. I’d never stop Ansel, and the slayer still had his wooden stake.

  I smacked Ansel with a snake of Beneath magic. The rope of it jerked his feet out from under him, and Ansel fell on his face. The attacker kept running.

  Ansel was up and after him again in an instant. The all-powerful magical woman behind them panted and wheezed as she struggled to keep up.

  My Beneath magic, mostly good for blowing things up or the direct kill, couldn’t do subtle things, like make Nightwalkers sit down and be quiet, or stop humans from trying to stake my friends. If I could have used my storm magic, I might have done better, but I can’t conjure storms—a Stormwalker can only use what nature provides, and tonight, nature was providing a warm, calm, starlit night. Mick had taught me some witch magic—protection spells, healing spells, defensive spells—but I needed sage or incense plus time to work the incantation, and I was fresh out of all those at the moment.

  If I killed the human with Beneath magic, Coyote and other gods would make me answer for it. They’d made it clear in the past that fighting for my life and that of a friend was no excuse for taking human life.

  So I smacked Ansel instead. Nightwalkers are hard to kill, and I’d apologize to him later.

  Ansel stumbled and went down, tripped by my next snake of Beneath magic, but damned if he didn’t spring immediately to his feet. I hit him again, and Ansel howled. The human slayer took advantage and ran like hell down the railroad bed, disappearing into the night.

  I finally reached Ansel. He looked up at me with blood-crazed eyes, his mouth opening as he gauged the best angle of attack.

  “Ansel! It’s Janet. Stop!”

  He couldn’t care less who I was—he smelled my blood, and he wanted it. Fresh, tasty, human blood, right from the vein.

  “Come on, Ansel,” I said, putting on my friendly voice. “Let’s go in. You can show me that new stamp you found, the one from Belgium, was it? Please, Ansel. I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  Even talking about his beloved stamp collection didn’t help. Ansel snarled and leapt for me, and I sadly gathered my magic to dissolve him into dust.

  A dragon burst out of the sky. Black and huge, it dove for us with the precision of a fighter plane, a line of fire streaming from his mouth in a tight, efficient burst. I leapt backward as a ring of fire bloomed around Ansel, and then the dragon took down the Nightwalker by the simple, effective method of running into him.

  Ansel crashed down the side of the empty railroad bed, landing flat on his face in the dust and dried grasses of the desert floor. He lay unmoving, clawed hands still. The fire disappeared, and the dragon took to the sky, the hot draft from his wings stirring my hair.

  The dragon touched to earth again some way away. The giant beast dissolved into darkness, and from that darkness walked a tall man with black hair, his arms covered with dragon tattoos.

  He was naked but didn’t seem to notice. I noticed plenty as he strode toward me on long, strong legs, his tight body shining with sweat in the hot night.

  When he reached me he looked down at me with eyes of brilliant blue and flashed me the warm grin I liked so well.

  “Hey, baby,” he said. “Miss me?”

  * * *

  Mick carried Ansel over his shoulder back to the hotel, down the stairs to the basement, and to the room that Mick and my plumber Fremont had built this spring.

  I had never trusted Nightwalkers as a rule, but I didn’t mind Ansel, who’d been turned Nightwalker at the tender age of twenty-two when he’d been a British soldier captured in North Africa during World War II.

  He’d been made a Nightwalker as a part of some bizarre Nazi plot, which Ansel said he never completely understood. Their plans for using Ansel had backfired when Ansel had turned on his makers, killing them. He’d escaped and spent the rest of the war sabotaging the hell out of the German army. They should have learned what my Wiccan hotel manager has taught me—whatever you dish out will come back to you threefold and smack you in the ass.

  Ansel has always been pretty evasive about what he’d been doing between 1945 and the day he’d showed up a my hotel last winter, but he’d been quiet, grateful, and never complained, which put him a few steps above most of my other guests. He’d only given me trouble once, but he’d been caught in a hex. Not his fault.

  Ansel had volunteered to sleep in the unfinished basement so he wouldn’t take up a guestroom, but I didn’t like the thought of him sleeping on the dank floor, despite his assurances that he’d survived far worse conditions. Mick and Fremont, with help from Maya, my electrician, had built him a comfortable, finished room with a bed, television, and a special cabinet for his stamp collection.

  Ansel’s gratitude had been immense, and he’d insisted on paying for the renovations himself. I had no idea where he got the money, but then Ansel had been alive for more than ninety years, and he’d obviously been good at putting a bit by.

  Mick grunted as he dropped Ansel’s inert body onto the mission-style bed. Ansel was out, but he wasn’t dead. When Nightwalkers die, they deteriorate into disgusting bone, sinew, and what’s left of their internal organs. Ansel was still whole; therefore, Ansel was still with us.

  I fetched a gallon jug of blood for Ansel and a pair of jeans for Mick. Mick slid on the jeans but only in deference to Ansel, who was groggily coming out of it. Dragons don’t mind nudity, and I don’t mind Mick nude either. His body is a work of art, fluid harmony. Ansel, on the other hand, was quite modest and easily embarrassed.

  I shoved the bottle of blood under Ansel’s nose. He grabbed it with both hands, his Nightwalker mouth opening again, and he upended the plastic jug and poured the blood down his throat. A rational Ansel would use a glass and a coaster—Standards, he’d say.

  He drank greedily. When he lowered the plastic bottle a long time later, the red had faded from his eyes, and his fangs had gone.

  Ansel shakily reached for the napkin I handed him and dabbed at his mouth. “Cheers, Janet.”

  Cheers, I’d come to know, was Brit-speak for Thank you. “Better now?” I asked.

  Ansel nodded. He started to close his eyes, ready to drop into his day sle
ep, but I shook him.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Talk to me.”

  He gave me a blank look. “About?”

  Ansel could do innocent very well. He had hazel eyes in a handsome if rather long face, and thick light-brown hair with a natural wave. Girls in London must have fallen at his feet before he’d rushed off to war.

  I sat down on the edge of his bed. “Tell me why the nice man with the crossbows and the stake was trying to slay you.”

  Ansel’s smile, even with his bloodstained mouth, better suited the tall young soldier he’d been than the monster he’d become. “Oh, you know. With all the vamp books and movies out there, anyone who believes in Nightwalkers wants to try to slay one.”

  “Bullshit.” I leaned closer to Ansel, looking him straight in the eye. “That slayer wasn’t a wannabe Buffy; he was a pro. Tell me why was he after you.”

  Ansel’s eyes flickered. “How should I know?”

  Mick had pulled out the desk chair and straddled it backward, his strong arms resting on the chair’s back. “Janet has a point. Hired pros don’t appear out of the blue. Who’s after you?”

  Ansel snaked out his tongue to catch a last drop of blood. Mick sat quietly, but his dragon tattoos moved restlessly on his arms, their black eyes glittering. Ansel might be a deadly Nightwalker, but no one and nothing out there can be more terrifying than Mick when he decides to be all dragon. Ask me how I know that.

  Ansel shrank into himself. He hugged his arms across his body and started to shake.

  “Janet,” he said in a voice so whispery I barely heard it. Nightwalkers don’t have to breathe if they don’t want to, and he wasn’t putting breath into the words. “God help me, Janet, I think I killed her.”

  Chapter Two

  “Killed her?” I asked in alarm. “Killed who?”

  “Laura.”

  The name meant nothing to me. I hadn’t met any Lauras lately, and Ansel had never mentioned her.

  “Laura DiAngelo?” Mick asked sharply.

  Ansel gave him the saddest nod I’d ever seen. I opened my mouth to question, but Mick shook his head at me, and I popped my mouth closed again. Fine. The Stormwalker is always the last to know.

  Mick went on, “What did you mean, you think you killed her?”

  “I mean don’t remember,” Ansel said. “A week ago, I woke up, lying facedown in the middle of the desert, blood all over me. It was night, but I could feel the dawn coming. I barely got to ground in time to escape the day. I’d started the evening with Laura, but she wasn’t with me, and I couldn’t remember what had happened to her. I called her when I woke up again the next night to make sure she was all right, and she didn’t answer. She isn’t at her house or her store, she hasn’t returned my messages, no one has seen her, and I haven’t been able to find her.” Ansel scrubbed his forehead. “Janet, I’ve been so bloody worried.”

  For Ansel, the calmest and most understated of creatures I knew, “bloody worried” meant he was out of his mind with fear.

  I’d never heard him talk about Laura DiAngelo, friend or otherwise. I didn’t make a habit of prying into my friends’ private lives, but I made an exception for Nightwalkers. Even ones like Ansel, who are trying to stay off the human blood and live as normal a life as possible, are extremely dangerous. Having a Nightwalker in your basement is like storing a ton of plastic explosives—perfectly stable until hooked up to a detonator, and then . . . look out.

  “Who is Laura, and why haven’t you mentioned her?” I asked.

  “I ought to have. Sorry.” That Ansel didn’t tell me it was none of my flipping business attested to his fear. “I met Laura in Santa Fe. She has an antique shop there. In went in to look at a few pieces—she keeps her shop open late during the tourist season. We got to talking, and then we went out for drinks.” He shot me his boyish smile, the one that must have floored all those girls in their high-heeled pumps in 1939. “Don’t look so surprised, Janet. I can be quite charming when I put my mind to it.”

  I knew he could be. “So, you talked about antiques?”

  “That and more. My family owned an antiques shop in London before the war. Laura and I talked for a long time, before the bar kicked us out. We became friends, and then we formed a sort of partnership. She’s a small dealer, nothing showy, but picks up nice Native American artifacts here and there—genuine ones. She rather roused the antiques bug in me again.” He gave me another smile. “I scour auction material online and tell her where to go and what to buy. She sells it and shares the proceeds with me. We’ve made a bit of cash; not much, but some.”

  “And that night?” I prompted.

  “We met up in Gallup and went to dinner. She wanted to discuss something with me, a . . . project we’d been working on. Afterward, we got in her car and headed out of town. She took a turn and started driving north, onto the reservation, I think toward Shiprock. And then . . . I woke up near dawn in the desert with a headache and no memory of how I got there.” Ansel sank back into his pillows. His face, which had picked up some animation while he talked, faded into hopelessness once more.

  None of this sounded good. If Ansel had gone into his blood frenzy, he could have dragged Laura out of her car, fed off her, dumped her, and fled into the desert. In the dark, out in western New Mexico, there wouldn’t have been many witnesses, if any at all.

  I asked, “How did you get out of the frenzy? You have to have blood to sate it, right? Anyone you’d drained couldn’t have been far away.”

  “Not unless I’d hidden the body before I passed out.” A gruesome possibility. “But I was alone out there. I was terrified of the dawn and fled. I didn’t stay to investigate. I spent the night underground, digging into a little cave I’d found in the side of an arroyo. I tried to go back to the spot when I woke up again, but I couldn’t find exactly where I’d been. One stretch of desert looks like any other to me.”

  He looked so pathetic, stretched out between me and Mick, lean and boyishly handsome. I’d seen Ansel become a crazed killer, though. Whenever he was the Nightwalker, he showed a ruthless cruelty and a brutal sarcasm that cut as sharply as his teeth. That person was inside him, somewhere, and I hoped I never had to meet him again.

  “Why the slayer?” I asked him.

  “Laura’s sister, Paige. She found out I was a Nightwalker. She’s convinced I killed Laura, and she’s probably right.”

  I exchanged a look with Mick. “Not many people believe in Nightwalkers,” I said. “Did Laura?”

  “Yes. She said that her research into history and antiquities has brought her up against many weird things. She guessed I was Nightwalker, and I told her my story. Laura promised to keep my secret, but Paige is a follower of the supernatural, it appears. Believes in Nightwalkers, Changers, angels, ghosts—everything occult. She’s convinced I killed Laura, and now is sending slayers to kill me.” Ansel dredged up a breath to let it out. “I’ll go, Janet. When the slayer reports that you and Mick protected me, Paige will be after you too.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “If this slayer puts out the word that you’re being guarded by a dragon and a Stormwalker, they’ll give up and look for easier pickings. No slayer’s going to want to tangle with Mick.”

  “Unless he’s a dragonslayer as well,” Mick said.

  I thought he was joking, but one look at Mick’s eyes—which had started to turn dragon black—told me he wasn’t. I lifted my hand. “One disaster at a time, all right? Ansel, how did Laura’s sister figure out you were a Nightwalker? I don’t broadcast the fact.”

  Ansel actually smiled. “People talk, especially about your hotel.”

  Good point. Gossip in the tiny town of Magellan put social networking to shame.

  “Back to the night in question,” I said. “How do you know you didn’t run away from Laura when you felt the blood frenzy coming on? You might have decided to ride it out in the desert, where you couldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “What about all the blood on my clothes
? Besides, I smelled of her.”

  Not good. I wanted to believe there was another explanation, but it was looking worse and worse for Ansel. If he had killed this Laura DiAngelo, Mick or I would have to put him down. Friend or no, we couldn’t let the bomb detonate.

  Ansel knew it too. He squeezed his eyes shut again and began to shake. The poor guy was miserable.

  Mick reached down and put his hand on Ansel’s shoulder. “We’ll find out what happened. Janet and I are on this.”

  I started to say that I couldn’t guarantee success, but Ansel opened his eyes and looked up at us, so pathetically grateful, that I subsided.

  “I have a photo of Laura in my nightstand,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you now. The sleep is coming.”

  His day sleep, he meant. Because Nightwalkers burned energy at an incredible rate when fully awake, they spent their days in hibernation. They can stay awake during the day, as long as they keep out of direct sunlight, but they remain groggy, crabby, and incoherent.

  As Ansel drifted off, I rummaged through his nightstand drawer and found a picture of a young woman in hiking attire—shorts, T-shirt, hiking boots, her brown hair in ponytail under a baseball cap.

  She had a wide smile in the sunshine, tanned arms and face, and pale circles around her eyes that showed she usually wore sunglasses. She looked like any other young woman out hiking the Southwest, though I’d never seen her before. I showed the picture to Mick, who studied it with interest.

  Ansel was truly asleep now, the sleep of the dead. Mick covered him with a quilt and tucked the bottle of blood into Ansel’s mini-refrigerator so it wouldn’t spoil.

  That was Mick all over—he’d knock you out to keep you from killing your friends then make sure you were comfortable for when you woke up.

  * * *

  Mick and I walked upstairs together. Though I was tired and a little sore from the fight, I’d had a big adrenaline rush, and I needed to work off the energy.