Truthfully, he looked like a giant cat, ready to leap.
I was still watching his face when the boy laughed, bringing my eyes back to him.
The laugh was jarring, hard, righteously triumphant. I couldn’t help but hear the cruelty in it, and feeling those emotions ripple out from such a small body, I tensed, alarm running through my aleimi before I had anything concrete to react to.
The boy wasn’t looking at me.
His eyes focused out the open windows to his left.
Following his gaze, that alarm going off in my light turned into a full-blown air raid siren. When I saw what made little Jason so happy, my breath stopped in my lungs.
A row of faces filled those windows.
Most of them were disturbingly zombie-like, wearing wide-brimmed black hats, their stringy hair hanging down on either side of pale faces. Long black coats covered every inch of their skin apart from their faces. Black leather gloves covered their hands and fingers. They had those crystal-like, pale eyes I remembered from vampires. Crimson bloomed in the center around the black pupils––like a ribbon of blood inside a clear marble.
All of the nearest ones stared at me.
Some had fangs exposed, and I immediately saw what Black meant about them being “different.” Those vein-y fangs extended down further than I’d seen on any vampire working for Brick, or on Brick himself. The look in their eyes and faces was animal-like, blank with hunger and want. A few of them were drooling as they looked at me.
Standing among all those faces, right in the middle, I saw one that was different.
A Native American man stood there, staring right at me.
He wore a dark brown hat that sat high on his head over a blood-red headscarf. A matching blood-red shirt with no collar hung open to expose a hairless but muscular chest, broken by a heavy, silver and turquoise necklace.
He had eerie, light-colored, half green and half brown eyes, almost like a seer’s eyes.
Feathers, colored beads, and what looked like gemstones had been woven into his raven-black hair with red-dyed leather thongs.
He just stood there, looking at me, a smile on his broad, fleshy lips.
I was still staring at those unnervingly light eyes when a low growl erupted from somewhere below the two thigh holsters he wore. I paused only long enough to take in the old-fashioned-looking revolvers hanging from his hips, and his dusty fingers resting on the black handles, like an old school gunslinger.
My eyes found the source of the growl.
Yellow eyes stared back at me. Black and gray fur covered multiple faces and ears, black lips bared from sharp white teeth flecked with drool.
The wolves growled at me, nearly in unison, and for the briefest instant, I just sat there, paralyzed, watching them stare.
Then, without thought, I moved.
“WHERE DID YOU last see them?” Charles turned in his seat, speaking over the wind and the Jeep’s engine as it bounced over the hard desert ground.
His pale, inhuman eyes focused on Red’s face.
“You sent a team up here yesterday,” he said, louder. “What did you find that caused you to do that? Was it something my nephew felt?”
Red and his tracker, Yiska, exchanged looks. Red motioned towards a canyon to their right then, speaking above the wind just as Charles had.
Charles, Red thought to himself scornfully.
It was a ridiculous name for a ghost, clearly meant to help him blend in with the white man. It likely worked, too; white men cared only about skin color, light eyes, and the right names. Not only were these ghosts not from here, they claimed the privilege of the white man, too.
“Turn in there,” Red said, pointing with his hand.
The ghost frowned, nonplussed that his question was side-stepped, but the driver, another officer from Navajo Nation police, was already turning the wheel to aim the Jeep into the narrow canyon. The SUVs behind them shifted directions as they did, following the trails of dust kicked up by their all-terrain, four-wheel drive tires.
Soon all four of the Navajo Nation SUVs drove towards the striated, black-veined cliffs that formed the mouth of the canyon.
Now that they were closer, Red saw the stream that ran along the canyon wall, lined by a row of desert willows below the steep slab of red rock.
“Did you see them in here?” Charles said, looking back. “Wolf’s people?”
“Henry’s people tracked them near here,” Yiska spoke up, his voice heavily-accented, deep and loud over the wind. “This is the only place they could be hiding near here. It is the logical choice. There is water. Caves, so protection from sun and rain. Some game nearby, and fish, both because of the river and the bosque.”
Charles frowned as they passed by what remained of the river that wound around the inside of the canyon. He didn’t comment on Yiska’s words, but Red could see from his face that he scorned the idea of calling that narrow gash of water a river.
Maybe the ghost was right.
Now, anyway.
Red remembered when that riverbed stretched to four times the size it was now.
Before white men destroyed so much of the Earth, before they began polluting the skies and the earth and the water, changing the desert along with the rest of the world, everything was greener up on these bluffs, and in the surrounding valleys. The beetles didn’t kill all the piñon trees in years past, or the other evergreens.
Fires didn’t devastate the land as often.
Even now, after the spring thaws, the water was deep, and flash-floods occasionally washed out through the gully during the monsoon season, catching out-of-state campers and backpackers in their muddy torrents, even killing them at times. There were warnings all over New Mexico not to camp by rivers or in dry creek beds, but white people didn’t listen.
Most of them tried to hike in here without permits, too.
Navajo Nation and B.I.A. police still picked up rock climbers who drove in from the cities, trying to sneak in to take their selfies, write their names on rocks, leave their trash. New Age enthusiasts came as well, often to take hallucinogens and act like idiots, or to look for their own personal shaman because they read a Carlos Castaneda book once.
Outsiders still tried to climb Ship Rock unless the native and local police forces patrolled. They even came at night sometimes, despite the fact that it was illegal to hike the Rock without permission from the tribe. That permission was rarely given, since the Winged Rock was still used for religious rituals and gatherings.
White people, Red thought to himself, shaking his head.
They were mostly blind and stupid, like children.
Ghosts were different.
Ghosts were more arrogant. More sure they were right.
They came to Earth the way white people came to the Americas. They wanted it, so they came and took it, regardless of who lived here first, or whether they belonged.
When Red looked over, he found those preternaturally light eyes on him again.
Making his mind blank, Red gazed back out at the striated rock walls as they descended under the shadow of the cliffs. Mud ruts formed a makeshift road as the canyon opened up, and the driver followed those tracks around a curve in the cliff walls that led into a crevice in the main box canyon, where the largest of the caves lived.
“In there,” Yiska said, pointing when the ghost looked back at him.
They drove right up to the mouth of the cave, now in full shadow from the cliffs on either side. The cave itself was too dark to see into properly, given the angle of the sun and how deep it stretched under the bluffs.
“Where did you find the tracks?” Charles said, as the Jeep slowed to a stop.
Behind them, the SUVs stopped as well, parking around the mouth of the cave.
When Red glanced behind him, doors were already opening and ghosts were spilling out, assault rifles slung around their desert camouflage and armored vests, their odd-colored eyes bright, even under the shadows thrown by the cliffs.
“The tr
acks led here,” Yiska said, jerking his chin towards the cave.
The green-eyed ghost was already looking at his people.
From his eyes, he might be using his psychic abilities to talk to them.
“We are,” the green-eyed one said, looking back at him.
Red met his gaze, feeling the other’s desire to intimidate him, to get the message across that the humans weren’t in charge here.
“And I’m not a ghost,” the green-eyed ghost said. “I’m a dragon.”
His handsome face held a touch of anger now––anger that wasn’t well-disguised behind the humor that wasn’t really humor.
“…We’re all dragons here,” Charles added.
Red grunted, glancing at Tiska, who muttered under his breath in Navajo.
Red caught enough of his friend’s words to grunt a short laugh.
The anger in the ghost’s face grew harder, colder somehow.
He wasn’t used to being questioned. He was used to pushing, forcing his way, being the man on the golden throne, the man who made all the rules.
“Are you coming in with us?” the green-eyed ghost said, his voice a touch harder.
“Do you need us?” Tiska said.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Charles said. “You’re law enforcement here, are you not?”
“We aren’t dragons,” Red said, his face and voice deadpan. He motioned with one hand towards the dark opening in the rock, keeping the smirk off his face. “Dragons like caves, don’t they? Unless you need white man’s gold and a woman in an uncomfortable dress to be a real dragon, you should feel right at home.”
Yiska snorted an involuntary laugh, gazing out the side of the Jeep.
The ghost didn’t bother to answer.
Clearly annoyed with their refusal to react to what he was, and their unwillingness to do his bidding, he unlatched the door to the Jeep and got out.
Red watched him out of the corner of his eye.
Like all ghosts, he was tall, but he had blond hair and fair, beige-colored skin, both of which were unusual colorings for ghosts, at least from what Red knew. Alone among his people, the green-eyed ghost didn’t carry a rifle. He carried two visible sidearms instead, one strapped to each of his hips. Looking him over, Red decided he probably wore at least one more gun somewhere, likely where no one would easily see it.
Red guessed under his pant leg… possibly inside the armored vest.
The ghost didn’t make a sound, but two of his people ran up to him as if he’d called them. Four more fanned out, taking forward positions heading into the mouth of the cave.
Red watched them, fascinated.
Something about the sheer precision and synchronicity of their movements was difficult to look away from, difficult to even track visually in its entirety. They moved more silently than animals. They moved more silently than air, or wind.
They weren’t quiet like his people––many of whom, like Yiska here, knew how to align with the land and its rhythms, rendering them one with that vibration, one with the creatures who lived within it, and therefore, nearly invisible in relation to both.
The green-eyed stranger and his people moved through space like they weren’t there at all.
They reminded him of that movie his nephews made him watch, about the alien who came to Earth to hunt humans for sport.
They really were ghosts.
He watched the first one disappear into the mouth of the cave.
More ghosts had joined the four in front, until most of the people Charles brought with him stepped in front of him now, forming a near V-shape as they gradually vanished under the cliff overhang, rifles propped on their shoulders, aiming forward into the dark.
Eventually, Charles and all of his people melted out of sight.
For a long-feeling few minutes, it was totally silent.
Yiska looked at him, and Red returned his look, neither of them speaking.
In the front seat of the Jeep, the driver, Niyol, smoked a hand-rolled cigarette, listening along with them.
A few minutes later, the first shots went off inside the cave.
The ghosts didn’t shout out like humans would have.
It remained eerily quiet apart from the sound of the guns going off. Even so, Red heard the nature of that gunfire change within minutes, from clusters of precise bursts to chaotic firing from all sides, echoing out of the mouth of the rock like thunder rolling over the hills.
Listening to the chaos erupting inside those rock walls, Red remembered what he’d told Black, when he first met him by that fancy car with the dark windows.
He told him you need a ghost to hunt a dead man.
What he hadn’t told him was, the opposite was also true.
Remembering the puzzled and more than a little pissed off look on Black’s face when he’d said it, Red couldn’t help but chuckle.
Nick really hadn’t been kidding about that rich fuck.
He really was an asshole.
Red felt some guilt that the ghost was Manny’s friend. He also felt some guilt for the ghost’s wife, who had native blood. Guilt or no, he knew he’d cheer louder than any of them when they finally chucked that piece of shit through the door under the Rock, sending him and the rest of the ghosts back to whatever hell they’d come from.
Even so, Red hoped both Manny and the ghost’s wife would get over it quickly, once the dark clouds caused by that pollution was gone from their souls, and their hearts.
When family was involved, sometimes tough love was the only way.
18
WOLF’S CHILDREN
I LEAPT TO my feet, reaching for the holster at the small of my back.
I moved instinctively, stepping in front of the boy, Jason, before I’d thought about whether he might pose more of a danger to me than otherwise. I hadn’t yet checked where Black was at that point, but he shouted the instant I yanked the gun he’d given me that morning from its holster, aiming it at the Native American man staring at me through the dusty glass.
“Miri!” he snapped. “Down!”
I didn’t think.
I dropped at his words, falling to a low crouch. The instant I was down, gunfire erupted from outside, making me suck in a breath.
I looked up and back at where the boy had been sitting.
He was gone.
Windows shattered overhead, raining glass down on the linoleum floor.
I held up an arm, shielding my face, but only a few windows were hit before the gunfire shifted angles, and started hitting into softer targets.
I heard it plunk into the wood of the schoolhouse walls, the packed dirt outside, what was probably bodies and maybe trees outside the window. There were a few more metallic pings where bullets ricocheted off something harder.
Whoever was doing most of the firing, they weren’t aiming at us.
I still held my own gun, a XDM Compact, gripped tightly in both hands.
Glancing around, I looked for better cover. Moving at a low crouch, I got closer to the windows, then made my way along the wall until I reached a row of metal cabinets, putting those between me and the gunfire outside.
Only then did I look for Black.
I found him easily, crouched behind the thick wooden teacher’s desk.
“Where’s the kid?” I said, shouting over the gunfire.
“He ran for the door,” Black shouted back. “I let him go.”
I bit my lip, trying to decide if I should go after him.
“Don’t bother,” Black said.
I looked over a second time. He had a gun in his hands too, but he wasn’t firing. He looked angry, but I also saw a harder, more concentrated look in his eyes.
“Elsie is with him,” he said, still half-shouting across the classroom as the gunfire outside intensified. “Just stay where you are. Wolf and his people are moving away. We’ll go out there in a minute. I don’t want to leave Easton without backup.”
“Easton?” I looked over, frowning.
It too
k me a second, then I realized why I recognized the name.
Black had told me all about the “chiefs” he’d befriended in that Louisiana prison.
“You called Easton?” I said.
“And Frank. And Dog. And Joseph. And about twenty of their cousins. They have this crazy idea they owe me a favor.”
I grunted, rolling my eyes. Then I raised my voice. “And Elsie’s with Wolf? Manny’s daughter? You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then Red must be, too. And probably those trackers in the B.I.A. he brought with him up to the bluffs. And to Ship Rock.” At Black’s nod of agreement, I looked towards the windows, still crouched under the line of the windows and behind the metal cabinets. “So Charles probably got led into an ambush. Or worse.”
“Probably.”
“Did you know this was going to happen?”
“No,” he yelled back. “Although I was beginning to suspect there was something weird with Red. I’m thinking now they would have killed me yesterday, if Manny hadn’t been there. That, and I think maybe they needed me to help them find the door.”
He frowned, his gaze turning inward.
“Come to think of it, that’s probably the real reason Red brought me to Ship Rock… to see if I could help them find the entrance to those caves. He seemed real interested in how to get inside. I was pretty out of it, but I remember him firing questions at me about how to get in.”
“Did you?” I said. “Help them find it?”
Black shrugged. “Not on purpose. But yes.”
Gritting my teeth, I exhaled. “What did you tell them exactly? Do you know?”
“I told them it was underground. Apparently I babbled a lot of shit when I was delirious. Told them about tunnels I could see in and out of there. Manny said I told them about the door being covered in crystals, along with some painting I saw on the wall, something about glowing lights… it was kind of confused, but maybe it was enough for Wolf to find the door.”
Pausing, he added, “Red, Elsie and a number of B.I.A. agents went back out there after they took me back to town. Probably to confirm what I’d said.”
Remembering what I’d seen the night before on the news, I added, “I think I know where they got their digging equipment.” At Black’s quizzical look, I said, “I saw it on the news. There was a robbery at one of the home builder stores out here… maybe even in the town of Ship Rock. They took a number of diggers, metal detectors––”
Black To Dust: A Quentin Black Paranormal Mystery (Quentin Black Mystery Book 7) Page 27