“Personal. Vacation.”
The flashlight moved to me, and he smirked. “Vacation. I see. Pull over there, sir, and get out of the truck.” He gestured to a pull-off just beyond the glare of the generator lights.
“Nash,” I said frantically as Nash drove the few yards into the darkness. “We can’t stop. This isn’t what it looks like.”
“I know, but I’m not running from trigger-happy feds,” Nash snapped. “Besides, he still has my ID.”
I seethed as Nash set the brake. The officer walked to us without fear, putting Nash’s truck between himself and his fellow officers at the checkpoint. It was pitch-black out here away from the lights, only the glow of Nash’s headlights and the officer’s flashlight to illuminate us.
“If you’ll get out of the truck, sir,” he said. “You too, ma’am.”
I hopped out, searching for some spark of magic within to help me out. The sky was deep, velvet black, the stars stretching across it in a ropy smudge. A Stormwalker without a storm was useless, and there wasn’t a cloud in sight. I scowled at the empty sky before the officer shone his flashlight in my face.
“You have documentation on you, ma’am? Green card? Naturalization papers?”
He was either a wise-ass or just ignorant. “My ancestors have been here a hell of a lot longer than yours,” I growled. “Where’s your green card?”
“Just give him your driver’s license, Janet.” Nash sounded weary.
I pulled it out and handed it over. Sourly. The officer’s flashlight moved across it. “Cleared for motorcycle operation, eh? You a biker, sweetie?”
“Not tonight.”
The man grinned. “Funny.” He had eyes of darkness, and I smelled the blood on him.
He switched the flashlight back to Nash. “Put your hands on the truck.” Nash, damn him, obeyed.
“You too, ma’am.”
I did it, muttering under my breath. I needed magic. Something. Anything.
The officer patted down Nash; then he reached through the passenger window to the glove compartment and fished out Nash’s nine-millimeter. “You go on vacation armed?”
“I’m an officer of the law,” Nash said. “I never know when I might have to help out.”
The man set the gun on a boulder behind him, out of reach, then moved to me. Hands roved up and down my legs, slid between my buttocks, cupped my crotch.
“Pervert,” I snarled.
Nash came to life. “Watch what you’re doing.”
“Oh, you’ll watch me.” The man took his own pistol out of its holster, cocked it, and shoved it into Nash’s neck. “You’ll watch while I feed off her, knowing that next, I’ll do the same to you.” He laughed, his unnaturally black eyes glittering. “Gods, I love the taste of mundanes in the moonlight.”
Three
“Nightwalker,” I grated.
“You know about Nightwalkers?” The Nightwalker sniffed me, never moving the gun from Nash. “Funny, you don’t smell magical.”
“What the hell is a Nightwalker?” Nash asked me. “And what does he mean, feed off you?”
The Nightwalker chuckled. “He doesn’t know? This should be fun.”
Very clever of one of the things to figure out how to work a checkpoint. He’d probably been a federal officer before he’d become a bloodsucker, likely still did his job well if he didn’t make many full kills. He could only partially drain his victims and let them go, unaware of what had happened, and he’d still be able to hide his true nature from his colleagues. But bloodlust lit his eyes, and I had the feeling that this was going to be one of his kills.
I wanted to kick the thing in the balls and get the hell out of there. But Nightwalkers are strong and hard to kill, and I didn’t have a handy wooden stake or sword with me. I would pack better next time. At the moment, I had no way of fighting him except with my fists, which wouldn’t do anything but hurt my fists.
But something strange was happening inside me. I felt a burning sensation in my fingertips, which moved all along my veins, and it wasn’t from Mick’s compulsion spell. The compulsion spell was a dull ache; this was raw and cold and new.
I had a swift vision of my body growling taller, shooting up to tower over the Nightwalker, a bright whiteness glowing around me to light the night. I saw myself raising my hands, heard my mouth issuing commands in a language I didn’t understand. I saw the Nightwalker screaming, his red mouth open, his body twisting in excruciating pain. He was dying but couldn’t die. I was somehow holding him together, making him relive the torment of every victim he’d ever drained, over and over again. It was heady; it was exhilarating. I laughed.
Nash Jones’s voice cut into my brain like a scalpel. “Don’t lose it, Begay.”
I blinked. The vision died, and I was standing with my hands on Nash’s truck, sweating inside my leather coat. The Nightwalker was very much alive and looking at me with a tinge of fear, as though it sensed my vision but wasn’t quite certain it had.
“Whatever you are,” Nash was saying, “leave her alone and let her go. I’ll do what you want.”
What a hero. The Nightwalker would never let me go, because I’d run screaming to his fellow feds, and he’d have to abandon this sweet little setup he’d made. Nash was eyeing the other officers, but they’d surrounded a diesel pickup that had pulled up, its noise drowning out all other night sounds. Nash’s truck was between us and them—the Nightwalker had perfected his methods.
But Nash’s heroism gave me an idea. I didn’t know whether it would work, and if not, I’d have to try to pry a blood-frenzied Nightwalker off of Nash, but it was worth a try.
“Do him first,” I said, making my voice weak and whiny. “Please. Take the edge off. Then I’ll make it fun when you do me.”
The Nightwalker’s smile returned, and I swallowed my disgust. “I think I like you, sweetheart. What did you have in mind?”
“Anything you want. I’ve been told I have stamina.”
Nash was staring at me as though I’d lost my mind, but he kept quiet. Either he thought I had lost my mind, or he was trusting that I had a plan.
The Nightwalker touched my cheek, and I stood still and tried not to gag. “Sweet,” he said. “If you please me, Navajo girl, I might just let you stay alive. With me.”
“Sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking.
The Nightwalker grabbed Nash by the neck. His mouth opened, baring fangs on both upper and lower jaw, his mouth narrow like a cat’s. Nash struggled, but the Nightwalker yanked Nash’s head to the side and snapped that hideous mouth over his throat.
Nash didn’t go down easy. He fought, and he fought hard, smacking the guy in the head with his fists, which did about as much good as punching a building. I grabbed the Nightwalker’s pistol as the feeding frenzy took him, even though I knew bullets wouldn’t kill him, and stood back as he sucked down Nash’s blood in greedy, wet gulps.
The Nightwalker kept feeding, and my heart pounded in terror. If my hunch was wrong, Nash could die. Words to a dozen spells ran through my head, but none would be powerful enough, especially when I didn’t have a storm to draw on. The gun was pretty much useless. A Nightwalker full of bullets was just an angry Nightwalker.
And then it happened. The Nightwalker jerked, his eyes widening in sudden agony. Nightwalkers, I had the scars to prove, held fast to their victims when they were in blood frenzy, not letting go even when someone ran them through with a stake. This Nightwalker shuddered, snarling, Nash’s blood running from his mouth, but he wouldn’t release. Nash was white, holding on to the truck to keep to his feet.
I dropped the gun, wrapped my arms around the Nightwalker’s middle, and hauled backward. At first it was like trying to move a huge boulder, but then the Nightwalker came away from Nash so suddenly that I fell, the Nightwalker landing on top of me like a wet rag. The Nightwalker keened, a sharp, piercing sound that rose to an inhuman note.
The thing crawled off me, tearing at his lips, his hands s
prouting claws that raked into his own face. Nash gasped for breath, his hand clamped to his bloody neck, watching with a stunned look.
The Nightwalker, still screaming, fell apart, collapsed into steaming, stinking pieces of flesh and gore, black blood making a river in the sand. His face went last, his scream dying into a gurgle as his flesh melted into a mess of blood and veins.
Bile bubbled in my throat, and I scrambled to my feet and lunged for the truck. I heard Nash behind me, his soft, “Janet, what the fuck?”
“You killed it,” I panted.
“I killed it? How, by standing there letting it suck me dry?”
“Can we talk about it later? We need to get the hell out of here.”
I yanked open the door, but Nash’s heavy hand landed on my shoulder. “Easy, Janet. Take it easy. We drive away slowly and don’t attract attention.”
I ground my teeth, furious that he could be so calm. I knew he was right, but my panic wanted me to dive into the truck, start it up, and peel out of there.
I made myself climb slowly into the passenger seat while Nash retrieved his gun and the Nightwalker’s and got inside. He leaned over me to stow both pistols in the glove compartment, blood still staining his neck.
“You all right?” he asked me.
“Am I all right? You’re the one bleeding to death.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” Nash sat up, put the truck in gear, and pulled slowly onto the highway, the same as any other vehicle that was approved to proceed. The other patrollers never even looked at us.
Not until we were well down the dark road, dipping and climbing along canyon walls, did I see that Nash’s hands shook as he gripped the wheel, his face gray.
“Shit, Nash, stop and let me drive.”
“No way am I letting you behind the wheel of my brand-new truck. There’s a first aid kit behind the seat. Should have some gauze and antibacterial spray in it.”
I dug around in the rear of the cab, found a pristine white box with a red cross on it, dragged it onto my lap, and opened it. Bandages, antibacterial, aspirin, sterile gauze, tape, and other useful items were stowed inside in neat compartments.
“This isn’t a first aid kit,” I said. “It’s a mobile emergency room.”
Nash didn’t answer. I extracted a wad of gauze and scooted across the seat to wipe the blood from his neck.
I had to reach around him, because the Nightwalker had bitten the left side, and Nash grunted impatiently when I inadvertently blocked his view of the road. There was no place to pull off on this stretch, the highway moving through cuts that left maybe a foot of space on either side of the pavement. Besides, I don’t think either one of us much wanted to stop.
I squirted Nash’s neck with a little antibacterial and pressed more gauze over the wound, fastening it with sterile tape.
Nash returned both hands to the wheel when I sat back and started cleaning up. “What the hell was that thing?” he asked.
“A Nightwalker. In layman’s terms, a vampire. Except it’s real.”
“A vampire.” Nash digested this with a few soft swear words. “And you’re saying I killed it?”
I finished putting the supplies back into the first aid kit and closed the lid. “The Nightwalker is a creature of magic, but you cancel out magic. A null, Coyote called you. The Nightwalker got enough of your magic-negative essence in it, which destroyed it.” That was what I had thought would happen, and I was gut-wrenchingly relieved that I’d been right.
“I felt something change in me,” Nash said. “I was losing blood, I was dying, and then it all stopped. It was as if something freezing cold formed inside me and moved to him through my blood.”
“Interesting.” I’d speculated with Mick over the summer how Nash had become a magic-absorber, and neither of us could figure it out. I’d never met anything like him, that was for sure.
Nash contemplated the road in silence, and I knew this was hard for him. Up until a few months ago, he had been the biggest Unbeliever in all of Hopi County. Then he’d seen dragons, watched Coyote shift from man to animal, fought skinwalkers, seen what had come out of the vortexes, and had me attack him with storm magic.
“I don’t want it to be real,” he said after a time. “I’m trying not to let it be real. It’s not what I grew up believing.”
“I know.” I nodded. “Believe me, when a storm first reached out to me, it scared the shit out of me. I thought I was chindi, a sorceress filled with evil. The sad thing is, I wasn’t far from wrong.”
“What am I, then?”
“We’re not sure. Coyote called you a null, a walking magic void. You’ve taken the brunt of some amazing power and never broken a sweat.”
“Did you know for sure that I could kill that Nightwalker thing?”
I hesitated but decided to be truthful. “I figured it was worth a shot.”
He shot me a scathing glance. “What the hell were you going to do if it didn’t work?”
“Shoot him, maybe. Run for help.”
“While I stayed behind and turned into a vampire?”
“Nightwalkers don’t turn their victims,” I said. “Usually. They drain them until they’re dead, or they can keep them alive if they want to. Some drink only a little from each victim and then make them forget in order to not leave a trail of bodies. Some even become civilized and learn to drink animal blood, live among humans almost normally, as long as they avoid direct sunlight. The crosses and garlic thing is all a myth, though. I once met a Nightwalker who was a monk. He probably still is one.”
“Damn it,” Nash said when I wound down. His hands were steadier now. I’d never seen anyone heal so fast from a Nightwalker attack.
“This one bit the wrong neck, tonight,” I said.
Nash banged his fists on the steering wheel. Not too hard—he wouldn’t want to damage his new truck. “My life made so much more sense before you came into it. What the hell did you do to me?”
“Sorry.” I really did feel sorry for him. Moving from Unbeliever to acceptance wasn’t easy. “But it didn’t really make sense, and you know it.”
Nash had been injured in the Iraq War, when a building he’d rushed into had collapsed on him and all his men. He’d been the only one who’d made it out. He’d suffered from flashbacks and had gone through all kinds of hell.
“So, educate me,” Nash said. “There are Stormwalkers like you; Nightwalkers, which are vampires; and then skinwalkers, those creatures I fought out at the vortexes. What are werewolves—dogwalkers?”
“You’re hilarious, Jones. There aren’t any werewolves, just Changers who can become wolves.”
We were approaching the dam, the road descending sharply around hairpin curves, traffic slowing to a crawl. “I liked being an Unbeliever,” Nash said. “I liked not knowing this shit was out there, on top of all the other shit. But I felt that thing die while he was drinking me, and I saw it disintegrate in a way no human could.”
I said nothing but stared up at the arch of the bridge that hung against the sky. Lit up by construction lights, the man-made steel was suspended between sheer cliffs hundreds of feet above the Colorado River.
“It isn’t the world I grew up in,” Nash said, but I knew he’d resigned himself.
“Yes, it is,” I said quietly. “But I know what you mean.” My magical cherry had been broken at age eleven. Nash was thirty-two, with a lifetime of stubborn disbelief to give up. I couldn’t decide which would be more difficult.
Nash fell silent again as he crossed the dam and navigated up the cliffs on the other side. Then we were heading down the highway to the glow of Las Vegas, Nash maintaining the speed limit and properly using his turn signals. The city spread out at the bottom of the valley, its line of bright colors tempting travelers to its pleasures. Nash stuck to the freeway, passing the tall hotels that reached out to us with promises of easy money, delectable food, and tantalizing glimpses of flesh of both genders.
On the other side of the city, the de
sert was stark and empty, lonely and cold. After more miles of endless night, Nash turned off on a narrow slice of road that headed due west.
We drove through a crease in the mountains into California and down into Death Valley itself, where moonlight danced on alkali beds that spread across the valley floor. Mountains soared around us, ten thousand feet high, cutting off moisture from this bleak gash of the land. At the same time it was cold, the hard cold of a high-desert night.
“So?” Nash asked me. “Where to?”
I looked out into all the darkness, feeling the spell pulling me northward. “Keep following this road. Pamela said she was on the northwest side of the valley.”
“Who the hell is Pamela?”
If Nash had let me indulge in conversation before, I could have told him the whole story. I gave him a truncated version now.
“We need to turn off somewhere around here,” I finished.
“This is the only paved road out this way, if you hadn’t noticed. I won’t try to navigate unfamiliar dirt ones at night.”
Which meant he didn’t want to get his precious new truck dirty or, gods help us, stuck. I agreed he was probably right to be cautious; in the dark it would be easy to run off a dirt road straight into desert. Desert floors aren’t necessarily hard or sandy—pockets exist under the crust that can swallow an unwary hiker’s foot, or bike, or half a car. Being stranded out here when the sun came up was not a good idea.
“We’ll go on foot, then,” I said.
Nash grunted but pulled the truck onto the road’s shoulder. “You don’t have a more specific direction than ‘somewhere around here?’ ”
“I’m lucky Pamela could tell me this much. There are probably spells all over the place to prevent people like me from finding Mick, compulsion or no compulsion. So no, I doubt she left me a detailed trail.”
Nash set the brake and turned off the ignition. He got out and rummaged in the back of the cab, then began to pile stuff on his seat.
Firewalker Page 3