Nash brought the candle back up and blew it out. “So we know we can breathe, at least that far in. That still doesn’t mean it’s safe.”
“I’m light and nimble, and Pamela got in and out all right.”
“So she says.”
While he spoke, Nash was taking out a rope and harness, so I knew he was going to help; he would just be crabby about it. Fine with me, as long as he helped.
He turned to me, held up the harness, and gave me a cold smile. “Since I’m bigger than you, you get to go down first.”
Five
I was never at my best in enclosed spaces. As Nash lowered me, wrapped in the rope and harness, I secretly agreed that Nash was right. This was crazy.
I had no way of knowing whether Mick was really down here or whether this was an elaborate trap, Pamela a part of it. But the spell tugged me on, and my heart told me that Mick waited for me at the end of the line.
After what seemed a long time, my feet touched firm ground. I played my flashlight around and found that a horizontal shaft ran to my right, sloping a little downward, shored up in places with rotting timber or rough-hewn stones. Lovely. This place could collapse at any moment, and only the crushed remains of an ex-Stormwalker would be found, if anyone bothered to dig me out at all.
I called back up to Nash that I wanted to explore the tunnel. He kept a firm hand on the rope, and I realized that if he didn’t want me looking around, he’d simply haul me back up whether I liked it or not. I unhooked the harness and slid out of it.
“Janet!” he shouted down at me. “Don’t be stupid.”
I ignored him and started walking, the compulsion spell now too strong for me to fight.
After a long time of stepping over old timbers, rotted sacking, and fallen stones, as well as stirring up the stink of bat droppings, I felt heat. The shaft bent left, running deeper into the mountain until it ended in a wall of solid stone.
Before I could despair, my flashlight’s beam found a long, vertical crack, about three inches wide, that ran from the stone’s base to the rotted timbers above my head. Through that crack, something glowed.
I put my eye to the crack. It went all the way through stone about a foot thick, and beyond that, I saw a vast cavern rising high into the mountain, a spelunker’s delight. The heat I felt came from a wall of flame that divided the cavern neatly in half. Behind that flame, cut off from me, lay a dragon.
“Nash!” I shouted back up the tunnel. “Get down here! I found him. I found Mick!”
I heard the fear in Nash’s voice as he called down to me—after being buried in that building in Iraq, he must hate enclosed spaces even more than I did. But I could never fault Nash’s courage. I heard him climbing down, cursing all the way.
“You don’t have a pickax in that backpack, do you?” I asked when he reached me.
“Don’t be funny.”
I looked around the floor of the shaft, searching for something, anything, that would help me break through the wall. Nash might not have a pickax, but miners did. I found one, buried under gravel. The handle had rotted away, but the head had been made of good steel. A little rusty, yes, but it would do the trick.
Nash took the pickax away from me with his gloved hands. He carefully jabbed the point of the ax into the stone and worked it until rubble started to fall. The rock wasn’t solid granite, just crust that had filled the end of the shaft.
I scraped gravel aside as it trickled away until Nash and I had made a hole big enough for me to crawl through. I squeezed into the cavern, ignoring the pain of the rocks scraping my flesh.
The cavern floor sloped downward to the wall of flame. I saw a hole in the wall opposite mine, though on this side of the fire, much bigger than the one I’d just crushed through. That must be where Pamela had entered, and I wondered why the compulsion spell hadn’t taken me that way. But maybe mine had been the easier route for me; after all, Pamela could change into a wolf and dig.
The dragon behind the wall of fire was folded so tightly that it turned back on itself several times, the end of a tail snaking around to touch its long snout. I couldn’t see his wings, but I knew they had to be there, large and leathery, amid the pile of his body. His head was long, lips slightly pulled back from enormous, jagged teeth.
I knew that if he’d been able to shift to his human form and give himself more space, he would have. As it was, the dragon could open only one eye, a bulbous silver and black orb, and fix it on me.
“Mick,” I whispered.
The spell thrummed between us, vibrating the air. Mick’s eye gleamed as he looked at me, but he was jammed in there so tightly that he could make no other move. I saw fury in the eye, plus relief, worry, and the impatience to be out of there.
As he blinked at me, his compulsion spell died away. The release sent me to my knees as did every other hurt the spell had staved off so I could get here.
Nash pressed himself into the cave and switched off his flashlight. “You all right, Janet?”
I lay still to catch my breath. “I will be.”
Nash studied the motionless Mick. “He’s a dragon. Why doesn’t he just fly out? I doubt the fire would burn a hide that thick.”
I couldn’t read Mick’s thoughts, but I sensed his vast irritation. He lifted his head what little he could in the tight space and shot a sudden stream of fire toward us.
I ducked instinctively, and so did Nash. The white-hot fire struck the flames, and the wall of them bulged, swelling, growing hotter. My skin burned, my hair singed, and Nash threw up his arm to ward off the brightness. Any second now, the flame would burst out; any second now, we’d be incinerated . . .
And then, we weren’t. As we watched, the fire sucked Mick’s dragon flame straight into it, absorbed it, inhaled it. The whole thing flared red-hot for a few seconds, then settled back down to a steady roar.
I blew out my breath. “It’s magical fire,” I said. “It feeds on magic, the same way Mick can siphon off my storm power. Any magic thrown at it will just make it stronger.”
The dragon lowered his head with a little whump of breath, happy we’d figured out the obvious.
I nudged a rock that was about a foot in diameter, checking for scorpions or spiders before I hauled it into my hands. I bent, swung the rock back between my legs, and heaved it into the flames.
The fire disintegrated the rock in the blink of an eye. Nothing reached Mick’s side but a trickle of dust and ash.
“Even Mick’s hide wouldn’t survive that,” I said.
Nash studied the flame wall as though he was trying to figure out a way to arrest it. “So, did you bring a magic fire extinguisher?”
So the man had a sense of humor. “Sort of,” I said in a quiet voice. “I brought you.”
He turned. “And I can do what?”
“You draw off magic, like you did to the Nightwalker. Maybe you can draw off that.”
Nash’s brows shot up over cold gray eyes. “You want me to touch fire that burns rock to ash to see what happens? Forget it. I like my hand, not to mention the rest of my body. We’ll find another way.”
“There is no other way. I don’t have magic without a storm, and even if I did, the fire would probably just absorb that too.”
As Nash turned back to the fire, another vision hit me with the force of a hurricane. In it I was standing in this cave, my arms raised above my head, the same kind of white light I’d seen in the last vision pouring from my hands. This wasn’t my storm magic—it was different, more intense, like the difference between a cheerful fire on a hearth and a stream of molten lava.
In the vision, the wall of flame bowed before me in terror. The cave shook with my power and then collapsed. The rubble buried Nash and Mick, but boulders glanced off me as I rose like the sun out of the mountain.
I heard myself screaming and then I was on my hands and knees on the bone-hard floor, Nash bending over me.
“Janet? What the hell?”
I sat down hard, my spin
ning head making me sick. “It’s nothing. Nothing. It’s just my headache.”
I was such a liar. Mick’s eye focused on me, the dark slit of his pupil glowing orange red. I felt his sharp interest, his worry, and not just for my physical well-being. Despite everything Mick and I had been through, despite what we had together, I knew that Mick still watched me with wariness. He loved me, protected me, shared a bed with me, yes. Had complete faith that I wasn’t a danger to every living being on the planet, no.
Nash’s face glistened with sweat as he contemplated the flames again. Then he quickly lowered his backpack and walked toward them.
“Wait!” I shouted. Like him, I wasn’t entirely sure the fire wouldn’t annihilate Nash the same as it had the boulder. As much as I wanted his help, I didn’t want to witness his fiery death.
Nash ignored me. He reached toward the flame as though mesmerized, fingers extended. I scrambled to my feet, ran at him, grabbed him around the waist, and tried to yank him back.
Nash had good instincts. He grabbed me and swung me out of the way, and the momentum put him squarely into the flames.
The fire flared with glee. Nash was lost inside it, the flames covering him like a blanket. I watched in horror, and so did Mick, me cradling my arm that had come too close to the fire. Both of us knew we couldn’t help him; we could only wait and see what happened.
After a few long, sickening minutes, Nash’s form became a solid silhouette inside the fire, pushing the flames aside.
No, not pushing them aside. Absorbing them. Yellow fire outlined his body, and flames streamed from the walls and ceiling into his core. Mick and I watched in astonishment, but Nash stood still and took it; he didn’t scream, and he didn’t die.
As soon as the fire began pulling away from the cavern walls, Mick moved. His dragon body shrank in on itself, the sinuous curves unwinding in fast motion, his long snout flattening down to a human face. And then he was Mick, the tall man I loved with glittering dragon tattoos curling down his arms.
Mick burst out through the hole in the fire, grabbed me, shoved me back through the crack in the rock, and hauled ass back up the shaft.
For a naked man who’d just been a dragon, Mick could move. I let him half carry, half drag me down the narrow tunnel, the beam of my flashlight bouncing crazily off the walls. My arm hurt like hell, but my skin was red, not black. Nash had tossed me out of the way just in time.
“What about Nash?” I shouted.
We reached the vertical shaft. Mick grabbed the harness and snapped it around me, not listening to my breathless protests. He grabbed the rope that hung from above and started to climb out, hand over hand, feet moving on the wall, as though he was born to climb, even bare-assed naked. I had a very good view of his bare ass as he scrambled up the shaft.
Mick gained the top and started to pull me up. I braced myself against the wall and tried to help, but I was exhausted and burned, and my head throbbed like fury.
Mick mercilessly dragged me upward. Finally the rope, harness, and I went over the lip of the shaft without impediment, and then Mick ripped open the buckles with strong hands and hauled me against him.
Oh, gods, it felt so good to have him hold me again. Mick was a big man, made of muscle, his flat face and once-broken nose so damn beautiful to me. I wrapped my arms around him and held on, loving the heat of his body and the salt scent of it.
He started kissing me, lips rough, hands roving my body as though he wanted to feel all of me at once. I kissed him back, my tongue in his mouth, stroking him, tasting him. I’d never get enough of him.
The rising sun touched my face, and I finally pulled back, panting and breathless. “What about Nash?” I repeated.
Mick buried his face in my neck. “If the fire didn’t get him, he’ll be coming.”
“If the fire didn’t get him, he’ll be pissed at me.”
His chuckle warmed my heart. “That too.” He held my face in his hands, studied me with dark blue eyes. “I missed you, baby.”
We heard a grunt and a grating of rope, and Nash appeared in the shaft, clinging to the rope Mick had tossed back down. He looked unburned, his clothes in place as though nothing worse had happened to him than a hike through an old mine shaft.
“I hate to break up the happy reunion,” he said, voice as dry and sarcastic as usual, “but you need to let him get dressed before we go down, Begay. I don’t want his bare ass on my new seats.”
I’d hoped Mick would turn back into a dragon and fly us down, but he shook his head. “The fuel for that fire was me. It siphoned off every bit of my magic, and shifting to human took the rest of it. The dragon council fixed it so I locked my own cage.”
“So, it was the dragons?” I studied the night sky worriedly, expecting to see flames on the horizon any second.
“Don’t worry,” Mick said beside me. “They won’t come back.”
“How do you know?”
Instead of answering, Mick touched the white bandage on my head, his expression grave. “What happened?”
“I hit her,” Nash said.
Mick might be drained of magic, but his fury when he swung on Nash would have made a lesser man back down. “What the fuck, Jones?”
Normally I’d delight in my six-foot-six biker boyfriend glaring at Nash with death-promising rage, but I was exhausted and aching and I wanted to be out of there.
“He didn’t mean to,” I said quickly. “He thought I was an insurgent.”
“What? Shit.”
“I tried to get her to go to an ER,” Nash said as he stashed things in his backpack. “She refused.”
“You should have tried harder,” Mick growled.
Tears filled my voice. “Not and leave you out here trapped inside a mountain. Besides, I was under this compulsion spell, remember?”
Mick cupped my face in his hands again and peered into my eyes. “It was a light one; that was all I could cast. It wouldn’t have let you die trying to fulfill it.”
I realized the truth of it at the same time he said the words. The compulsion spell had led me to him, but it had been my own emotions that had made me so determined to get to him. “Doesn’t matter. I couldn’t go and leave you out here.”
Mick’s touch softened on my face. “Well, you’re going now.”
He snatched up the clothes I’d brought for him and quickly dressed, covering his naked body. I’d brought him his leather jacket as well, not knowing how cold it would be up here. Despite the rising sun, a chill wind blew fiercely along the ridge, and Mick shrugged into the jacket.
“Which way?” he asked.
Nash snapped off the flashlight. The mountains to the east cast deep shadows, but the sky above was already brightening to blue. We’d make it to lower elevations about the same time the sun did, and then we’d roast.
Nash signaled us to follow him, and we started back down the trail, me stumbling and clinging to Mick’s hand.
“How do you know the dragons won’t come back?” I repeated.
“Because I know the dragon council,” Mick said. “Escaping was me passing a test. Putting me back would be cheating, and they’d never do anything so dishonorable.”
“Passing a test?” That did not sound good.
“Sort of like me making bail, or them honoring a truce.”
“But what would happen when your magic ran out?” I asked. “The fire would die?”
“No, I’d be dead,” Mick said, not sounding worried. “But they wouldn’t have kept me in there that long. We need to catch up to Nash.”
End of conversation. Nash was marching at a swift pace, the soldier in him eating up distance. Mick propelled me along, keeping me too breathless to ask more questions, but no matter. I’d grill him later.
We caught up to Nash on the narrow saddle that led to the next chain of hills. Without thinking, I looked over the edge of the ridge, and I bit back a hysterical cry. The dawn light showed me what the darkness had hidden—to either side of the path, cliffs f
ell away in ripples of gray and black, down, down, down through clumps of sagebrush and creosote to the darkness at the bottom.
I saw something else down there. Eyes. Hundreds of them. Faint white light swirled at the bottom of the hill like mist. A vortex.
From the vortex, demons were crawling. The shard of mirror in my pack started shrieking, drowning out my own cry of horror.
Mick looked over the side, saw what I saw. “Aw, damn it. Up!” he shouted at Nash. “Back up!”
He started hustling me along the path back toward the mine shaft. Nash didn’t waste time asking questions and sprinted with us up the trail.
The demons boiled after us. I’d fought creatures like this before, down in the dark desert of Nevada, fought for my life. That was the night I’d met Mick, but that night I’d had a good storm to help me out. This morning, the sky above remained stubbornly clear, not even a breath of wind to stir the dust.
Mick shoved me behind him and faced the onslaught. He was exhausted, I saw it in the slump of his shoulders, and he’d just said he was drained of magic. Nash passed me the gun he’d taken from the Nightwalker plus two magazines, but I knew it wouldn’t do much good against a horde of crazed demons.
Nash sighted down his nine-millimeter at the beings with leathery bodies, clawed hands, and bloodred eyes. “What are they?”
“Demons,” Mick answered curtly.
“Not the steal-your-soul, take-you-to-hell kind of demons,” I put in. “Just the garden-variety, kill-and-eat-you demons.”
Nash gave me a resigned look, sighted down his pistol again, and fired. The boom of the pistol echoed into the morning, and a roar from a hundred demon throats answered it.
Nash’s bullet hit the first demon square in the chest, and it tumbled back into its fellows in a shower of blood. The demons came on. Nash fired again.
Flames danced in Mick’s hands, but I could tell his magic was at low ebb, very little restored yet. I aimed the gun Nash had given me, sighting down the barrel. I hated guns. I knew how to use one, because Mick had taught me, but when I finally made myself pull the trigger, the kick sent me reeling. I fell flat on my back, already off balance from my head injury. The acrid smell of the gun, plus the roar of it, made me want to puke, and I couldn’t even tell if I’d hit the demon.
Firewalker Page 5