Mick was fighting with fists, Nash shooting, and still the things came on. At this rate, the demons would leave our shredded bits over the mountain, and the rangers would assume we’d been mauled by bears or a puma. I wondered if any bits would be identifiable.
Demons boiled at Nash like a horde of cockroaches, and he was swearing and shooting, falling to his knees. Mick sagged, his body gleaming with sweat, his fire fading. The demons swarmed over him, jumping on his back, dragging him down to feast on the flesh of the man I loved.
I tossed my gun into the pack and stood up, something wild surging inside me. I suddenly felt strong, adept, fearless; the surety that I could kill the demons and save the day rising in an amalgam of white-hot heat and blinding light. I raised my hands, and light poured out of my palms, just as in the visions I’d had tonight.
A terrible glow lit up the mountain and flowed like a deluge toward the demons. The white light engulfed the demons, Mick, Nash, the ridge. Rocks exploded into rubble and rained into the crevice, and the demons screamed as they began to fall with it. Trees on the ridge above us burst into flame, grasses crackling in the gray morning light.
As soon as the demons fell from Mick, he sprang to his feet, grabbed Nash, and dragged him away from the mewling, desperate demons and the white light. I lifted my hands higher, my laughter booming. Words came out of my mouth, and I didn’t understand one of them. I wasn’t speaking Diné or any other Indian language I knew, or English, or Latin, or Spanish.
The demons ran from me, plunging over the precipice, screaming as they dropped. My wall of light followed them down. It killed all of the demons, and then the light incinerated them. The magic in me killed every single demon, all the way down into the vortex, and once they were nothing but ash, my magic snapped the vortex closed.
I turned to face Nash and Mick, who watched from a little way away, both of them covered with bloody bite marks. Mick’s eyes had gone black all the way across, and the way he looked at me should have terrified the hell out of me.
I laughed. “Hi, boys,” I said, raising my hands again. “Want to play?”
The rocks in front of them exploded. The two men scrambled out of the way of the ensuing rain of gravel, and Nash trained his pistol on me. “Why the hell are her eyes green?” I heard him shout.
“Janet.” Mick’s voice was harsh with warning. “Stop.”
I had no clue how to stop. I’d killed the demons, all of them, completing the task I should have completed that night six years ago. Now I wanted to crush the entire mountain, find the dragons who’d imprisoned Mick in it and imprison them too.
Mick started for me. Brave man. I knew I could stop him, enslave him, make him obey me. Mick had the ability to absorb my storm powers and not be hurt by them, but I knew good and well that he couldn’t survive the magic in me now.
“I command you,” I said, power boiling up inside me. “You are mine.”
The white light wrapped around Mick, and he snarled. And then, without warning, the magic blinked out.
The light died, and with it went the last of my strength. I fell and started sliding toward the edge of the gorge, my fatal plunge stopped by a single boulder that hooked me around the waist. Beneath me, the rocks tumbled over the side, bouncing and rattling for hundreds of feet to the mists of the vortex, which faded into the rising sun.
Six
I woke up hanging facedown on Mick’s back. It was damn hot, and I felt as though someone had poured cleanser into my body and scrubbed my insides with a wire brush.
As soon as I groaned, Mick stopped and laid me gently on the ground. Both Mick and Nash were breathing hard and sweating, smeared with dried blood where the demons had clawed and bitten them. Mick’s wildly curly black hair hung across his face, and his blue eyes glittered behind it.
“Are you all right?” I croaked.
“We should be asking you that,” Nash said in clipped tones.
Mick was watching me in a way I didn’t like. His face bore the wary look of a man whose trained animal had suddenly remembered its wildness and turned on him.
“Mick, don’t,” I said.
“Your eyes changed color,” he said. “To very light green. Like ice.”
Fear kicked me in the gut and kept on kicking. “My mother isn’t inside me, I swear to you. I know how that feels. We sealed her vortex, Mick, you and me. Even the cracks are sealed. She’s trapped.”
Nash crouched next to us, his gun out. “What the hell are you two talking about?”
Mick broke in before I could draw breath to answer. Just as well. Explaining this was beyond me.
“The entity you saw coming out of the vortex last spring,” Mick said. “She is a goddess, trapped in the world Beneath. She created Janet, even though Janet was born of human parents. She is, in essence, Janet’s mother. She has the ability to possess women. Or had.”
Nash stared at me. “That thing was your mother?”
“We’re not responsible for our parents,” I tried to joke.
“You’ve always had her Beneath magic in you,” Mick said. “When did you learn to channel it so well?”
His voice was quiet, dark, waiting. “I didn’t,” I said. “I have no idea how I used that magic, I promise you. I just did it.”
Nash unfolded next to me. “Good thing you did. We wouldn’t have survived that attack.”
I still didn’t like the way Mick watched me. He wasn’t going to let it go, and I had the feeling that me busting him out of that cave and then saving his life wouldn’t mitigate things. My connection to my goddess mother and the powers of Beneath were the very reasons all dragons, including, at one time, Mick, wanted me dead.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “It’s going to get hot here, quick.”
It was already hot, the sun streaming over the eastern mountains, bringing another day of heat to the valley floor. Mick carried me again, and it got hotter as we descended, the white alkali flats reflecting the sunlight in bright waves. I remembered reading a statistic that the ground temperature in Death Valley could reach two hundred degrees during the day. You could make fry bread on that. Salty, sandy fry bread. I giggled.
Mick stopped and fed me water. “She’s delirious,” he said.
“Not much farther,” Nash promised.
Lower and lower we went, as the morning grew hotter. I hung upside down over Mick’s shoulder and quietly started dying. Sun played on the pale sand dunes and dry flats, forcing my eyes shut against the brightness.
Mick finally stopped and lowered me to my feet. We stood on black pavement, a road, and my heart leapt. I never thought I’d ever be so happy to see asphalt in my life.
When the rushing sound in my ears cleared a little, I heard Nash swearing.
“What’s wrong?” I tried to ask.
Nash was shouting foul and filthy words. Parallel tire tracks showed where a truck had been driven off the road, but of Nash’s shiny new black pickup, there was no sign.
“Son of a bitch!” Nash kicked the dirt, sending up sprays of fine gravel. I knew he wasn’t angry about being stranded in the middle of Death Valley with no transportation and little water—he was pissed that someone had dared to touch his beloved truck.
Mick gave me water again, and I slumped against his side to drink. “Where are we?” I heard him ask.
“About thirty miles from Stovepipe Wells,” Nash said.
“We walk it, then. We can’t afford to wait.”
I didn’t want to hear that, and I was about to argue with him, to beg him to let me lie down right here and go to sleep, when I heard the blissful sound of a car engine. It wasn’t Nash’s big truck but an older, dust-covered pickup with its windows down, bumping toward us along the road. Three people crowded into the cab and several more rode in the bed.
The truck stopped beside us, its engine chugging like a steamboat’s. A Native American man leaned out the window and looked us over. “Hey, you folks lost?”
Mick didn’t h
esitate. “She needs a doctor.”
A young woman peered over the driver’s shoulder. “We’re going into Beatty,” she said. “Come on with us, if you want.”
A chubby youth obligingly vacated his seat in the cab and hopped into the truck bed. The young woman remained, helping Mick slide me in next to her. Mick buckled a seat belt around me before he kissed my forehead, shut the door, and climbed into the back with Nash.
The truck had no air-conditioning, but the open windows admitted a dry breeze that still held morning cool from the mountains. My rescuers discussed something as we pulled away, using a Native American language I didn’t know. If they were from Death Valley itself, they’d be Shoshone, from the tribe that lived in the southern part of the valley.
The girl turned to me. “I’m Beth,” she said. “That’s my dad and my good-for-nothing brothers in the back.”
“Janet,” I croaked. “Really, really pleased to meet you.” Beth was college age, I guessed, maybe about twenty or twenty-one. She shot me a grin. “That white guy with the gray eyes is cute. Who is he?”
“His name is Nash Jones. The sheriff of Hopi County. In Arizona,” I added when she looked blank.
“Yeah?” Beth’s dad said. “What’s he doing out here?”
“Hiking.” Well, it was partly true.
Beth looked through the back window at Nash again. “Well, he is sure cute. He have a girlfriend?”
Did Maya Medina qualify as his girlfriend? “It’s hard to say. Have you seen a brand-new black Ford 250 out here? I think Nash loves it more than any girlfriend.”
“Nope,” Beth’s dad said. “You’re from Arizona, huh? What tribe?”
“Diné,” I said, copying his laconic style.
He didn’t make any reply to that, and neither did Beth, and my eyelids drooped. As I drifted toward sleep, my vision started to play tricks on me. Through my eyelashes I saw Beth, but I also saw a shimmering light superimposed on her and an animal shape—with feathery wings? Wings? Were they Changers?
Beth’s dad glowed a little too. He was at once a black-haired Native American in dusty jeans, and a shining creature I couldn’t identify. Were they aliens, maybe? I giggled.
“You okay?” Beth asked me.
I think I nodded, but the world was going dark. It occurred to me that we’d been very lucky that they’d happened by just at the time we’d made it to the road, as though they’d known we’d be in trouble and exactly where to find us.
Guardian angels?
“Did my grandmother put you up to this?” I tried to ask.
Beth gave me a worried look and touched my forehead. She whispered soothing words in Shoshone, and my eyes drifted closed again. When they opened, I was lying alone in a hospital bed with white curtains around it, and the ride in the pickup was fading like a dream.
I first noticed that I was cool and not thirsty, and then I noticed that I felt no pain. Not an iota. In fact, I felt pretty good.
“Mm,” I said in satisfaction.
The curtain opened, and there was Mick, cleaned up a little, but still in the T-shirt and jeans I’d stuffed into my backpack for him. His arms and face were covered with gouges from the demons, but the wounds were closed.
“Hey, Mick.” I held out my hand. “Come and get into bed with me.”
Mick’s smile warmed his face—gods, how I’d missed that smile—but his eyes were still watchful.
“Sounds like you’re feeling better.”
I wanted to throw my arms around him and pull him down to me, but my arms felt like rubber, and they were filled with tubes. I also had a big bandage on my head. No pain, but the bandage was awkward.
“She sounds high.” I saw Nash Jones on a chair behind Mick, a magazine in his hands. “What did they give her?”
I smiled. “Whatever it is, I like it.”
“You had a concussion, sweetheart,” Mick said. “Plus dehydration, the beginning of sunstroke, and a third-degree burn on your arm. Lie back and take it easy.”
In other words, I was lucky my guardian angels got me here before I keeled over. “You find your truck, Nash?”
“No.” The answer was short, irritated. “I have the park rangers and sheriffs in both Nevada and California on alert for it.”
“Must be nice to have so much power.”
He gave me a noncommittal grunt.
“I want to go home,” I said.
Mick smoothed my hair. “Not just yet, baby. You get better, then we’ll go.”
“Turn around,” I said, my mind relaxing. “I want to look at your ass. I’ve missed your ass.”
“Can you gag her?” Nash growled.
“Hey, your ass isn’t so bad either,” I told him.
“Please, gag her,” Nash said.
Fear worked its way through the soothing drug. “Mick, why are you so certain the dragons won’t come after you? What were you talking about—making bail? What the hell does that mean?”
“Janet.” Mick sat on the edge of the bed and took my hands in his warm ones. With muscles and his tattoos he looked like a big, bad biker—and he was—but to me, he could be gentleness itself. Even so, there was some part of him always wary around me, and my little display on the mountain had heightened that. “Like I told you, it was a test of my resources, the equivalent of a human putting together enough money to get out on bail. They won’t lock me in again, but I’m honor-bound to turn up at the trial. They know I’ll show up; it’s a dragon thing.”
My mouth popped opened. “Trial?”
“For breaking dragon law, for letting you live.” Mick’s gaze held mine, that deep, ancient gaze that betrayed how nonhuman he truly was. “When they convict me at the trial, then there will be no escape from that.”
The problem with good drugs is that they wear off. By the time the doctors decided I was well enough to go home the next morning, I was hungover and aching. I had meds to stave off the worst of the pain, but I was stiff and sore, my skin smarting from both the fire in the cave and the brutal sun of Death Valley.
I discovered once I was coherent that we weren’t in Beatty, a small town just inside the Nevada border, but in Las Vegas.
“You made those people drive us all the way to Las Vegas?” I asked in surprise.
“They wanted to,” Mick said. “They were worried about you, and I wanted you at the best possible hospital.”
I remembered my conviction in the truck that Beth and her family were some kind of mystical beings, like angels or gods. Had that been real? Or pain hallucination? I’d been half-gone on sunstroke at the time, so who knew what I’d really seen.
Mick rented an SUV to get us home, but Nash insisted on driving. I wanted to grill Mick about the dragon trial, but the meds kept me too drowsy, and I slept fitfully in the backseat, my head on Mick’s lap. Anytime I slid from sleep, I found Mick’s comforting hand on my shoulder, heard him whispering healing spells over me. I’d drift off again, dreaming of chasing Nightwalkers and demons around Magellan, demanding that they pay their hotel bills.
When I next woke, I was in Mick’s arms, being carried into the hotel through the back door. A short hall led to my bedroom and bathroom, with a door beyond my suite leading into the hotel itself. Through this entrance I could come and go when I pleased, without having to pass any of the guests or reception.
I blessed the privacy as Mick carried me in from the warm afternoon to the cool shadows of my bedroom and laid me on the bed. He quickly and competently undressed me, while I lay there and enjoyed it. What healing spells he’d done on me during the drive made me feel better, though I still had a long way to go.
Mick tucked me into bed and disappeared into the bathroom, and I heard the shower go on. I listened to him cleaning himself up and was still awake when he came out.
“Mick.”
He looked down at me while he toweled his hair, in jeans but with his torso bare. He had the best body I’d ever seen, six-pack abs and muscular chest, his biceps hard and smooth. A dra
gon tattoo curled down each arm, their black eyes seeming to glitter with life. They kept his dragon essence, he’d once told me, holding that part of him while he walked around in human form.
“You need to tell me more about this dragon trial,” I said.
Mick wrapped the towel around his neck and held on to both ends. “No, what you need is to sleep.”
“I’m tired of sleeping. What did you mean when you said, when they convict you? Don’t you mean if?”
“That’s not how dragon trials work. Guilt is already proved. The trial is more to clear the air, but the fact that they’re holding one at all gives me some hope.”
How he could talk so calmly about it, I had no idea. “Hope? How can a trial in which they’ve already found you guilty give you hope?”
“Because even though you opened the vortexes, as they feared, we sealed them again, mitigating the threat. That act changed the order for immediate execution to one of a trial. It gives me a chance.”
“This is bullshit.” I wanted to leap out of bed, hunt down this damned dragon council, and tell them what I thought. “Take me to the dragons. Let me talk to them.”
Wry amusement danced in Mick’s eyes. “I’m not letting you anywhere near the dragon council, or them anywhere near you. What you’re going to do is stay out of it and get better.”
Like hell. I didn’t have the vaguest idea how to find the dragons and their council, but I’d hunt them down and wring their scaly necks if it was the last thing I did.
“Damn it, Mick,” I said. “You said they know you’ll show up at the trial even if they don’t force you there. Why would you go? Why not fly away to Antarctica or something?”
“If I don’t appear on the trial date, I’ll be immediately hunted down and killed. Antarctica wouldn’t help, and besides, it’s too cold for me.” He smiled, as though he found my human ignorance funny. “I would also be dishonored if I didn’t go, and honor is everything to a dragon. Even if my sentence is execution, my honor will remain intact.”
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