Gods, I wanted him. I pried loose his belt, tugged open his waistband, finally felt him in my hand, hard and ready. He was unbuttoning my jeans as well, and then his warm hands slid to my backside.
“I want to taste you,” he whispered against my mouth.
He was kissing his way downward even as I nodded. I half leaned against the bike as Mick sank to his knees, pulling my jeans and underwear down as he went. I tipped my head back as his mouth started its dance between my thighs and gazed at the stars spread out in white glory above me.
What Mick did blotted out all thought. My aching brain focused on the heat of his breath, the heady friction of his tongue, his hard fingers on my thighs. I furrowed his hair, pressing him tight to me, letting my cries ring up to the stars.
When I could think again, he was on his feet, pulling me against him. I reached into his jeans, wanting to return the favor, but he stilled my hands and kissed me again.
“Turn around and face the bike,” he murmured.
Heart beating in excitement, I did as he wanted, leaning my palms on the bike’s seat. His hands went to my bare waist, and I felt his kiss on my neck, his breath hot in my hair.
He made love to me right there, me bent over his bike, he lifting my hips and sliding into me. I smelled the vinyl of the bike seat, the pungent odor of dried grasses as they withered for the coming winter, and I smelled the scent of our loving. Mick stretched me gloriously, filling me with his hardness at the same time cool air touched my skin.
“I love you, Janet,” Mick said, his voice thick with sex. “Love you so much, baby.”
I was beyond words. He moved faster and faster, and I clung to the bike and made noises of happiness. We could be as loud as we wanted to out here, which was part of his point in bringing me here. The other part was the excitement of doing it outside, at night. He knew I’d love it.
He thrust into me, and I pushed my hips back, wanting more and more. His hands were hard on my hips, the feel of his thighs smacking my buttocks so erotic, my breasts hot and aching with it. Mick had been my first and only lover, and he knew exactly how to make me feel the deepest kind of pleasure.
I couldn’t see and couldn’t think by the time I shouted my climax, but Mick went on and on, our bodies sweating even in the rapidly cooling night. He drove into me until I came again, and this time he came with me, saying my name over and over, his voice hoarse.
Then Mick turned me around and held me tight, stroking my skin, kissing my hair. I kissed his neck, feeling his pulse throb hard beneath my lips. He was so human, and yet . . .
“How do dragons do it?” I asked, out of breath.
His hands warmed my hips as he chuckled. “Carefully.”
“Seriously.”
“I am serious. A female dragon can turn on her lover, kill him as soon as he’s done what he’s there for. Females are more interested in their clutch than their mates.”
“Mmm, so that’s why you decided I was your mate. Because you don’t have to worry about me going black widow on you.”
Mick kissed my forehead, lips scalding. “You’re pretty dangerous yourself, Janet Begay.” He was laughing, but I sensed his tension despite our lovemaking.
Headlights sliced abruptly toward us out of the dark. Mick had my jeans up in two seconds flat, so that the only one caught in the light with his butt bare was himself. Mick calmly pulled up and zipped his pants as an SUV with flashing red and blue lights stopped a few yards from us.
“Damn him,” I said, as Nash Jones opened the door. “Can’t he give us two seconds of privacy?”
“He helped get me out of that cave and back to you,” Mick said, unperturbed. “I’ll cut him a lot of slack for that.”
Nash approached, the SUV’s headlights throwing him into stark silhouette and gleaming on his holstered gun.
“How long have you two been out here?” he asked as he reached us. He didn’t ask what we’d been doing—he knew damn well what we’d been doing.
Mick coolly finished buckling his belt, not in the least embarrassed. “An hour?” he suggested. “Maybe longer.”
“I have something to show you,” Nash said. “You need to follow me.”
Without waiting for us, he walked back to his SUV and got inside, the engine whining as he backed it until he found a place to turn around. Mick swung onto his bike and started it up.
I didn’t move to join him. “You’re just going to do what he says?”
Mick shrugged. “I’m curious.” He pulled on his driving gloves and rested his hands on the handlebars, waiting. I heaved a sigh of exasperation and scrambled up behind him.
Mick turned the bike and headed after Nash’s retreating vehicle. Nash led us out to the main highway and then turned west on a dirt service road. I coughed from the dust his SUV kicked up—it hadn’t rained out here in a couple weeks.
Nash stopped about a half mile along this road, and Mick drew the bike alongside him. Nash was already climbing out, gesturing with his flashlight for us to follow him. We walked with him down the road, the SUV’s spotlight blotting out the moonlight.
About ten yards along, Nash’s flashlight reflected on an orange hazard cone. The cone was clean and bright, not a speck of dust or a scratch on it. Nash had probably had his deputies polish it before he came out here. He stepped off the road at the cone and led us across hard earth and clumps of bristly grass.
The stench hit me before I saw the blood. Nash didn’t prepare me, didn’t tell me what we were about to view. He simply played his bright light on the bloody mess stretched out on the desert floor.
“Dear gods,” I whispered.
The person, whoever it had been, had been turned inside out. The bones were on top, broken and smashed, resting on a bed of blood, organs, and skin. It was a parody of a human body, deader than dead under the bright stars of the desert sky.
“Have either of you seen Coyote tonight?” Nash asked us after we’d looked at it for a while in stunned silence.
“Coyote?” I asked sharply. “Why?”
Nash gave me a grim look, eyes icy cold. “Because he’s my prime suspect,” he said. “Coyote was seen on this road right about the time whoever this is would have been killed. I’d like very much to talk to him.”
Eight
I stared at Nash in shock. “Seen by who?” I asked.
The kill had been fairly recent, an hour or so ago at most. Whoever that poor person was, he or she hadn’t lain there long.
“A reliable witness.” Which meant Nash wasn’t about to tell me. “This witness gave Coyote a ride from the Crossroads Bar and dropped him off here an hour and a half ago, at his request.”
“Coyote couldn’t have done this,” I said. He was unpredictable, cryptic, annoying, sexually blatant, and sometimes frightening, but I couldn’t see him ripping someone open like this.
Then again, what did I know about him? He was a god, a powerful being who didn’t necessarily follow human rules. My blood chilled.
Nash continued, “Coyote has no known address, he hangs around Magellan bothering people, and he was dropped off on this road tonight, as though he’d come out here to meet someone. That makes him a suspicious person in my book.”
“But he was at the diner, sitting next to me an hour and a half ago,” I said. He had been, hadn’t he?
Mick didn’t meet my eyes. Nash did, his gray irises like chips of ice. “Are you contradicting my reliable witness?”
I didn’t know how to answer. No one had seen Coyote in the diner but me—at least, Maya and Mick hadn’t. Could he be in two places at once? I had no idea.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Nash frowned, and Mick still wouldn’t look at me.
“So, you’re putting the time of death to an hour and a half ago?” I asked.
“The ME will say for certain, but I’d guess no longer than that.”
“And you have no idea who it is? The victim, I mean.” The bones, strings of muscle, and blood against the gra
ss were gruesome. I doubted I’d be eating meat for a while.
“I didn’t find any obvious ID. Wallet gone, no driver’s license, anything like that. It will be DNA and dental records that tell us who it was.”
I ran through everyone I’d seen at the diner: Maya, the McGuires, the waitress, other townspeople I recognized. They’d been safe and whole, not turned inside out on the desert floor, nor had they been out here committing murder.
But plenty of people hadn’t been there: Jamison Kee and his wife, Naomi; Cassandra; Fremont Hansen; Assistant Chief Salas; Nash’s deputies from Flat Mesa; any number of others. I’d seen Coyote, but no one else had. Why had he chosen tonight of all nights not to reveal himself to people?
“Coyote is only one possibility,” Mick was saying. “This was a pretty powerful kill, but any number of supernatural killers could have done this. A dragon, for instance.”
I knew Mick spoke rhetorically, but Nash was the kind of sheriff who would arrest and interrogate in a heartbeat.
“What other kinds of supernatural killers?” Nash asked him. “These skinwalkers or Nightwalkers Janet told me about?”
I shook my head. “Skinwalkers either just kill, or they flay the corpse and steal the skin. Nightwalkers suck their victims dry. Changers would maul, in whatever animal form they change into. It would look like an animal kill.” I glanced at Mick. “Wouldn’t a dragon just fry someone?”
“Usually, yes,” Mick said. Of the three of us, he was the calmest, looking at this with almost clinical interest. “Most often, dragons ignore humans. Not worth the trouble.”
Mick spoke with easy conviction about the arrogance of his kind. I didn’t know how to respond, so I asked Nash, “Why did you bring me out here to see this?”
“Because, whether I like it or not, you have the reputation for finding out the truth about weird crimes. I decided to take a shot and ask you what you thought about this one.”
That Nash had even considered asking me my opinion spoke volumes as to how far he’d unbent since he’d first met me. When I’d arrived in Magellan five months ago, he’d made it clear he thought me a con artist who’d bamboozled the McGuires into believing I could find their missing daughter. It floored me that Nash was extending this small tether of trust.
I looked at the body again, at the sticky black aura surrounding it. It radiated death, but the only thing I could sense about the victim was his or her acute surprise. Whoever had killed had done so quickly, and the victim had probably been unaware it had even happened.
The magic residue from the killer was incredibly powerful. It had a whiff of godlike power—not good, solid earth magic—but it was uncertain. It might not be god magic at all, or, indeed, Beneath magic. The fact that I couldn’t see anything clearer bothered me a lot.
I rubbed my still-aching head. “Hard to say. If you’re hoping I’ll confirm that Coyote did this, I can’t.”
Nash opened his notebook and started writing. “That’s it?”
“Something or someone is hiding the aura of the murderer. Whoever can do that would be very powerful.”
“Like who?” the literal-minded Nash asked.
Coyote for one, I thought but didn’t say. “A human mage, possibly. If they were powerful enough.”
Nash looked at me over his notebook. “Mage?”
“A witch, you’d call them. Not necessarily Wiccan, but someone with some hard-ass magic.” Someone like that, I didn’t want to meet.
Nash’s eyes narrowed. “Heather Hansen claims to be a witch.”
Heather owned the local woo-woo store called Paradox, which sold crystals, tarot cards, incense, and other accoutrements for magic working. “I don’t think so. Heather thoroughly embraces the creed of doing no harm to others. She works spells of protection, leaves gifts for the wee folk, organizes the Ghost Train festival. She has power, more than she knows, but she doesn’t have the temperament to kill with it. Especially not like this.”
Nash listened with a look of doubt, but I knew I was right. Heather’s aura had no darkness. She was a truly kind person and didn’t have the power I sensed here, but I watched Nash noting down Heather Hansen as a person to be questioned.
“Anyone else?”
Cassandra, I thought but didn’t want to say. She was Wiccan, but I didn’t know her well enough to know what she was capable of. She was strong, I knew that, and damn good at her job, but I couldn’t know whether she had it in her to kill.
I was debating whether to mention her to Nash, who would probably whip her under hot lights without drawing breath, when the arrival of the rest of the police interrupted us. A car marked “City of Magellan Police” pulled up to disgorge Emilio Salas and a uniform cop. Lopez and two other deputies from the county pulled in right behind them, Lopez and Salas greeting each other like the old friends they were.
“Don’t leave yet,” Nash said to me. “I need statements from both of you.”
“Statements? What for?”
Nash’s badge winked in the light of the flares Salas was setting out. “I am still pinning my suspicions on Coyote, but either of you could have done this. You only alibi each other.” He looked from me to Mick, who nodded thoughtfully.
“I couldn’t,” I said. “Not without a storm.”
Mick and Nash looked at me at the same time, and I knew they were recalling what I’d done to the demons in Death Valley. Both gave me hard stares, and I didn’t have to be psychic to know they thought me perfectly capable of this horrific deed.
“I don’t know how I called that magic,” I said irritably. “It just happened, probably because we were going to die. I can’t conjure it at will.”
Nash didn’t believe me, but then, Nash never believed me.
He directed us to give statements to Lopez, and then he turned away to take Salas and his deputies over the scene. Lopez’s lips quirked as I had to tell him exactly what time I left the diner, who I’d seen there, and why I’d decided to ride with Mick into the middle of the desert. Everyone in town would know by tomorrow that Mick and I had been engaged in sexual activity out there in the dark, because Lopez was almost as good a gossiper as Fremont Hansen. Finally, Lopez finished with us and told me and Mick to go.
Mick stopped by the diner on the way to the hotel, where I picked up my bike. Everyone had already heard about the corpse, of course, and townspeople in the parking lot tried to get out of us what we knew. Mick and I managed to evade questions and head home.
Mick had known me long enough to understand what I needed. He pulled down the blinds and undressed me himself, and then he carried me into the bathroom and set me under a warm shower. His clothes came off, and he stepped in with me, his large body enveloping mine.
We didn’t make love there as we sometimes did; we just soaked up the hot water. I closed my eyes to the feel of Mick’s big hands smoothing soap over my body, opening them when he rinsed me off and lifted me out. He wrapped me in a towel, carried me into the bedroom, and laid me on the bed.
Now he made love to me, slow and easy. By the time he was done, I was pleasantly drowsy, the horror of the crime scene fading a little. As had been Mick’s intention, I drifted off to sleep in his warm embrace.
Whenever I encountered Coyote in one of my dreams, I seemed to be naked. This time was no exception. We stood side by side, he in his animal form, looking down at the remains of the body, me human and naked. Turkey vultures moved in slow hops around the corpse, like hooded demons feasting on their victim. Coyotes, lured by the scent of blood, circled at a safe distance, their eyes shining in the darkness.
“Did you do this?” I asked Coyote. He sat on his haunches, a coyote as big as a wolf, except that he had the rail-thin legs and pointed nose of his species.
I am capable of such a thing.
“Don’t go all cryptic on me again,” I growled. “Were you really in the diner tonight?”
Were you?
“Of course I was. I was eating dinner.” I glanced at the corpse. “
Kind of sorry I did, now.”
There is your answer.
“No one else could see you. Maya couldn’t. Did you pull a glam to get free food?”
His answering laugh was full of amusement. I wanted to talk to you without anyone knowing about it.
“Why? You didn’t say much of anything.”
I didn’t have time. I knew Mick was coming for you. Be careful of Mick. He’s more dangerous than you know.
“You told me that before. I’ve seen how dangerous he is.”
You know only what you’ve witnessed. What goes on in his mind is unfathomable to you. If he makes the decision to kill you, he will without warning. He will be swift and merciless. You love him with your human emotions, but he is not human. He never has been. His emotions are . . . complicated.
“Like yours?”
No one is as complicated as me.
“No kidding.” I knew better than to ignore his warnings, but I had many immediate things to think about, like the dragons taking Mick to trial for not killing me and now a corpse at the edge of town. Worrying about what Mick might do in the future would have to wait.
You need to end your Beneath magic, Coyote said. Before it ends you.
“Easy for you to say.”
You were born with the magic, but it has been biding its time, unable to grow here in this world of earth magics. Now it has been triggered by your journey Beneath.
I felt cold, but I nodded. “I figured as much. I thought maybe you could help me get rid of it.”
No, Stormwalker. It is part of you. But you must control it, or it will consume you. And possibly everything else on earth.
“How could it do that? My mother is the monster, not me.”
Don’t worry. I’ll destroy you before you can do too much damage. I love you, Janet Begay, but that doesn’t mean I won’t put aside my feelings and kill you.
“It is always so comforting to talk to you.”
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