Firewalker

by Allyson James

  “That’s okay. I booked us a room. You’re splitting the cost with me.”

  So much for our plan to make it back home before anyone noticed we were gone. But right now a soft bed sounded good. “I didn’t bring a toothbrush.” I giggled.

  “The hotel sells them, and I packed clean underwear in my purse. I brought some for you.”

  Her purse was tiny, and I imagined the underwear was too. I started laughing, drink and exhaustion making everything hilarious.

  Maya wanted to dance some more. I watched her, basking on the cushion of music, half-asleep. A guy sat down next to me and tried to pick me up, but I stonewalled him. He was good-looking, tall, obviously rich if he’d paid for that suit, but I wasn’t interested. I preferred big, hard-muscled bikers who tied me to the bed.

  I was in the middle of letting him down easy when Maya grabbed me by the hand and dragged me up. “Sorry,” she said to the guy. “It’s time for bed.”

  We left the man sitting there with his mouth open. I was laughing and hanging on Maya to keep myself upright as we snaked through the still-busy casino to the elevators at the back of the hotel.

  “That was mean,” I said.

  “So? He was sleazy.”

  “I bet his wallet was pretty thick.”

  “I don’t care.” Bless Maya, she really didn’t. While I liked bikers with wicked smiles, she liked crabby sheriffs in crisply pressed uniforms.

  The elevator arrived, and we glided up alone. “Nash is going to kill us,” I said.

  “Serves him right. I should have slept with that guy, maybe stolen his boxers or something to show to Nash.”

  The idea of Maya waving her prize silk shorts in front of a furious Nash made me double over in laughter again. I’d never make it down the hallway.

  The elevator spilled us out, and Maya put her arm around me to help me to our room. I shouldn’t touch alcohol. I’d feel like crap in the morning, and I knew it. Oh, wait, it already was morning.

  Maya was shoving her key card into the door slot when the elevator dinged softly. I heard a tread on the carpet, and then a man’s voice. “Que pasa, ladies.”

  The guy who’d tried to pick me up was standing behind us. My heart thumped a little in my alcohol haze.

  “Sure you want to sleep alone tonight?” he asked us.

  Maya tightened her arm around me, and I failed miserably at keeping a straight face. “We’re sure,” Maya said.

  “I don’t mind watching,” he said. “Tell you what, why don’t you show me a little right now? Kiss her. I’d like to see that.”

  “Ewwww,” Maya said.

  I pushed away from Maya, tried to stand upright, and ended up sagging against the wall. “Go away. I don’t care how rich you are.” I might have said that. The words were pretty slurred.

  “Really. Kiss each other.” His voice had changed from eager idiocy to something hard and nasty. “Hurry up.”

  “No,” Maya said.

  “Bitches.” The man cornered Maya against the door. His hand moved, I saw the barrel of a gun pointed at Maya’s gut, and my alcohol fog lifted abruptly. Maya didn’t see the gun and went on cursing him.

  The man shoved Maya inside the room, her calling him a son of a bitch at the top of her voice. I ran in after them, and the heavy door swung closed behind me.

  “Maya,” I said sharply.

  “What?”

  She looked down, saw the gun, and froze.

  People have different reactions to guns being drawn on them. Some stare in disbelief, not believing it real. People pulling guns only happens on television. Others panic. Still others fly into a rage.

  Maya chose the second reaction. She screamed. The guy pressed his hand over her mouth and shoved her into a wall.

  He thought I was the lesser threat, the small Indian woman teetering in her high-heeled sandals. Too bad for him. I chose the third reaction—rage.

  The Beneath magic in me surged up with the force of a tornado. One flick of my fingers twisted his pistol in half. The next sent the man flying across the room at a sickening speed until he smashed against the window. The heavy-duty window held, and he slid down it to groan in a heap on the floor.

  While Maya stared in shock, I hurried to the man and leaned over him. He breathed evenly, knocked out, nothing more. I grabbed Maya’s hand and dragged her out of the room.

  “Wait!” she cried. “Where are we going? I’m going to puke.”

  “Out,” I said. The elevator opened with a machine’s quiet indifference. I pulled Maya inside, and we zoomed down to the lobby.

  “I don’t want to go back out. My feet hurt.”

  “Do you want to be in the room when security finds that guy? We’ll be arrested for assault. I’m not sure how hard I hit him.” I glanced up at a shining black half-sphere in the ceiling, behind which I knew was a spy camera, as we hurried out of the elevator and joined the crowd in the casino.

  Maya stopped arguing. She let me lead her by the hand at a quick walk out the main entrance and along the line of taxis. Lucky us, we were able to jump into the back of the first one. We’d left our coats in Maya’s truck, but the nights in Las Vegas were mild in September, and we slid unencumbered into the cab’s backseat.

  “Where to, ladies?”

  “Someplace with male strippers,” I said on impulse. “Not like Chippendales. Something smaller, more intimate.”

  The cabby grinned through his rearview. “Gotcha.” He zipped smoothly down the drive and into the nearly grid-locked traffic.

  “They’ll charge me for the room,” Maya complained. “They have my credit card; they know who I am.”

  “I’ll pay for it.” My adrenaline was high, my body charged. “Besides,” I whispered, “if they find that guy in our room, with a gun, they’ll arrest him. We just got scared and ran off. Right? You ready to go home yet?”

  Maya pushed her hair out of her face and sat up. “No. Fuck him. I want to have some fun.”

  I held her hand and whooped as the taxi scooted into the far lane and maneuvered down the packed Strip. He dropped us in front of a club near old downtown Vegas, the neighborhood kind of seedy, but I didn’t care. I was strong and powerful. No one would mess with us.

  The club was still going strong, the men on the little stage stripped down to what was legal. I went light on the drink, though Maya had another martini, but I let myself enjoy the show. I took most of the cash I’d brought with me and slid it into the G-string of a guy who looked like Mick. He rewarded me with a beautiful smile.

  “This is boring,” Maya yelled in my ear. “I want to dance.”

  A club a block away provided more dancing. It was even seedier, but by this time, Maya and I had decided we could handle anything. We danced together, attracting the same amount of attention as we had at the upscale club. The guys here were working-class and a hell of a lot more friendly than the rich ones. No one pulled a gun on us, anyway.

  Then something evil entered the club.

  Maya continued dancing, and two guys undulated with her. The air went thick, the music dimming, as though I watched the scene from behind textured glass. A smell came to me: death, decay.

  No one noticed but me. The music ground on; the dancing continued. I scanned the crowd, tensing, waiting. I saw no skinwalker, sensed no aura of a Nightwalker. Not a dragon either, come to scoop me up and carry me off. Dragons smelled good, anyway, fiery and hot, and this thing bore the stink of rot.

  He walked through the crowd toward me. People parted for him without realizing, as though their subconscious noted his presence, but their conscious minds did not. He slid through until he stopped in front of where I waited. His body was wiry, like a runner’s, and his light blue eyes held no spark of evil, but I knew who he was.

  “Jim?”

  He was the man from my vision, the one the magic mirror had claimed was evil incarnate.

  “You left your camera at my hotel,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel. “Nice piece. I wouldn’t have
run off and left that behind.”

  “I don’t need it anymore,” Jim said. “You take it.”

  The camera was still stashed in my desk drawer, because I felt queasy even touching it. “How did you find me here?”

  “I followed you.” Jim Mohan spoke in a normal voice, but I could hear him even over the music. “I sensed you were in danger, and I was right, wasn’t I? That guy tried to kill you. I came to make sure you were all right.”

  My heart squeezed. “Why should you want to protect me?”

  “Because you helped me. Your magic brought me back to life.”

  “What?” I stared at him. “The hell it did.”

  “You used the same magic tonight, when you fought the man in the hotel.”

  The music had dimmed to almost nothing, although people kept on dancing. It was as though Jim and I stood in a bubble surrounded by light and noise, but none of it touched us.

  “What do you know about the man in the hotel?” I asked.

  “I told him not to hurt you. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

  I froze in horror. “Oh, gods.”

  “They’re so fragile, human bodies. Even mine was.” He laughed a little, his lean face so normal. “Guess it’s not, anymore.”

  I felt sick. “You killed him?” I thought of the body out in the desert, all the blood, the smell, the terror. “Like you did that person in Magellan?”

  Jim nodded. “They both were just guys. Like I used to be. I really didn’t mean to do anything to the hiker. He was hurt—he’d sprained his ankle, and he didn’t have a cell phone. I wanted to heal him, like you healed me.”

  “I had nothing to do with that,” I said.

  “They’re looking for you. The people at the hotel. I came to warn you.”

  As Maya had mentioned, the hotel had her name, her address, her credit card number, all the pertinent facts about Maya Medina. I didn’t know whether she’d indicated she’d be sharing the room with Janet Begay, but it didn’t matter. It was one thing for two girls to run away from a man who’d shoved his way into their room with a gun, another when the girls left behind a mangled corpse. We had to go.

  Jim touched me with a hand that was warm. He should have been ice-cold, dead, but he was alive. A living, breathing creature, but not right.

  “They’re coming,” he said.

  I saw red and blue lights through the open door of the club. I turned to find Maya, but she’d worked her way to the other side of the floor. “Stay here,” I told Jim, and started worming my way through the crowd.

  The music and noise came back with a rush. I got to Maya and pulled her away from a Latino she’d wrapped her arms around. She swore at me.

  At the same time, my midsection gave a sudden lurch, and magic flared through the building. The music died with a screech, and people started to scream.

  Jim was standing in the middle of the room, his hand out, palm pressed forward. The sickening stench of magic—a mixture of death and godlike power—flowed from him to collapse the door and bury it in rubble.

  People started making a dash for the emergency exit. Lights came on overhead, to be extinguished a second later, and the club plunged into darkness. I still had my hand around Maya’s arm and she pulled at me, trying to get me to the emergency exit. An alarm sounded, the constant note of it lodging inside my head.

  “Stop!” I screamed at Jim.

  He poured more magic at the front door. I heard the crunch of cars, and plaster rained down the inside of the club. Bricks exploded inward, falling on the people trying to cram their way out.

  I had to stop him. I dug for my Beneath magic and found it very close to the surface. Coyote’s warnings and the Koshare scaring me hadn’t dampened it at all. My promise to try to control it was a lie, and I knew it. I couldn’t control it taking me over, and right now, I didn’t want to.

  I didn’t even need to raise my hand this time. I shot the magic around Jim, binding him and his magic into a little bubble. He stared at me and started shouting, but his sounds were muffled by the crackling magic.

  His power met with mine, and the air around us expanded, unable to take the pressure. Every bottle and glass behind the bar exploded. Shards of glass sliced my face, and the smell of liquor cut sharply through the musty smell of the club.

  Most of the guests had made it out of the dark club, and Maya, after one wild look at me, ran after them, the last one out. Now police officers started in through the emergency exit. I slammed up another shield over that door to keep them out of the club and safe.

  “Let me go,” Jim screamed.

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with him—giving him to the police would only condemn the nice officers to a bloody and untimely death. I’d have to kill him to stop him. My insides roiled at the same time my Beneath magic rejoiced. It wanted me to be a bitch-queen goddess like my mother. It wanted me to take my mother’s place.

  “No,” I said in a loud voice. “I won’t.”

  You no longer have the choice.

  “Coyote!” I yelled. “Help me!”

  Jim turned his magic on me. My bubble expanded and burst, and the emergency lights in the club exploded. So did the flashlights the cops had brought in with them, and we were sent back into darkness. In that darkness, something inky and clutching crawled up my legs, weaving around my thighs, stretching fingers into my underpants.

  I wasn’t putting up with that. “Dust,” I screamed, and the vinelike tentacles dissolved.

  Jim was pounding me with magic like that of gods. My Stormwalker powers would have crumbled and died before it, but my Beneath magic resisted it well.

  A detached part of my thoughts wondered why Jim thought I’d resurrected him. Because he sensed goddess power in me? Had he been brought back to life by another god? By my mother? I needed to find out.

  Whatever had created Jim, he was currently trying to destroy me. I thought of Mick, how much I loved him, even when he drove me insane. I thought about his fire, how he could call flame without thought.

  “Burn,” I yelled. The magic Jim was shoving at me burst into flames. He screamed and beat at the fire that started in his hair and clothes.

  I yanked down the barrier between us and smothered the flame in cold. Jim tried to fight, and he was strong, but he hadn’t figured out how to control his power. I didn’t know how to control mine either, but I had the advantage of years battling to keep my storm powers from killing me.

  Jim withstood my magic, but the club couldn’t. The walls started to fall, the ceiling to come down. Jim was already dead—my detached thoughts wondered whether he’d get up after being crushed. One thing was for certain: if the club fell on me, I wouldn’t rise again. I’d be very much dead.

  I sprinted for the back exit as pipes burst and fell, lights and wires tumbling down. The roof came apart slowly, piece by piece, giving me mere seconds to run for the emergency door. The police were still there, waiting on the other side of the magic barrier I’d erected.

  Here was my choice: run into their arms and live out the rest of my life in prison, or stay in here and take my chances being buried alive.

  Neither option excited me. A shower of bricks just missed me, kicking up a heavy cloud of dust. Jim had vanished into the darkness and rubble. I could try to climb over it, head for where the walls gaped open to the night, and get out that way.

  I turned to scramble up a pile of brick, pipe, and glass when Nash Jones walked in right through my magic barrier. His body sucked the magic into it with a little pop, allowing Mick, his hands full of fire, to follow him in.

  Nash had his gun out and trained it on me. “Stand down, Janet.”

  I kept scrambling for the opening in the wall. Would Nash shoot me? I could lose him in the dark, make my way to the main roads, hitch a ride somewhere. To Mexico City, maybe. Brazil was sounding good.

  Mick moved between me and Nash’s gun, grabbed me around the waist, and hauled me off my feet. One of Naomi’s pretty sandals got left
behind as the rubble wrenched it from my foot.

  My Beneath magic surged to stop him. “Mick, let me go!” I cried. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Flame licked his hands but didn’t burn me. Mick had amazing control, and I fought to keep my flaring magic from obliterating him.

  Maya waited by Nash’s sheriff’s SUV, huddled in Nash’s coat, tears and mascara black rivulets on her cheeks. Mick put me down and took my face between his hands. “Janet, stop.”

  My teeth were chattering so hard I could barely speak. “I don’t think I can.”

  I looked into blue eyes filled with anguish. Mick was scared, not for himself, but for me. “I’m sorry, baby.”

  It happened so quickly that my Beneath magic had no time to answer. One minute, Mick was looking at me in sorrow, the next, I had no air. I recognized the tentacles of a quick and dirty binding spell, felt Mick’s hands on my neck and over my mouth, but too late. Spots crashed into my vision and then darkness.

  Sixteen

  I swam to wakefulness inside a moving vehicle. It was mercifully quiet, except for the occasional burst of static from a police radio. My head was cushioned against a strong thigh, and an equally strong hand smoothed my hair.

  Opening my eyes didn’t help much. It was daylight—I thought—but I stared at the dark, bare floorboards of someone’s backseat. I groaned.

  “Can you knock her out again?” Nash asked from the front.

  Mick leaned over me, his touch gentle. “You okay, sweetheart?”

  “No.”

  The word dragged out from my tight mouth. I could barely move my lips, or anything else for that matter. I lay on Mick’s comfortable lap for a long time, getting my bearings and feeling absolutely shitty. The Beneath magic was gone—where, I didn’t know—and it had left me with a hell of a hangover. Or maybe that was the martinis.

  “I told you ten times already,” Maya said from somewhere in front of me. “I don’t know anything about a dead guy in the hotel room. I booked the room, but we decided not to go in. We went to a strip club instead. With male strippers. I paid a hundred bucks for a lap dance.” Maya was lying—she’d never gotten near the strippers.