The flunky nodded. He stripped off his coat and then his shirt, sweat pouring down his face as he hastily got rid of his clothes. Once he was naked, he raised his arms out to his sides and let fire pour out of his hands. The fire wrapped around what was left of the councilman, encasing him like a sheath.
The dragon flunky’s body gleamed with sweat, the tattoo of a full dragon on his back. The tattoo wrapped all the way around his torso, the wings running down his arms; what I’d seen on his neck were the barbed spikes at the bend of the wings.
The tattoo glowed and rippled. It seemed to absorb the flunky’s body into it, until a black dragon, shining in the streetlights, spread real wings and rose on them. The dragon shot into the air, expanding as he went; then he snaked one talon down and scooped up the cocoon of fire. The downdraft of his wings bombarded me with hot air, and then the dragon was rising into the night.
A second dragon swooped out of the desert to meet him, this one so fiery red it glowed with its own light. He wasn’t Mick—Mick was huge and black all over. The dragons exchanged screeches before winging off together over the empty desert. Silence settled on the street, and the breeze stirred the dead man’s coat.
Sirens erupted from both sides of Magellan at once, both the town and county police responding.
I turned shakily toward Maya’s house and found myself staring down the barrel of a semiautomatic. The Beneath magic had left me, vanishing as quickly as it had come. The eyes of the chauffeur over the barrel were human, terrified, and enraged.
“Get in,” he said.
“What . . . ?”
“Get in the fucking car!”
I raised my hands and backed quickly into the limo, and the chauffeur slammed the door. I grabbed the handle as soon as he started for the driver’s side, but he’d locked the door, and there was no button or latch to let me out. I bounced to the front of the limo, ready to crawl out that way, but thick glass separated back from front, firmly in place. They’d not wanted their prisoner to escape.
The driver slammed himself inside the car and squealed away from Maya’s house just as two Magellan police cars, two sheriffs’ cars, and Nash’s official SUV sped toward us. The chauffeur drove through a yard to avoid them and then down Maya’s street to the main highway.
One sheriff’s car turned to pursue us, and I saw a flash of Lopez’s face at the wheel. The other four vehicles continued their charge to Maya’s lit-up house, Nash leading the way.
Meanwhile, Lopez chased the limo. The chauffeur drove through Magellan at triple the legal speed, and Lopez hung in there as we barreled out of town past my hotel and up the road toward Flat Mesa. About halfway along, the chauffeur jerked the wheel to the right, spinning us onto a road I hadn’t even known existed. It was narrow and treacherous, what was known as a primitive road. That meant it hadn’t even been graded, and dropped into and out of washes with jarring abruptness.
There was no way we could make it down this road in this car and not get stuck. Raised pickups with four-wheel drive could do it, but not a limousine. The recent rains had made the ground soft, and washes out here would be full of water. I didn’t care how big this car was; a good whitewater wash would sweep us away in seconds.
“Where the hell are you going?” I shouted.
If the chauffeur heard me through the glass, he made no sign. He rocketed through the desert at an insane speed. Looking back, I saw Lopez’s lights swerve wildly, and then go still. He’d hit mud or soft dirt, and his wheels would be spinning in place. I hoped he was all right.
A few moments later, the chauffeur slammed on the brakes. I went flying forward, barely stopping myself from slamming into the glass between us. Red lights blinked out of the darkness, and I heard the thrub-thrub of a helicopter.
The chauffeur yanked open my door, shoving his gun in my face again. I don’t know where he thought I was going to run, but I let him herd me toward the helicopter.
I approached it with my heart pounding. I hated flying, and I’d heard bad things about helicopters. Yes, I had many more things to worry about right now than fear of flying, but with the machine vibrating in front of me and a gun in my back, I developed a bad case of the shakes.
With no storm to help me, and my Beneath magic hibernating again, I had no choice. I climbed onto the step, the chauffeur pushed me in, and I landed on a seat that was much like a car seat. I couldn’t hear anything over the blades, couldn’t see anything but the glow of cockpit lights in the front.
The chauffeur dropped into the seat next to me, gun still aimed in my direction. He jammed on a headset and started shouting something. The pilot looked over his shoulder, arguing with him, but I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying. The pilot swung around to his controls, and the helicopter lifted with a slight jerk and glided up into the night.
I hunkered into the seat with my arms folded. My face was sticky, and I realized I still had the councilman’s blood all over it. My jacket was spattered with it too.
We flew for a long time. I had no idea how far or how fast helicopters could go; I just knew that I was scared, uncomfortable, unhappy, and had to pee. I figured if the chauffeur had wanted me dead, he’d have shot me, so he must be under orders to take me someplace specific. Once I got there, I might be executed, but until then I was relatively safe. Such comforting thoughts.
By the clock in the cockpit, it was about two a.m. when we started to descend. I looked out the window and saw a city in the distance, far too big to be anything in northern Arizona. I had no idea which direction we’d gone, but I knew I wasn’t looking at Las Vegas or the enormous sprawl of Phoenix. That left Albuquerque or Santa Fe—we couldn’t have gone far enough to have reached Salt Lake City or L.A.
So by process of elimination, I was probably in New Mexico. That was confirmed as we started to land—I saw the twisty streets of old Santa Fe flash under us and the vast bulk of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the darkness. I’d been to Santa Fe plenty of times in my wanderings before I’d moved to Magellan, and I knew we’d headed north and west of the city.
We landed just outside a walled compound. The chauffeur had to lift me out of the helicopter, because I was too exhausted and shaky to manage on my own.
The compound turned out to be a large house surrounded by an equally large wall. The outer walls were adobe, smooth, plain, and unbroken. Inside the gate, the house itself formed another barrier, with small windows facing the approach.
Once through the next gated breezeway, I found paradise. The courtyard was a vast open space that followed the natural contours of the land, with desert mountain plants and trees in abundance. Walkways led through this lush garden, and a tiled arcade ran along all four sides of the house.
The chauffeur took me inside, still at gunpoint, and led me through cool tiled halls. The house had been built in the old Spanish style, with staircases bending upward beyond arches, rooms opening unexpectedly, and few windows except those that overlooked the courtyard. The room I was taken to, after they searched me, had a balcony, but below it was a sheer drop down the cliff face that the house had been built upon.
The chauffeur closed the door and locked me in. The balcony doors were easily opened, which meant they didn’t worry that I could escape that way.
I dropped a piece of loose tile over the wrought-iron balcony rail and waited a sickeningly long time before I heard a click of rock on rock below. Unless my jailers had conveniently stashed climbing gear under the bathroom sink, I was stuck.
I explored the room, finding phone and computer jacks, but no phones or computers. They’d taken my cell phone when they’d rudely patted me down, but they’d left my piece of magic mirror in its chamois bag. They probably thought I kept it so I could check my makeup on my daring adventures. Every person I’d seen here so far had been human, lucky me. A supernatural being would have sensed the mirror’s magic.
I sat down on the bed, which was amazingly comfortable. I’d vacation here if I wasn’t being held capti
ve.
A full-length mirror in a heavy, carved frame hung on the wall to the left of the bed. I gazed into it for a few minutes, noting the splotches of dried blood on my face and Maya’s pretty shirt, the black mess of my hair, my eyes wide and brown. Brown, thankfully. No green gleam in sight. Of course, now that I could have used magic to help me escape, it had deserted me.
I took out the piece of magic mirror and angled it toward the mirror on the wall.
The magic mirror purred. “Oh, girlfriend, this is nice. Here I was all worried about you, and you’re sitting in splendor. So not fair.”
“Locked in splendor is more like it.”
I kept playing with the mirror until a white spark flashed between the magic mirror and the mundane one. Magic mirrors could enhance the properties of ordinary mirrors, or so I’d heard. I hadn’t taken the time to discover everything I could do with a magic mirror, being busy with the hotel and Beneath magic and dragons and being kidnapped and all. Plus, working with the magic mirror meant listening to it.
“Can you let me see through all mirrors in the house?” I asked. “Channel them into this one?”
“I don’t know. It depends on the mirrors and where they are.”
“Well, try,” I said impatiently.
“Give me a second. This is powerful magic, honey, not simple chanting and incense.”
Light danced between the two pieces of glass, glinting in the way mirrors did when they caught the sunlight. It was pitch-dark beyond the windows, except for the city lights I could see in the distance. The air through the balcony doors I’d left open was crisp and cold. Winter begins early at seven thousand feet.
A key scraped in the lock. I quickly dropped the mirror to the rug and slid it under the bed with my heel. “Give me a break, sugar,” the mirror said. “I can’t work if I can’t see anything.”
The young man who walked in didn’t hear the mirror. His aura told me he was human, one without magic. He was maybe twenty-two or so and good-looking. Very good-looking. Good thing the mirror hadn’t seen him, or I’d be listening to a panegyric about his flawless face, his chocolate brown hair, his light blue eyes, his firm body, and his ass in tight jeans. He had a Taser in his belt, and the two men standing outside the door held automatic rifles.
“All that hardware for me?” I asked.
“You’re dangerous,” the young man said. He closed the door behind him, and someone outside locked it. “Don’t bother trying to take me hostage. They wouldn’t care if you killed me. I’m expendable.”
I stood up. “And this doesn’t bother you?”
“It’s a good job, with lots of perks.” The young man shook a tablecloth over a table in the corner and started laying out silverware and glasses. “I make way more money than I would in an office job; plus I get lots of time off. They don’t mind if I party here when they’re out, and I meet a lot of women.”
“Paradise,” I said.
He grinned in an un-self-conscious way. “It is for me. But really, if you killed me, they’d just hire someone else.”
“I guess when you work for big reptiles, you have to expect them to be cold,” I said.
He gave me a puzzled look and then shrugged as he set a covered dish on the table and opened a bottle of wine. “Yeah, I guess. I’m Todd, by the way. This is pollo en mole, one of the cook’s specialties.”
“I already ate.”
“The wine’s from a local vintner. It’s pretty good, though I’m not really a wine guy.”
“You can take all of it away when you go, Todd. I’m not about to eat and drink anything served to me by dragons who want me dead. If they can’t fry me with fire, poison might work.”
Todd looked blank. “They don’t want to kill you; they just want to talk to you. Look, I’ll eat some first.” He picked up a fork and scooped a dripping bite of the chicken dish into his mouth. “Mmm. Damn good. I love poblano chiles. They’re not as hot as the habaneros but still tasty. Try some.”
“Maybe later,” I said.
I sank down on the bed again, trying to decide what to do. I believed Todd when he said the dragons wouldn’t care if I killed him. He was another flunky, a house boy, if a well-paid one. They counted on me being nice enough to not hurt an innocent. If I did hurt him, take him hostage, throw him over the balcony, or kill him, then I’d confirm to the dragons that I was the monster they believed me to be.
Todd took a sip of wine to show me that it wasn’t tainted. He put the cover back over the plate to keep it warm. Very thoughtful, was Todd.
“You all right?” he asked. He came and sat beside me on the bed, switching his Taser to the side of his belt opposite me. “I’m training to be a massage therapist, so I can give you a massage if you want. Neck and shoulders or full body, clothes on or off. Or if you need sex, I’m here for that too.”
I gave him an irritated look. “Do you offer that to all guests? And prisoners?”
“Sure. It’s part of my job.”
“What if I were a man?”
Todd laughed. “Then they’d have sent in a woman. Or a gay man.”
“They really take care of their guests, don’t they?”
“They do. Lie back and enjoy it. They’ll talk to you and release you in a couple of days. There’s clean towels in the bathroom if you want to shower, plus robes in your size. I can take your clothes down to be cleaned.”
“What I really want, Todd, is a phone.”
“Sorry. No can do.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that they’re holding me here against my will?”
Todd stood up, making sure I had a good view of his behind as he looked into the mirror to smooth his hair. “No, because they told me you’re their enemy, and these are some pretty cool guys. They’re not drug dealers or anything like that. Just businessmen. So if they don’t want you leaving before they can talk to you, they’ve got a good reason.”
“Sure. Why don’t you go away, now, Todd, so I can eat? Or shower? Or jump off the balcony, whatever I want to do?”
He grinned at me through the mirror. “You don’t look like the type who’d kill herself; you look like the type who’d try to talk her way out. That’s why they’re allowing you out on the balcony. It’s kind of cold tonight, though. You might want to close the windows.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Sure.” Todd headed for the door. “You’re pretty good-looking, though, so if you change your mind about the sex, just thump on the door and tell the guard to let me back in.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, deadpan.
“Great. Good night.”
Todd tapped on the door, it opened from the outside, and my affable jailer waltzed out. The men stationed in the hall didn’t bother to look in or give me an evil glare or anything else villainous before one of them shut the door and locked it again.
I snatched the mirror out from under the bed. “I assume you heard all that.”
“Yes. Please tell him you want sex, and please let me watch. He sounds divine.”
I held the shard up in front of the other mirror. “Concentrate.”
“Oh, you’re no fun.”
I didn’t want to be fun; I wanted to get free. “Show me what’s going on in this damn house. And while you’re at it, yell at Mick. I need to find him.”
“Well, which do you want first, sugar? I’m not powerful enough to do both. Especially since Micky hates to pull me out of his pocket. I like it in there, as I said, but I can never see him.”
“Show me the house, first.” I’d have more information to impart to Mick if I did reconnaissance, and besides, Mick might have tossed away his mirror shard. The look in his eyes when he’d left us on the highway had been bleak and empty.
“Got something,” the mirror said. “Oh, nice.”
The big mirror clouded as though shower steam coated it. Then it cleared, showing me a picture of a bathroom. Todd had just opened his pants to take a leak and preen himself in the mirror at the same
time.
“Something a little more important,” I said in irritation.
“Can’t help it, sweetie. I’m fixing on him because he was in here, and he’s easiest to follow. He’ll go somewhere else in a minute.”
Todd took his time at the toilet; then he moved to wash his hands and preen some more. He didn’t look self-absorbed, just anxious to present the best possible picture to the world when he left the bathroom again.
Finally, after he’d combed his hair, anxiously scrutinized it, and combed it again, Todd left the room. The image of the bathroom dissolved, and I caught a glimpse of Todd striding down a long, tiled hall. I guessed I was looking at the corridor from an ornamental mirror on the wall.
“He’s out of range,” the mirror said. “Want me to keep following him?”
“Stay here for a while. Let’s see if we can see someone else.”
We waited for the longest time while the hall remained boringly empty. I ducked into the bathroom after twenty minutes and washed my face, hands, and arms clean of blood, but I refused to discard my clothes.
To give myself something to do I took a few bites of the food Todd had left. It was lukewarm now but quite good as promised. I liked mole, which was a smooth sauce of chiles and unsweetened chocolate, with various vegetables and other ingredients, depending on what the cook had handy. This one had the bite of hazelnuts in it. I wondered if the chef was also like Todd, working here for high pay but knowing he or she was expendable.
I didn’t have the appetite or the time to appreciate the food. After my second bite, the mirror said, “Who’s that?”
I glanced at the mirror and let my fork clatter to the plate. The dragon flunky was striding down the hall away from us, his leather duster moving, his ponytail in place.
“Him,” I said. “Focus on him.” I moved to the mirror to watch the flunky disappear around the corner. “Follow him!”
“All right, keep your pants on. Or not, if you’re wearing that cute little black satin number.”
I didn’t bother to tell the mirror to shut up. It never listened anyway.
Firewalker Page 18