Firewalker

by Allyson James

Don’t let him get away, my voice said.

  I sprinted for the edge of the canyon. Coyote in coyote form bounded after me, planted himself in front of me, and snarled.

  “Fuck you!” I screamed. I shoved Coyote aside. It didn’t even hurt.

  As I scrambled to the bottom, Nash was shooting frantically at Jim, who was racing down the creek, splashing water as he ran. I reached out with my magic, lassoed Jim around the middle, and jerked him to a halt.

  Jim looked horrible, half his skin burned away, his body a bloody mess. Bone poked through his melted flesh, and still he faced me, his burned mouth forming a parody of a smile.

  Never piss off a Stormwalker who’s been filled with the power of the gods.

  “Jim,” I said. I held up my hand. A small ball of white light hovered above my palm.

  “Janet, no,” Coyote, human again, growled. The command was clear.

  “This is your life,” I said to Jim, pointing at the silver white ball. “And now, it’s over.”

  I pinched the ball between my thumb and forefinger. It went out like a spark, and Undead Jim died.

  Twenty-four

  Coyote blasted me with magic. I should have died on the spot, but Nash stepped between him and me and took the brunt of Coyote’s power.

  Damned if Nash didn’t absorb it all, the full magic of a powerful god like Coyote. Coyote’s eyes widened in surprise as Nash sucked the blue light into his body until the magic flickered out and disappeared.

  At least Nash was breathing hard this time. “Is that all you’ve got?” he asked.

  “Well, fuck me,” Coyote whispered.

  Jim was dead. Unmistakably, irrevocably dead. The pile of his bones lay motionlessly in a few inches of water, his skin half-rotted, the decomposition that should have started days ago finally catching up to him.

  I’d killed him. And if I had to do it all over again, I would.

  Still, I kept Nash between myself and Coyote, just in case. I glared at Coyote. “Save Mick.”

  “Janet...”

  I knew my eyes were ice green without looking into a mirror. “Save him. All-powerful god, can’t you even heal a dragon?”

  “It’s too late.” Coyote’s voice was so damn calm it made me livid.

  “No, it isn’t. And if you can’t, I will.”

  Coyote took a step toward me, but Nash remained planted in his way, a firm, protective wall.

  “Look at him.” Coyote pointed an angry finger at Jim’s remains. “Mick would become as Jim was. Is that what you want?”

  “Whoever resurrected Jim didn’t know what they were doing,” I said. “They gave him life, animation, but not a soul. I know how to restore Mick completely.”

  Coyote’s eyes narrowed. “No mortal knows how to bestow a soul. Only the gods can do that.”

  “You’d better start learning what mortals can do, Trickster. Especially this mortal. I’m the daughter of a goddess; why shouldn’t I have a goddess’s power?”

  “Because if you use it, she will have won.”

  Something cold burned in my stomach, fear churning with dread. “It’s worth it. Worth it to save Mick.”

  “Janet,” Nash said. “You know that you’re acting more crazy than you normally do, right?”

  I switched my green gaze to Nash. “My mother wanted me to mate with you. To create a child that combined my power and yours, because she said that such a child would be unstoppable. I understand what she meant now. You’re infused with more power than any of us put together.”

  “Good.” Nash clearly didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but that didn’t matter. “Then let’s go help Mick.”

  He took my hand, and we started climbing out of the canyon. Coyote watched us go, neither interfering nor helping. Just watching. He was letting me make my choice.

  Nash and I pulled each other through dirt and rock. I was so tired I could barely move, and Nash was shaky also. When we scrambled over the top, we walked to the dragons who encircled Mick’s motionless body.

  When I saw Mick, my heart broke all over again. His human limbs were askew, his chest no longer rising with breath. He stared at nothing, his black hair flowing over his lifeless face.

  I dropped to my knees beside him and lifted his head into my lap. I smoothed his wild hair from the face I loved so much, the mouth I’d kissed so many times. “Mick, do you trust me?”

  Colby moved behind me, his voice subdued for the first time since I’d met him. “Janet, he’s dead.”

  “He will have a dragon funeral,” Bancroft said. “With full honors.”

  “Screw that,” I said. “He’s coming home with me.”

  “Stop her,” Drake growled. I flung the smallest amount of magic at him, and Drake froze in his tracks.

  I touched Mick’s face again. What I had to do was complicated, requiring great stillness within myself. My thoughts had to be orderly and straight. One wrong word, one wrong syllable, and Mick would be lost, beyond saving, or else messed up like Jim.

  Nash knelt on Mick’s other side. He’d holstered both his pistols, and he looked at me in grave sympathy. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Keep them off me.”

  Nash got to his feet and walked toward the three dragons, arms out, like a police officer keeping a crowd from a crime scene. “Stand back, gentlemen. Let her work.”

  “What she’s doing violates every law of life and death,” Bancroft said. “This is why we sent Mick to kill her in the first place.”

  “Mick is my friend,” Nash answered. “I have to let her help him.”

  I was touched by Nash’s compassion. I also didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I closed my eyes and tried to look inside myself, as Jamison had wanted me to. He’d wanted me to find my two natures, to observe them, to learn about them, to make them play nicely together.

  I wished I was better at meditation. I knew I needed to focus on something specific—a sound, a string of words, my breathing. But all I heard was buzzing in my ears, I couldn’t think of a mantra to say to myself, and my breathing was all over the place.

  It’s simple, the magic said. Push the puny Stormwalker power out, and let this one take over. You can do anything. Remember what it felt like when you were Beneath.

  That experience had been heady. When I’d been Beneath and wanted something to happen, it just happened. I had but to say a word.

  And you don’t even really need the word.

  Being a Stormwalker is what I am. The storms drive me crazy, but if I couldn’t ride them, who would I be?

  A damn powerful hell-goddess, the magic answered.

  A hell-goddess who has arguments with herself. Both magics are part of me. I’m not all one or the other.

  You can’t save Mick with the storm magic.

  Why not? Storm magic makes dragons even stronger.

  Because there’s no storm, you simple-minded bitch!

  Well, that was true. The night was cloudless, cold, crisp.

  Watch who you’re calling a bitch, I thought grumpily. You want to rule me, to take over and use me to work your own will. Well, I’m not letting you. Wimpy Janet doesn’t live here anymore.

  You must embrace the goddess power entirely, or you’ll never be able to save Mick.

  Wanna bet?

  For just an instant, I felt the other voice waver. Then it went on.

  Forget about Mick. He’s weak. The other dragon, Drake, has a nice body, and he’d make a good slave. Or the human, Nash. You know you want him in bed with you. Just to see what it would be like.

  A vision took me. Mick gone, ashes scattered, Nash consoling me. His mouth on mine. Me on top of him on the exercise machine in his long, low house.

  Then I thought of the way he usually looked at me—in vast irritation. I thought about Maya, the look on her face when she’d called down the hall tonight: Nash, I love you.

  The vision fled. Not likely.

  You won’t be able to save Mick. Not by yourself.

&
nbsp; I had the feeling the voice was right. But talking to it let me start to separate it from the Stormwalker within me. The feeling of each magic was different. The Beneath power was bright, sharp, brittle. The storm power smelled like damp, clean earth; it was thick, substantial, solid, and strong. The Beneath power came and went, but the Stormwalker power was always there, centering me.

  I touched both, marveling at the difference. If I wound them together, grounding myself with the Stormwalker magic while wielding the Beneath magic like a sword, I could do this. I could do anything.

  I drew a breath. With my feet I reached for the earth, for the core that bound the world together. With my hands I reached for the Beneath magic. I twined the darkness of the storm power with the brightness of Beneath, and twisted it into something that sparkled like black onyx.

  Beneath my fingers, Mick twitched.

  At the same time, all the breath was abruptly squeezed out of me. My storm power and the Beneath power squeaked like the magic mirror when it was scared, and both vanished. I opened my eyes, weak, sick, and suddenly magicless.

  Cassandra stood not far from me, protected by Drake and Colby. She wore a business skirt suit, which looked ridiculous out here in the middle of dust, rocks, and scrub. Pamela stood behind her, arms folded.

  Cassandra’s glowing hands were pressed together while she chanted words I didn’t understand. I knelt beside Mick, rigid, unable to move.

  The binding spell. Cassandra had been working on one to weave around Jim, except now she’d decided to work it on me. And it was so damned powerful that my own magic, both Stormwalker and Beneath, hid behind me and whimpered.

  The dragons stood back and let her work. I saw Coyote at the lip of the canyon in his coyote form, simply watching.

  Beyond the dragons, Maya Medina’s red truck threw up dirt as it spun to a halt, and Maya leapt out of it. She ran toward us, slipping and stumbling on gravel. Nash met her halfway, and she flung her arms around his neck.

  It should have been a beautiful moment. Nash held Maya tight, tight, lifting her from her feet, holding her close. When Maya raised her head to look at him, he cupped one hand around her face and kissed her.

  My attention was dragged from them by the sound of wings. Not leather dragon wings, but feathered wings. I expected the crow, but there was too much noise for just one bird.

  I couldn’t look around, couldn’t speak. The binding spell certainly wouldn’t allow me to talk. So many mages commanded words of power, could destroy their enemies in two or three syllables. A smart witch would include speech suppression in her binding spell, and Cassandra was so very smart.

  When the winged beings surrounded me, I nearly screamed in spite of the spell. I couldn’t, of course, and so the sound plunged back down my gullet and rested like a rock in my stomach.

  They were men with masks painted in patterns of red, turquoise, white, black, and yellow. They wore loincloths and soft boots, and their winged bodies were painted as well. These were the kachinas, the real ones, gods not very happy with one small Navajo woman.

  They surrounded me, cutting off my vision from my friends, my enemies, and my lover. I couldn’t tell whether the shudder I’d felt in Mick was the magic working or just a residual spark of his own life force.

  I’d never know. The kachinas whirled around me until I could see nothing but feathery wings, and then the desert and the night vanished. I found myself in a small, enclosed space, in the dark, and utterly alone.

  There’s nothing like being walled in a living tomb to make you appreciate the small things in life.

  I sat on cold stone, and cold stone surrounded me. I could stand up and walk a few feet from wall to wall, but sharp pebbles littered the floor, making footing treacherous. After I’d fallen and cut my hands a few times, I decided it was safer to just sit.

  I wiped my hands on my shirt and toyed with the pebble I’d picked up. It was light but sharp—lava rock. My tired mind told me that the kachinas dwelled in the San Francisco mountains, which Navajo call the Diichilí Dzil and the Hopi call Navatekiaoui. The San Francisco Peaks were extinct volcanoes, the cinder cone of Sunset Crater and the lava tubes around it reminders of that fact.

  Was I there, under those mountains? Or in another world entirely? Would the kachinas have risked taking me to their spirit world? Or had they simply walled me in here and left me to starve to death?

  Strangely, I didn’t panic. The room was dark and cool but not freezing, and I had air. I couldn’t feel any breeze, but the air wasn’t stale and I didn’t struggle to breathe, so I figured oxygen got to me from somewhere.

  It was calm here after the crazy fight with Jim, after fighting, terrified, against the stasis spell. In here I was alone, dirty, sore, tired, and trapped—but at least I was safe.

  Needless to say, my cell phone didn’t work, not even to tell me the time. I was surprised it had survived intact. I had the habit of being hard on cell phones.

  I pulled out the chamois bag I kept the mirror in and pulled out the shard. Even in the absolute darkness, the mirror glinted with a spark of its own.

  “So, where am I?” I asked it.

  “Haven’t the faintest idea, sugar. It’s dark.”

  “Well, thank the gods you were here to tell me that. Your best guess, then? How far am I from Magellan?”

  “I don’t know. Distance means nothing to me.”

  I refrained from putting the shard under my boot heel and grinding it to powder. “Will you at least give me some light?”

  “That I can do. Coming right up, sweetie.”

  The mirror glowed, the white light stabbing into my dark-accustomed eyes. I snapped my eyelids shut and then opened them a fraction of an inch at a time.

  The pale light revealed what I’d guessed—I was in a small, cavelike room with no entrance anywhere to be seen. The floor was littered with black lava rock and glittering Apache tears, which were translucent obsidian stones. I picked up one of the Apache tears, liking how I could hold it to my eye and see the light through it.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked the mirror. “What is happening at the hotel?” I avoided the question I most wanted to ask, but the mirror caught on.

  “I don’t know whether Micky’s all right, honey. If he were the only mage I answered to, I’d know, because I’d go dark if he were dead. But I answer to you too, so I’m still here, and I can’t tell.”

  Pain lanced my heart. “Can you just show me the hotel?” I asked.

  The shard of mirror clouded for a few seconds, and when it cleared, I looked through a spiderweb of cracks into the saloon of my hotel. The room was dark, the chairs up on the tables, the place closed.

  I was about to tell the mirror not to bother when Cassandra walked in, took down a chair, and sank into it, resting her head in her hands. Cassandra, whose damned binding spell had landed me here.

  Another figure followed her: Pamela, tall and strong in jeans and sleeveless shirt. She stood behind Cassandra and put her hands on her shoulders.

  “It wasn’t your fault, sweetheart,” Pamela said. “You were trying to help.”

  “No, I was trying to stop her from using the magic. I didn’t know they were going to take her. How do I know she’s even alive? My locator spells haven’t worked. They’re being blocked.” She laughed a little. “Gods can do that, you know.”

  Pamela softly kneaded Cassandra’s shoulders. “I didn’t realize Janet was that special to you.”

  “She gave me a chance without question, never pries about my past. She’s given me what I need, a place to lick my wounds and be alone.”

  “Is that what you need? To be alone?”

  “I thought so when I first came here.” Cassandra laid her hand over one of Pamela’s. “Not so sure now.”

  Pamela leaned down, sliding her arms all the way around Cassandra. “We’ll find her. That was some damn powerful magic you did out there. You’ll work some more.”

  Cassandra looked miserable. “I don’t know i
f I can. I’m so tired.”

  I’d never seen Cassandra anything but calm and cool, always knowing exactly what to do. Now she raised a tear-streaked face to Pamela, and Pamela bent and kissed her lips.

  “Turn it off,” I told the mirror. “Leave them alone.”

  “No way, sugar pie. Those two ladies are hot.”

  I put my hand over the glass. “What is it with your obsession with sex?”

  “I’m a mirror. I can only be a voyeur, so I have to go for it.”

  “Will you get their attention? When they’re ready; don’t rush.”

  “Hang on, they’re coming up for air.”

  When Cassandra’s face filled the broken mirror, I let go of my anger at her. Her eyes were red and anxious, her usually sleek hair in tangles, her makeup smeared by tears.

  “Janet? Where are you?” She peered into the mirror, but I could tell she saw only her own reflection, not me.

  She was magical enough to hear me, though. “I was hoping you could tell me,” I said.

  “My locator spells won’t work. They fizzle out. Sheriff Jones tried to activate the GPS on your phone, but that didn’t work either.”

  “I’m somewhere underground. Probably too deep for satellites or phone signals. It’s lava, though. An old volcano. That should narrow it down to a few hundred places in the world.”

  “Keep the mirror going,” Cassandra suggested. “Maybe my spells will work through that.”

  “Worth a try.” My matter-of-fact, brave tone faltered. “Mick?”

  The lines on Cassandra’s face deepened. “I don’t know. The dragons took him away. Janet, I’m sorry. I think he’s gone.”

  I thought he was too. I remembered the film over his eyes, the last breath he drew when he smiled at me and said, Sorry, baby. I put my hand over my mouth, stifling a sob.

  “Janet?” Cassandra kept trying to find me in the mirror. “You all right?”

  I wiped my eyes. “I’ll keep the mirror out, and you keep trying those spells.”

  “I will.” She turned away and started talking rapidly to Pamela as the two of them moved out of sight.

  I drew my feet up and hugged my knees. I couldn’t concentrate anymore on trying to figure out where I was; I didn’t try to wake up my magic that seemed to have gone dormant; I stopped worrying about how I was going to get out.