Firewalker

by Allyson James

  “What happened to the lady dragon? Is she still with Colby?”

  “She died.”

  “Oh.” Though I’d already labeled the dragon as a she-bitch, that was sad. “How?”

  “Battle with another dragon faction. We’re not all best friends.”

  I remembered the fight when Drake had pulled me out of the mountain. “So I gathered.” I toyed with the stem of my wineglass. “I’m sorry. About the lady dragon, I mean.”

  “She and Colby hadn’t mated yet. No bond there. But still it was hard on him.”

  “And you?”

  He nodded. “And on me too.”

  It gave me something to think about later while he held me so tenderly in bed. Mick fighting Colby for a lady dragon. I remembered him telling me that female dragons could turn on their mates and try to kill them. If female dragons were all like Aine, I believed it. I wondered how Mick viewed me in comparison.

  Fast-forward two days to the cool lobby of my hotel, me sitting comfortably with Mick and watching day-to-day business commence. Fremont came in to check a leak in the kitchen, his cheerful affability soothing. Pamela leaned over the counter to talk to Cassandra. I didn’t see Maya, but I would visit her later and grill her about her and Nash. Nash had damn well better have gone to see her by this time.

  I hadn’t seen Coyote since the big fight in the wash. Had he forgiven me, eased his strictures, and let me go? I needed to know.

  I also wanted to twist his fur to help me figure out who had made Undead Jim in the first place. Now that the dragon trial was over, I’d take more time to pursue the question. If some other goddess with the same kind of powers as my mother was walking around up here, I’d need to know. I also wanted to know why they’d brought Jim back to life and given him Beneath powers. And, more important, would they try again?

  I didn’t think Coyote had done it, but he needed to help me track this person down. We could start at the vortexes and work our way from there.

  Worrying about all this was a strain, so I told Mick I needed to take a walk.

  Mick didn’t want to let me out of his sight—he had that look.

  “To the railroad bed, that’s all,” I said. “You won against the dragons, and the kachinas will keep away the dragons who still want to kill me. So you told me.”

  Mick didn’t like it, but he’d learned something about me—that if he tried to tether me, I’d struggle that much harder to break free. I gave him a smile that said that when I got back, he could tether me in a more fun way. I kissed him and left.

  The sun was well up in a blue sky, but the air was cool. The brutal heat of Death Valley had no place here in the mile-high elevation of my desert. I climbed to the top of the railroad bed and breathed in clean scents of scrub and grasses, cedar and juniper, fresh earth, dust, and wind. The vortexes lay out there under the sun, closed, quiet.

  The crow flew to the juniper it liked and gave me the eye. I smiled at it. “Thanks, Grandmother.”

  She gave me her “humph” look, but I swore I saw affection in the glittering black orb.

  “Janet Begay?”

  At the woman’s voice, the crow gave a hoarse caw and flapped into the air. I turned to face a young woman who was my age, perhaps a few years younger.

  She was Native American, but I didn’t think Navajo. She was about an inch shorter than me, and her face was rounder than mine. She wore her hair in a straight ponytail and had on ordinary clothes—jeans and a tight-fitting black top. The only thing out of the ordinary was the lovely silver necklace around her neck, heavy disks decorated with swirls and animal symbols. If it was artisan-created, it would be worth a thousand or so.

  “Yes?” I answered.

  “I’ve been wanting to meet you.” She stuck her hands in her pockets as I sometimes did, and grinned at me. “My name’s Gabrielle Massey. From Whiteriver.”

  “My chef is from Whiteriver,” I said. I wondered if this was one of the Apache woman’s daughters or grand-daughters.

  “I heard.” Gabrielle smiled at me again, the smile wrinkling her nose. She looked friendly, but in a standoffish way, if that made any sense. As though she waited to see how I reacted to her and was prepared to find the reaction amusing.

  “Are you looking for a room?” I asked politely. It never hurt to be nice to a potential guest.

  “Not this time.” Her smile broadened. “You don’t know who I am, do you? And you think you’re so good at reading auras.”

  I looked at hers—no, I looked for hers and didn’t sense one. That was weird. The only being whose aura I couldn’t always sense was Coyote’s, because he knew how to suppress it. That’s how he always snuck up on me.

  She laughed. “I learned the trick. You should too. Your aura is messy. Black and white, like smoke in sunshine. Two natures struggling against each other so hard. I’m lucky. I only have one kind of magic.”

  I stared at her, confused as hell and getting nervous. I wasn’t ready to experiment with my newly mixed magic, but I started imagining a nice, impervious barrier rising between her and me.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” she said, as though she sensed what I wanted to do. “I just wanted to meet you, really. And for you to meet me. It’s been a long time coming.”

  I gave up on politeness. “Well, since I don’t know who the hell you are, I can’t say I’ve been waiting.”

  “I want us to be friends,” Gabrielle said, “which is why I’ve done it this way. But if you want to see...”

  She dropped whatever shields she’d been using, and I got the full blast of her aura. It was white, glittering, hard as ice and just as cold. I swallowed a scream, and it nearly choked me. I’d felt this kind of aura before, and I knew exactly where. It had happened not a mile from this place about four months ago, on a powerfully stormy night.

  The swift glimpse was all I got. By the time I’d drawn a single breath, Gabrielle’s shields were back in place.

  “I learned to hide,” she said. “Because there are things out there that are so easily frightened.”

  Me being one of them. I swallowed on dryness. “You can’t be . . . She said I was the only one that survived.”

  Gabrielle’s eyes crinkled in the corners. “The thing about Mother, Janet, is that she lies. She’s very, very good at it.”

  I felt as though one of the locomotives that used to traverse this track had just slammed into me. My mother, the goddess from Beneath, had made it a habit to possess women, get them with child through unsuspecting males, then withdraw. The resulting child, like me, often had too much magic in her for the innocent woman to carry. The mother most often died, taking the baby with her. The goddess had told me that in all the years she’d been trying, there had only been me.

  The young woman who stood before me, half-Apache, half-goddess, was another.

  Another me.

  Another Janet.

  The world just got very, very complicated.

  “You made Undead Jim,” I said, knowing I was right.

  “Very good. I felt sorry for the guy, lying there stabbed to death, and all he’d done was dig up a few pots. I knew I could bring him back before he was too far gone, so I did. I didn’t realize he’d go on a killing rampage.”

  I understood now why Jim thought I’d resurrected him, why the kachinas had thought I’d made him. They’d sensed Beneath magic, Gabrielle’s magic, and thought it was mine.

  “You didn’t realize?” I repeated. “Three people dead, and you didn’t realize?”

  Gabrielle shrugged. “I’d never resurrected anyone before. Don’t go all moralizing on me, Janet. I made a mistake. You fixed it. Everything’s fine now.”

  “After I got buried alive by kachinas, nearly fried by dragons, and threatened with death by Coyote. Sure, everything’s fine.”

  “Overreact, why don’t you? I came here as a courtesy, because I wanted to meet my sister.” Gabrielle grinned. “So I’m meeting you. I’ll go away now, so you don’t keep getting beat up
for what I do.”

  “Go away where?” I asked in alarm.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere. Don’t worry, I’ll come back to visit.” Gabrielle took her hands out of her pockets and smiled, sunshine glistening on her black hair. “See you, Janet.”

  And she vanished.

  Not in a puff of smoke or anything dramatic like that. She was simply there, and then she wasn’t.

  I stood there for a stunned, frozen moment, and then I scrambled back down the railroad bed and sprinted back to the hotel, shouting for Mick.

  Twenty-eight

  Gabrielle didn’t make a reappearance, but I had Mick and Cassandra help me put extra wards all over the hotel. I spent the next several days looking for my “sister,” checking up on my friends to make sure she hadn’t come near them, and warding their houses as well.

  Coyote didn’t come to me to make good on his promise to kill me for using the Beneath magic to kill Jim and save Mick, but the crow started hanging around a lot.

  My grandmother was pissed as hell about Gabrielle and let me know it. The fact that Grandmother called me on the phone about her, voluntarily, the afternoon after I’d encountered Gabrielle, told me how upset she was. Grandmother had not been thrilled about my existence, but at least I was part of her blood and carried her earth magic. This Gabrielle—I hadn’t sensed any other magic in her but that of Beneath, which meant her biological father and mother must have been ordinary humans. I drove home to Many Farms, taking Mick with me, to try to reassure Grandmother plus strengthen the wards on my family home. My mother had never been able to reach as far as Many Farms, but Gabrielle, born of this earth, could go anywhere she wanted.

  In spite of my worries, I went through weeks of nothing very traumatic happening at my hotel. Guests came and went, I sold some of my art photos, Pamela started renting an apartment in town, and Cassandra moved in with her. The only excitement came when a soft-spoken Nightwalker appeared at my heavily warded door and asked if he could spend the night. He had the hollow look of one of the tame ones, so I let him, provided he was watched. He kept to himself, didn’t make any trouble, didn’t try to suck the other guests dry, and so I put the stakes back into my desk drawer.

  Coyote finally did come to me, in a dream of course.

  We stood in the cut of Chevelon Canyon, the petroglyphs on its steep walls glowing with their own light. The strange creatures in the pictures seemed to writhe and whirl, dancing in their own little frenzy. The creek flowed down the middle, quiet in the moonlight.

  As usual, I was naked. So was Coyote, in his man shape this time.

  “You did good, Janet,” Coyote said, looking me up and down. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Is that why I’m still alive and walking around?”

  Coyote gave me a grin. “Yep.”

  “How did I do good?” I asked, fed up. “You were ready to blast me into atoms the last time I saw you. You did try, and only Nash jumping in front of me saved me.”

  “I wasn’t going to kill you, sweetie, just slow you down a little, but Nash misunderstood and got in the way. You see, you passed my test.”

  “Your test?” I glared at him, folding my arms over my bare breasts. “What do you mean, your test?”

  “I needed to know what you’d do once you realized how powerful you were. Though I wasn’t lying when I said I’d kill you if you screwed up. But you didn’t. You chose to show compassion, even for someone as mindlessly evil as Undead Jim. I get that you had to destroy him in the end. He was wrong, and he had to be stopped.”

  Damn him. He regarded me with calm, dark eyes, still powerful, still a god. Still Coyote.

  I glared back at him in rage. “Would it kill you to tell me these things at the time? I’ve been losing sleep worrying about what you were going to do to me.”

  “Poor baby. Staying awake so Mick can help relax you. Damn, I should have been looking in the window.”

  “Bastard,” I said.

  “Hey, it was for your own good, and you know it. You needed to learn how to silence that voice in your head.”

  The little voice had gone away. I think. I hadn’t heard it in a while anyway, not since I’d learned to braid the Beneath magic and the storm magic into one entity. The good, the bad, and the ugly, coming together to make a useful whole.

  “You learned, you grew,” Coyote said. “I had faith that you would, my Stormwalker.”

  “And if I hadn’t, you would have killed me?”

  “Yep.” Coyote put his strong arm around me. “But you showed your true colors. I love you, Janet.”

  “Thanks,” I said drily. “But I’m still not having sex with you.”

  “Hey, a god’s gotta try.”

  A lizard scurried by, scattering gravel as it scrambled for its next spot of cover. “I need to tell you something,” I said slowly.

  “About your sister?”

  I made an exasperated noise. “How long have you known about that? Will it do me any good to ask why you didn’t bother to tell me about her?”

  “Relax. I didn’t know until she came to you. I was lurking at the bottom of the wash, watching you. I heard when you heard.”

  “You’re telling me you didn’t know she existed? You knew all about me.”

  “That’s because you blundered around burning down buildings as soon as your storm magic manifested. You sure know how to attract attention, Janet. And then your Beneath magic flared up all sparkly once you met your mother. Stealth was never your strength. This Gabrielle, now, she’s learned somehow to hide what she is and hide it damn well. She must have been raised by someone powerful and very smart. We’ll have to keep our eye on our Gabrielle.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetie. You have a lot of friends ready to protect you. Me, for one. Him, for another.”

  Him was the Koshare cartwheeling down the wash. He did a final cartwheel in front of us, misjudged, and fell on his backside. He gazed up at me with a look so comical I had to laugh.

  This wasn’t Ben Kavena; it was the real Koshare, who’d come to me in the cave. I noticed he’d left off the loincloth. What was it about naked flesh in Coyote-instigated dreams?

  “My friend?” I asked the Koshare. “The one who buried me inside a volcano?”

  The Koshare mimed grievous weeping. He fell on his back and kicked his heels like a kid in a crying tantrum.

  “Yes, a friend,” Coyote said. “You passed his test too.”

  “I’m glad I was such a star student.”

  “You should be.”

  The Koshare stopped kicking, arched back, and leapt forward to his feet. He grabbed my hands and spun me around, but only once this time before letting me go.

  You are powerful, he said in my head. You have the magic of the storms—good magic of this earth—and the magic from the place of origin. You have proved that you are strong enough to contain both. You have earned the great respect of my brothers and sisters.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  If you have need, ever, you call on me.

  “Thank you.” I was grateful for that, in truth. Kachinas were powerful entities, and I’d much, much rather they regarded me as a friend than an enemy.

  “We’re good to go, then?” Coyote asked me. “How about some celebratory nookie?”

  I laughed, finally relaxing. “You never stop, do you?”

  Coyote winked. “Okay, then. How about a beer at the Crossroads Bar?”

  “Now, that I can do. Can I bring Mick?”

  “Sure. You know I’m always up for a threesome.”

  The Koshare made a snorting noise. He studied Coyote in mock disgust and shook his hips so that his penis rocked back and forth.

  Coyote’s grin vanished. “Oh, yeah?”

  He morphed into his coyote form, a blue nimbus surrounding his lanky body, and leapt at the Koshare.

  The Koshare sprang into the air and started running for the shallow creek, Coyote right behind him. Halfway there, the Koshare
spun around and pointed at Coyote, and Coyote’s long tail burst into flames.

  Coyote’s high-pitched yowls echoed up and down the canyon, and he ran flat out for the creek. I heard a heavy splash and the hiss of steam.

  The Koshare mimed sidesplitting laughter, sprang into the air, and vanished. I ran to the bank as Coyote climbed from the water, his limbs stiff, tail sodden. He shook himself out, glaring at the air where the Koshare had been, and snarled.

  I fucking hate clowns.

  Turn the page for a special preview of the next book by Allyson James

  Shadowwalker

  Coming soon from Berkley Sensation!

  One

  Nothing quite makes your night like falling two hundred feet into a sinkhole.

  My motorcycle spun as the solid pavement of the highway opened up under me, and then I was falling down, down, down, into the bowels of the earth. An avalanche of rocks, dirt, trees, and the speeding sheriff’s SUV followed me into the abyss.

  My bike and I separated, and it smashed against the side of the hole and broke into many pieces. I tried to stop my fall, to grab on to the roots that protruded from the breaking wall, but I fell so fast, my hands could close on nothing. The SUV ground its way down with the boulders, metal groaning, glass flying to mix with the shower of dirt and gravel.

  I’d been wearing padded leather against the January cold, which protected me somewhat, but all my padding wouldn’t help me if Nash Jones’s SUV fell on top of me. I tried to reach into myself and draw on my magic, but I’m foremost a Stormwalker, which means I can channel the power of a storm, but I need a storm to be present to work the magic. The night, though raw with cold, was stubbornly clear.

  I also had Beneath magic in me from the world below this one, but I had to be in a steady frame of mind to temper it with my Stormwalker magic, or I’d simply blow up the sinkhole and me and Nash with it.

  Falling a couple hundred feet down a sheer drop with an SUV did nothing to put me into a calm frame of mind. I could only flail and claw, gasping for breath as dirt leaked under my helmet and threatened to suffocate me.