by L. M. Hawke
The dark mouth of an unlit street opened to her left; she darted down it, thinking to put on a burst of speed under cover of relative darkness and lose her pursuer that way. But her eyes adjusted quickly to the dark lane, even through her shades, and Ellery stumbled to a halt, cursing bitterly.
In her panic she had turned down an alley, not a street—and its other end was sealed by a brick wall that looked much newer than the walls on either side of her. If the streets of downtown Flagstaff were like the landscapes of her home, then this alley was a box canyon: steep and impassable on three sides. The only way out was the way she had come in, and there was a Navajo man out there, chasing her down.
She couldn’t go back. No way.
Ellery looked up at the sky. A few stars asserted themselves and shone through the light pollution of the city. The sky—that was another way out. Her only option now.
She reached through the bracelet token, and for once Ghost Owl dispensed with his usual grouching. She felt him give an eager screech; he wanted her to get out of this mess just as badly as she did, and as Dusty the coyote did.
Ellery concentrated, opened herself to the intense flash of blue light and the shock of rapid travel through time and space that always accompanied her shifts.
But nothing happened.
Ghost Owl screamed again, more desperately this time, and she could all but see the barn owl’s face before her, his sharp beak clacking in his pale, heart-shaped face, his black, slanted eyes scornful.
“I’m trying,” Ellery said, trying to keep her voice down, trying to keep panic from overwhelming her every thought and every move.
She attempted the shift again. Ghost Owl tried, too, pushing back at her from the barrier between their two worlds, flapping his speckled wings, tearing with this talons—trying to help her break through. But still Ellery remained in her human form.
“What the hell is going on?” she panted, though there was no one there to answer her. She had never been unable to shift when she wanted to do it—ever since she’d been taught how, as a little girl.
Again and again she strained to change herself into Ghost Owl, and then into Dusty, who might at least be able to hide somewhere in the alley better than a human woman could. But there was no getting through the barrier between her world and the spirit world, where her animals existed. There was no way to bring them through the mysterious channels of blue light that connected their two worlds like the fragile strands of a spider’s web.
Wide-eyed with fear, facing the alley’s mouth, Ellery backed up until she bumped into the alley’s rear wall. “Shit,” she muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”
If she held really still, maybe the man in the black duster would pass her by. Maybe he hadn’t seen her turn into the alley. Maybe he’d go right on past without looking down its length; or if he did look into the alley’s depths, maybe Ellery would be well-hidden by shadows and he would move on.
At the alley’s mouth, she could see the lights of passing traffic—the yellow flash of headlights, the intense red glare of tail lights like the eyes of predatory creatures in the night. Somebody rode past on a bike; the bike’s thin frame, flickering rapidly against the glow of street and cars, made Ellery think of a skeletal monster loping through the Arizona night.
Then the shape she feared to see appeared at the alley’s mouth. Tall, broad in the shoulder, the duster coat made him look like a monolith of strength in silhouette. The hat, the kind a proper and traditional Diné man always wore, loomed atop that black shape like a vulture with its wings spread.
Ellery held her breath, though she was reasonably sure the man was Typical and therefore not likely to pinpoint her location by sound. Not at this distance, with the noise of the city all around them.
“Ellery Chee,” the man called softly down the alley.
Despite her will to remain invisible and silent, Ellery let out an explosive breath. She couldn’t help herself. She felt as if she’d been slugged in the stomach.
The man knew her name—knew exactly who she was. That settled it: he didn’t mean her any good. And Ellery had no way out of this trap. She reached through the owl token again, but the barrier remained as impassable as before. It was hopeless; she was caught at last, and now there was no escape.
The man approached slowly. Against the glare of traffic, she could see that he held his hands out to his sides, fingers spread, holding nothing. No gun, no knife. It was meant to be a soothing gesture, Ellery felt sure. But she saw his fingers as claws, poised to rip and tear at her flesh.
“Go away,” she told him. She was proud that her voice was steady. But as she spoke, she felt that strange pull toward the northeast, stronger and more compelling than before. She bit her lip and resisted it; she couldn’t take her eyes off this man—not for a second.
“I can’t go away,” the man answered. Still walking slowly toward her, still holding his hands out in a display of peaceful intent—or in readiness to catch her if she tried to make a break and run past him. “I need you.”
His voice was deep, but without the gravel of age. It held the rhythms of the Rez—the sound of the Navajo Nation, the place she longed to return to and the place she knew she must never go back to, on pain of death. The sound of home in his voice—home, with all it implied for Ellery—was an enchantment stronger than any trick the vampire had pulled. But this man was no Chanter, Ellery felt sure. No Para of any sort. Just an ordinary man, as Typical as they came.
“Back off and let me leave,” Ellery said.
The man was much closer now—six paces away, five.
“Stop right there!”
Ellery didn’t really expect the guy to obey her command. But he did, halting a few feet away with his hands still held out placidly.
“I’m not here to hurt you, Ellery.”
“Then why are you here? Why are you following me?”
At closer range, she could make out his features, even with the glare of the road backlighting his shape. He had the broad, straight nose, dark eyes, and wide mouth that so clearly said “Diné,” and he looked little older than Ellery herself—perhaps six or seven years her senior, no more.
“My name is Hosteen Sikaadii,” he said. “I’m an officer with the Navajo Nation police force.”
Ellery flinched back violently; the brick of the wall bit into her flesh, cold and hard.
“Please don’t be afraid,” Hosteen continued. “I’m not here to do you any harm.”
Ellery’s heart thumped. She was seized by a sudden, desperate inspiration. “You can’t, anyway. We aren’t on the Rez. You have no jurisdiction here.”
The moment she said those words—the Rez—Ellery felt another insistent tug from whatever strange force was out there, pulling at her, enticing her, commanding her. And she realized, with a twist of dread in her gut, that northeast—the direction that called to her—was the direction of the Navajo Nation.
Hosteen smiled at her assertion, but it didn’t make Ellery feel any better. “Exactly. I came to find you because I need your help.”
“My help? That’s crazy. I can’t help you. I’m a barista, not a cop. Now move aside and let me go home.”
“You can help me,” Hosteen insisted. There was a hint of a plea in his voice, the barest note of desperation. It made Ellery feel a little less afraid, to know that this officer was feeling less than confident right now, too. “And you’re not a barista. Or at any rate, a barista is the least of what you are.”
Ellery lifted her chin in defiance. “You don’t know a thing about what I am. Not one damn thing. So go find somebody else to help you; I’m not interested.”
“You’ll be interested once you know more about the case. I feel sure of that.”
Hosteen lowered his hands slowly to his sides, and Ellery tensed, wondering if he’d draw some weapon. But he never did. He didn’t come any closer, either. He just stood in silence, watching her, stilled by awe or—could it be?—fear.
Finally he said, “And
I do know what you are. I know all about it. But you don’t need to be afraid of me. I’m willing to trust you, if you’re willing to trust me.”
Ellery choked out a bitter laugh. How stupidly, predictably, mind-numbingly Typical of him, to assume he knew the first thing about Ellery Chee, her life, her past, or her paranormal abilities. If he’d been a little closer, she might have swung a fist at him, purely from exasperation.
Instead, she reached up and very deliberately removed her sunglasses.
She faced Hosteen squarely, staring straight into his eyes, and she noted the superstitious shudder that wracked his broad frame.
“You think you know me?” Ellery said quietly. “Then tell me: what am I?”
Hosteen’s fear seemed to flow through him like a cold current. But though he swayed slightly and his breath came faster, he didn’t allow any of his agitation to show on his face. Ellery admired that, a little. She admired, too, the fact that he didn’t avert his eyes, didn’t break her gaze—even though she knew that under the light of stars or moon, however faint that light, her own eyes glowed a chilling red, like the gaze of an animal caught in the beam of a flashlight.
“What am I?” she said again, braver now, sensing she was rapidly gaining the upper hand.
Hosteen’s voice was faint when he spoke, almost a whisper. But even though it was night and the alley was thick with darkness, he still said the word.
“Skinwalker.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Skinwalker!” Ellery’s answer was half laugh, half shout. “Hah! Shows what you know: not a damn thing.”
“But your eyes,” Hosteen said. He still sounded shaky, awed.
“But nothing. I’m not a skinwalker. There’s a proper word for what I am: a Changer. Or to be more specific, a trader.”
“You’re a shapeshifter. Everyone knows—”
Ellery donned her shades again. Hosteen relaxed visibly when the eerie red glow of her eyes vanished behind the lenses.
“Yes, I am a shape-shifting Paranormal, but that doesn’t make me a skinwalker. It doesn’t make me evil.”
“I never said you were evil,” Hosteen insisted, holding up his hands again in that placating gesture.
“But what is a skinwalker, according to Diné belief, if not evil?”
Hosteen grimaced. Ellery had him pinned to the mat, and they both knew it.
The Diné were certainly not the first or the only people in the world to assume Paras were bad. It had happened everywhere, in every culture, as far as Ellery could tell. In Europe and Colonial America, people had been killed for witchcraft—whether they were really witches or not. The Arab tribes had their djinn, the Hindus feared shape-shifting rakshasas, and all across Africa people had fostered fears of paranormal beings from abayifo to zimwi. Every culture in the world had its particular assumptions about paranormal beings. But none of those assumptions, as far as Ellery knew, were true.
“Look,” she said, “I’m willing to grant that maybe there is something to the Diné beliefs. Maybe some Diné practice a form of magic I’m not aware of. Maybe there are evil shapeshifting witches out there who are everything our people believe skinwalkers to be: malevolent and dangerous and not to be trusted. But just because I’m a shapeshifter, and just because I’m Diné, that doesn’t mean I’m a skinwalker, okay? I’m like every other Para in the world, from any given culture. I’m just trying to keep to myself, live my life, and take care of my own. Same as you. And I really am just a barista. So now will you please step aside and let me get on with my life? Somewhere there’s an annoying white lady named McKayla who’s waiting for me to make her an iced skinny pumpkin spice latte with no whip.”
Hosteen shuffled to one side. Ellery brushed past him, walking quickly down the dark alley, trying not to give in to the impulse that was screaming down her nerves to run. That would only give him more reason to suspect her of wrongdoing—to find some way to haul her back to the Navajo Nation, where he did have jurisdiction, and where, she knew, tribal law would not treat her kindly.
“I really do need your help, Ellery,” he said as she walked away. “And I hope you’ll be kind enough to assist me.”
“Not interested,” she answered without turning around. She was almost at the mouth of the alley now, nearly out on the street where she could run again if necessary.
“William Roanhorse is dead.”
Ellery froze at the alley’s mouth. A cold wave crashed over her, scouring away all her bravado, even her panic over Hosteen’s presence and her concern for Vivi. It left behind nothing but emptiness, a vast, cavernous sense of loss that she hadn’t felt in ten years.
She turned around slowly. Hosteen was still standing where she’d left him, a blocky shadow against the deeper dark of the alley.
“William Roanhorse was like an uncle to me,” Ellery said softly.
In truth, he was the last family she had in all the world, although he was no blood relation. He was the kindly elder who, when she was just a girl and her shifting abilities first began to manifest, had taken Ellery under his wing and taught her what it meant to be a Changer, how to work with the animal spirits that chose her for Trading. Roanhorse had taught all the Changers Ellery knew on the reservation—a very small group, to be sure, and one that had had to guard its secrets more assiduously than Paras did in the Anglo world, lest they be mistaken for skinwalkers—for malevolent beings.
When she’d fled the reservation at the age of fourteen, Ellery had begged Roanhorse to come with her—to escape the danger and set up a new life elsewhere, someplace where Paras could expect a little more freedom, more understanding. But the old man had shaken his head and smiled. “This is my home,” he told her, “and I won’t leave it.”
Ellery had hugged him so tightly that day, she thought she might stop the world in its tracks and freeze time right there, just her alone with the last family that was left to her. But the world hadn’t stopped turning. Time went mercilessly on. She eventually pulled away from Roanhorse and left, with nothing but the remembered feeling of his strong, warm arms holding her tightly, bracing her up with confidence and love.
She had always intended to go back and visit Roanhorse—somehow. To find him and let him know that she was okay.
But now he was gone forever.
“He’s dead?”
Hosteen nodded. “It wasn’t a… a natural death.”
“He was killed?”
“Why don’t we go somewhere and talk?” Hosteen suggested. “An alley is no place to discuss something as important as a loved one’s death.”
Still Ellery hesitated. The traffic flowed past, smooth and swift. She longed to run, to let go of all her concerns and sprint down the street at her greatest speed, to keep on running out of Flagstaff and far out into the desert where her fears and her darkest memories could never find her.
But she sighed, and then nodded. “All right. I can agree to talk to you, at least, as long as we stay in a public place.”
At the all-night diner across the street from the alley, Ellery and Hosteen settled into a booth, secluded in the back of the restaurant. The waitress filled their coffee mugs; as soon as she had gone, Ellery leaned her elbows on the table, fixing Hosteen with a stare.
“Tell me what happened to William Roanhorse. Don’t hold anything back.”
Hosteen sipped his coffee slowly, as if reluctant to talk after all. But Ellery’s stare was relentless, and finally he set his cup back on the table.
“Roanhorse was killed inside his home.”
Ellery remembered the place. Unlike most Diné, the old man had lived in a traditional hogan, a domed, roughly octagon-shaped hut made of logs and the red mud of the Colorado Plateau. A memory of the place came back vividly to her: pale morning light coming in through its open door, illuminating its simple furniture, the woven rugs on the floor, the colorful cloths hung high up near the convex ceiling, covering the chains of turquoise beads that waited there for Roanhorse’s use.
Sh
e hated to think of him being killed there, in a place that was so beloved to him and to Ellery herself—a place that had been filled with joy and light.
“They killed him in his house? While he was defenseless and alone? Why?”
“Wait a minute,” Hosteen said. “‘They’? Who do you think did it?”
Ellery shrugged uncomfortably. “You’re the cop; you tell me. I haven’t been back to the Rez in ten years.”
“You seem to have some suspicion already of who might have killed Mr. Roanhorse.”
Now it was Ellery’s turn to sip her coffee slowly. It was a useful delaying tactic. “‘They’ is a vague word.”
“You have a suspicion—I can see it in your eyes.”
She glowered at Hosteen. “I’ll put my shades back on, if you think my eyes give away so much.”
You’re damn right, I have suspicions about who killed Roanhorse.
It wasn’t the first time a Changer had been killed on the Rez. But what did this Hosteen character actually know about Roanhorse? Did he know the man had been a shapeshifter, or did he assume Roanhorse was Typical?
Ellery’s long-ingrained instinct to avoid all talk of shapeshifting around Diné had kicked in. If Hosteen didn’t already know that Roanhorse had paranormal abilities—that he had, in fact, turned out to be the most knowledgeable and capable Changer Ellery had ever met—then she wasn’t about to supply him with that information.
But if any of the more superstitious Typicals who lived on the Rez had suspected Roanhorse of shapeshifting… of being a skinwalker… well, that could easily have spelled his doom.
“He was killed in his house,” Hosteen went on, “but here’s the thing: when we found him, the door was barred from the inside.”
Shocked, Ellery leaned back against the booth seat. Her breath whooshed out of her lungs, and for a long moment she couldn’t seem to draw another. But at last she managed to stammer, “Maybe… maybe he died of natural causes, then.”
Hosteen shook his head slowly, his eyes deep with sympathy below the brim of his black hat. “No, Ellery. The attack was… violent. There’s no way his death was natural. No way it could have been a suicide, either.”