Mick went on, “What did you mean, you think you killed her?”
“I mean don’t remember,” Ansel said. “A week ago, I woke up, lying facedown in the middle of the desert, blood all over me. It was night, but I could feel the dawn coming. I barely got to ground in time to escape the day. I’d started the evening with Laura, but she wasn’t with me, and I couldn’t remember what had happened to her. I called her when I woke up again the next night to make sure she was all right, and she didn’t answer. She isn’t at her house or her store, she hasn’t returned my messages, no one has seen her, and I haven’t been able to find her.” Ansel scrubbed his forehead. “Janet, I’ve been so bloody worried.”
For Ansel, the calmest and most understated of creatures I knew, “bloody worried” meant he was out of his mind with fear.
I’d never heard him talk about Laura DiAngelo, friend or otherwise. I didn’t make a habit of prying into my friends’ private lives, but I made an exception for Nightwalkers. Even ones like Ansel, who are trying to stay off the human blood and live as normal a life as possible, are extremely dangerous. Having a Nightwalker in your basement is like storing a ton of plastic explosives—perfectly stable until hooked up to a detonator, and then . . . look out.
“Who is Laura, and why haven’t you mentioned her?” I asked.
“I ought to have. Sorry.” That Ansel didn’t tell me it was none of my flipping business attested to his fear. “I met Laura in Santa Fe. She has an antique shop there. In went in to look at a few pieces—she keeps her shop open late during the tourist season. We got to talking, and then we went out for drinks.” He shot me his boyish smile, the one that must have floored all those girls in their high-heeled pumps in 1939. “Don’t look so surprised, Janet. I can be quite charming when I put my mind to it.”
I knew he could be. “So, you talked about antiques?”
“That and more. My family owned an antiques shop in London before the war. Laura and I talked for a long time, before the bar kicked us out. We became friends, and then we formed a sort of partnership. She’s a small dealer, nothing showy, but picks up nice Native American artifacts here and there—genuine ones. She rather roused the antiques bug in me again.” He gave me another smile. “I scour auction material online and tell her where to go and what to buy. She sells it and shares the proceeds with me. We’ve made a bit of cash; not much, but some.”
“And that night?” I prompted.
“We met up in Gallup and went to dinner. She wanted to discuss something with me, a . . . project we’d been working on. Afterward, we got in her car and headed out of town. She took a turn and started driving north, onto the reservation, I think toward Shiprock. And then . . . I woke up near dawn in the desert with a headache and no memory of how I got there.” Ansel sank back into his pillows. His face, which had picked up some animation while he talked, faded into hopelessness once more.
None of this sounded good. If Ansel had gone into his blood frenzy, he could have dragged Laura out of her car, fed off her, dumped her, and fled into the desert. In the dark, out in western New Mexico, there wouldn’t have been many witnesses, if any at all.
I asked, “How did you get out of the frenzy? You have to have blood to sate it, right? Anyone you’d drained couldn’t have been far away.”
“Not unless I’d hidden the body before I passed out.” A gruesome possibility. “But I was alone out there. I was terrified of the dawn and fled. I didn’t stay to investigate. I spent the night underground, digging into a little cave I’d found in the side of an arroyo. I tried to go back to the spot when I woke up again, but I couldn’t find exactly where I’d been. One stretch of desert looks like any other to me.”
He looked so pathetic, stretched out between me and Mick, lean and boyishly handsome. I’d seen Ansel become a crazed killer, though. Whenever he was the Nightwalker, he showed a ruthless cruelty and a brutal sarcasm that cut as sharply as his teeth. That person was inside him, somewhere, and I hoped I never had to meet him again.
“Why the slayer?” I asked him.
“Laura’s sister, Paige. She found out I was a Nightwalker. She’s convinced I killed Laura, and she’s probably right.”
I exchanged a look with Mick. “Not many people believe in Nightwalkers,” I said. “Did Laura?”
“Yes. She said that her research into history and antiquities has brought her up against many weird things. She guessed I was Nightwalker, and I told her my story. Laura promised to keep my secret, but Paige is a follower of the supernatural, it appears. Believes in Nightwalkers, Changers, angels, ghosts—everything occult. She’s convinced I killed Laura, and now is sending slayers to kill me.” Ansel dredged up a breath to let it out. “I’ll go, Janet. When the slayer reports that you and Mick protected me, Paige will be after you too.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” I said. “If this slayer puts out the word that you’re being guarded by a dragon and a Stormwalker, they’ll give up and look for easier pickings. No slayer’s going to want to tangle with Mick.”
“Unless he’s a dragonslayer as well,” Mick said.
I thought he was joking, but one look at Mick’s eyes—which had started to turn dragon black—told me he wasn’t. I lifted my hand. “One disaster at a time, all right? Ansel, how did Laura’s sister figure out you were a Nightwalker? I don’t broadcast the fact.”
Ansel actually smiled. “People talk, especially about your hotel.”
Good point. Gossip in the tiny town of Magellan put social networking to shame.
“Back to the night in question,” I said. “How do you know you didn’t run away from Laura when you felt the blood frenzy coming on? You might have decided to ride it out in the desert, where you couldn’t hurt anyone.”
“What about all the blood on my clothes? Besides, I smelled of her.”
Not good. I wanted to believe there was another explanation, but it was looking worse and worse for Ansel. If he had killed this Laura DiAngelo, Mick or I would have to put him down. Friend or no, we couldn’t let the bomb detonate.
Ansel knew it too. He squeezed his eyes shut again and began to shake. The poor guy was miserable.
Mick reached down and put his hand on Ansel’s shoulder. “We’ll find out what happened. Janet and I are on this.”
I started to say that I couldn’t guarantee success, but Ansel opened his eyes and looked up at us, so pathetically grateful, that I subsided.
“I have a photo of Laura in my nightstand,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you now. The sleep is coming.”
His day sleep, he meant. Because Nightwalkers burned energy at an incredible rate when fully awake, they spent their days in hibernation. They can stay awake during the day, as long as they keep out of direct sunlight, but they remain groggy, crabby, and incoherent.
As Ansel drifted off, I rummaged through his nightstand drawer and found a picture of a young woman in hiking attire—shorts, T-shirt, hiking boots, her brown hair in ponytail under a baseball cap.
She had a wide smile in the sunshine, tanned arms and face, and pale circles around her eyes that showed she usually wore sunglasses. She looked like any other young woman out hiking the Southwest, though I’d never seen her before. I showed the picture to Mick, who studied it with interest.
Ansel was truly asleep now, the sleep of the dead. Mick covered him with a quilt and tucked the bottle of blood into Ansel’s mini-refrigerator so it wouldn’t spoil.
That was Mick all over—he’d knock you out to keep you from killing your friends then make sure you were comfortable for when you woke up.
*** *** ***
Mick and I walked upstairs together. Though I was tired and a little sore from the fight, I’d had a big adrenaline rush, and I needed to work off the energy.
I looked at Mick, fantasizing about peeling the tight jeans from his fine behind once we made it to the bedroom. I hooked one finger through his belt loop in preparation.
Mick, though, towed me to the front door a
nd started unlocking the heavy thing, opening the hotel for the day.
This did not make me happy. Mick had been walking on eggshells around me the past couple of months. I’d thought we’d worked it out—what had happened this winter wasn’t his fault, so there was nothing to forgive. I’d told him this. Repeatedly.
Should have been end of story, but Mick is a complicated guy. Plus, he’d been making mysterious trips, thankfully not long ones, that he wouldn’t talk about. I worried about him like crazy when he wasn’t around, but when Mick didn’t want to say something, he was master at not saying it. He’s about two hundred and fifty years old and has had a lot of practice.
“It’s still early,” I said, my finger finding his belt loop again.
“Why don’t you go shower and take off for Gallup, and I’ll prep for breakfast. You know Elena pitches a fit if the kitchen isn’t set up the way she likes it.”
“That can wait a few minutes, can’t it?” Your girlfriend’s horny, Mick. Catch the hint.
He gave me his heart-melting smile. Mick was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a hard body, currently wearing jeans and nothing else. I knew there was nothing else, because I’d watched him don the jeans over bare skin down in Ansel’s room. His waistband rode low on his hips, showing me the glory trail that pointed downward from his navel.
As irritated as I was, I couldn’t deny that Mick was sexiness wrapped in human form. Who could blame me wanting a little morning delight before I ran off to investigate a week-old possible murder?
Mick bent to kiss my forehead. “Trust me, Janet. We’d need longer than a few minutes.” He touched my hair then turned away for the kitchen.
I put my hands on my hips and watched him go, filling my senses his bare back, fine ass under one layer of cloth, and the sharp-lined fire tattoo that ran across his lower back.
The vision would have to sustain me for a while. He ducked into the kitchen without looking back again, and I had to let him go.
In my bedroom, I ditched my clothes and showered, scrubbing off the dirt, blood, and sweat from the fight. I dried off, dressed, and walked out the back door to greet the sunrise—one thankfully empty of slayers, and of coyotes who liked to spy on me.
Not that I’d seen much of Coyote since his wife—his wife, the gods help us—had shown up. I liked Bear, what little I saw of her, but Coyote had made himself scarce.
What I did see outside was my new Harley gleaming in the morning sunlight. Mick had brought it out of the shed and parked it at my back door while I showered.
Mick, now with a shirt and boots to go with the jeans, came out of the kitchen. I gave him another full glance. The black T-shirt clung to his body, and I knew he was still commando under the jeans.
“Come with me,” I said. “You’re good at this.”
Mick could be a more clearheaded thinker than I was—most of the time. When he got mad, though, all bets were off. He was a dragon and thought like a dragon, which meant, If it pisses me off, crush it.
“One of us needs to stay,” Mick said. “Ansel’s vulnerable in his day sleep, and the slayer was human, which means our wards won’t keep him out. And . . .” Mick looked up at the two stories of square brick hotel rising behind us. “If there’s a price on Ansel’s head, who’s to say that one of your other guests isn’t a slayer? I’ll stay and keep watch and fill in Cassandra and Elena when they get here.”
Cassandra, my hotel manager, was a witch of incredible power, in addition to being a damn good hotel manager. She’d understand the need to protect Ansel until we knew what was up.
I wasn’t as certain about Elena, the temperamental cook. She too was a powerful witch, but in a different way, having access to incredible Apache shaman magic that had pooled for about a century. She didn’t much like Nightwalkers, though. She was good about stocking blood for Ansel, but she’d made it known she didn’t approve. Elena could go either way on the Ansel question, and might decide to give aid to the slayers.
However, Elena liked Mick—one of the few people she did like—and Mick would better be able to persuade her to help than I could.
Mick kissed me good-bye, a lingering kiss that made me want to push him back inside the hotel and lock the door. But he straightened up, told me to watch myself, and waved me off.
Not that riding out into the dawn on my new, dark blue Softail was a bad thing. I’d wrecked my last Harley, a Sportster, this past winter, by falling with it into a two-hundred foot sinkhole. The thing had shattered, and all that was left now fit into a shoebox. Mick had bought me the new one after he’d assessed that I’d had time enough to grieve for the old one.
I started the Softail and closed my eyes to enjoy the throb under me. My previous bike had rattled my bones no matter how much I’d tuned it, but this girl was smooth as silk. Mick had tucked a pair of gloves onto the handlebars, and I drew them on, fastened my helmet, lifted my feet, waved to Mick, and glided out of the parking lot.
I rode north, up through Flat Mesa toward the I-40. With any luck, Sheriff Jones would still be curled up next to Maya Medina in his house in Flat Mesa and not out watching for the first opportunity to pull me over. Not because I’d done anything wrong, but because he could. In Hopi County, Sheriff Nash Jones was God.
Whether Jones was still home or striding in early to work, I made it through the quiet streets of Flat Mesa unharassed, and continued to Holbrook. The early morning was cool, a breeze moving the dry grasses. North of me, the land was pink and gold with the rising sun, thin red buttes poking from the desert like fingers into the morning.
In that direction lay home—Chinle and Many Farms—but I needed to go east, on the freeway that would take me along the edge of the Navajo Nation, to Gallup where Laura and Ansel had dined.
I wished Ansel hadn’t fallen asleep before he’d given me more than Laura’s name and her photo, but at least I had that. I could ask connections in Santa Fe to tell me what antique store Laura owned, and Ansel could fill me in on more details when he woke up.
Ever thoughtful, Mick had filled my gas tank. The freeway was quiet this early, and I smiled as I leaned into the bike, riding into the rising sun.
About an hour later, I rode between straight-sided cliffs, an ancient river valley, and into Gallup, a town upon which people from the Navajo, Zuni, and other Pueblo nations converged to trade, shop, eat, sleep, pass the time of day, and sell things to tourists.
I’d been an art photographer before I’d decided to restore the hotel in Magellan, and I still sold the pictures I took of the Navajo Nation and the deserts around Magellan through a shop run by a man called Jeff Benally on the main highway in town. Jeff was always up on gossip. He’d be able to tell me if Ansel had come to town to have dinner with a white woman from Santa Fe—and probably what they’d ordered, what time they’d left the restaurant, whether they’d left together, and which direction they’d been heading.
I started to take the exit to town—Jeff and his wife never minded me dropping by—and discovered I couldn’t move the handlebars. At all. The bike was still going seventy miles per hour, but the handlebars were locked solid.
I tried to lean into the turn, to slow down and glide off the road, but nothing happened. Alarmed, I yanked the bike toward the road’s shoulder, and the bike yanked back.
I hit the brakes, which did nothing. I tried throttling down. Nothing. I cut the power, but the bike roared to life again under my hands. What the fuck?
The motorcycle took off, me clinging on to its back like a spider. The speedometer climbed to seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred.
The bike flew on east as the sun climbed, Mount Taylor looming in the distance, but I was closing that distance fast. Me leaping off the motorcycle at a hundred miles an hour would only kill me, and smacking the bike with magic might destroy it and me along with it.
A voice chirped to my right, a piece of magic mirror custom ground by Mick into my side mirror. “Oh, girlfriend,” it said in its drag-queen drawl. “What’s goi
ng on?”
“Tell Mick!” I shouted. The wind tore away my words, but the mirror heard me.
“Can’t,” it said.
“Can’t? What do you mean can’t? You have to. You’re supposed to obey me.”
“Can’t,” it repeated. “Sorry, sugar.”
The mirror—the original of which was hanging in the saloon at my hotel—was magic-bound to obey me and Mick, and no one should be able to take that obedience from us. The idea that someone or something had done it scared me even more than my out-of-control bike.
The bike glided around eighteen wheelers, RVs, and cars without me doing a thing, taking me east at breakneck speed.
Not surprisingly, I picked up the attention of the local police. A state patrol car got on my tail, and another one going west tore through the island between the east- and westbound lanes and pulled in behind me. Nothing I could do. I put my head down into the wind, and the cops kept pace behind me.
At the turnoff to the 371 toward Farmington, my motorcycle swerved onto the off-ramp, squealed around the corner at the end of it, and headed north. The cops were right behind me. A tribal police SUV swung in ahead of me, trying to cut me off, but my bike kicked in still faster. The motorcycle rocked back, front wheel rising into the air like a rearing horse, me hanging on in terror.
The bike came down and sped forward, swerving around the tribal SUV and tearing on up the road.
The Softail dodged onto a narrow road after Crownpoint and headed east then north again on a rough, unpaved road. My bike banged through ruts and holes without stopping, me gritting my teeth and clinging on as best I could.
The state patrollers in their sedans got left behind, but the Navajo cop was still on me. This road was supposed to be impassable for passenger cars, but the cop had a high-clearance SUV, so he’d be fine. Or, if not, and I got him stuck in a wash, he’d only bust my ass even harder.
I finally had an idea where we were headed, though. About forty miles up this road lay Chaco Canyon, a mysterious place with deep history, and an aura that made me crazy. The huge structures at Chaco had been built a thousand and more years ago, and the pueblo people who lived in them had also constructed wide roads that led nowhere. New Agers claim the roads are landing strips for aliens; Navajo stories say that the peoples who lived there built the roads for races against a god. Whatever the theories, the place has the weight of magic and the ages.
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