Nightwalker

by Allyson James

  I borrowed Gabrielle’s idea and lifted Mr. Young off his feet. Higher and higher Young rose, still wrapped in the lightning. His pistol, on fire, burned his hands.

  “Why does this oh-so-powerful mage want this pot?” I asked. “The real one, I mean. If he’s a mage, he’ll know it’s a fake as soon as he sees it. I knew as soon as you opened the box.”

  Mick answered. “But Mick Burns will have authenticated it. Not Young’s fault if he didn’t know it wasn’t real. The mage still gets mad, but he goes after me instead, to find out what I know, and to kill me if he wants to make himself feel better.”

  I shoved Young a little higher. “Hmm. I’d like to see that fight.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Young said down to me. “McKinnon will kill you in a cold minute. All of you. Doesn’t matter how much lightning you play with.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “See, I’m not playing with the lighting—this is me being nice. I’m not letting it touch you. Where can we find Mr. McKinnon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I shoved Young upward until his back slammed against the smooth, plastered ceiling. “Where was that?”

  “I swear to you, I don’t know. He gets in touch with me when he wants me. I don’t know where he’s from.”

  I believed him. Powerful mages didn’t hand out business cards with their addresses printed on them. The problem with being a powerful mage is that other powerful mages are always ready to go after you. Mages can steal each other’s powers, usually when the first mage was dying.

  I’d met an ultra-powerful mage this past spring. He called himself an ununculous—no, the ununculous, the only one in the world. Emmett Smith had gotten the position by killing the previous ununculous. He’d made no secret of the fact that he’d murdered his way to the top, absorbing and stealing the magic from the mages he’d killed along the way.

  “Why does he want the pot?” I asked.

  “For spells,” Young said. He looked pathetic stuck to the ceiling like a bug in a spider’s web. “Don’t ask me what kind. He just said he needed it for spells.”

  Which made me want to have a good look at the original pot. Magic could cling to artifacts from the past, building up over time—like a sword from the European middle ages, or an ancient Native American pot, or my hotel basement. I suspected that the vessel known as the Holy Grail had started as a simple table cup from ancient Rome, which by the Middle Ages had contained vast magic, building quietly year after year.

  Such artifacts are hard to find, because they’re powerful enough to hide themselves. They aren’t sentient, exactly, but they somehow obscure themselves from the naked eye, or even the magical eye. The Holy Grail must have been picked up and tossed aside hundreds of times. After millennia of trying, no one has ever found it, have they? Claims in novels and movies notwithstanding.

  All of which made me suspicious of Ansel’s story that he’d found the pot after such a brief search. Something smelled.

  Something really did smell. Young. He was on fire.

  My speculations had only increased my rage. Young’s clothes were singeing, and the odor of burning wool curled inside my nose.

  “Janet,” Mick said warningly.

  I wasn’t allowed to hurt and kill people with my magic. Dragons and Hopi gods would appear out of the mists to stop me, by my death if necessary.

  So not fair. I whipped the lightning away from Young. His face and hands got a little burned in the process, and he screamed. Oops.

  I also let him fall. Mick shot a look at Gabrielle, who gave him a stubborn glare back. At the last minute, she rolled her eyes and cushioned Young’s fall with a bubble of Beneath magic, the same kind that held the bullets suspended in midair.

  Young hit the floor with a loud thump. Well, Mick hadn’t told her to make the landing soft, just not lethal.

  I still had all this lightning in my hands, with nowhere to go. The Beneath goddess in me wanted me to crash it into Young and his lackeys, killing them for the petty criminals they were. I knew damn well Young hadn’t come by all the stuff in his house honestly.

  The auras of the artifacts both here and in the giant room below continued to knock at me. Ancient pieces, wrenched from where they’d been buried, torn from the people who’d been buried with them. Angry, lonely, and scared, they yearned to return to the places from which they’d come.

  I brought the lightning back to me, gave it a little spurt of Beneath magic, and let it loose on all the glass cases.

  The doors shattered, one after another, and the tops of the floor cases smashed in one long, spectacular crash. The lightning whipped through objects inside—pieces of history, pieces of lives. My Beneath magic nudged the auras, and they rose, black and angry, seeking vengeance.

  Chapter Twelve

  Each potsherd and artifact had only the smallest of auras on its own, but put every tiny piece together, and they filled the room. The lackeys on the ceiling screamed as bullets of darkness, like tiny shards of glass, tore at their faces.

  Young got to his feet, swaying. “No! No, what are you doing?”

  The auras from the floor cases shot into the air. First came the pottery shards, then knives, bones, and finally the blackest auras from the shriveled skins. They swirled around each other, faster and faster, taking on the force of a tornado, then they threw themselves at Young. The man threw up his hands as the gathered spirits of his beloved collection descended on him.

  The windows high above us exploded. Mick hit the floor, dragging Gabrielle down with him.

  I laughed with my power. I’d awakened a thousand years’ worth of rage, the rage of captives finally turning on their captors. My storm magic fed the artifacts the power of the earth in which they’d rested, and the Beneath magic gave them the nudge they needed to be deadly.

  Wind blasted through the open windows, and with it came hail. Round stones of ice cascaded over the remnants of the cases, splintering wood, shattering the last of the glass.

  Mick got under one of the heavy tables, Gabrielle huddling next to him. My breath fogged in the freezing cold air. The hail struck me, nicking my skin and staining it with blood, but I didn’t feel a thing.

  The next lightning strike came right through the window. Fat and white, it blew me down the length of the room and slammed me into the door. The ceiling sprouted a giant hole, and the beams and smooth plaster slowly buckled and fell inward.

  The ceiling carried the lackeys down with it, and buried Young. Ripped wiring crackled, and pipes spewed water. The lightning bolt had gone right through the floor, and acrid smoke came up through the hole in the carpet.

  I could no longer feel my body, and could hear nothing after that explosion of sound. I seemed to be on the floor, but had no recollection of falling there.

  Men were crawling out of the wreckage, only to find the whirling black auras of ancient anger dancing before them. Blood flew as the tornado of rage whipped into them.

  “Janet!” Mick’s shout sounded from somewhere in the maelstrom. “You have to stop it!”

  I had to try a few times before my voice worked. “I didn’t create the lightning strike. It’s a storm. Nature.”

  “You’re attracting it. This whole house could come down. Shut it off.”

  He made it sound so easy. Like all I had to do was snap my fingers, and everything would go away.

  I wrapped my arms around my chest, but I was still numb, no sensations in my body. I could move but that was about it.

  The lightning struck again—not this room, but somewhere else in the house. The explosion shook the whole building, and fire leapt into the sky.

  If the lightning had hit a gas pipe, we’d be in big trouble. Still I couldn’t move.

  I needed Mick. He could steady me, but he was all the way across the room under a table.

  I closed my eyes, trying to find the calm core within myself, as the koshare—a Hopi clown—had taught me. Mick and Cassandra also had been teaching me more about Wicc
a magic, about the importance of grounding and centering so the magic didn’t twist me into nothing.

  The problem was, I’d been practicing these meditations in the cool calm of evening outside my back door. Easy to ground myself when I knew Elena was cooking something delicious in the kitchen, my guests were down for the night, and Mick would be waiting for me inside.

  Now I had the full force of a high-desert storm dancing around me, plus the collective magic of ancient objects I’d awakened, hot and ready to kill.

  I couldn’t anchor myself by focusing on my breathing, because I couldn’t feel anything in my chest or hear anything above the shriek of wind. Same went for my heartbeat. If I hadn’t been aware of being aware, I wouldn’t know I was alive.

  I closed my eyes, shutting out the sights of men bleeding from a thousand razor-like cuts, Mick’s bulk folded under the table, Gabrielle beside him, for once being sensible and taking cover. I needed to focus on an image, one that would calm me and stop the crazed laughter in my brain.

  Mick’s hard face and warm blue eyes usually did it for me, but the image that sprang instantly to me was Coyote, dying while I watched.

  His expression had been one of release and relief. Also surrender. I’d never seen Coyote give up, and so readily.

  He couldn’t be gone. He was a god. And yet, his last breath had held finality. Then he’d dissolved, floated away on the wind.

  He’d have wanted that. Traditional Navajo were afraid of dead bodies and their lingering ghosts. Coyote would not have wanted to upset people by leaving remains.

  Tears filled my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. A shudder went through me, and then I felt my heartbeat, which hurt. My chest burned and ached, and my throat shut up tight.

  I thought about the big man with his wicked smile and lewd jokes, and his eyes so warm. I thought about how he dressed in his jeans, cowboy boots, and button-down shirt and hung around the center of Magellan, playing Indian for the tourists. He’d tell stories, some outrageous, some sad—of the gods and of the tribes who’d populated the area for centuries. He was especially good with kids, dialing back his off-color humor for them. Julie Kee, in particular, adored him.

  Julie. I’d have to tell her.

  I pressed my arms tightly over my stomach and let sobs wrack my body. Even if Coyote had managed to save himself, and he wasn’t really dead, being a god, there was no telling whether I’d ever see him again. He came and went—sometimes, he’d told me, for centuries at a stretch. At least he’d kissed me good-bye.

  “Janet.”

  Mick was beside me. I opened my eyes. Thunder still rumbled, and lightning flickered, but farther away now. The storm had rolled on, naturally, down the valley.

  The auras were gone. The hail had softened to rain, which was now pouring in through the broken roof. The soaked floor was littered with Young and his lackeys, all bleeding, all groaning.

  Mick gathered me into his arms and pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “That’s my girl,” he whispered.

  *** *** ***

  The storm still shook me as Mick helped me stumble from the house, back to his bike, which stood wet but unharmed at the bottom of the driveway.

  I needed release, my skin crawling with the aftermath of lightning. Mick knew it, because he kept his arm around me as we walked out, his big body shielding mine.

  Mick knew the best method to draw off the residue of the storm and keep me from having one of my bad magic hangovers. Unfortunately, it involved a private room, a large bed, a long stretch of time, and no clothes.

  Right now I was in a neighborhood halfway up a mountain, the neighbors coming out to see the storm damage. Sirens sounded as emergency vehicles raced into the neighborhood to make sure the fire didn’t spread.

  Plus, we had Gabrielle with us. She walked along beside Mick as we made our way down the driveway, her black windbreaker slung over her shoulder. Mr. Young apparently had sent a car to bring her to his house, so unless she stole one from the garage, she had no transportation back into town, or wherever she’d come from.

  She was all for stealing a car from Young, but Mick stopped her, telling her we didn’t have time to deal with bailing her out of jail when she got caught.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” I demanded when we reached the bike. The electricity to open the gate was still off, but Mick solved that problem by wrenching the thing open with his big hands. “You’re supposed to be at Many Farms with Grandmother, driving her crazy instead of me.”

  Gabrielle looked at me with wide, innocent eyes. “Who do you think sent me? Ruby heard about Young buying this old pot, and she sent me here to see if it was real.”

  I stopped. “Grandmother sent you to find an artifact that might possess magic great enough to interest a strong mage? She sent you?”

  “Don’t keep saying it like that, Janet. Yes, she trusted me. Well, all right, she’s pretty sure that what Young bought was a fake. And she asked me to get a picture of it, so she could look at the markings.” She grinned. “But I went one better.”

  Gabrielle carefully swung her jacket around and opened it. Inside lay the fake pot Young had bought from Laura.

  “It survived the storm somehow,” Gabrielle said. “So I grabbed it while Young and his boys were feeling sorry for themselves.”

  “And when Young comes after you for taking it?” I demanded.

  “It’s fake. What does he want with it? Now he can tell his big, bad mage Pericles that it was stolen by two Indian chicks and a biker dude.”

  “Then Pericles comes after us,” I said.

  Gabrielle hefted the pot. “So? We can take care of him. Aren’t you interested in what this pot does?”

  I was. So was Mick, I could tell. And so was my grandmother.

  I snatched the pot from her. “I need to talk to Ansel. And find Laura. She must have the original.”

  “I say we find this mage,” Gabrielle said. “Make him tell us everything.”

  My sweet, innocent little sister. She was pretty, with her round, soft face, her dusky skin and shining black hair, her body’s curves showed off by her cropped top and jeans, the kind of outfit I liked to wear.

  My eyes narrowed. She wasn’t just dressing like me—those were my clothes. She’d taken them out of the dresser in my bedroom at Many Farms. Gabrielle had more on top than I did, and she was stretching out the shirt in a bad way.

  “Have you ever gone up against a mage, Gabrielle?” I asked.

  “Sure. I won.”

  “A truly powerful, unstoppable mage? It’s not that easy.”

  “Mages have earth magic. I have goddess magic. Goddess magic always wins.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “Mick, can you take her back to Many Farms? I’ll rent a car or something, or ask Maya to drive out here and get me. I want to take a look at Laura’s antique store before I leave.”

  Before Mick could answer, Gabrielle said, “Ruby and I are staying in Santa Fe. Just give me a ride to our hotel, Mick.”

  She grabbed my helmet and swung herself onto Mick’s big bike without waiting for his invitation.

  “Grandmother’s here?” Grandmother, who didn’t like to leave Many Farms or the Navajo Nation for any reason had come to a city as large as Santa Fe? With Gabrielle no less. Grandmother’s exception to her rule of never traveling far from home was my hotel, and she only went there so she could find out what I was up to.

  “She wasn’t about to let me that far off the leash,” Gabrielle said. “Hurry up, Mick. I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll take her,” Mick said to me, getting on the bike. “You going to be all right?”

  He meant because of the storm. The aftermath was still crawling through me, and I needed to let off steam, but there wasn’t much I could do here and now. I nodded.

  Mick looked at me in concern, but he knew that we had to contain Gabrielle before we worried about me. “You have your cell phone?” he asked me. “I’ll call you when I’m done, and we’ll meet to chec
k out the store.”

  “Nope,” Gabrielle said. Her voice rose as Mick kicked the bike to roaring life. “Ruby says I’m supposed to bring you to see her, Mick. She wants to talk to you. It’s important, she said.”

  *** *** ***

  They left me with the fake pot. I took off my jacket as Mick roared off, Gabrielle giving me a cheerful wave, and wrapped the pot in the jacket, hiding it. Of course Gabrielle had left it with me, stolen from the rich Mr. Young, with police coming up the hill in the wake of the fire trucks. She’d think that was funny.

  I did my best to look like an innocent bystander as I walked away down the block. Gabrielle wearing my clothes had one advantage—I heard a neighbor’s gardener telling a policeman he’d seen a biker and his black-haired woman ride up to the house, and he’d just seen them ride away. I’d been wearing a helmet, and so had Gabrielle. I had my jacket off now; she’d put hers back on.

  It was still raining, so I bent my head and just kept walking.

  For once I’d remembered to bring my cell phone, and it actually worked, so I called a taxi when I reached the main intersection at the bottom of the hill. A sandwich shop, new and clean, stood next to a gas station, everything shiny new for this wealthy neighborhood.

  I was hungry and still shaky, and I ordered a sandwich and ate it while the rain pattered down. I wondered exactly what Grandmother wanted to talk about with Mick, and I knew neither would tell me unless they wanted me to know. Who knew how long I’d have to wait for them to be finished, and where Mick would have me meet up with him after that.

  In irritation, I crunched the house-made chips that came with the sandwich. They were good. I should tell Elena to consider making some—not that she ever listened to my culinary suggestions.

  The taxi arrived as I finished eating. I threw away my sandwich wrappings, took my soft drink with me, and told the taxi to take me to a corner in the heart of Santa Fe near the train station.