Nightwalker

by Allyson James

  “You must destroy . . .”

  “I know that. But how do I destroy it? Tell me.”

  “Bear . . .”

  “She knows?” Tears spilled down my cheeks. “Coyote, stop this, and get up.”

  Gabrielle bent to me, her hands on her knees. “Give him a break, Janet. He’s dying.”

  “No, he isn’t.” I shook Coyote’s shoulder. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Bear.” He covered my hand with his. His strength, even in this state, nearly crushed my fingers. “Love you, girl,” he said, and he called me by my spirit name—the name known to no one but my father and me. Gabrielle didn’t hear it, because Coyote whispered it straight into my mind.

  The word gave me a burst of strength. Coyote’s form shimmered again, then the hand holding mine relaxed, and Coyote vanished.

  I shuddered as I rose to my feet. Gabrielle remained staring down at the spot where Coyote had lain. “Well, that was weird.”

  I turned away in silence and got back into the truck. Gabrielle climbed into the bed again, and I drove on.

  “He’s dead then,” Emmett said.

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Shut up.” I took the truck down a slippery track and stopped at the bottom.

  The moon thrust itself out from behind the clouds and bathed the valley in subtle light. The rocky outcrops to either side of us became stark silhouettes.

  One of the roads to nowhere, built for the gods, seemed to stretch toward the pile of clouds on the horizon. Lightning licked the clouds, flashing them purple and gold before the world faded again to black.

  A figure stood at the foot of the road just inside the circle of my headlights, like a tall, upright monolith in open ground. At first I thought a bear stood there, a giant grizzly up on its hind legs.

  As I got out of the truck, I saw that it was Bear. She was in human form, with a bearskin wrapped around her body, the dead bear’s face forever fixed in a carnivorous snarl. Under the skin she wore flowing skirts like my grandmother’s and her usual silver and turquoise jewelry. She’d tied three hawk’s feathers in her black hair.

  Her bangles, rings, and necklace caught the moonlight as she raised her hands, throwing the reflection at us in wide bands. The stone knife she’d used to slay Coyote hung on her belt, the aura of it thick and black against her otherwise clean silver.

  “What the hell?” Gabrielle had stopped by my side.

  Emmett, who’d gotten out of the truck in spite of the dirt, adjusted his glasses. “Bear goddess. Interesting.”

  Grandmother was walking toward Bear, her stick tapping the earth. She stopped about ten feet in front of Bear who watched us, her dark eyes quiet. “Did you know we were coming?”

  Bear said nothing. I’d never seen her like this, not in her goddess persona. She’d always appeared to me as the large, rather placid Indian woman in her old-fashioned dress and jewelry, ready with her gentle strength and good advice—her hunting of Coyote with the knife notwithstanding.

  Now she radiated power, the aura of her stronger even then the aura of Chaco itself. I felt her strength and her compassion, but also a power beyond measure, plus the crushing knowledge all deities had that they were far stronger than any creature on the earth.

  She, like Coyote, had lived in the worlds before this one, the Beneath worlds, out of which the first men and women had climbed. She’d been one of the gods who’d sealed the Beneath worlds behind them, trapping the more evil gods and goddesses—my mother being one of them—inside.

  But though Coyote and Bear and others had thus protected the world from the evils of Beneath, that didn’t mean the gods who’d stayed in this world were wholly benevolent. They had their good sides and their frightening sides.

  I was starting to get frightened.

  Bear watched me as I stopped next to Grandmother, both of us sensing we shouldn’t move closer.

  “Stormwalker,” Bear said. Her rich contralto rolled across the valley. “I’ve come for my vessel. Bring it to me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Your vessel?” I asked in surprise, though Grandmother didn’t look astonished in the least.

  “I created it,” Bear said, her voice filling the spaces around us. “I’ve come to take it back.”

  “And do what with it, exactly?” I asked. “Destroy it?”

  “No.”

  Emmett and Gabrielle came up beside us—Emmett must think hearing this worth the dust on shoe leather. “A vessel fashioned by a Native American bear goddess?” he mused. “My price just went up.”

  “Price?” Grandmother scowled at him. “I thought you wanted it for yourself.”

  “I was speaking figuratively. Let me put it this way—the price for me helping you keep it away from her.”

  “You can’t let her have it, Janet,” Grandmother said, ignoring Emmett.

  “Why not? I certainly don’t want Emmett or the dragons getting their hands on it.”

  “Gods can’t be trusted,” Grandmother said firmly. “Even friendly ones. What she thinks is right to do with it might destroy half this world. She’s originally from Beneath, remember? She doesn’t have good, solid earth magic to ground her.”

  “Hey, I’m from Beneath,” Gabrielle said hotly.

  “Exactly my point.”

  I took a step forward, trying to shut out the distractions. “What do you want the pot for?” I asked Bear.

  She fixed a gaze on me like the power of seventeen suns. “For? Why must things be for, human child?”

  “I’m trying to understand why you didn’t destroy a thing that dangerous a long time ago. It tried to turn me into something I didn’t want to be. If I’d kept resisting it, I’d have died.”

  “Because you are human, Stormwalker. Though god blood beats in your veins, you are held to the earth, as is your sister. Humans are too weak for my vessel. The shamans who decided to destroy it in lava many years ago were unable to throw it away, so I took it from them and hid it. But it uncovered itself eventually, and so your Nightwalker’s friend found it.”

  “You’re going to hide it again?”

  “Bring me the vessel, Janet.”

  “Janet.” Another rumbling voice assailed me, one I was relieved to hear.

  Mick walked out of the black shadows of the canyon walls, Elena with him. Mick was dressed, so he must have had Elena carry clothes for him, but the aura of his dragon flight was pungent—the familiar taste of fire and smoke wrapped up in the music of his name.

  I tried not to hurry as I went to meet him. “Did you bring him?” I asked in a low voice.

  Mick took my hand. “He’s coming.”

  Elena wore her usual look of disapproval. “The Nightwalker insisted on accompanying us.”

  Ansel walked shakily out of the shadows, as though he’d been waiting until summoned. He folded his arms over his lanky body, his sandstone-colored Sedona T-shirt making his skin even starker white.

  “This was my fault,” he said. “I want to put it right.”

  I didn’t agree with him, but Elena broke in before I could answer. “Whatever you do, don’t give the vessel to the goddess.”

  “So Grandmother advised me.”

  “Ruby is correct. The bear goddess has infinite power, maybe more than Coyote himself. She made that vessel to contain some of her extra power so she could hold onto her shape and live more easily in this world. But she didn’t know how to temper her strength. She gave it to shamans of a tribe, trying to help them. They found that the pot enhanced their magic, but the magic built to dangerous levels, and then the pot, made to siphon off excess power, sucked it all back out of them until they were dead. Mortals simply can’t handle those kinds of forces.”

  Made sense from what Jamison had told me, and what I’d experienced. “How do you know all this?” I asked Elena.

  “Bear told me.”

  I blinked. “She told you? Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe s
he likes my cooking.”

  Elena shut off her stream of information then and walked away to be with Grandmother, leaving me with Mick and Ansel, Mick still holding my hand.

  Elena’s irritability aside, I agreed with her and grandmother that Bear shouldn’t have the pot until we understood more what she’d do.

  Ansel unfolded his arms. “I’m only here because one of these people has Laura. I’m not leaving until I find her.”

  He moved away from us and the rest of the group, his Nightwalker speed carrying him out of sight into the shadows before I could ask him to stay.

  I squeezed Mick’s hand. “We could go,” I said softly.

  We could fly away from here, to another continent or a remote island to lie in the sun or in a cool-sheeted bed together. We could leave god magic, ancient pottery, and power-hungry mages to themselves.

  Mick wanted to. His eyes flicked from black to the deep blue I’d fallen in love with.

  I looked from him across the space of ground to Grandmother and Gabrielle, in a cluster with Elena, taking themselves apart from Emmett. My family.

  As a child, my grandmother had been hard on me. I realized much later she’d been hard because she’d known I possessed powerful magic, more powerful than the earth magic she’d inherited from her shaman ancestors. She’d been afraid, I understood now, that I’d turn out to be an evil being like my mother, or at least arrogantly powerful like Emmett.

  Now Grandmother had taken in Gabrielle, born of our goddess mother and an Apache man who’d been weak and cruel. Gabrielle was a handful of trouble, but Grandmother was teaching her and protecting her as she’d taught and protected me.

  They were my family. Vulnerable. Here because of their own stubbornness, but here. To help me.

  I swung Mick’s hand. “Afterward? You and me? Beach?”

  He sent me a sinful look that licked heat through my body. “I have the perfect place in mind.”

  Knowing Mick, it would be remote, quiet, and romantic, and we wouldn’t resurface for days.

  I let out a sigh. “Let’s survive this first. We need a plan.”

  Mick grinned. “You brought us here without a plan? What am I going to do with you, sweetheart?”

  “My plans always screw up. You know that. I hoped you’d have some ideas.”

  Mick studied the group with cool calculation. “Kill Emmett, kill Pericles if he comes. Tell Nash how to destroy the pot and have him do it for us.”

  “That sounds easy and dragon-y. What about Bear? She’s insisting we bring the pot to her. I’m betting she’s responsible for making my motorcycle carry me out here in the first place, so I’d get curious. Or maybe she planned to talk to me, but Officer Yellow got in the way. The mirror said a person hadn’t been responsible, but Bear’s not a person, she’s a god.” I let out a breath. “Would you fight her? I don’t think we can.”

  “I’ve fought gods before.” Mick studied Bear, who still stood patiently in the moonlight, the bearskin around her looking almost alive. “But with Bear, I was thinking about using reason.”

  “Good luck with that.” Gods would listen to reason, true, but you never knew how they’d twist your reason to their own purpose. They might nod and agree with you, then walk away and carry on with whatever they’d planned in the first place.

  Headlights broke the night, a vehicle winding down the canyon road. I couldn’t tell at this distance what kind of vehicle, but I knew that Nash had come.

  “We’d better decide fast,” I said.

  “We defend Nash from physical attack,” Mick said. “He’s our primary objective. When the others exhaust themselves trying to keep each other from the pot, then we disable them and decide what to do with it.”

  “What about if dragons join in?” I asked, looking up.

  Mick snapped his attention to the sky. Two giant silhouettes blotted out the starlight, both with wings spread. One dragon was midnight black—Drake—the other fiery red—Colby, still under compulsion to obey.

  Drake’s fire streaked down and caught Nash’s black F250. The impact lifted the truck a few feet into the air before dropping it again, the entire truck engulfed in incandescent flame. Dragon fire was magical, so it couldn’t hurt Nash directly, but it could incinerate the truck he was in, or push it over the edge of the road into the canyon.

  I started running. Mick didn’t follow, and before I’d made it halfway to Nash, Mick shot into the air on colossal wings. He headed for Drake, his cry of challenge splitting the air.

  Nash kept on driving, despite the fire dancing through his pickup. He was not going to be happy about this. He loved that truck.

  Once Nash was on flat ground, he pulled onto empty dirt, leapt out, and started squirting the pickup with a fire extinguisher. Gabrielle broke away from Grandmother and ran for him.

  I doubled my speed as Beneath magic glowed around Gabrielle, but when she reached the truck, the wash of Beneath magic she released only put out the fire.

  Nash shut down his compact fire extinguisher and stood with it hanging from his hand. Perspiration streaked his face, and his jeans and sweat pants were singed and soot-stained. “Thanks,” he said to Gabrielle.

  “Where’s Maya?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Not here,” Nash answered curtly. Maya was not a fan of Gabrielle, who had once taken Nash hostage. “I wasn’t going to bring her to a meet like this.”

  “Did you have to lock her in a cell?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I grinned. “Can I watch when you let her out? Please?”

  Nash gave me a withering look. “Why the hell did you ask me to bring this thing to you? The dragons followed me the minute I left town.”

  I should have figured Drake was clever enough to realize that Nash was the logical person to watch over the artifact. Drake had probably commanded Colby to keep tabs on him.

  “It’s time to decide what to do with it,” I said.

  Gabrielle looked puzzled. “You’re not going to destroy it, are you? Something like that would be useful.”

  “That’s exactly why.”

  Gabrielle pretended to pout. “What, you still don’t trust me?”

  “No.”

  She laughed and put her arm around my shoulders. “You are so smart.”

  Grandmother was hobbling toward us, Elena at her side. Emmett continued to face Bear, who stood calmly, waiting.

  Except that now two men faced Bear. The second was Pericles McKinnon.

  How he’d gotten here, I didn’t know, but he was a good mage, and I’m sure he had plenty of tricks in his repertoire. Emmett adjusted his glasses to look the other man up and down.

  “They won’t wait long,” Grandmother said. “Whatever it is you’re going to do to stop this, you’d better do it now.”

  “I’m not going to do anything,” I said.

  “You can’t let either one of them touch that vessel. They’ll unleash forces too large to handle, not to mention they’ll try to kill every one of us. Yes, the pot will drain them, but they can do a world’s worth of damage before then.”

  “I don’t intend to let anyone grab the pot, Grandmother. I’ll protect it with everything I have.” I lifted my hands. “But if so many people want it, they can fight it out. I’ll be over here protecting my friends and family.”

  Grandmother’s eyes narrowed. “What about Bear?”

  “I think she can take care of herself.”

  Bear hadn’t moved. She watched the two mages size each other up, but she did nothing, said nothing. She, like me, waited to see what happened.

  Above us, the dragons circled one another, shooting warning jets of fire whenever any of the three got too close to the others. Dragon battles were so deadly, Mick had told me, that dragons didn’t fully engage unless they had to. For now, they were watching, wary, Mick keeping himself between the other two and Nash.

  The clouds on the western horizon slowly moved our way, coming down from the Chuska Mountains and thickening as they went
. The thunderheads drove dust before them, lightning curling under the clouds. I felt the storm’s fiery tingle awaking the earth magic in me.

  “Letting the mages and dragons fight each other might release powers this valley can’t contain,” Elena said. “We’ll be caught in the backwash.”

  “But we are four of the most powerful women I know,” I countered. “Between us, we can protect ourselves and Nash from anything they do.”

  In theory. I knew Gabrielle was strong, but I didn’t know how close Elena had to be to her pool of shaman magic to use it, and I still had no idea how Grandmother’s magic worked. She had a vast well of earth magic in her, which is where I’d come by my Stormwalker ability, but I had never seen her in action.

  “I like this plan,” Gabrielle said, sliding her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. “Whoever wins the free-for-all will be weak, and we’ll just kill him.”

  “You aren’t killing anyone,” Grandmother said. “We talked about this.”

  Gabrielle shot me an appealing look. “See what I have to put up with?”

  “Could everyone please shut up and let me think?” I stuffed my hands into my own front pockets, finding the chamois-wrapped piece of magic mirror. “Nash, will you bring it out?”

  Nash looked up from checking the ammunition in his Glock. “Why?”

  “You don’t have to hand it to me. In fact, please don’t. But uncover it.”

  Nash scowled, but he reached into the truck’s cab and retrieved the leather-wrapped pot from the seat. He set the bundle on the hood, opened the drawstring, and peeled back the bag.

  His null magic so absorbed the pot’s field that Emmett and Pericles, still eying each other, didn’t look our way. The dragons didn’t break their focus on one another either. Even I couldn’t feel anything from the pot, which was fine with me.

  Moonlight picked out the sharp outlines of the bear, the tortoise, and the jagged lightning. I wondered why Bear had chosen the tortoise and lightning. I’d love to sit down with her and ask her how she’d designed the pot, and even more importantly, why she hadn’t told me she’d made it.

  The light danced on the figures, which seemed to move themselves. Around and around they went, bear chasing tortoise, chasing lightning, chasing bear.