I couldn’t resist hugging my father again. When I’d been blissfully riding with Mick across the country after we’d first met, the one thing that had finally drawn me back to Many Farms and home was him. Dad had been the one person in all the world who loved me unconditionally.
I was nervous though, as I led my family in through the hotel’s front door. Grandmother had been here, but I had to wonder what Dad and Gina would think of my new home.
Dad didn’t like entering through the front, and he didn’t like going first. He told me his habit of not announcing himself came from his long line of warrior ancestors making sure they weren’t seen by their enemy until the very last minute. When I’d been old enough to point out that the ancestors in our family had been farmers, he’d only chuckled.
Grandmother saved Pete’s embarrassment by marching in ahead of us all, her walking stick thumping. She sniffed the air as soon as she made it over the threshold. “Everything seems fine here. No demons. Not now, anyway.”
Gina followed, looking around in slow inspection. She took in the walls painted in warm reds and yellows, the tiled staircase with a wooden bannister, my framed artwork of places around the southwest, and turned her dark eyes on me. “Well done, Janet.”
Her praised warmed me. Gina wasn’t talkative, not like Grandmother. Gina and my father could sit for hours, not saying a word, but being perfectly content in silence together. Gina only spoke when she had something important to say.
The kitchen door banged open. Elena, her bright flowered top and black pants covered by a long apron, emerged, glaring at my family.
“You had no need to come down here, old woman,” she said to my grandmother. “I have everything under control.”
“Do you think so?” Grandmother retorted, stumping forward. “My granddaughter was in a coma, put there by demons. Under control, you say? Pah!”
“She fought the demons in Flat Mesa,” Elena countered. “Without bothering to tell me she was going there first. I kept her safe when the Firewalker brought her home. She is still alive, isn’t she?”
“You should have called me!”
“What would you have done? Worried and wept, and nothing more.”
“I don’t weep,” Grandmother snapped. “Now, we’re hungry. And guests. We want our supper.”
Elena shook her head. “I’m done with service for the night.” She looked at my grandmother’s stubborn face and heaved a sigh. “Sit down—I will see what can be thrown together.”
She departed, her head high. Both women looked a bit smug, as though each considered she’d won the argument. They argued, I knew, solely because they enjoyed it. In truth, Elena and Grandmother had become close friends.
“Guests?” I asked Gina as Grandmother followed Elena into the kitchen. Grandmother would never sit quietly while Elena worked. She’d try to take over, they’d yell at each other some more, then they’d settle into a truce.
“It is a long trip for your grandmother,” Gina said.
Grandmother would never admit that, and she’d be incensed if she knew Gina had said such a thing. I agreed with Gina, but the hotel was full. There was another motel in the town of Magellan itself, two miles away, but it was a standard motel, full of bikers, RVers, and New Agers. Grandmother wouldn’t like it.
Cassandra, who’d returned to the main desk, said, “We have plenty of room. How many nights would you like to stay?”
I glanced at her in surprise, but Cassandra didn’t change expression. She gave Gina her welcoming and efficient look then greeted them in perfect Diné. Gina gave her a nod in return, answering. My father said nothing, but he looked impressed. Few outsiders tried to learn our language or succeeded in doing it. Cassandra, of course, was perfect at everything.
I surrendered. “This is Cassandra Bryson, the manager. Anything you need, just ask her.”
“I’ll stay in the attic,” Gabrielle said, her hands in her back pockets. “I like it up there. Why didn’t you tell us you were so sick, Janet?” She gave me a look full of sorrow.
“Because I was unconscious,” I said, spreading my hands. “Hard for me to pick up the phone.”
“Micky should have told us.” Gabrielle’s pout was exaggerated, but I could see that my father and Gina agreed.
“He didn’t want you worried.” Or here, hovering. “Take it up with him.”
“Oh, I will,” Gabrielle said with a dark look.
My father, too polite to stare at me like Gina and Gabrielle were doing, moved to look at the black-and-white photographs I’d taken of Canyon de Chelly, Chocolate Falls on the Hopi reservation, the Homol’ovi ruins, Chevelon Canyon, Sunset Crater, and the woods up in the White Mountains. I’d wanted to return to Chaco to photograph the lonely, ghostly ruins there, but after our battle this past summer, I wanted the place to simmer down before I went back. The auras of Chaco drove me crazy, and I’d need Mick with me to keep me sane.
Dad looked over my photos with a touch a pride—he loved that I had an artistic bent. He moved on to the sculpture of the coyote near the staircase, done in polished black stone.
“Jamison,” Dad said, resting a hand on it.
My closest friend from my teenage years, Jamison Kee, had sculpted the statue for me. He was a Changer, able to take the form of a mountain lion. He also was a shaman and a storyteller, with a gorgeous, liquid voice. He’d given me the statue for my hotel when I’d opened it.
“He sees well,” Dad went on, giving the statue a pat.
I warmed, glad he liked it. Dad didn’t praise just anything.
The kitchen door was slapped open. Grandmother stood in the doorway and beckoned to me. “Janet.”
Hiding a sigh, I went to her. She turned around and walked back into the kitchen, expecting me to follow.
Elena was busy at the stove. She and Grandmother apparently had reached truce stage, because Grandmother returned to chopping mushrooms at Elena’s side. A bowl of carrots waited their turn next to the mushrooms.
Grandmother spoke without looking up from the chopping board. “I didn’t like to say while your father could hear, but you should go out and check the vortex. In case his presence triggers something.”
I went cold. The joy of seeing my father had made me forget about the other part of his life—his connection to my mother.
My dear mother was a goddess from Beneath, who’d been able to possess women when she’d come out through the gates and walk this earth. She hadn’t been able to travel far from the vortex in the bodies she possessed, but she had been close enough to ensnare my father one evening when he’d stopped in Holbrook. As a younger man, he’d been more prone to traveling across the Navajo lands and a little outside them.
Pete had fallen in love with the goddess and had an affair with her, resulting in me. However, my mother couldn’t exist for long stretches outside of Beneath, and had to abandon the woman whose body she’d inhabited and return to her realm. The human woman, technically my biological mother, had been weakened by the strong magics of the goddess, and she’d died having me, leaving me with my young, bewildered father.
Dad had never seen my goddess mother again. But he’d looked for her. Shortly after my birth, he’d left the reservation for one reason only, to search the stretches near the vortexes for her. Eventually, he’d gone home and given up, resigned to the fact that the goddess was never coming back to him.
About a year and a half ago I’d finally confronted the true manifestation of my mother, when I’d gone to her realm in Beneath. She’d wanted to use me to take her out of there, where she would destroy anything she wanted to—namely the dragons and Coyote, who’d shut her into Beneath in the first place. After that, she’d simply go on a destructive spree.
Our mother-daughter reunion had resulted in pitched battle, and then Mick and I and Nash destroyed the vortex. Nothing was left of that crack in the earth but a caved-in wash, buried under tons of rock and dirt.
That was not to say my mother had been killed. She
was immortal, as far as I knew, just sealed in. I hadn’t heard a peep from her, however, since that night.
But Grandmother had a point. The goddess had liked my father, had responded to him, and she might again.
I growled under my breath. “Yes, all right. I’ll go.”
“Take Mick with you,” Grandmother advised.
“He’s not here,” I said. “I’ll run out and make sure it’s quiet.”
I snatched a mushroom from the board and headed out the back door, chewing it. I don’t like the texture of mushrooms, but I put up with it for their dark, smoky taste.
The night was quiet, peaceful, a half moon rising to flood the land with light. The back of the hotel faced the old railroad bed, a straight ribbon that stretched from north of Flat Mesa south into Magellan and beyond. Long ago, it had been a railway line to connect Flagstaff to the mining towns in the mountains, abandoned when mines closed.
The rails and ties had been stripped away to be used elsewhere and the empty railroad bed left intact. It rose high here, built up to keep trains out of the flat plain that could flood when washes overflowed. Hikers, joggers, and mountain bikers now used the bed as a convenient way to go cross-country anywhere between Magellan and Flat Mesa.
It was also the demarcation line dividing the towns from the vortexes. I climbed up the side of the bed and down the other, the moon throwing white light over the grasses and juniper on the other side. I wasn’t foolish enough to simply rely on moonlight and starlight to guide me, however—I’d grabbed a big flashlight from a shelf on my way out the door.
A rush of air touched my side, then a low-pitched English voice said, “You shouldn’t walk around on your own, Janet.”
My feet landed back on the ground, and I shoved my hand to my chest, my heart pounding against my ribcage. “Shit, Ansel.”
“Apologies.” Ansel gave me a contrite look in the flashlight’s glow. “I did not mean to startle you. But that does not make me wrong.”
“I know.” I dragged in breaths to take my heart back to normal beating. “I’m heading to check out the vortex. I haven’t been able to in a while, being in a coma and all.”
“One of us has been keeping an eye on it,” Ansel said, sounding a bit hurt I’d think otherwise. “If not me, then Cassandra or Sheriff Jones.”
“Nash came out here?” I asked in surprise.
“Often. He was worried about you, and also about what might happen while you were incapacitated.”
“Aw, how sweet.”
Ansel flashed me an understanding look. “He is gruff, but a protector. Don’t be too hard on him.”
“Me be hard on him?”
Nash and I had an understanding rather like Grandmother and Elena did. We could work together as long as we each respected the other’s territory—my territory was the hotel; Nash’s, the rest of Hopi County.
Ansel gave a light laugh. “He can be pesky.”
“That’s an understatement.”
I did feel better with Ansel with me. He’d fed, his blood need sated, so I didn’t worry he’d turn on me … much. Nightwalkers are fast and deadly strong, and also highly unpredictable. Anything could set off the monster inside him. It was also true that anything out here in the dark would think twice about going for either of us.
We walked in companionable silence across the land, the stars spreading in a twinkling blanket overhead. “Nightwalkers should be astronomers,” I remarked. “You’re up all night anyway.”
“An intriguing idea,” Ansel said in his mild voice. “Had I any interest in astronomy, I might consider it.”
I gave him an appreciative laugh. Ansel spent the nights he wasn’t visiting his girlfriend watching classic movies or scouring the Internet for his next big antique find.
We reached the top of a rise and hiked down the other side. While this land could look fairly flat from the window of my comfortable hotel, walking it involved some climbing in treacherous footing. Washes could open abruptly at our feet, made from streams that carried water from the mountains down, down, down, to join larger rivers. The water had carved out sheer sandstone cliffs over the millennia, beautiful on a hike, but deadly to the unwary on a dark night.
The vortex that held the gateway to Beneath lay in a fold of land that snaked east to west, perpendicular to most of the canyons. A vortex isn’t a physical landmark that can be seen, but more like a ripple in the aura of a place. Energy collects in swirls that can be felt by the magically inclined. Spells work better with vortex energy, and some people believe they have healing qualities.
For those in the know, vortexes can certainly be used to enhance magic and spells, but the risk is horrific. Vortexes can crack open the earth and let out demons and other nasties to make the life of the mage practicing at the vortex very bad.
The wash Mick and I had filled in lay like a scar on the landscape, a pile of rocks, dead tree limbs, sand, and jutting boulders. Under the moonlight the wash stretched like a pale ribbon to end under a clump of cedars.
All was quiet. I felt no disturbance in the vortex, no sign of the goddess beneath trying to work her way out again. I breathed a sigh of relief. She would someday, of that I had no doubt. But not tonight.
“Janet,” Ansel said in a worried voice.
I felt another aura, dark and crushing, which hadn’t been there a moment ago. One minute, the night had been clean and fresh; the next, oppressive and murky, the moonlight dimming.
That dim light glinted on the gold rims of glasses and sparkled on the diamonds in its temple pieces. Emmett stepped from the shadow of a tall sandstone boulder on a rise above the wash.
“Good to see you awake at last, Janet,” he said.
Chapter Eleven
Emmett hadn’t been leaning against the boulder, no. That might mess up his suit. Even so, he slid a handkerchief from his breast pocket and brushed off his sleeve, an affectation of his.
I ran up the hill, ready to tear his silk tie off him and make him eat it. “What the hell did you do to me?” I yelled. “Did you spell me?”
The eyes behind the glasses fixed me with a cold stare. “If you are going to be hysterical, I can spell you. Would you like that?”
“Touch me, and I’ll dust you. Did you put me into that coma? Or were you trying to kill me and didn’t succeed?”
Emmett tucked his handkerchief neatly into his pocket. “Someone has you riled. No, I did not put you into a coma. You woke up those demons all by yourself, got caught in the chaos, and were knocked out. If you had simply handed me your mirror¸ I would have considered myself your ally and helped you. As it was, I had to watch you go down under garden-variety demons.”
I clenched my fists, trying to catch my breath. “You expect me to believe that?”
“You will believe what you wish. I promise I did not open the pocket under the Flat Mesa motel and let out the demons. You did that yourself.” Emmett made a dismissing gesture. “If I wanted you dead, Janet, you’d be dead.”
“I had dreams,” I said in a hard voice. “Not normal dreams—the kind achieved only by magic.”
His gaze sharpened. “Dreams can be interesting. What were they?”
I made a frustrated noise. “I don’t remember now.”
“Again, interesting. Would you like me to help you remember?”
The last thing I wanted was Emmett tinkering in my brain. “No, thank you.”
“Your dreams would be fascinating. What does a Stormwalker envision in the night? Conquering hail?”
“Funny. Go away before I lose control and kick your ass.”
“No,” Emmett said, not moving. “I came for the magic mirror. I will have it, my dear, one way or another.”
His glasses began to gleam. I felt the bite of his power, a small one, testing me.
The night was beautifully clear, no storm on the horizon. Perfect for stargazers, bad for me. I had Beneath magic, of course, but if I used that here, I risked opening the vortex and letting out the hell goddess
below us.
Emmett knew that. Why else would he have chosen this spot to confront me?
A rush of air passed me, and then Ansel was on Emmett, his Nightwalker mouth open, ready to rip out Emmett’s throat.
“Ansel, no!” I cried.
Ansel, snarling in rage, wrapped his thin but muscular arms around Emmett and shoved him into the huge slab of sandstone. Emmett, momentarily startled, let whatever magic he’d been preparing die back.
Ansel’s mouth came down on Emmett’s neck. I rushed forward at the same moment, grabbing Ansel to yank him away. I might as well have tried to yank a sequoia out of the ground with my bare hands. Ansel had latched on to Emmett’s throat, and Emmett’s blood flowed into his mouth.
A second later, Ansel flew backward about twenty feet and landed hard on his back on the desert ground. I heard bones crunch, and Ansel’s initial shriek died into a groan of pain.
Emmett took out his handkerchief again and dabbed at the blood dripping down his neck. “The mirror, please.”
I resisted running to Ansel to make certain he was all right. Nightwalkers healed quickly, but pain and weakness made them blood-frenzied. He might grab the nearest person—me—and drain me to restore his strength before he could stop himself. I had to let him lie there, moaning softly.
“I’m not going to say anything stupid like over my dead body,” I said to Emmett. “Anyway, it will be over your dead body. I’m not giving up the mirror.”
Emmett’s usual calm expression creased with anger. “You have no idea of its potential power, little girl. No idea how to tap into it. I do. Think of it this way—it would be like you watching a complete novice trying to work an amazing camera you’d give anything to have. Why this incompetent fool has a piece of equipment that sophisticated while you’re stuck with your phone camera is beyond your comprehension.”
“The difference is, I wouldn’t kill someone for their camera,” I said clearly.
“You would if it were the only one of its kind in the world.” Emmett’s glasses began to shine again. “You’d do anything in your power to get your hands on it.”
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