Stormwalker

by Allyson James

  Before we’d parted ways, Mick had given me six light spells locked into little silver balls. I had one in my pocket now, the last of the remaining two. The balls, when activated, radiated a white light that drove away every shadow—temporarily. They had no heat, only light, but they were useful in emergencies, against skinwalkers or demons or Nightwalkers, creatures that shunned the light.

  The electricity ebbed, the storm diminishing. The skinwalker came at me, a murderous look in its red eyes.

  The situation definitely qualified as an emergency. I dug into my pocket, digging out the spell that was about the size of a ball bearing. It didn’t take much magic to activate them, which meant I could use them whether I had a handy storm or not.

  The skinwalker loomed over me, huge fists ready to crush me. I lifted the spell ball, but before I could call it to life, the skinwalker gave a sudden cry of anguish. A blue nimbus sprang up to surround it, one not created by me. The skinwalker fought it, trying to beat its way out, while I stood with my palm outstretched, watching in astonishment.

  The skinwalker ran off into the darkness, still surrounded with glowing blue, until it was lost to sight. I blew out my breath in sudden relief and returned the spell ball to my pocket.

  The stench receded, a sure sign the thing had gone. Had Mama called off her pet? Or had some other entity interfered? I didn’t know, and at the moment, I didn’t care.

  I limped toward the pickup. The next burst of lightning revealed a dusty red truck that looked familiar, and my heart sank as I read the words on the now upside-down door. “Fremont Hansen, Install and Fix-It.”

  “Shit,” I whispered. Fremont was the plumber I’d hired to help me restore the derelict hotel I’d bought on the outskirts of Magellan. He was a friendly guy with a receding hairline and innocent brown eyes, who claimed to have a little magical ability of his own. “I can fix anything,” he’d boasted, wriggling his fingers.

  I closed my bloody hand around my cell phone, but the fall had smashed it. Plastic shards stuck to my fingers, and the battery dangled from useless wires.

  I tossed the phone aside and crouched on the road next to the pickup’s cab. Blood coated the inside of the driver’s window, and I saw a head pressed against it.

  “Fremont.” I tried the door, but I couldn’t budge it. I hobbled around to the other side of the truck, my leg hurting like hell. The passenger window was open. I saw no gleaming pebbles of glass, so the window must have already been open before the wreck. The man lay in the blackness inside, upside down, neck bent unnaturally.

  I fumbled in the debris inside the truck and found no cell phone, and the frame was too crimped for me to open the glove compartment. I withdrew, my nose wrinkling with the stench of death.

  Another flash of lightning lit the sky, farther to the east, the storm moving on. The lightning died, and red and blue lights took its place, accompanied by the wail of a siren. I sat down, exhausted, my back against the pickup, as a vehicle came charging toward me, headlights blinding.

  An SUV with “Hopi County Sheriff’s Department” painted on its side stopped a few feet from me, its tires sliding a little on the wet pavement. The door popped open, and booted feet hit the asphalt, followed by sharply creased khaki pants. The boots were polished to a sheen, strange for a man who worked in the dusty desert all day.

  Nash Jones, sheriff of tiny Hopi County, squatted down next to me, regarding me with eyes ice gray in the glare of his headlights. Blearily I heard another truck pull up and more boots crunch on dirt and pavement.

  “Janet Begay.” Nash’s voice was flat and hard. He didn’t like me. When I first arrived in Magellan, I’d tried to talk to him about Amy McGuire, and he’d shut me down before I’d done more than introduce myself. Amy McGuire had been his fiancée. Jones had hated me before he’d even met me.

  He turned on a pinpoint flashlight and trained the light right into my eyes. “You all right?”

  “I’m alive,” I croaked.

  “You ran into him with your motorcycle.” His voice held no sympathy. “The impact flipped the truck. Am I right?”

  “Something hit him. Not me.”

  He didn’t believe me. “Can you get up? Do you need the paramedics?”

  “I think I’m okay.”

  Nash didn’t believe that either. A woman in a black coverall came over at his signal, and she helped me stand. Nash abandoned me while the woman got me to the back of a paramedics truck and cleaned the blood off my hands. She checked me over, took my blood pressure, felt my limbs for breaks, asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no but asked her for a lift into town, my motorcycle wheel bent like it was. She agreed but said she had to wait for the sheriff’s okay.

  I felt hollow inside. Fremont was dead in that truck. Dead because a skinwalker sent by my evil goddess mother had missed me and hit him.

  Nash Jones and his deputies surveyed the accident and started cutting the body out of the truck. I sat there sick and miserable. The storm was dying, leaving me drained and sick as usual. I really wanted some coffee. Or a stiff drink. I was a lightweight drunk, so I never drank much, but tonight I’d make an exception.

  Nash returned and beckoned with a curt gesture. “Begay. Come with me.”

  Probably the only reason he didn’t manhandle me was because the paramedics woman might get mad at him. Nash Jones had made it clear as soon as I arrived in Magellan that he resented the hell out of my presence and the fact that Chief McGuire had asked me here. Nash had never been officially charged regarding Amy’s disappearance, but he’d been questioned as a suspect, and the talk on the street was that no one knew for sure. The things Chief McGuire had told me about Sheriff Jones were . . . interesting.

  Nash didn’t touch me, but he made me hobble in front of him to his SUV. He opened the back door. “Get in.”

  “Why? The nice lady with the blood pressure cuff is giving me a ride home.”

  “I’m taking you to the sheriff’s office. For reckless driving, possible manslaughter.”

  “You are kidding, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t kid.”

  Jones could glare. He had gray eyes that could turn on you with the intensity of a supernova, black hair cut in the military style he’d brought back from his army time in Iraq, and a hard, handsome face. I’d seen women in Magellan and Flat Mesa turn their heads to watch him go by, his looks marred only by a scar on his upper lip.

  “There’s something out there,” I said. “It hit Fremont’s truck, hard enough to flip it. It ran off, but the storm’s dying, and it could come back anytime. It can tear this SUV apart like a paper bag if it wants to. Skinwalkers are frigging strong.”

  He answered me with a flat stare. Nash Jones was an Unbeliever, one of those people who didn’t buy the fact that Magellan was built near a mystical confluence of vortexes, where the paranormal was normal. He’d grown up here but derided those who made money from the tourists who flocked to Hopi County in pursuit of the supernatural.

  “Get in before I throw your ass in.”

  “Were you like this in the army? Not believing anyone who warned you of danger?”

  “There I was with trained men. You’re a Navajo girl from a sheep farm. Get in the damn truck.”

  “It killed Fremont, easy as anything.” I was close to hysterical tears. I liked gossipy, quirky Fremont.

  “It’s not Fremont.”

  I looked at him in shock. “What?”

  “It’s his assistant. Charlie Jones.”

  I’d seen Charlie helping Fremont work on my hotel’s plumbing, a quiet, kind of scruffy kid in his late teens who’d kept to himself. I’d known his first name was Charlie, but that was about it.

  “Jones?” I repeated.

  “My fourth cousin.”

  “Oh, Nash, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Nash gripped me under the elbow and all but threw me into the backseat. “Stay there.”

  He slammed the door and clicked a remote, and the locks e
ngaged. As I suspected, the windows wouldn’t roll down for the prisoner in the back, and a black grill separated back from front, with another one blocking me from the storage space to the rear. I decided to be thankful that Nash hadn’t handcuffed me.

  I slumped down in the seat, but I knew I couldn’t hide. If the skinwalker wanted to find me again, it would. I didn’t sense it nearby, though. The flashing emergency lights and activity might be keeping it away. Skinwalkers didn’t like light, noise, crowds. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t rise out of the desert and attack again when Nash drove me away.

  I also worried about my bike. Would Nash leave it by the side of the road like a mangled toy? I could imagine him doing that, sending impound to retrieve it when he felt like it.

  I didn’t have much in the way of possessions, feeling freer without them, but that Harley was important to me. I’d ridden her across this country and down into Mexico, first on my own, then with Mick, then alone again, when I’d finally left him five years ago.

  The bike represented my means of escape. No matter how many roots I put down or how much trouble I got into, I could always throw a change of clothes into my saddlebags, swing my leg over my Harley, and disappear into the night.

  I saw the poor thing in the flicker of police flares, the wheel bent, the handlebars sticking up forlornly. It was a machine, a piece of metal, I told myself, but it was like looking at the twisted body of my own child.

  When Nash finally opened the driver’s door, I smelled no stench of skinwalker on the night. I inhaled, tasting the ozone tingle of the storm. I toyed with the idea of snatching the lightning’s power and zapping Nash with it, but that would make me no better than the skinwalker. Hurting for the fun of it. I shuddered.

  “Should I consider myself under arrest?” I asked.

  Nash slammed the door and put on his seat belt. “Being taken in for questioning.”

  “My bike?”

  “Deputies are impounding it. It’s evidence.”

  “Damn you, Jones. I didn’t run into that truck.”

  “Save it.” He put the SUV in gear and pulled out past the flipped pickup as the deputies lifted my Harley and tossed it carelessly into the back of their truck.

  Nash didn’t turn on his emergency lights, but he gunned the SUV and roared down the highway. Ten miles along, the road ended in a T-intersection, another narrow highway heading north to Flat Mesa, the other south to Magellan. My hotel stood here, at the Crossroads, a dark, forlorn square against the darker sky. The Crossroads Bar, which shared a parking lot with the hotel, was lit and swarming with people.

  I gazed longingly at the hotel, picturing my bedroom in the back with its waiting bed and bathroom, even if the water didn’t work yet. That hotel was my haven, my defiance if you like.

  Nash turned left, passing the hotel without stopping, and drove north toward Flat Mesa.

  Two

  “I thought you brought me here for questioning.”

  Nash Jones kept his hard grip on my arm as he stopped outside a cell in the Hopi County Sheriff’s Department. He’d had his deputy give me a breathalyzer test and seemed irritated that I wasn’t drunk. Said deputy then patted me down while Nash watched. They took away all my personal items, and Nash dragged me off to lock me up.

  There were four cells in the jail, empty except for the first one, which held a man drunk on the floor. Nash took me to the very end of the block and slid the bars open on the last cell. Inside was a bunk with a thin mattress and a toilet. Lovely. Nash shoved me inside and closed the grate.

  “You forgot to strip-search me,” I said.

  Nash gave me a cold stare. “Don’t push it.”

  “Don’t I get to call a lawyer?”

  “Tomorrow. Tonight you’ll cool down, and tomorrow you’ll tell me all about the accident that resulted in Charlie Jones’s death.”

  “No time like the present.”

  “Tomorrow,” he repeated with finality.

  Bastard. He could question me now, but then I might be able to convince him I was innocent, and he’d have to let me go. He’d feel so much better knowing I was sweating overnight in a jail cell.

  No one knew where I was, not Fremont, or Chief McGuire, or my friend Jamison Kee, who’d been responsible for me coming to Magellan at all. Jamison had recommended me to Chief McGuire as an investigator of the weird when McGuire turned to unconventional means to find his daughter. McGuire would eventually get word of my detainment, but probably not until morning. I didn’t think Nash would call him, because the accident had taken place on county land, Nash’s jurisdiction. I’d come to learn in the short time I’d lived in Magellan that Nash took his jurisdiction seriously.

  I felt awful about his cousin Charlie. Among my people cousins could be as close as brothers and sisters, and the loss of one family member sent ripples of grief down the line. Nash was certainly going to blame me, and it was true that if I hadn’t been out there, Charlie wouldn’t have died.

  Nash walked away, his footsteps loud in the silence. I lay down on the mattress and pulled my knees up, my feet flat on the bed. My leg felt better, so I hadn’t sprained or broken it, just temporarily wrenched it. My muttered healing spells helped a little, but I didn’t have enough magic left to make the pain go completely away.

  Nash had taken everything: my broken cell phone, the chaps I wore over my jeans, my wallet and keys, the silver ball spell. I didn’t worry about him activating the spell, because only people with magic could do that, and Nash had no aura of magic around him, thank the gods. The spell would remain safely unused, but it was anyone’s guess as to whether he’d let me have it back.

  I closed my eyes.

  I must have fallen into instant sleep, because suddenly I was floating above the desert, seeing everything as though through a flying creature’s eyes. Below me was the gleam of Flat Mesa, larger than the circle of light that was Magellan. Between the two towns lay the Crossroads Hotel, dark, and the bar, loud and full of light. To the east of the Crossroads, beyond the empty railroad bed that cut through the land like an artery, lay dark desert.

  Except it wasn’t entirely dark. Swirls of mist moved through it, glowing an unhealthy white. The air was heavy, warm with the smell of rain, but the wind out of the retreating clouds was freezing cold.

  The tightly whirling mists marked the vortexes. Vortexes are places in which mystical energy gathers, combining the magics of earth, air, fire, and water into one concentrated space. Some people claim that standing among the vortexes makes them feel better, more alive. Witches seek them to enhance spells, and mystics like to draw in vortex energy to build up their own. Some New Agers even believe that they hold cosmic energies that aliens use to locate places to land, but that’s complete nonsense.

  Few people know what the vortexes really are, but I do. They’re gateways. Sealed gateways, but openings nonetheless, to Beneath.

  Beneath is the world below this from which humans once emerged, eons ago. There’d been still another world below that one, and so on. Some storytellers say that the world we inhabit now is the last and best of them; some think there is another, better one beyond this, which we will reach when we figure out how to get to it.

  Gods had led the way from Beneath to this world, pushing up through the vortexes and bringing people with them to populate it. Those gods had sealed the way behind them before some of the crueler entities could emerge. The ones who hadn’t made it out, like my mother, were very, very angry.

  The vortexes were sealed now, but skinwalkers and other demons collected around them because there they could feed on the tiny residue of power from Beneath. Gods like my mother could direct skinwalkers using that magic.

  I could sense her out there now, trying to reach me, the white mists swirling to ensnare me.

  Janet.

  “Leave me alone!” I screamed.

  Be with me.

  “No!”

  A long, vicious growl filled the air, and I jumped awake to an overpowering
stench and something hitting the roof full force.

  I was off the bunk and at the bars before the second blow landed, yelling at the top of my lungs. The building shook. Thunder boomed, a second storm racing through the narrow fingers of canyons to the town huddled under the night.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” Nash Jones stopped in front of my cell, his face suffused with anger.

  “We got struck,” his deputy told me from behind him. “But don’t worry. This building is solid stone.” He sniffed. “What’s that smell?”

  “It wasn’t a lightning strike,” I said. “We’re being attacked.”

  Nash scowled. “Not the skinwalker story again.”

  “Hey, skinwalkers are real,” the deputy said. “At least around here.”

  “As you were, Lopez. Don’t encourage her.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “It will tear down this building to get to me, and it won’t care who it kills on the way. Are there rooms behind me?”

  Lopez nodded, ignoring Nash’s glare. “Old cell block. Unused. Locked off.”

  “Open it up. Flood it with light. They don’t like light. Flood it or he’ll bring the building down around us.”

  Lopez looked alarmed, but Nash’s face was like granite. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re a lunatic, Begay?”

  “Sure, all the time. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

  Something boomed against the outer wall beside me, and Nash’s gaze flicked to it. I smelled the skinwalker; I sensed it and its rage. Nash acted like he smelled and sensed nothing. Maybe being an Unbeliever made him oblivious.

  “Lopez, check out the cell block,” he ordered.

  Lopez looked worried, but he squared his shoulders. “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t check it out alone,” I said quickly.

  Nash gave me a withering look. “Lopez is a big boy. He’s not afraid of the dark, and neither am I.”

  “You should be,” I said.