Stormwalker

by Allyson James

  I reached out for the building storm, sighing with relief when tiny sparks laced through my fingers. The sparks were too weak to do much more than sting, but the Nightwalker jumped and swore.

  Then he hit me. My head snapped back, my vision blurred, and I tasted blood.

  Damn it, where was Mick? Or Coyote? Unreliable trickster gods. If I survived this, I’d kill him. Mick too.

  And then Coyote was there, in the doorway, his coyote form glowing with light. Mick was beside him, fire in his hands.

  I’d never known coyotes could snarl like that. I’d heard a grizzly bear growl once, but that animal had nothing on Coyote’s fang-bearing fury. The grips on me slackened, except for the Nightwalker’s. Coyote leapt, and pistols opened fire.

  The Wild West wasn’t dead. Except instead of gunslingers and posses, I had bikers and skinwalkers on one side, an enraged coyote-god and a man who wielded fire on the other.

  I rolled off the bar and hit the floor behind it. The Nightwalker came with me, his mouth open wide, ready to fasten on my neck, my face, my arm. Never mind about arteries or the jugular, Nightwalkers didn’t much care where they bit as long as they got blood.

  Lightning danced in my hands. It wasn’t easy stilling my mind to channel power with the Nightwalker going crazy on top of me, but the storm was coming closer, giving me strength.

  The mirror couldn’t do anything but yell. “You get off her, do you hear me? Hit him, honey, hit him!”

  “I am hitting him,” I shouted back.

  Hitting, kicking, punching, sizzling, fighting for my life. I had the feeling the Nightwalker had stopped caring about keeping me alive. If this one went into a feeding frenzy, my dear mother would be minus a daughter.

  I screamed as the Nightwalker’s teeth closed on my shoulder and bit down hard.

  The storm flowed to me, as though answering my distress. The pain in my shoulder was agonizing, my heart fluttering as the Nightwalker swiftly sucked blood out of my body. A lightning bolt struck outside the broken windows, and I grabbed it.

  White-hot fire sparkled in my hands. I laughed, even though my shoulder burned, and I shot every bit of power I had at the Nightwalker.

  The Nightwalker’s mouth popped from my flesh like a cork from a bottle. He screamed as I climbed to my feet, pushing him into the air with the white light around my fists. I lifted him all the way to the ceiling while he shrieked and cursed at me, his fangs dripping blood. My blood.

  I got him against the ornate tin ceiling that had been original to the hotel. Then I surrounded him with lightning and let nature take its course. The ceiling danced with electricity, and the Nightwalker fried.

  His death was swift. The Nightwalker screamed as gobs of his blood and gore rained down on me. I couldn’t duck out of the way with my lightning power still smoking him, and blood soaked my skin, my nightshirt, and my jeans. The Nightwalker’s screams died out as he burned away, until only ash fell on my upturned face.

  “You go, girlfriend!” the mirror shouted. I turned to it, my reflection splintered across its cracked surface. One hundred crazed Janets looked out at me, each coated with blood, each surrounded by white light.

  I swung around as a skinwalker came up behind me, the huge, brutish thing ready to pound me to nothing. It smelled like a slaughterhouse, its yellow eyes wild with rage.

  I killed it with one strike of lightning. The storm was on top of me, and I was unstoppable. Coyote and Mick were fighting like crazy, Coyote leaping and diving, tearing into skinwalkers as he had the other night. Fire danced out of Mick’s hands, his eyes once again lit like flames. They avoided killing the humans, I noticed, but the skinwalkers were toast.

  Mick flamed a skinwalker and looked around for more. Coyote barreled into the sorcerer who’d come running into the saloon, his aura weakened by the fight with our wards. I saw them go down, and then two of the bikers brought up sawed-off shotguns and emptied them into Mick.

  I screamed. Mick fell against a wall, hands pressed to his stomach, his fingers turning crimson as blood poured from the wound. He’d shrugged off the bullet Nash had put in his shoulder, but that had been a flesh wound, no vital organs involved. This was a blast in the gut by guns made to bring down bears.

  Mick slid down the wall in slow motion, a thick streak of blood smearing the new paint. I screamed again. Coyote landed on top of one of the shooters, sending his shotgun spinning. I flung the other guy aside with lightning.

  I felt the Beneath magic wake up inside me and answer my storm magic, the first time I’d ever been able to sense it as an entirely separate entity. I wanted to tap it, to draw from sorcery of that other world to destroy everything in my path.

  Outside, sirens began to wail. I sprinted to Mick, slipped on his blood, and landed on my knees beside him.

  “Mick!” I gasped.

  He lay motionless, and in the darkness I couldn’t tell whether he breathed. I wanted to gather him into my arms, hold him, but the way power crackled through my fingers I didn’t dare touch him. Though Mick usually absorbed my magic, who knew what the magic of Beneath would do to him? “Mick, damn it, please don’t die on me.”

  “Everyone on the floor.” The voice of Nash Jones thundered through the room. Red and blue lights swept through the broken windows, staining the walls, floor, mirror, and faces crimson and sapphire. “Weapons down, hands on your heads. I want to see everyone in this room kissing tile.”

  Nash walked in, his pistol rock steady, his eyes as cold as ice. Deputies and uniformed Magellan police followed him. The skinwalkers were all dead, fried by me, Mick’s fire, or Coyote’s wrath. The remaining bikers hit the floor, knowing when they’d lost, except one who stayed upright and took a shot at Nash.

  Nash plugged him. The guy gurgled as he fell, and the others went still. Silence reigned, broken only by thunder.

  I hugged my knees and rocked back and forth, crying. Coyote came to me, human now but naked. He crouched down, gently pushed me out of the way, and reached for Mick.

  Nash and his officers started going through the room, taking weapons, cuffing wrists, hauling men up and out. Mick’s eyes flicked open. No longer blue, the voids of darkness sought not me, but Coyote.

  “Take me out of here,” Mick rasped.

  Coyote lifted Mick as if he weighed nothing and slung the large man across his shoulders.

  Nash pointed his pistol at Coyote. “I said, stand down. Get on the floor.”

  Coyote ignored him. “Nash, no!” I shouted.

  Not listening to me, Nash tightened his finger on the trigger. I threw every bit of lightning I had at him, no holding back.

  The impact lifted Nash and flung him into the wall. Plaster broke around him, and my electricity lashed him in place like a cocoon. Nash fired, but his shot hit the ceiling, the tin ringing like a kettledrum.

  Lopez and another deputy tried to get me on the ground, but I could no longer stop the magic. The storm was right on top of the hotel, answering the storm inside me. I tossed both deputies aside like they were straw and ran outside.

  Coyote was carrying Mick’s body into the darkness, toward the railroad bed and away from the paramedics truck that was open and ready.

  “Wait!” I shouted.

  I sprinted after them, but Coyote moved fast. Weeping and stumbling, I scrambled up the side of the railroad bed as Coyote laid Mick’s body on top of it.

  I raced for Mick, but Coyote grabbed me around the waist and hauled me back. I hit Coyote with my lightning, but for all his reaction I might have thrown a swarm of gnats at him.

  “Stop it,” Coyote said, voice firm. “This needs to happen.”

  The air around Mick darkened into a dense, inky cloud, and in a few seconds, I couldn’t even see him. I cried out and again tried to go to him, but Coyote pulled me away along the railroad bed, my boot heels catching on clumps of dried grass.

  “Begay!” Nash came striding toward us, lights from the police vehicles gleaming on his drawn pistol. “I said, stand
down.”

  I gaped at him in amazement. I must have seared him with a couple thousand volts, but here he was, marching toward us as though he’d risen fresh from a good night’s sleep. He didn’t look hurt or burned or even winded. I must have made myself pull the punch, I thought, my mind dazed, but I sure hadn’t done it on purpose.

  “On the ground, Begay. Coyote, you too.”

  He came on, his face set, leaving me no doubt he’d fire on me if I didn’t obey. I dropped to the railroad bed, embracing the scent of cool red earth and grasses. Coyote ignored Nash and remained standing, watching the weird darkness engulf Mick.

  Nash’s boots stopped right by my face, and he rested one foot on my back. The lightning inside me shot upward through his leg. Nash didn’t even flinch.

  Cool metal touched my wrists, and I heard a faint click as the handcuffs expertly locked. Electricity snaked around the metal and fed back into my skin, and I groaned.

  “Stop the light show, Janet,” Nash snapped. “It’s over.”

  “I can’t,” I moaned.

  The darkness around Mick swelled and swelled, and then suddenly shot out like tentacles in all directions. A wave of heat rolled out of the blackness, smelling of fire and ash.

  “I’d stand back,” Coyote said in a mild voice.

  The ground shuddered. I yelped, unable to do anything flat on my stomach with my hands behind me.

  Nash grabbed me, lifting me up, dragging me off the railroad bed as the black cloud exploded into shards. We hit the ground at the bottom of the little slope, rocks cutting into my knees.

  From the shards rose—a creature. It was black and gigantic, like a beast from the deepest part of hell. Huge, leathery wings shot out of a long, sinuous body and flapped once, blasting me with furnace-hot air. The air didn’t smell bad—it reminded me of the heat of an intense fire, clean, hot, tinged with fragrant smoke.

  “What the fuck?” Nash’s words echoed my thoughts.

  The creature’s wedge-shaped head rotated on its neck as it looked down at me, its huge black eyes cut with orange red slits. It gleamed black from its head to the barbed tail that snaked out behind it, but its hide glistened faintly red, as though fire surged just under its skin.

  I’d seen it before, I remembered. A split second only, when my bedroom had been lit with frantic magic, and I’d seen a flash of the monster that now hovered above me. I’d thought it a hallucination or a by-product of the magic Mick and I worked, but now I realized that in that moment I’d seen the aura of what Mick really was.

  They weren’t supposed to exist. They were legends only. Weren’t they?

  The creature roared and swooped down on us. Nash and I both hit the dirt, but Coyote stood straight and grinned up at it. “Feeling better, my friend?”

  The beast sailed to us again and opened its mouth, a row of sword-edged teeth passing too close for my comfort. The gleaming scales of its hide and the football field-length tail glided by, and then the monster rose to incredible height, blotting out the stars. I thought it would disappear into the night, but it turned again, angling behind the hotel.

  Fire came out of the thing’s mouth, a stream of white heat so concentrated it picked out one stray skinwalker fleeing into the desert. The skinwalker screamed, burst into flame, and died to ash.

  The creature roared in triumph, and I swore I heard grating laughter in my head. As the giant swooped by me and Nash once more, the lightning inside me arced up to it as though greeting an old friend. The beast opened its mouth and swallowed the forked bolts, then it sped out into the black desert and was gone.

  I fell back against Nash, breathing in short gasps, my hands still locked behind me. I wanted both to heave and to curl up in a little ball and never get up again.

  “Shit,” I rasped.

  “You didn’t know?” Coyote stopped in front of me, still naked, a god-man with no sense of embarrassment.

  Nash’s pistol hung slack in his grip, his face shining with sweat. “She didn’t know what?”

  “That my boyfriend is a—” I coughed to clear my throat. “Holy shit. Mick is a dragon.”

  Coyote deserted me. That is, he walked off down the railroad bed in spite of Nash growling at him to stay put. The air rippled like a special effect, and when it cleared, Coyote was gone.

  “He’s a god.” I was aching and exhausted, the storm magic still eating through me. I got shakily to my knees, but couldn’t dredge up the energy to climb to my feet. “He doesn’t listen to anyone.”

  “A god. Right. And a dragon. What the hell are you—a werewolf?”

  “Changers don’t run in my family as far as I know. I’m a Stormwalker.”

  “What’s that supposed to be?”

  Nash’s pistol was on me again. I let lightning flicker across my skin, sparking into the night. “I can call the power of any storm, twist it to my will, as long as it’s close enough to me. I can bend the wind, channel lightning, use rain to flood my enemies.”

  Nash listened to my speech with a skeptical look on his face. “That is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”

  “Nash, the Unbeliever. You just saw a dragon, plus I picked you up and threw you across a room with my storm power. I’m sorry about that, by the way. I didn’t mean to hurt you—I was upset, because I thought Mick was dead.”

  “It didn’t hurt.”

  My eyes widened. “No? You put a good-sized hole in my wall.”

  “Yes, that hurt. I’m going to charge you for assaulting a police officer, but your little light show didn’t affect me.”

  “Now who’s bullshitting?”

  “You might scare drunk bikers with your tricks, but I’m not drunk, and I’m not interested.”

  I stared at him. I’d convinced myself that something decent in me had prevented my magic from killing him, but thinking about it, now that I knew Mick wasn’t dead, just a dragon . . . Shit.

  I had hit Nash with my power full strength. I’d been way too upset for any kind of control, and the lightning I’d sent through Sheriff Jones should have killed him.

  “That can’t be right,” I said, half to myself.

  “It is right, and I’m going to testify that it’s right, and you’re going to do a few years for assault.”

  I sat back on my heels. “Damn it, I said I was sorry. I’d just seen my boyfriend get shot in the stomach, for the gods’ sakes.”

  “You can say ‘sorry’ by good behavior while wearing your nice orange overalls.”

  “You’re a shithead, Jones, you know that? And I still don’t believe that you didn’t feel it.”

  “I don’t care what you believe.” Nash holstered his pistol and hauled me to my feet, easy to do because my wrists were still cuffed behind me. “Time to go.”

  Like hell. I collected more lightning into my bound hands and shot it back to Nash. Because he stood behind me, and because my hands were at about the level of his crotch, he got it there full force. I didn’t hold back, and I wasn’t nice—I zapped every bit of lightning magic I had right into Nash Jones’s balls.

  His body jolted, but he didn’t let go of me. I gaped over my shoulder at him as my power surrounded his body like arcs in a Frankenstein movie. I gave it to him as hard as I gave it to Mick, and Nash absorbed every ounce of my power without flinching.

  He gazed down at me, his gray white eyes glowing with my magic, and I saw raw need awaken in him. He cupped my neck in his strong hand, pulled me to him, and kissed me.

  Eighteen

  I knew I should pull away. I should jerk back, get myself free, and kick Nash in the stones. But my body craved the release, and it felt so damn good letting it go, not holding back.

  Hell, Nash should have pulled away. I was the one in handcuffs, and he’d been in bed that afternoon with Maya. But he really kissed me. His mouth opened mine, his tongue dug deep, and he gripped the back of my neck as though he was afraid to let go.

  Humid air licked our bodies. I felt the wild beating of Nash’s
heart against my chest, the heat of his breath on my skin, the rough scrape of unshaved stubble against my lips. I was hot all over, the power melting my body to his, him hard against me.

  My photographer’s eye had missed nothing when I’d burst into Maya’s bedroom this afternoon. I clearly remembered Nash’s arms thick with muscle, his hands strong on Maya’s thighs, Maya’s beautiful body arching, unashamed of the joy she took in Nash. The memory made me crave sex even more. I wanted what they’d had—a coupling to ease my itch, my confusion, and my heartache. But not with Nash. With Mick.

  Neither my thoughts nor Nash stopped us. Mick did.

  I heard a light click of rock on rock and opened my eyes to find Mick standing three feet behind us, human once more, wearing jeans and nothing else.

  Nash jerked away. His lips were swollen, his hand still locked on my neck. The three of us remained still, frozen in place.

  Thunder rumbled but more distant now. The air smelled fresh, of ozone and fire, of the burning crackle of my power.

  The look in Mick’s eyes took the last of my strength. I collapsed, and Nash, the good cop, had to catch me. When I looked up again, Mick had disappeared.

  I wanted to cry, to lie down right here and weep until I had no more tears. Nash growled in his throat, and I felt the handcuffs leave my hands.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, too tired to even rub my wrists. “You think I don’t need to be restrained anymore?”

  “I’m letting you go.”

  That made me look up in surprise. “What? No more assaulting a police officer? No more destruction of my own property? Or whatever else you were going to charge me with? Disturbing the peace by letting a motorcycle gang drive through my hotel?”

  “Just go home, Janet.”

  “You all right?” I asked him. As much as he confused me at this moment, I also felt responsible for him. He looked tired but in no way harmed by the voltage I’d burned through his body.