Stormwalker

by Allyson James

  “Don’t be stupid. It’s your word against Maya’s. No one else saw you; Maya could have fed me the story to cover up for doing something herself.”

  Nash looked at me in exasperation. “So what are you trying to say?”

  “Leave it for now. I’ll just tell you that Amy’s disappearance wasn’t your fault, no matter how worried you are that it was.” After my grandmother’s revelation about Harold Yazzie and his illegitimate baby, I thought I was close to understanding what had happened. My talk with Father Matthews made me even more certain. “We have more important things to talk about.”

  Nash’s hostility returned. “What things?”

  “Like what happened behind my hotel the night before last.”

  He assumed I meant the kiss. Nash’s neck went red. “No, now you need to leave. I have a shitload of work because of your hotel. The bikers we arrested had meth on them, not to mention illegal weapons. I should thank you for helping the sheriff’s department make so many good busts.”

  “Sure, I’ll let people drive through my hotel and shoot holes in my boyfriend every night.”

  “I suggest you consult a good lawyer if you want to sue for damages.”

  “I don’t want to talk about the hotel; I want to talk about me slamming you with every bit of magic I had and not even singeing you. What I did should have killed you.”

  “Are you confessing to assault or attempted murder?”

  “Don’t try to be funny.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a little spell I’d worked up from stuff I’d bought at Paradox: a sage smudge stick with a stone bound to it with wire. The spell should wind a temporary but effective bubble of protection around the person I cast it on. I’d cast similar spells on my father many times, the man who liked to wander the land alone at night. I worried about skinwalkers and spirits and just plain weird people hurting him, so I used to sneak up on him while he napped in his truck or on the sofa and cast the spell.

  I lit the smudge stick and slowly waved it in front of Nash while I chanted words in the Diné language.

  A silver shimmer issued from the smudge and wound itself around him, along with the fragrant smoke. The spell hovered in place for a moment or two, quivering like a soap bubble, then it shattered. I jumped as the shards of the spell dove directly into Nash’s body.

  I stared, openmouthed, holding the sage in cold fingers, and Nash watched me in suspicion. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Didn’t you feel that?”

  “Feel what? All I saw was you waving a weed and chanting in Navajo.”

  “The spell broke. Exploded is more like it.” I searched for the spell’s residual aura but felt nothing.

  “I have a lot of work to do, Begay. Go away, or I’ll have Lopez escort you out.”

  “I want you to come to my hotel. Say this Friday night? There’s someone I want you to talk to.” I had no idea whether I’d be able to find who I wanted by then, but this was only Monday. It gave me a little time.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to tell you yet. Will you come?”

  Nash flipped open the folder. “I’m too busy.”

  “Come on, Nash. It’s important.”

  “Maybe.” He pointed at the door. “Go.”

  I snatched up my sage stick and left his office.

  I’d never seen a spell burst like that, ever, not even when I faced powerful sorcerers and skinwalkers. They’d thwarted spells but had never smashed one into pieces and sucked it into their bodies. Nash had destroyed the spell without breaking a sweat, and he hadn’t even realized he’d done it.

  I returned to the hotel and on my new cell phone made a series of calls based on what Father Matthews had told me. It took all frigging day, and no one wanted to tell me what I needed to know. I had to persuade and cajole even to find out I’d gotten the wrong place, and sometimes the person at the other end simply hung up on me. Home-land Security should defend its secrets as well as these people did.

  I was about to give up when I made a breakthrough at a place in Tucson. I made an appointment with the reluctant woman at the other end, but she agreed that it was important I come and talk to them. When I finished, my phone rang again, the mechanic up in Flat Mesa informing me that my bike was finally ready. I snapped off the phone and punched the air.

  I found Fremont in the saloon refitting PVC pipe behind broken walls. The dent Nash’s body had made in one wall was still there, but Mick’s blood had mercifully been cleaned from the other. A couple of guys were distastefully mopping up what was left of the Nightwalker behind the bar. My own blood was mixed in with the gore, my bruised shoulder still aching a little from the bite.

  The poor magic mirror looked forlorn with its spiderweb cracks radiating from the big hole in the center. I was surprised the glass hadn’t fallen from the frame, but magic mirrors were resilient. I had no idea how to repair it, or if it even could be repaired. I’d have to track down the witch I’d known in Oklahoma and ask her.

  The damage hadn’t shut it up, however. “Hello, sweetie,” it said to me. “These cracks make me see dozens of you at the same time. It’s fabulous.”

  “Very funny,” I told it.

  “What’s funny?” Fremont asked me. “I’m still hearing that hum in here, but I can’t track it down.”

  “Never mind; it’s not important. Will you do me a favor? I need to get my bike and return my rental to Flat Mesa. Will you be my second driver?”

  “Sure. Let me finish here . . .”

  “Let’s lock up and not worry about it. The repair shop closes at five.” Another night without my motorcycle suddenly seemed one too many.

  Fremont started putting away his tools. “Mick’s here. Why don’t you have him drive you?”

  “He’s busy with something.” That might even be true.

  “Liar, liar,” the mirror whispered. I shot it a dirty look.

  Fremont took my words at face value. Mr. Gossip of Magellan didn’t seem to realize there was anything wrong between me and Mick, which meant Mick had kept our problems to himself. That was fine with me.

  Fremont rode with me in the SUV to the bike shop in Flat Mesa. My Harley was there, fixed and gleaming, waiting for me.

  It felt so good mounting the bike and starting it up that I could have ridden out and left Fremont and the rental without looking back. I wanted to speed out of town to the winding highways and freedom.

  Instead, I made myself wait for Fremont to get into the SUV and follow me sedately to the rental agency.

  “Want dinner?” I asked Fremont when I finished turning in the SUV. “Least I can do for taking you out of your way.”

  Fremont eyed my bike in trepidation, as though it had just dawned on him that I was his ride home. “I can call a friend to pick me up.”

  I patted the seat. “No, you can’t. Mount up. I’m taking you to dinner.”

  Fremont put his leg over the bike, looking worried. I got on in front of him, started it up, then told him to hang on.

  “To what?”

  “To me.”

  Fremont froze. “You’re boyfriend’s big, Janet. I’ve seen his muscles.”

  “He won’t touch you, I promise. I won’t let him.”

  “All right, but if he comes after me, I’ll . . . I’ll scream and run.”

  I laughed, letting the situation amuse me. It kept me from the empty pain of thinking about Mick.

  Fremont clasped my hips in a light hold, but when I glided the bike out of the parking lot, he yelped and threw both arms around my waist. I grinned as I headed down the street, barely topping thirty-five.

  Clouds were gathering, not the high, dense clouds of a thunderstorm, but the more uniform gray of rain. Liquid started pattering on us as we rode.

  “Well, damn, sugar,” said a voice. “Your hunk of a man never told me I’d get wet.”

  It wasn’t Fremont. Fremont was clinging to me, too terrified to make a sound.

&nbs
p; “Nice view,” the voice drawled. “Tits ‘R’ Us.”

  I stared in horror at my right-hand mirror. “Oh, no.” I groaned. “Oh, gods, no.”

  “Oh, yes,” the mirror said, and breathed a happy sigh.

  Twenty-one

  I would kill Mick. Kill him, stuff him, mount his dragon head on the lobby wall.

  I knew Mick had done this. Who else would have made sure a piece of broken magic mirror got ground into one of my bike’s mirrors? This was Mick’s way of keeping his eye on me.

  The bastard.

  “I love this,” the mirror said. “I can see right down your shirt.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  The mirror laughed, a drawling chuckle. “I always said I wanted to get out more.”

  I ground my teeth as I drove to the diner at the north end of town. The rain was coming down hard as we parked and hurried inside, me hurrying even faster to get away from the mirror.

  The mood in the diner was electric. People in the desert don’t hate rain. The steady stuff, like what started to pour as we ran inside, was rare. Usually we got wild storms with wind, hail, and flash floods, which blew in and out in the space of a few hours. Rain like this was different. Patrons in the diner gazed out at the streaming water with smiles on their faces. The waitress who dropped glasses of water on the table said, “I love this rain. We sure need it.”

  This particular diner reminded me strongly of the one in Holbrook, where I’d first met my mother. I discovered why when I saw the owner’s picture and name on the wall—he owned both of them. I felt a frisson of remembered fear, but Jamison was right about facing ghosts. Besides, I was hungry and happy to get away from the damned mirror.

  Fremont and I ordered. As we waited for my burger and his steak, Fremont kept up a steady chatter about goings-on in Magellan. The destruction of my hotel was the most interesting thing that had happened in town lately, but other things had caught Fremont’s interest—a tourist shoplifting in Paradox, Sheriff Jones making more than one of the biker gang members cry, a cousin in the vast Hansen clan having a new baby.

  I noted that Fremont’s gossip never included personal information about himself. He’d never once told me about this date he’d had the night Charlie Jones had died. I wondered if he, like Mick, trained his conversation on trivialities to keep people from learning anything significant about him.

  The waitress slid a platter of golden French fries and a burned-black burger in front of me, the white plate punctuated by a crimson puddle of ketchup and a sunflower yellow one of mustard. Worry made me hungry, so I ate in silence while Fremont talked, the rain streamed down, and the humidity rose.

  Rain like this didn’t bother me as much as did lightning, but the storm still affected me. My skin grew damp, and the urge to draw the water to me grew strong. I resisted, wanting to eat in peace.

  A tall man with a tan and sharp eyes stopped beside the booth. Both Fremont and I looked up at him in surprise before he reached down and grabbed Fremont by the neck.

  “What are you doing?” I yelped.

  “Are you the fucker who was banging my wife?” the man asked Fremont.

  His voice was loud in the small diner, and people turned to stare. I started to retort that Fremont would never bang anyone’s wife, but Fremont was as red as my ketchup and words died on my lips.

  “You might want to leave, honey,” the man said to me. “This is between me and your boyfriend.”

  “He’s my friend, and I’m not going anywhere.” The man wore a light jacket, I’d assumed against the rain, but when he moved I saw the butt of a pistol beneath it.

  “It’s all right, Janet.”

  Fremont looked panicky but resigned, but I wasn’t about to leave him alone with this guy. “Who the hell are you?” I asked.

  The man shook Fremont by the neck. “He knows.”

  “His name is John Beaumont.”

  “Beaumont?” I repeated in amazement.

  “My wife came out here to find herself, she says. Instead she finds this pecker.” John Beaumont shook Fremont again. “All of a sudden she disappears and then turns up dead. What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing,” Fremont panted. “I swear to you. I thought she’d gone back to L.A.”

  Fremont had sounded more fascinated than devastated when Maya first found the body in the basement. Of course, Sherry hadn’t been recognizable, and if Fremont had thought she’d returned to California a year ago, he might not have realized right away who it was. I’d put Fremont’s subsequent sadness and loss of buoyancy down to the death of his assistant, Charlie, but I realized now that he’d started to sag after Nash released Sherry’s name as that of the dead woman.

  “I don’t remember you mentioning this to me,” I said to Fremont.

  “I was afraid to. I had nothing to do with her death, I swear. I really thought she’d gone back home.”

  “You were the last person she was with,” Beaumont said. “And you were screwing her.” He moved the jacket so Fremont could see the gun. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  No way was I going to let Fremont leave with him, but if I started screaming that he had a gun, Beaumont might panic and open fire. At the booth across the aisle was a family with a little kid in a high chair. No one in this diner deserved stray bullets ruining their lives.

  “Why don’t you come outside and talk to me,” I said to Beaumont. “You can tell me your troubles.”

  “Fuck you, bitch. I want him.”

  This was going nowhere fast. I looked at the rain steadily falling, and my fingertips became slick with water.

  “Fremont,” I said. “Get under the table.”

  “What?”

  The man tightened his grip on Fremont’s neck. “He’s coming with me.”

  “Fremont, now!”

  A giant wave shattered the window and engulfed our table, the remains of our meal, me, and Beaumont. Beaumont shouted obscenities and fell under the onslaught.

  Fremont had dived under the table, and the other customers fled their seats as the floodwaters rushed in. I’d put my body between the window and the kid in the high chair, taking the wave and shards of broken glass myself. The cuts stung, rainwater washing the blood away as soon as it flowed.

  People were screaming, scrambling away. The stunned father yanked his son out of the high chair and dragged his weeping, babbling wife to the door.

  Beaumont scrabbled on the floor, another wave curving over him to pin him down. Water seeped from my body, wanting to join the storm I’d called. I held myself together with effort, grabbed the pistol from Beaumont’s jacket, hauled Fremont up, and pushed him toward the door.

  “Go!” I ran after him, slipping and sliding on the drenched floor.

  We made it to the parking lot. The rain beat down in torrents, the clouds above the diner black as night. The wave of water targeting John Beaumont would hold until I was out of range.

  I more or less shoved Fremont onto the bike, stashing the pistol in my saddlebag. I started the bike and gunned it, squealing out onto the highway.

  Within twenty minutes, I pulled into the hotel parking lot, which was deserted except for Mick’s bike and Fremont’s new work truck. The rainstorm had died behind us as wind pushed the clouds west.

  Mick walked out of the saloon as Fremont and I came in. A new front door had been fitted, a plain one this time, and Mick locked it behind us. I laid the pistol, a nine-millimeter, on the drop cloth-covered counter in the lobby.

  “Mick, will you look after that for me?”

  I shouldn’t have guns, not with the volatile magic inside me. I’d not even liked the itchy feeling of having the loaded gun in my saddlebag.

  “Sure thing.” He didn’t even ask.

  I looked away as Mick left the room. Seeing him at all reopened the hole in my heart.

  “I should go,” Fremont tried.

  I had him up against the counter in a heartbeat. “No, you should stay and tell me everything you know about Sh
erry Beaumont and how she died.”

  The light was dim in here because the windows had been boarded up, but in that light I saw Fremont’s eyes fill with tears.

  “I don’t know how she died. I barely knew her at all.”

  “John Beaumont seems to think you had an affair with her.”

  I heard Mick come back in, and he leaned on the counter on Fremont’s other side. Mick didn’t look surprised at my words, but he’d likely been watching us through the mirror on my bike.

  “I met her in Flat Mesa,” Fremont said. “She said she’d only be here for a couple of weeks, and I knew it would be over when she left. She told me she had a husband and that she was separated from him, but that they might get back together.”

  I never would have guessed that innocuous Fremont Hansen would have a fling with a married woman, even a separated one, but then I realized I’d only known him a few weeks. Not enough time to discover hidden depths.

  “So what happened?” I asked. “Didn’t you wonder when she was reported missing?”

  “I never knew about that. The last night I saw her, she said she was going back to California. She kissed me good-bye, got in her car, and drove away. I never saw her again. I swear to God.”

  “Then how did she get back to Magellan, and why?”

  “I don’t know. I never talked to her again. I assumed she went back to her husband.”

  I thought I knew what had happened, though it wasn’t something I could explain to Fremont. I was pretty certain that my mother had possessed Sherry Beaumont. From the picture printed in Magellan’s newspaper after she’d been identified, Sherry had been young, pretty, blond, and athletic, similar to the woman who’d come to me in Holbrook six years ago.

  My mother wanted to create more children like me, perhaps producing one more bendable to her will. I figured she’d possessed Sherry and found kindly Fremont, then had Sherry make love to him to impregnate herself. I didn’t know at what point my mother had left Sherry alone, probably when the woman was heading back to California. Had Sherry returned to Magellan to try to find out what had happened to her? Had she wandered, looking for the vortex or my mother, until she died of exposure? Or had she been a “weak vessel,” as my mother had described the woman who bore me and simply died of the magic inside her? Perhaps Sherry hadn’t been strong enough to take it.