Crossroads Burning

by Nash, Layla

  “Nelson, Mason, and Hazel, meet Luke Mankiller. Luke—the rest of Lincoln’s team.”

  “Mankiller?” Mason blinked and seemed to grow a bit, his shoulders flexing, and he might have looked intimidating if his hair wasn’t sticking up in tufts and he didn’t have pillow-lines in his cheek. “Nice to meet you. But strange that you’re all the way out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  Luke’s smile didn’t budge, though the skin around his eyes crinkled. “My people own these lands, so I go where I want. Stranger that you’re all the way out here, friend.”

  “No fighting,” I said under my breath, whisking the eggs faster. The blue-eyed dog inched closer on his belly, keeping an eye on his owner in case he got a command, but too tempted by the food to stay away. “Luke brought supplies for us, so if you want breakfast, be nice.”

  Mason’s nose twitched and he finally looked at the fire where the bacon crisped. “Well, that was mighty... convenient. Perfect timing, Luke. Glad to have you.”

  But his tone said he was anything but. I shook my head and flipped the bacon onto a clean plate, pouring the eggs into the skillet where they hissed and sizzled in the grease. Hazel smiled at Luke, something predatory in her expression, and poured another cup of coffee for him before getting her own. “Nice to meet you, Luke. Can’t say I’ve ever met a Mankiller before.”

  “There aren’t that many of us left,” he said, maintaining his equilibrium. He hardly noticed the way she eyed him, only blinking as he sipped the coffee. “But I can introduce you to my grandfather.”

  I almost snorted my coffee through my nose, coughing and flopping back away from the fire so I didn’t end up setting my hair on fire as I laughed. Eddie stuck his head out of his tent, took in the assembled group, and started laughing as well. “I thought I heard trouble.”

  Luke grinned and bent to shake Eddie’s hand while the ranger was still extricating himself from the tent. “Eddie, you ole tool of government repression. Got any smallpox blankets for me today?”

  “Nah, but I’ve got some beads I think you’ll like, if you’ve got some land you want to give away.” Eddie clapped the younger man on the shoulder, already eyeing the bacon and eggs. “And you came bearing gifts. I’ll give you the beads for free.”

  “Sounds like a deal I can’t pass up.” Luke held out his hand, waiting expectantly, while Lincoln and his pals all stared in near-horror at the scene unfolding. I shook my head—couldn’t seem to stop shaking it—as I stirred the eggs. I didn’t know if it was gallows humor or offensive or what, but after Eddie worked for two years to have the park service accept the historic boundaries of the reservation from an old treaty the government had previously ignored, Luke had softened to him and they’d rolled right into horrifying conversations like the one playing out in front of the feds.

  Eddie winked and picked up a plate. “Raincheck?”

  “Another broken treaty.” Luke shook his head, dropping to crouch next to Eddie at the fire.

  I sighed, kicking his boots and stepping over the dog as I moved around the fire and tossed a loaf of bread to Eddie along with the toasting forks. “Get to work. Hazel, there’ll be pancake batter and syrup in the other pack. Get it out.”

  “How do you know?” She went to the pack I’d gestured at anyway and pulled it open, starting to grin when she held up the two jugs. “Damn, girl.”

  “They know each other well,” Lincoln said. He slowly sat on one of the rocks we’d pulled close for the camp, alternately watching me and Luke. Trying to figure us out, it seemed.

  “Real well,” Hazel said, glancing between us. “If you know how a man packs his bags.”

  I refused to react or feed into the speculation, scraping the eggs onto another plate. I shook up the jug of pancake batter, since Luke only got the cheap stuff and it tended to form lumps in the bottom, and started making flapjacks. I didn’t look at the shaman as I held my hand out in his direction, flapping my fingers closed against my palm a couple of times. “Come on. Out with it.”

  “No idea what you’re talking about.” Luke’s smile turned bland and he tipped his hat forward to shade his eyes.

  “Make with the fry bread.”

  He sighed, folding his hands across his flat stomach as he half-reclined there next to the fire. “I ate it on the way over. It was a long ride to reach you guys this far out, and I was hungry.”

  “Bullshit.” I tossed another pan to Hazel and pointed at the pile of apples that materialized from one of the packs, and gestured for her to chop them up. I still didn’t look at Luke, feeling oddly self-conscious under Lincoln’s scrutiny. “Nona would beat you senseless if you ate my fry bread.”

  “She’d never know, and since you can’t get on the res, you can’t tell her.”

  “She has a telephone, Luke.” I turned my head to squint at him, trying to look threatening. “And she still plays bridge at the rec center every Wednesday night. Maybe I find myself over there in a couple of days, about to take up bridge. Maybe we start catching up on all the news, and I fill her in on this little trip, and how you delivered all the supplies and yet...”

  I held my hands up, empty, and made big eyes at him.

  He sighed and leaned over to his saddle bag, pulling out a brown paper bag and tossing it to me. “You’re the worst, Sass.”

  “Ha!” I didn’t exactly clap my hands in excitement, but it was a close thing. I stuck my face in the bag and inhaled the sugar and fat goodness of the fry bread, my eyes almost rolling back in my head, and let the memories take over.

  His great-grandmother was a wizened old lady, just over a hundred years old, but she had the fire of someone far younger. Most days she put me to shame with the energy she had. And she was a strong medicine woman with many tricks of her own, so periodically she pulled on her coyote skin and wreaked havoc around town just for the hell of it.

  I loved her madly, more than almost anyone in my blood family, and I liked to think she felt the same. She always made sure Luke brought me fry bread and other goodies, and she’d long tried to play matchmaker between us. Even the fact that I couldn’t enter the reservation wasn’t a problem for her—she’d said something about building a house on the border of the res and figuring the rest out as we went.

  I let the others have a small taste of the greasy goodness, still crispy somehow, but kept most of it for myself. I didn’t get the fry bread as often as I liked, which would have been every day, but it was just as well—I’d have to keep buying new jeans to squeeze my ass into, and I didn’t have the money for it.

  As I was murmuring to the fry bread how much I loved it, Luke sipped his coffee and rubbed his dog’s ears thoughtfully as he considered the strangers. “So what brings all of you out here to the Crossroads?”

  The four traded glances, and I wanted to laugh at the sudden awkward pause. So apparently the drone retrieval story had gone out the window, or at least they hadn’t practiced it since they outed themselves to Eddie and me and suddenly everyone could do magic. I waited, taking a break from the fry bread to start making plates of eggs and bacon and apple pancakes, and didn’t jump in to save them.

  Hazel recovered first, somehow finding another smile for him. “We’re researchers. We lost a drone out here, and wanted to retrieve it.”

  “Researchers?” Something changed in his expression, as if he could smell the lie, but Luke’s smile remained frozen in place. He wasn’t the youngest shaman in his family in generations for nothing. He had a sixth and a seventh and an eighth sense, all by himself. “From where, exactly? And researching what?”

  Before Hazel could answer, I leaned forward and whispered to Luke, “Bureau of Indian Affairs, my friend. Looking at some of the land boundaries in the park, and—”

  His expression went stony, even though he had to know I was teasing a little, and the tension in the air jumped a few degrees. “Really. Breaking a couple different laws, then.”

  Even Eddie grinned, enjoying the show, eating his eggs in great big
forkfuls so he wouldn’t miss a single thing.

  “Ms. Luckett is mistaken,” Lincoln said, giving me a dirty look. “We work for a different agency, and we’ve been researching wolf populations and their recovery in the region.”

  “What other agency? Forgive me if I’m suspicious of federal agents bearing money and good ideas on how to save us out here.” Luke hardly blinked. He had a great talent for not moving, for just sitting there stone-still as the bugs settled on him and the grass grew and he might as well have been a lump of rock.

  I licked grease and sugar off my fingers from the fry bread, wanting to roll around in the dirt I was so happy, and called Luke’s dog over so I could scratch his tummy. “Magical agency. Something to do with regulating what magic folks do.”

  The four of them froze, and Mason’s look of complete horror had me snorting with laughter again. Luke rubbed his jaw, still watching them all with narrowed eyes, though he spoke to me. “You don’t say. Magic folks.”

  “Yep.” I refilled his coffee, glad that for once someone else was uncomfortable. “Looking for werewolves in the Crossroads.”

  “Werewolves,” Luke said, real slow and careful like he hadn’t heard me right.

  Hazel made a strangled sound in her throat, staring at me with wide eyes like she was trying to telepathically tell me something. I just raised my eyebrows and made a “what, that’s a secret?” kind of look at her, though I didn’t think she got it.

  Eddie handed me a plate with some eggs, shaking his head. “Girl, you got an appetite for trouble like I’ve never seen.”

  “Buckle up, buttercup.” I still had Luke’s attention, though, and inclined my head at the four strangers. “You won’t guess what they are.”

  Lincoln tensed, his hands gripping his knees. “Anastasia, I think your game has—”

  Luke eyed the four of them, then nodded at Hazel. “Witch.”

  I waited, eyebrows raised in challenge. The feds sat there, holding their breath, and I thought I might have heard a growl come from Mason or Nelson. Luke scratched his chin, frowning as he looked at them, then glanced back at me. “The two big bruisers—half-bloods, maybe. Animals.”

  “Close.”

  His attention drifted to Lincoln, and for a long, tense moment, he only looked at the other man. Luke’s head tilted as he studied him, and a curious tension drifted down his shoulders. I’d never seen Luke work magic, or at least what I knew as magic, but I’d always wondered at the way the air moved around him. Sometimes earth and water and fire seemed to exist differently around him, which didn’t make sense until it did. They weren’t my secrets to know, though, and I’d never asked about how his and Nona’s medicine worked.

  Luke shrugged, focus returning to his coffee. “Another witch. Two witches, two animals. An interesting team.”

  “They’re shifters,” I said. Mason’s face started turning red, and I wondered how long he could hold his breath before he passed out. Lucia claimed I’d held my breath for almost a minute when I was little and throwing a fit because Ma wouldn’t give me something. Apparently I fainted dead away. I still didn’t get the toy I wanted. “Lions. Not skin-walkers, though. Not bad, just different.”

  “Interesting.” Luke squinted at them, trying to figure it out, then glanced at me. “Where are their skins?”

  “They don’t need ‘em.” I gestured at the twins. “It’s just them. They turn inside out and wham—they’re lions.”

  Nelson looked downright peeved. “There’s no reason to—”

  “Luke is a medicine man and can become a coyote when he wants to,” I said. “He already knows about all this shit. And he’ll be able to help you, maybe, if you have questions about the magic around here. He’s got most everything figured out in the Crossroads, though he doesn’t want to share with the Lucketts.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to,” he said. “I just can’t.”

  I rolled my eyes and got myself more eggs. “Same song, different day.”

  “A skin-walker?” Nelson managed to look curious rather than pissed off, which was all that Mason could pull his features into. “How does that work?”

  Luke’s expression darkened and he folded his arms over his chest. “I’m not a skin-walker; they are evil, using bad magic. Like the witches among my people are evil. They’re different from what the Luckett women do, but words mean something. Words matter.” His face cleared just a touch and his fingers ghosted over the saddlebag next to him. “I only use good medicine, and my family is descended from powerful magic, from Coyote himself. We are born with coyote skins. When I pull it on, there is some magic and I become the coyote. When I am done being the coyote, I take off my skin.”

  Eddie arched his eyebrows and laced his hands behind his head. “You don’t say. I didn’t think that was real. I heard all the stories, but I never imagined such a thing would exist.”

  “Some day I might show you,” Luke said, still with that remarkably calm smile. “But not today.”

  The ranger stretched, shaking his head. “The last couple of days had been quite an education. Witches and shifters and werewolves and God only knows what else. This unnatural place, this Crossroads.”

  “It’s a good place,” Luke said. He glanced at me and the smile grew a touch. “For some more than others.”

  Then his attention drifted back to Lincoln. “So you were out here chasing werewolves. Did you catch them?”

  “Yes. They’re dead and disposed of.”

  Luke nodded slowly, snapping his fingers so his dog trotted back over and flopped down at his side. “And did you think of asking my people about these werewolves? What if they were from the tribe and you just murdered a whole lot of them?”

  “I killed them,” I said. It hurt to admit with a deep pain I didn’t think would ever go away. “I’m sorry, Luke. They weren’t like coyotes, not like I’ve ever seen, and worse than dire wolves. They were only focused on attacking, on biting. They tried to kill us. To kill me.”

  His head tilted as he looked at me, and I wondered if I’d just ended our friendship. He was right, of course; I should have called him. Should have included him and the tribe in evaluating the danger. The werewolves could just as easily have run into the reservation and started biting people there, and I’d been so focused on my family and the town that I hadn’t even stopped to consider that some of the werewolves themselves might have been native.

  Luke held up his hand, reaching for my arm, and put aside his coffee cup. “May I?”

  “Damn.” I sighed, holding out my hands so he could take my wrists in his fingers. “Go ahead.”

  He closed his eyes and exhaled, and then it was like the whole world disappeared around us in a dark blur. Time unwound itself, spooling by in bright colors and sounds, until we were back in the fight against the second group of werewolves. I shivered; Luke’s hands were the only warm spots in the entire world, it seemed. He frowned, even though his expression remained serene, as my memories tripped and stumbled, adrenaline rushing through me as I drowned in the sudden reality of another werewolf attack. Luke saw it all, including the horror and helplessness as one of the beasts nearly killed Eddie, and I squeezed my eyes shut so I wouldn’t have to see it again.

  And then he released me and the world came back in full color, and I found everyone else frozen around the fire, staring once more in horror. I shook myself to get rid of the last of the heebie-jeebies from Luke’s magic, and returned to my eggs. “That never gets better.”

  Luke, to his credit, didn’t even make a face at me. He folded his hands calmly at his waist and frowned into the fire. “They were not my people, nor were they skin-walkers. So that is good news for your federal friends, Sass.”

  “And for me,” I said under my breath, though it didn’t help me feel any better about taking lives.

  “But the question is why your federal friends brought them here.” And his dark eyes drifted to where Hazel and Lincoln both watched us with intense interest.

/>   “We didn’t bring the werewolves,” Hazel said. “We’ve been trying to stop them. We heard reports of attacks in the area and were dispatched to deal with the problem. We certainly didn’t bring them with us.”

  “Well,” Luke said, hardly blinking. “We never had these problems here before, and we’ve never seen the likes of your kind here either. Seems strange that one shows up, followed by the other.”

  “There have been more dire wolves than normal,” I said before the feds could react. “All summer. Hunting in packs instead of pairs, getting too close to the house. Waiting around for Olivia and me. There’s been strange happenings all summer; these just seemed like part of it.”

  “I’ll ask around about it,” Luke said, shaking his head. He didn’t entirely believe me, and he didn’t trust Lincoln and his team one bit. Not that I blamed him.

  When the silence stretched into a curious discomfort and no one could pretend it was because everyone was busy eating, since the food was long gone, Eddie tossed a piece of bacon fat to Luke’s dog and tried to change the subject. “You going to ride with us for a while, Mankiller? We’re headed back to town since all of our business is accounted for.”

  The dog inhaled the bacon and sighed, looking around with mournful blue eyes, and I took pity and gave him some flapjacks, too. Luke shook his head, eyes rolling to the sky in a long-suffering expression. He’d told me long ago that his dog was a working dog and not a pet, but I’d never been able to treat the furry beast with the same reservation and respect. Luke’s relationship with Chapo was one of partners, a working relationship, while I got to treat the pup like any other dog—ear scratches and butt rubs and treats sneaked under the table.