Shadow Walker

by Allyson James

  I touched my Beneath magic again, my only weapon. Using it might either rip a hole in reality or make my brain implode, but I knew with ever-increasing certainty that I didn’t want those skeletal fingers touching me.

  The hands multiplied as they poured across the surface of the boulders, sliding through them like fish through water. The sickly light increased until it lit up the inside of the cab, illuminating the blood black on Nash’s head and face. His skin was pasty, his lips bloodless. He’d die if I didn’t get him out of here.

  Mentally, I closed my fist around a ball of Beneath magic and drew it to the surface. Oh, it hurt. It hurt like holy hell, as though someone had thrust a lit firework into my chest. I held on to the magic as hard as I could, knowing that if I lost control of it, I could kill me, Nash, and every living creature within five miles. But at least I could try to send up a signal, like a magical flare.

  I opened my imaginary fingers, releasing a bit of light. The skeletal hands stopped, fingers moving slightly, each hand pulsing in exact time with the other. Like a heartbeat, I realized. My heartbeat.

  In panic, I let out more of my magic, and the moment I did that, the hands oriented sharply on me.

  The scream that came out of my mouth was more of a croak. I closed my mind over the Beneath magic, frantically shutting it down. As soon as my magic retreated below the surface, the hands stopped, stilling, waiting.

  Shit, shit, shit. If the Beneath magic excited them, and I had no storm, then I was essentially screwed. All I could do was sit here with the dying sheriff and watch the hands fill the sinkhole to the right and left, above us and beneath. They started moving again, enclosing the SUV in a bubble of light, and I was so scared I wanted to puke.

  A face appeared in the middle of the unnatural glow, an animal face, long-nosed and pointed-eared. It looked more like a glyph of an animal rather than a real one, but I grasped at the hope.

  “Coyote? Damn it, help us!”

  The animal faded, but the bony fingers didn’t. They were touching the SUV now, sliding through the metal and fiberglass, and the whole truck began to groan.

  I grabbed Nash and lifted him the best I could, cradling him against my chest. I feared to move him, but I feared those hands even more. Nash himself was some kind of magic void—which meant that his body somehow negated all magic thrown his way, even the most powerful stuff. Whether he could negate these evil hands, I didn’t know, but I had to take what I could get. They were all around us now, crawling across the hood toward the broken windows.

  I couldn’t sit here and do nothing. The hands had homed in on my Beneath magic, but maybe, if I was fast enough, I could take them out before they could touch me.

  I reached down into myself for the ball of white magic again. Coyote had told me he didn’t want me to use my Beneath magic unless I tempered it with my storm magic, but Coyote wasn’t here, was he? And it wasn’t my fault there was no raging storm overhead. I was stuck in a sinkhole with weird petroglyphs coming for me, and I wanted to go home.

  I had to let go of Nash—I knew from experience that he could negate my magic, even the strongest of it. I laid him gently against the far door and braced myself on the dash to push up through the broken passenger window.

  I screamed as I threw the snake of Beneath magic at the hands on the truck. Screams echoed through the sinkhole—my screams—absorbed by the hands and thrown back at me. The hood of the SUV melted, hoses breaking and fluid erupting. And the hands kept coming.

  I had drawn back for another strike when red light and sudden heat burst high above me. Hot orange light poured down the hole like a thousand bonfires strung together, burning the dust into little yellow sparks.

  The skeletal hands froze, and as I held my breath, clenching the Beneath magic, they retreated. In the distance, I heard the bellow of a gigantic beast and then felt a downdraft as a huge dragon flapped his wings.

  I started to laugh, tears streaming down my face. “Mick,” I tried to shout, but all I could manage was a clogged whisper.

  “Mick,” I whispered again. “Down here.”

  Two

  Mick couldn’t reach us. A gigantic dragon weighing who knew how many tons would never get into that sinkhole without killing us. Even the wind from his wings started a small dirt avalanche. With another dragon shriek, he flew away.

  But he’d found us. He’d sent a light spell down to me, one fiery and warm and everything that was the goodness of Mick.

  The next thing I heard was sirens, the joyful sound of emergency vehicles. Many of them, which meant the sheriff’s department plus the town police were responding, maybe even some state DPS. A helicopter chopped air, and magnified voices spoke to one another, unintelligible to me.

  I crawled painfully to the top of the SUV and into the glare of their searchlights, waving my good arm and hoping they saw me. The voice of Paco Lopez, Nash’s senior deputy, answered me, and I wanted to fly up there and kiss him.

  Eventually a paramedic got lowered, carefully, down to me. He checked me over, his flashlight painful, and moved to Nash, talking to those above through a static-filled handheld. I was left alone for the moment on top of the boulders, and damn it, I couldn’t stop crying. As much as I told myself that tears in my eyes wouldn’t help me right now, the sobs kept coming.

  A harness came down, and the paramedic helped me into it. They were taking me up first, which made me even more worried about Nash. When the paramedic gave a thumbs-up, the rope tautened, and the helicopter started to haul me up. At least the tears stopped as I concentrated on holding on.

  As I rose from my rocky grave, Mick’s light spell dispersed, and the skeletal hands reappeared with a vengeance. They poured from the rocks straight for me, and at the last minute, I felt spidery fingers close around my ankle. My leg froze to the bone, and I kicked and kicked in panic. Then the harness dragged me inexorably upward, and the fingers were forced to retreat.

  When I made it over the lip of the gaping hole, other hands reached for me, these human and whole and warm. Deputy Lopez; Chief McGuire and Lieutenant Salas from Magellan; a paramedics woman who’d patched me up on another adventure; and Mick, in human form. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans despite the cold, Mick came at me, shaking off the paramedic trying to hold him back. I charged past her and flung my arms around Mick’s neck.

  Male warmth had never felt this good. Mick kissed my hair and my face, raw kisses, his hands hard on my back. My handsome, sexy man had come for me. I was so happy to see his square, hard face, his black hair, and his blue, blue eyes.

  His healing magic flooded me too. Mick possessed the clean fire-magic of dragonkind—he never had to steady himself or meditate or fight himself to use it. He simply decided to let the magic come. Now it flowed into me, healing my hurts.

  Mick tilted my head back until I looked into his eyes, which were turning to dragon black and laced with fire. “Janet.” His voice was rough. “Gods, I thought I’d lost you.”

  I couldn’t speak, because I thought I’d lost me too. I held on to the solid heat of Mick, shaking reaction setting in.

  “Nash,” I croaked. “Is he all right?”

  The paramedics woman was at my shoulder. She gently dragged me away from my lover, and Mick let her take me. He let her; if Mick hadn’t wanted me to lie on the stretcher with the oxygen mask on my face, there was no way she’d have gotten me there.

  “Nash,” I repeated through the plastic mask. “Is he dead? Just tell me.”

  The paramedic snapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm. “He’s alive,” she said curtly. “They’re bringing him up.”

  Many people had gathered around the lip of the hole, the helicopter hovering. As the paramedic spoke, a knot of DPS and paramedics pulled up a stretcher. Nash was so strapped in I couldn’t see him as they rushed him to the helicopter.

  Lopez leaned over my other side, the usually easygoing young man looking a bit green. “They’re airlifting him to Flag. He’s bad, Janet. Real bad. What
the hell happened?”

  “Sinkhole. Wasn’t there one minute. Next minute . . .”

  I clutched the stretcher, reliving the terrifying confusion of falling, falling. Mick took my hands and held them hard. More healing magic flowed through me, relaxing my mind from the remembered horror.

  I grew warm and drowsy. And horny. I wanted to go home, wanted a warm shower, soft sheets, and Mick in bed with me.

  Lopez continued, “Someone should have seen the pavement going bad. Someone should have cordoned it off. Why didn’t anyone see it? Why didn’t they know?”

  “Take it easy,” I said, my voice still painfully scratchy. “Sinkholes happen. It’s geology.”

  The guy was miserable. “It’s my fault.”

  “You made the earth collapse? Nice trick. Only the gods can do that.”

  Gods. Oh gods, what a thought. That hole happened to open up the moment I rode over it? And then those hands down there? What supernatural entity had it in for me this time?

  “No, I mean it should have been me,” Lopez said. “I was supposed to be manning the speed trap tonight. I asked Jones for the night off, and he agreed to switch shifts with me.”

  I reached for Lopez’s hand, reflecting on the irony that I, the survivor, had to comfort one of my rescuers. “No, blame Nash. I was only going about eight over the speed limit. You would have let it go. And hey, at least it was me, not some tourist’s RV full of kiddies.”

  The speech grated out of me, the effort wasted, because Lopez still didn’t look happy. He’d carry the guilt for a while, poor guy.

  The paramedics loaded me up and took me to the clinic in Flat Mesa. They let Mick ride with me, and he held my hand the whole time. I started to drift into exhausted sleep, but as soon as I closed my eyes, I saw those skeletal fingers reaching for me. I jumped awake, gasping, motion-sick in the swaying vehicle. My leg still burned with cold where the hands had touched it.

  The doctor in the clinic’s ER was surprised I hadn’t sustained more injury, but Mick’s healing spells outdid medical technology any day. The doctor puzzled over the frostbite on my ankle, and Mick sent me a grave look. I’d given him a garbled account of the hands while we rode in the ambulance, and I didn’t like it that Mick didn’t seem to know what they were.

  The doctor wanted me to stay overnight for observation, and Mick overrode my objections and went to check me in himself.

  “How’s Nash?” I asked the doctor. The doctor hadn’t been at the scene, but he would have heard all about it by now, officially or unofficially.

  “He’s going into the ICU in Flag. That’s all I’ve heard. Alive, at least. They’re trying to stabilize him.”

  Damn Nash anyway. I still wasn’t sure whether we were friends or enemies—it depended on the situation—but one thing I knew about Nash: he always came through when I needed him. I prayed he was all right.

  “Someone should tell Maya,” I said. Maya Medina, the beautiful Hispanic woman who was my on-call electrician, was madly in love with Jones.

  “His mother will be there,” the doctor said.

  I blinked. Nash Jones had a mother? He was so cold that sometimes I believed he must have hatched out of rocks in the desert. But no, Nash had a brother, so it followed they must have had a mother.

  “His parents live in Flag,” the doctor explained. “I called them.”

  That relieved me a little. I wondered if the parents knew Maya, and whether they’d contact her.

  Mick returned, and the doctor, finished with me, left us alone. Once in my small, private room—which Mick had arranged—I was out of the bed. “Shower.”

  I had to jerk the IV needles out of my hand, but that tiny pain was nothing compared to the bone-jarring ache in my leg.

  Mick followed me into the bathroom and closed and locked the door behind him. He stripped off, the pale fluorescent light brushing the dragon tatts that encircled his arms and the stylized flame that rode across his lower back. Mick was six-feet-six of honed muscle, his black hair touching his shoulders, his eyes blue as summer skies. I’d tried to kill him the night I’d met him, after a bar fight. He’d laughed at me as he’d sucked down my storm power, enjoying it, and I’d fallen madly in love with him.

  “Let me see that ankle,” he said.

  I demurely put my right foot on the toilet seat. The bathroom didn’t have a tub or shower stall, only a showerhead high on one tiled wall with a drain beneath it. Mick knelt and put his hands around my ankle. The skin was blackened, like a deep bruise, in the exact shape of the fingers that had touched me.

  “You don’t know what they were?” he asked.

  “They were dead things,” I said, and shivered. I’d been raised to abhor death and dead bodies—bodies were simply the shell of a person, and the shell could rise as a ghost. Even all the science I’d been taught in school, plus the couple of years at college, hadn’t erased my deep-seated dread of death.

  “I would have said they were auras,” Mick said. “Of the ancient dead, many accumulated in that spot. But auras don’t do this.” He drew his finger across the frostbitten skin.

  Under his healing touch the blood vessels started to knit, bringing some of the feeling back to my ankle. And with it, pain. Excruciating pain. I grew nostalgic for my IV drip.

  But I wanted to be clean. I stripped off my hospital gown and turned on the water, needing to wash myself of the dirt and sweat and blood from the sinkhole.

  I’d been holding it together well enough, but now reaction hit me. I’d cried as I’d waited for the harness, then my tears had dried because I’d had to do things and talk to people. I’d thought I was over it. Nope. As soon as the water cascaded from the showerhead, I crumpled into a heap on the tiled floor, sobbing, cursing at myself for being so weak.

  But Mick was there. He lifted me from my huddle and stood me back against the wall, fitting his large, hard body over mine. He kissed my face, his lips taking away my tears. I felt his erection solid against my belly, but he didn’t try to make love to me. Not now. His touch was healing, comforting, tender.

  He held me until my crying stopped, then he lathered me up with soft soap from the wall dispenser. I let him wash my entire body, loving the feel of his fingers on my thighs, my cleft, my breasts, my legs. My ankle burned as it healed, but that was better than it being numb and frozen.

  Mick rinsed me, and then he held me against his slick body, his own reaction emerging. “I thought I’d lost you,” he whispered brokenly. “I thought my girl was gone. I thought I’d be all alone again.”

  I heard the tug of grief in his voice, saw in his eyes the sadness of an ancient being, who was lonely more often than not. “I’m all right,” I told him. “I made it. I’m tough.”

  So tough that tears leaked from my eyes again. He kissed them away.

  “Shh, baby, it’s over,” he said. “I’ll take care of you now. I won’t let them get you.”

  “It’s not that.” I wiped my eyes, sorrow filling every space in me. “It’s my bike. She’s at the bottom of a sinkhole in about a million pieces.”

  They let me out of the hospital right before lunch the next day. My hurts were almost gone, thanks to Mick’s healing spells. Some of the healing spells involved Mick and me twined together in the bed, him making love to me so hard that I was surprised the hospital bed made it intact.

  I called Lopez first thing, to see if he had any more news about Nash. Still in the ICU, Lopez said. He told me he’d called Maya and broken the news, and she’d rushed up to Flagstaff. Good.

  I was greeted at my hotel with sympathy and concern. Cassandra brewed a cup of tea for me and made me drink every drop. There was magic in that potion, because afterward, my already healing body came alive, and the lingering pain in my ankle vanished altogether.

  After Mick made sure I was all right and in good hands, he left again, saying he wanted to go to the accident site and see what could be salvaged of my bike. I didn’t want to think about my motorcycle smashed up in the ho
le, and I was grateful to him for sparing me that. I knew I’d have to go back to the sinkhole eventually, because if there was a new evil in town—or an old one awakened—I needed to learn everything I could about it.

  But I was content to let Mick reconnoiter while I recovered. I planned to sit in my office sipping Cassandra’s magic teas and wait for Lopez to report about Nash, but after only an hour of solitary bliss, Cassandra knocked and entered, looking harried.

  “I’m sorry, Janet. I tried to put him off when he came earlier this morning, but he’s back now.”

  I looked at her blankly. “Who? I told Lopez everything I can remember.”

  “It’s not about the accident.” As usual Cassandra had every blond hair in place in a French braid, her linen suit unwrinkled. “It’s worse. He’s a hotel inspector.”

  I sat up in alarm. The very word “inspector” made my stomach churn. I’d restored the Crossroads Hotel from a derelict old building that I’d basically had to gut and redo from the inside out. I’d filed every form, passed every inspection, paid every fee, and kept meticulous records. I knew that. If this was a snap inspection, it must be only a formality, but if so, why did Cassandra look so worried?

  As Cassandra went out to fetch the man, I tried to stay calm, but my mind whirled with questions. Those weren’t butterflies inside my stomach; they were angry bees.

  Cassandra was nothing but calm as she entered again with a tall man behind her. “Janet, this is Mr. Wingate. County safety inspector.”

  “Ted,” the man said in a jovial baritone.

  I stood up as Ted held out a tanned hand and shook mine with firm pressure. He was about forty or so, hard-muscled as though he worked out, with brown hair and light brown eyes. He wasn’t so much good-looking as striking, with a white-toothed smile and a deep tan that made his skin golden all over.

  “I don’t think I recognize you,” I said, looking him up and down. I’d only lived in Magellan nine months or so, but already I’d met everyone who lived in the area.