Shadow Walker

by Allyson James

  I mulled this over as I walked the couple of blocks to my next stop, the house where my friend Jamison Kee lived with his wife and stepdaughter. Jamison’s wife, Naomi, ran the town’s plant nursery, which was closed today, due to the weather. I found Naomi at home with Jamison and her daughter, Julie, in the house behind the nursery.

  Jamison was a Navajo from Chinle and had met me one summer day in Canyon de Chelly when he’d come out to enjoy a storm. He’d found teenage me huddled, wet, and alone, crying because I couldn’t control the lightning that tried to take me over. Jamison was the first person to teach me how to start mastering my powers. Jamison was also a shape-shifter, a Changer who could become a puma. As a storyteller, he knew all kinds of history of the Diné plus that of the ancient Pueblo peoples that had populated this area. If anyone knew about petroglyphs and what they meant, it was Jamison Kee.

  Naomi’s eyes danced as she hugged me. I didn’t much like hugging, but I made an exception for Naomi. Jamison, the tall Indian who’d grown up declaring that he wished all white people would vanish from the face of the earth, had fallen madly in love with Naomi and her blue green eyes. They were insanely happy together.

  I’d drawn some of the petroglyphs I’d seen in the hole, and Jamison smoothed out the drawing on the kitchen counter. Naomi perched on a stool at the breakfast bar, and Julie, Naomi’s eleven-year-old daughter, ducked in under Jamison’s arm to look. Julie had been born with total hearing loss, though she could now speak and was a master at sign language.

  Jamison’s hands were strong, a sculptor’s hands. He traced the glyphs with his roughened fingertips, dark brows drawn in a frown.

  “This one is a comet,” he said, touching one that looked like a starburst. “This one a bright star. Did you draw them in sequence?”

  “I tried. There were so many, kind of blobbed together.”

  “I’d love to be able to see them all.”

  Jamison took on a thoughtful look, and Naomi frowned. “Jamison, no.”

  Jamison looked at Naomi in innocent surprise. “What?”

  “No, you are not climbing down into that hole to see for yourself.”

  Jamison continued with his “would I be planning that?” expression, and I broke in. “Listen to your wife. There’s something evil down there. I survived because of Mick’s light spell, and Nash survived because he’s a magical black hole. I’m pretty sure magic pulled us down there.”

  “I thought it was just a sinkhole,” Naomi said.

  “So everyone has been telling me. But why should that hole collapse at the exact moment Nash and I happened by? We were going fast—in another second or two, we’d have been clear of it. Something wanted us down there, and if Mick hadn’t come along, that something would have had us. You’re tough, Jamison, but you’re not that tough. Besides, even if you climb down there as a mountain lion, you likely wouldn’t be able to get back out.”

  “I planned to use climbing gear,” Jamison said indignantly.

  “Nash’s boys won’t let you near the place anyway. It’s unstable and dangerous.”

  “And you’re not going,” Naomi repeated, scowling at him.

  Jamison held up his hands. “All right, ladies, all right. I give up. It’s just that I could read these better if I saw them in context.”

  “When I can get out there again, I’ll take my camera and get some good photos,” I said. “In the meantime, can you tell me anything about them?”

  Jamison studied the drawings again. “These glyphs are observations of the night sky, made over time.” He touched the page. “Here are constellations, the moon in different phases. Changes. Significant changes.”

  “These were already down in the hole, not on pieces that fell from the surface. They must have been inside the caverns themselves.”

  Naomi looked interested. “If that’s true, then there must have been a separate entrance at some point. I wonder how extensive the caves are.”

  “Now who’s talking about dangerous exploration?” Jamison asked.

  “It fascinates me,” Naomi said, not looking contrite. “All this under the ground, and we don’t even know it.”

  “There has to be more to this than what you’re telling me, Janet,” Jamison said. “These glyphs are fairly common, if used in an unusual way here, but you didn’t come to me because of drawings of a comet. What else worried you down there? A vortex?”

  I shook my head. “I’d have sensed that, and the hole is too far north of our vortexes.” Vortexes came in clusters—there were some in Magellan, some in Sedona, some in the foothills of the Sierras between Las Vegas and Death Valley. What humans called Area 51 was swamped with vortex energy.

  “What then?”

  I glanced at Julie, who followed the conversation with interest. I knew that if I tried to ban her from the room, she’d find a way to figure out what we were talking about anyway. Julie was a smart, and determined, kid.

  I sighed and told the tale of the skeletal hands, including how one had shown up in a photo I’d taken near Spider Rock. Jamison listened, his expression grave. When I finished, he grabbed a pencil and started drawing on my paper with an artist’s precision.

  “Did it look like this?”

  Under his fingers, the hands I’d seen took shape. My blood chilled as he swiftly drew the thin lines that ended in bony digits. Then he drew another, and another.

  “Yes. Stop it.”

  Jamison lifted his pencil halfway through the fourth hand he drew and dropped it. “Sorry. You’re right, these are dangerous.”

  “What are they? What can they do?”

  He looked troubled. “The ancient word for them is something like karmii. It’s no longer a word in Diné or in any Pueblo language, but that’s as close as I can figure. The glyphs don’t stand for anything. They’re like harbingers. They point the way to evil. From what I’ve read, when the karmii find evil, they multiply, gathering in hordes to try to smother said evil.”

  I remembered how the hands had burgeoned on the walls as I’d brought up my Beneath magic, remembered the eerie glow surrounding them and lighting up the truck.

  “They were homing in on Nash and me. I know my Beneath magic can be considered evil, but I’m not evil. Neither is Nash. Irritating as hell, yes, but that’s not the same thing.”

  Jamison studied what he’d drawn, gaze riveted to it as though he couldn’t look away. “The karmii, they’re mindless. Primal, created by shamans using ancient spells that never faded. The karmii were to protect the shaman from evil spirits while he performed his rituals. If they are triggered, they multiply and smother the threat. Maybe they sensed your Beneath magic and wanted to get rid of it. Nash was just in the way.”

  I thought of the woman at the hospital who’d pretended to be Nash’s mother and tried very hard to kill him. She certainly hadn’t been made of drawings of hands, but I couldn’t help but believe the two incidents went together.

  “They didn’t like Mick,” I said. “Didn’t like the dragon fire at all.”

  “Firewalkers have clean earth magic. Not evil.”

  “So dragons can be destructive shits, but not evil?”

  Jamison grinned at me. “Exactly.”

  I folded the paper in half, shutting out the drawings. Jamison said he couldn’t tell me much more, so I thanked him and said I’d go. He’d given me a lot to think about.

  Naomi and Julie tried to get me to stay for dinner, but I knew I’d better return to the hotel. I hugged Naomi again, and then Julie, and departed.

  Fremont picked me up in front of the nursery and drove me back to the hotel. Pamela’s pickup sat in the snowy lot when we arrived, but Mick’s bike wasn’t there. The Crossroads Bar was optimistically open, and sure enough, about a dozen motorcycles were parked in the snow in front of it.

  Fremont followed me in through the hotel saloon, probably hoping I’d reward him with a beer, but as soon as I walked inside, I smelled the heady odor of cooking from the kitchen. Mouthwatering, fam
iliar cooking. Someone was making stew and fry bread.

  “Oh, honey,” the mirror in the saloon moaned as I made for the kitchen door. “I couldn’t stop her. She’s way too powerful for little ole me.”

  I ignored the mirror and hurried into the kitchen.

  A small Diné woman stood in front of my stove, stirring stew in a pot. She had iron gray hair, long skirts, and a pinched expression on her wrinkled face. I stopped in dismay.

  “Grandmother,” I said.

  “About time you got home,” she said. “Don’t you stop for meals anymore, Janet?”

  Ten

  “Grandmother, what are you doing here?”

  Ruby Begay glanced up at me with her black eyes and went back to stirring. “I heard you needed a cook. So here I am. Cooking.”

  “But how did you get here?” My grandmother could turn into a crow. I had visions of her flying across the snowy landscape, a speck of black in the sky—carrying a bundle of clothes in her beak? The vision fled.

  “Your cousin Thomas dropped me off on his way to Flagstaff,” she said. “Do you know there’s a hole in the highway from Holbrook? We had to go all the way around through Winslow. Took a long time.”

  She spoke Navajo, so I replied in the same language. “Yes, I’m well acquainted with the hole in the road.”

  Grandmother turned the fry bread over, then slid it onto a plate, and my mouth continued to water. No one made fry bread as good as my grandmother’s.

  “I thought you’d have something to do with that,” she said.

  I didn’t bother arguing that I hadn’t opened up the sinkhole on purpose. Arguing with my grandmother was always futile.

  “I can have as many as twenty guests here at a time, you know,” I told her.

  “I don’t see that you have any guests at all. Just a witch and a Changer who ought to be ashamed of themselves. And I can cook for twenty people. Didn’t I raise four children on my own? Don’t I feed all my grandchildren and greatgrandchildren when they bother to come see me?”

  Yes, but she’d trained us to shut up and eat what we were given and be grateful, which guests didn’t always do. We had been grateful, though. Grandmother was one hell of a cook.

  “Guests don’t always want the same things,” I tried.

  “That’s your fault. Have a set meal, and if they don’t like it, they can go someplace else.”

  Again, I gave up the argument. I did need someone to make basic meals, and once the roads opened and guests returned I’d try to get her to go back home.

  “I don’t like witches,” Grandmother said.

  “Cassandra’s Wicca, not chindi.” Witches were hated in my world; they were seen as people who used dark, evil magic for personal gain.

  Grandmother didn’t look convinced, and I knew Cassandra’s relationship with Pamela annoyed her as well. While Grandmother believed that women were far superior to men, she did not believe that women should shut men out of their lives entirely. Women were meant to carry on the family line, to have children who would inherit their mother’s lands and goods. The family would stop if a woman didn’t marry and have children.

  I suddenly wondered what she’d think about me having children.

  Grandmother ladled out a heaping bowl of stew, slung the piece of fry bread over it, and handed it to me. Argument won. I got a spoon, sat down at the kitchen table, and devoured the meal.

  Mick hadn’t returned. That meant I couldn’t ask him about his blond woman, nor could I borrow his motorcycle for my next errand.

  I borrowed Fremont’s truck again instead. It was sturdy and heavy and had a four-wheel drive; the afternoon sky was clear and hard blue, and I had confidence I could return it unscathed. Fremont, happily working in my basement, tossed me the keys and waved me off.

  Because the road to the sinkhole from my end of town hadn’t yet been cleared of snow, I had to drive all the way through Flat Mesa to the freeway, then along the 40 to Holbrook and the turnoff I’d taken a few nights ago. That road had been plowed, so that county deputies and DPS officers could come and go to the hole as needed.

  The orange and white wooden barricades had been replaced with waist-high black ones forming a solid and snowy wall. No one was guarding the place, so they must have decided the barriers were warning enough to keep people out. I hung my big camera around my neck and climbed over them, heading for the sinkhole.

  Not wanting to slide in, I’d brought a harness and rope, which I attached to a solid boulder that was three times my size. Secured, I crawled to the lip of the hole, focused the lantern flashlight down on the petroglyphs, and started snapping pictures for Jamison.

  My camera had a zoom feature that let me fill the screen with the glyphs. I finished and backed away from the hole, only to collide with the legs of a young woman standing over me.

  I was on my feet in a flash, unclipping myself, and stepping well away from the hole. I reached for my Beneath magic, but Gabrielle held up her hands.

  “I’m not here to fight you. Truce?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Janet, you are so very suspicious. Maybe I just want to talk.”

  “You know where I live,” I said. “Everyone does. Why don’t you come talk to me there?”

  Gabrielle laughed. “In that heavily warded hotel? You’ve put alarms up just for me. I’m flattered. Besides, you have so many friends there.”

  “Are you afraid of them? If you are so interested in a truce, why only come to me when we’re both in the middle of nowhere?”

  “So I’ll have a chance. Of course I’m afraid of them, big sis. You’ve got so many earth-magic friends—a witch, a couple of Changers, a dragon, and a magic mirror—how can I compete? Not to mention you’re best friends with Coyote.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  She smiled the cute smile that wrinkled her nose. Gabrielle was actually a very pretty young woman, with soft Native American features, a compact but curvy body, and glossy black hair. “He’s not really friends with anyone, is he? Coyote doesn’t trust you, and he doesn’t trust me, equally, because you and I are cut from the same cloth.”

  “No,” I said. “We’re not.”

  “Oh, please. Your father is Navajo, your biological mother unknown. I was born to an Apache man and raised by his wife, a nice woman. They’re gone now. But we both know who our true mother was.”

  She mentioned the death of her parents without a flicker, but I thought I saw something in her eyes, some sadness. I hoped so, and I hoped, for their sake, that they’d never known what their daughter was.

  Gabrielle went on. “I know what you went through, growing up. People sensing you’re not quite right, treating you differently, not really accepting you. Not fitting in with your own people and not fitting in anywhere else. No place in the world for us.”

  I slid my camera back into its case. If this came to a fight, I didn’t want the precious camera to get broken. Mick had given it to me as a birthday present. “I’ve made a place.”

  “Yes, your little hotel. Your friends, who’d turn on you in a heartbeat. Come to think of it, they have turned on you once or twice already, every single one of them. Haven’t they? Except the mirror, but that’s enslaved to you. It doesn’t have a choice.”

  I didn’t like that what she said was very close to the truth. “Did you come out here to make a point? If not, I have things to do.”

  Gabrielle stepped close to me. I tensed, but I didn’t sense her power at the ready. “My point is that you’re a fool. You were offered the world, the universe, and you turned it down. For what? A dump of a hotel in the middle of nowhere and so-called friends who don’t trust you.”

  How the hell she knew all of this—that my mother had offered to make me a goddess if only I’d stay Beneath with her—I didn’t know. It unnerved me, but I kept my voice even. “I made my choice. And I’d make it again.”

  Gabrielle sighed. “Janet, my poor sister, life is hard. Don’t you get that? We’re d
ifferent from everyone else, and people don’t like different. We’re American Indians in a world in which Indians no longer have any power.”

  “Life is hard,” I agreed. “But I like my life. I’d like it better if you’d go away and leave my friends alone.”

  “I haven’t done anything to your friends.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I hate that you don’t trust me.” She almost pouted. “You really should trust me, you know.”

  I was tired of the conversation. “The world is a large place, Gabrielle. I’ll take Hopi County and the Navajo Nation, and you can find someplace else. We don’t ever need to see each other again.”

  “What are you afraid of? I came to interest you in a partnership. Together, my sister, we can kick some serious ass.”

  “I don’t want to kick serious ass. I want friends and family who aren’t afraid of me. A strange concept for you, I know, but that’s my world.”

  I turned around and walked away from her, going back over the barriers. I didn’t have to justify my choices to Gabrielle, the daughter of our bitch-queen-from-hell mother. If Gabrielle wanted to follow in our mother’s footsteps, fine. That was her choice. I’d try to stop her, of course, before she did too much damage, but I didn’t like Gabrielle pretending that she and I shared this special bond.

  I felt a sudden burst of power from her and ducked, but the only thing that happened was that Fremont’s tires hissed and went flat.

  “That’s childish,” I said.

  She climbed over the barriers after me. “I’m not finished talking to you. You’re adept enough to change a few tires, aren’t you?”

  Yes, but not what I wanted to do on a cold, snowy afternoon, when the truck had only one spare. “What do you want, Gabrielle? Spell it out. Do you really want us to be friends and partners, or are you here to size up the competition?”

  Gabrielle snorted. “Like you could ever be competition for me.”

  “Don’t push me, sweetie.”

  “There’s no storm, Stormwalker. You have Beneath magic, sure, but your storm powers keep it dampened. Without a storm, I could kick your butt from here to the Pacific, and you couldn’t stop me.”