Shadow Walker

by Allyson James

“I can’t. I’m waking Cassandra, and we’re binding this thing.”

  “Let him go, Janet.”

  It was my grandmother’s voice. She stood in the hall, beyond Mick, small and stubborn, swaddled to her throat in a thick robe. She didn’t seem in any way perturbed by Mick’s nudity, but I could see her eyes sparkle in disapproval at mine. I snatched up the quilt.

  “Grandmother, get out of here,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

  Grandmother sniffed. “I know a thing or two about Firewalkers. He’s not possessed, he’s enslaved. If you don’t let him go, he’ll destroy everything around him in order to get to his master.” Her lips pinched. “In this case, mistress.”

  My mouth fell open and stayed there. Enslaved? I remembered something Cassandra had said to me, offhand, a few months ago. Dragons can be useful to witches, if the witch is powerful enough. What the hell did that mean? Was this blond chick Mick had been seen talking to the witch? And who the hell was she?

  The blue departed from Mick’s eyes, and they became white and hard again. Right before the blue flicked out for good, he whispered, “Remember that I love you, Janet.”

  Mick shoved my grandmother aside, strode down the hall and out of the hotel, still naked, and ran across the white snow. Grandmother and I watched as he stretched out his arms and morphed to a dragon that took off over the iceshrouded land. Mick’s footprints faded, leaving behind unbroken snow and no sign that he’d ever been there.

  Twelve

  Cassandra fed me coffee in the saloon the next morning, but even her delicious brew couldn’t cut through my anxiety. “Explain it to me again,” I said.

  I’d been grilling her since she’d come downstairs, repeating my questions as though she’d give me the answer I wanted to hear if only I asked her often enough. Cassandra, the good woman, was exceedingly patient. Grandmother, not so much. She scowled at me after a while and trudged to the kitchen to bang pots.

  Pamela had risen at the same time as Cassandra and now sat across the table from me, sharing in the coffee and listening to the interrogation. Pamela was strong, as most Changers were, her muscular shoulders emphasized by her pale sleeveless shirt. She kept her black hair pulled into a braid, and she sucked down coffee faster than Cassandra could pour it.

  “A witch has to be damn powerful to enslave a dragon,” Cassandra said. “I’m strong, and even I couldn’t do it. I’ve studied the theory, but that’s as far as I’ll ever go. Even if I could control a dragon, I wouldn’t. I don’t believe in using slaves to do my dirty work.”

  “Good for you,” Pamela said, giving her an affectionate look. “So what would a witch use a dragon for? If someone is powerful enough to control a dragon like Mick, wouldn’t her magic be kick-ass enough already?”

  “Yes, but dragons have amazing magic,” Cassandra answered. “Very different from witch magic. Dragons are born able to do things that witches can only dream of—perform spells simply by thinking about them, shape-shift, even cross dimensions and maybe time, theories say. Plus dragons are good muscle to have around. But the problem with enslaving a dragon is that the dragon has to be totally controlled. One tiny slip, and the dragon turns on the witch and solves his dilemma by taking out the witch.”

  I balled my fists on the table. “This is Mick we’re talking about. He’s powerful even for a dragon, some kind of dragon lord. Who the hell would be strong enough to hold him? Gabrielle?”

  Cassandra frowned and tapped her mug with wellmanicured fingers. “I doubt it. Dragon enslavement takes control and strict discipline, and from what you tell me about Gabrielle, I don’t think her control is very good. She’s more like a loose cannon. This witch would have to be trained, focused, learned, and powerful. Much more powerful than I am.” Her voice held a trace of envy.

  “The blond woman he was talking to?”

  “Possibly,” Cassandra said. “You’d never seen her before?” she asked Pamela.

  Pamela shrugged. “Nope. But I didn’t get an ‘I’m a hugely powerful witch’ vibe from her at all. More like ‘I’m lost, help me.’”

  “A hugely powerful witch can become any kind of person she wants,” Cassandra said. “Mick is a protector. If he saw a woman in trouble, he’d help her, and then . . .” She reached out one hand and snapped it closed.

  I shivered. “Fine. It’s the blond woman. Or the blond woman is an innocent tourist he doesn’t remember. I don’t care. I want to find her, find out, and help Mick. How do we get Mick free?”

  Pamela lifted her coffee mug. “Kill the witch?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. My Beneath magic stretched and tingled, wanting to find the woman and kill her now.

  “It’s tricky,” Cassandra said. “We have to be careful.”

  Pamela started to sip her coffee but put the mug down instead. “Tricky, yeah. She’s now a witch protected by a dragon.”

  “An enslaved dragon,” I said. “Wouldn’t Mick welcome a chance to end that?”

  Cassandra gave me a look of sympathy. “Understand, Janet. Mick will be completely enslaved. Which means if she orders him to kill us, he will. If Mick hadn’t already been totally enslaved when he flew off last night, he’d have killed the witch himself and be sitting here telling us about it.”

  “So what do we do?” I growled. “Sit around and wait for her to be tired of him?”

  At the glance Cassandra sent Pamela, I shot forward across the table, sending my coffee cup spinning. “What? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Cassandra spoke gently. “When a witch commands a dragon and uses his magic, she drains him. He can’t stop it, and the more powerful the witch, the faster the drain. In the end, the dragon dies.”

  I jumped to my feet, white magic crackling in my hands. “Then we find the bitch and take her down.”

  “I agree,” Cassandra surprised me by saying. “Someone like that has to be stopped. But we have to be careful, as I said. If she dies while the spell is in full force, it might kill Mick too. Plus Mick will be compelled to protect her. We need to respect just how difficult fighting Mick would be.”

  Damned difficult. Mick was a dragon, huge and magical, and he could shoot fire, not to mention that in dragon form he possessed gigantic, jagged teeth.

  I thought about what he’d said to me: When you see me again, don’t try to help me, don’t try to fight me. Just run. Mick had known.

  “What can we do, then?” I asked. “If we can’t get behind him to get to the witch, how can we get him free? What kind of spell does the witch use? Can we break that?”

  “The witch uses the dragon’s true name to bind him.” Cassandra looked hopefully at me, but I had to shake my head.

  “I know you don’t mean the Latin-sounding name the dragons call him. Mick told me his true name would sound like musical notes, but he never told me what it was.”

  The true name, Mick had said, was sung to a dragon in the shell by his mother. True dragon names were similar to Native American spirit names, given to a child by his or her father and told only to the gods.

  “How would this witch find out his name?” I asked. “If Mick wouldn’t even tell me?”

  “I wish I knew.” Again, Cassandra betrayed a trace of envy. “I know dragon names leave vibrations on places that they frequent, like dragon lairs. If the witch was able to find Mick’s lair, she might be able to piece it together, but dragon lairs are well hidden. Do you know where Mick’s is?”

  “No, but I know who does.” I itched to get my hands on him—Colby, a snarky dragon who’d come to help Mick last fall. Colby did things for his own reasons, but I had to admit he’d stood by Mick’s side against the mighty dragon council when Mick was in trouble. I also knew that Colby at one time had confronted Mick on his own territory—a big no-no according to dragons. And, come to think of it, I knew someone else, even more powerful than Colby or any witch alive, who possibly knew.

  “Coyote,” I said. “I think Coyote’s been there.”

  Cassandra gave me
a skeptical look. “Sometimes finding Coyote can be just as difficult as discovering a dragon’s name.”

  I couldn’t argue. I thought I’d spied Coyote outside last night when Mick had thrown the shard of mirror out the window. I’d ask it. Other than that, I hadn’t seen Coyote since he’d dropped us off after getting us out of Flagstaff.

  “Colby too,” I said. “At least he answers his cell phone.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Cassandra said. “But be careful what you tell the dragons. The one thing dragons dread is enslavement. The dragon council might convince themselves that the only way to help Mick is to kill him. And if there’s a witch out there who knows how to discover dragon names, they might kill her before we can get Mick free.”

  “Terrific.” I dropped my fists to the table. I didn’t like the way Cassandra looked at me—pity mixed with knowledge that the odds of getting Mick free were slim to none.

  I couldn’t let myself believe that. I was a damn powerful Stormwalker and I had the power of Beneath inside me, and some witch had just stolen my boyfriend. There would be no power on earth that would stop me getting him back. If Mick died because of that witch, I’d make sure every breath she took became absolute hell. And then I’d kill her. Slowly.

  I stood up again, determined. “We do this. Cassandra, research like crazy about how to get him free. Pamela, see what you can find out about this blond woman, and I’ll hunt up Coyote.”

  Pamela and Cassandra exchanged another glance, as couples do when they share an opinion without saying a word. But they both nodded and rose to put the plan into action.

  They left me alone with cooling coffee and a magic mirror, its voice subdued. “We’ll get our Micky back, girlfriend,” it said. “We’ll save him. We have to.”

  The mirror told me it didn’t remember a thing after Mick threw the shard out into the snow. It had been so panicked, the mirror said, it had blacked out its vision through that shard. So it hadn’t seen the coyote and couldn’t tell me if it had been the god Coyote. Lots of help that was.

  I went out the back door of the kitchen into the bright snow to try to get Coyote on his cell. The weather was changing already, the morning warming. Local birds had already ventured out to eat the corn I’d strewn at my back door, and the corn my grandmother had also tossed outside the kitchen door.

  Getting Coyote to use his cell phone wasn’t easy. He didn’t answer this time either, and he didn’t have voice mail.

  I sighed and clicked off the phone. I stood a long time watching the black birds pick through the snow for the corn, debating whether to call Colby. Colby hated the dragon council, so the odds that he’d rush and tell them the tale of Mick’s enslavement were slim. Still, I didn’t need him deciding he needed to kill Mick or the witch, but then I didn’t think Colby was strong enough to take on Mick and win. It was a risk, but if he could help, I had to try.

  “Hey, little Stormwalker,” Colby sang when he picked up. “Please tell me you kicked out Mick and want to trade up.”

  I studied the turquoise-and-onyx band on my finger as I gathered my thoughts. Mick had given the ring to me as an engagement ring. Had he bought it before or after he’d been enslaved? And had the entire idea to ask me to marry him been the witch’s? The thought made me ill.

  “Colby.” I stopped.

  He must have heard something in my voice, because his amusement died. “What’s wrong, honey? What happened?”

  I told him. I tried to be cautious, but the entire tale poured from my lips. When I finished, I was wiping tears from my face. Colby was absolutely silent.

  “You still there?” I asked.

  “Shit.” Yep, still there. “Who did this?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Well, you need to find out. Anyone who can enslave Micky is going to be one powerful witch. And anyone who can enslave Micky can enslave me. Every dragon could be screwed, because—Hey—”

  His outraged cry faded into the background, and a dark but cold voice took Colby’s place. “Janet Begay, you need to discover who has done this quickly. When you have, report to me.”

  Oh, crap. It was Drake, a dragon who was head flunky to Bancroft, one of the three members of the dragon council. So much for not letting the dragon council in on the secret.

  “Nice to talk to you too, Drake,” I said in a hard voice.

  “We will be waiting for your call.”

  “Wait, I still need to talk to Colby—” Click.

  A callback went to Colby’s voice mail, so I assumed Drake had confiscated the phone.

  What Colby was doing with Drake I had no idea. Colby was like the juvenile delinquent to Drake’s dragon law enforcement. I couldn’t imagine Colby not doing as he damn well pleased, though, so I left a message for him to call and hung up.

  Damn it. I went back into the kitchen, where at least it was warm.

  Grandmother was chopping vegetables. It was her answer to all problems, cooking. Either that or cleaning, but whenever I was at home, she usually made me do the cleaning.

  “How did you know what had happened to Mick?” I asked.

  She went on slicing carrots without looking at me. “I told you. I know about Firewalkers.”

  “Can you tell who has him?”

  Grandmother shrugged as she put the carrots into a pot and started rinsing the beans she’d soaked. “The woman everyone saw with him with is a good prospect. A Shadow Walker, as I heard it.”

  “What’s a Shadow Walker?”

  Grandmother looked impatient, as though I should have been born with an encyclopedic knowledge of magic. “A witch who wears her magic like shadows. Strong and nasty. The blond woman is a likely candidate, but I’d like a serious talk with your sister.”

  Her lip curled when she said the word sister. Grandmother was all about family—which I’m sure is why she hadn’t tossed me to the coyotes when my father first brought me home. Grandmother had known there was something wrong with me, and watched and mistrusted me all my life. However, she’d protected me as well, and she was still protecting me, because I was a Begay. I was family.

  But though Grandmother was all about family, she wasn’t about to let Gabrielle in. Neither Grandmother nor I had known about Gabrielle until last September, when Gabrielle had come to me and announced herself. Because Gabrielle wasn’t technically blood related, and not even Diné, Grandmother had felt no need to find her and draw her into our clan.

  “Cassandra says it’s probably not Gabrielle,” I said.

  “If there’s mischief, then Gabrielle is somehow involved.”

  “You used to say that about me.”

  Grandmother gave me a severe eye. “And I was right. Don’t defend her. She’s not like you.”

  Grandmother, in her crow form, had been with me when Gabrielle had revealed her existence to us. Grandmother’s first impression of her had been of pure evil, and nothing had changed her mind since. I had to admit, Gabrielle hadn’t done much to change my opinion either.

  “I’ll find the witch,” I said. “And Coyote. He can help us.”

  “Never put your fate in the hands of a trickster.”

  “I don’t plan to. But I need his help.”

  Grandmother added the beans to her pot. “Best go find him then.”

  I left her to her cooking. Grandmother wasn’t sentimental. When something was wrong, she declared that it should be fixed first, cried about later. I had to admire her philosophy.

  I went back to my office. I tried Colby again but added no message this time. I could only hope that the dragon council would have as hard a time locating the witch and Mick as I did.

  I had an advantage, though, and his name was Nash Jones. Nash liked to keep tabs on anyone who came and went in his county, and the woman had been seen in Magellan by several people. If she’d been acting the part of a passing tourist, it would be tougher, but Nash would have found out something. Emilio Salas kept the same kind of eye on Magellan, if in a quieter way. I scrolled thro
ugh numbers on my cell phone, happy I’d finished putting them into my new one. I was hard on cell phones, the last one dying because it somehow wound up in a potted plant that got watered.

  Before I could push the button to dial Emilio, I heard a yell and swearing in Spanish from the basement. Dropping phone to desk I sprinted out and down the basement stairs.

  Maya and Fremont had returned early to work on repairs, going downstairs before I’d even gone up to wake Cassandra. They didn’t know yet what had happened to Mick, because I was hoping Cassandra would have a quick fix and it wouldn’t be necessary to tell them.

  “What?” I asked testily as I hit the bottom step.

  “This!” Maya pointed to wires that looked as corroded as the ones she’d showed me yesterday. “I replaced those. Yesterday afternoon.” She flipped the dead wires and more copper crumbled from them. “Let me put it in an English phrase you’ll understand: It’s all fucked-up again.”

  “Same thing here,” Fremont said. He sounded sad rather than angry. “Brand-new PVC, the kind that’s flexible, and it’s as disintegrated as the copper.”

  The three of us studied the ruin of my pipes and wiring, our combined frustration and defeat keeping us quiet.

  “It’s a spell,” I said, my voice hollow. “It has to be.”

  Fremont poked a green encrusted pipe with a wrench. “Like Penelope.”

  Maya glared at him. “What? Who the hell is Penelope?”

  “In the Odyssey,” Fremont said. “She promised she’d chose a new husband from the men who hung around her house—they wanted her to declare Odysseus dead and marry one of them so they could get their hands on Odysseus’s estate. But they agreed to let her hold off deciding who she’d marry until she finished weaving her tapestry. So every night she unwove what she’d done that day to buy herself more time.”

  “Oh, thanks, Fremont.” Maya scowled. “Very helpful.”

  “Only none of us are doing this on purpose,” I said.

  Fremont adjusted his hat. “But Janet, there’s a problem with it being a spell. You and Mick have magic wards all over the hotel. Wards are like a net,” he said to Maya. “Or a barrier against malevolent magic. Nothing magical can get in, and if someone is strong enough to penetrate the wards, Janet and Mick are alerted, like a magical burglar alarm. Only you haven’t said you were alerted.”