Nash stopped so abruptly I barely kept myself from running into him. He stood at the top of a long rockslide, boulders tumbling away from us into a high-ceilinged cavern. I’d love to say it was a majestic place of stalagmites and stalactites, but nothing so grandiose. It was a big hole in the ground, nothing more, and it had a mountain lion in it.
The mountain lion sat on its haunches, staring at the wall above it. It moved so little that it might have been carved of stone, like one of Jamison’s amazing sculptures.
When Nash’s light touched him, the mountain lion turned with a low growl, eyes green and glittering.
“Jamison?” I asked.
The lion growled again, this time in irritation. Lips pulled back from fangs, and Nash eased his pistol from its holster.
I put my hand on the weapon and forced it down. “It’s Jamison. Turn off the light. He doesn’t like it.”
“Well, I don’t like the dark,” Nash snapped.
“He wants to shift. Turn it off.”
“You can read his mind?” His skepticism rang clearly.
“No, but I recognize Jamison annoyed when I see it. Turn off the flashlight. Trust me.”
Nash heaved an aggrieved sigh but flicked the switch. The cave became inky black, the growling increased, and I heard what sounded like a crunch of bones. More silence, broken only by the slither of fabric and then Jamison said, “All right.”
Nash flicked on the lantern. Jamison stood in front of us, clad in jeans and in the act of pulling on a T-shirt.
I understood why he’d wanted darkness. Unlike dragons, who saw no reason to put on clothes unless absolutely necessary, Jamison was a modest man. He didn’t like people watching him shift, and only Naomi got to see him naked.
“These caves are dangerous,” Nash said to him.
“Then why are you down here?” Jamison countered. “Especially you, Janet.”
“Naomi got worried.”
“And you shouldn’t be here,” Nash finished, still the sheriff.
“I’m not trespassing,” Jamison said. “These caves are part of the S.J. Ranch, and Samuel has given me permission to walk this land anytime I want. I come here looking for stones to carve. I was going through the photos Janet sent me and realized where I’d seen drawings like them. Here.”
He gestured to the top of the cave, but Nash didn’t move his light. “So you came to investigate, alone, in the middle of the night?” Nash asked him.
“It was late afternoon when I started. Took me longer to find what I was looking for than I thought.”
“What did you find?” I asked. “Nash, please, I need to see this.”
Finally Nash raised the lantern and shone it on the wall where Jamison pointed.
I sucked in my breath. The highest point of the walls and the entire ceiling were covered in petroglyphs. Whorls of stars, animals, humans with triangular torsos, plants, and abstract symbols had been chipped out here, there, and everywhere, overlapping one another as they had in the sinkhole.
Among these the spidery, skeletal hands of the karmii began to glow, and as we watched they started skimming across the ceiling, coming directly for me.
Nineteen
Jamison sucked in a breath. “Those weren’t here a minute ago.”
“No,” I said. “They’re sensing evil.”
Three guesses as to who was the evil. Jamison the Changer who took such good care of his family? The diligent sheriff who could absorb and negate all magic? Or the Stormwalker whose mother was a goddess trapped Beneath?
The hands multiplied, glowing with the sickly light I remembered from the sinkhole. Nash snapped off his light, and the glow continued, the karmii now flowing down the walls.
“Nash—no!”
Nash had started to walk for the wall, his hand out. He looked at me. “What are they? How are they moving?”
“They point the way to evil,” Jamison said.
Nash had been an Unbeliever all his life, and even now that he knew magic was real, he didn’t simply accept things without question. “What evil?”
“Me,” I said.
“You’re not evil. A pain in my ass, yes, but not evil.”
“Haven’t you been paying attention?” I asked him. “You saw my mother coming out of the vortex; you’ve watched me kill with my Beneath magic.”
“To save other people’s lives, yes. Your methods are not the most reassuring, but you’re not evil.”
I warmed at his praise, but I didn’t think the karmii would take his word for it. Nash walked straight to the wall, ignoring me and Jamison, and put his hand right over a skeletal one.
He jerked but didn’t pull away. Under his palm, the karmii squirmed like a bug trying to get out from under a boot. Light shot up Nash’s arm, then dispersed as suddenly as it started. When Nash lifted his hand away, that karmii had vanished.
Just the one. The other thousand or so lingered, pulsing, watching, waiting.
“Did it burn you?” I asked. “Or give you frostbite?”
Nash showed me his hand, whole and unblemished.
“We need to go,” Jamison said.
The karmii had stopped for now, but if they continued down the walls and reached the floor, they could flow through that to me. My leg ached with the memory of the karmii’s frozen touch, and that had been only one of them. What would happen if the entire horde poured over me, crawled up my legs, dragged me down? I shuddered, pivoted, and headed for the rockfall at the entrance.
Which was suddenly blocked by my sister, Gabrielle. “Hey, Janet,” she said, giving me a wide smile. “Sheriff, you left your truck running.” She held up her hand, the keys dangling from her fingers.
The karmii stopped for a split second, then they went insane. Another thousand or so sprang to life and homed in on my evil little half sister.
“Gabrielle!” I shouted.
She looked up, and for the first time since I’d known her, I saw her eyes fill with fear. The karmii whirled, silent in their fury, and dove straight at her.
I scrambled up the wall of fallen rock, grabbed Gabrielle, and started hauling ass up the tunnel. The karmii followed, flowing fast through the walls ahead of us. Could they follow us all the way out of the cave? When I’d left the sinkhole they hadn’t come after me, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t.
The karmii lit the tunnel so brightly we didn’t need a flashlight. Gabrielle ran, me right behind her. We reached one of the places where the floor rose toward the ceiling, and the karmii were waiting, filling the space. We’d have to try to squeeze past them, and they’d have us. Would they simply freeze us to death? Or keep us alive while they burned the skin from our bones?
“Let me.” Nash shoved past me and Gabrielle and put his back to the wall.
I gasped as the karmii flowed behind him, his skin lighting with them until I could see the blood pulsing through his veins. The hands fled from him, bunching together on the opposite wall and the ceiling, waiting.
Nash grabbed Gabrielle and squeezed her between him and the space of the wall he’d cleared. As soon as Gabrielle touched the rock, the karmii tried to zoom back, but Nash shoved her hard, and she fell past, free of them. Giving Nash a look from her wide brown eyes, Gabrielle fled on up the tunnel.
“Janet.” Nash was body squashing the karmii again. As soon as he’d cleared a space, he moved a body width, and I dove between him and the wall.
I scraped my flesh on rock and heard Nash swear as I dug him in the ribs. But Nash was strong, hard with muscle, and my little body flailing past him didn’t faze him. As soon as I landed on the rock on the far side, he dove after me, hauled me to my feet and started pushing me ahead of him.
Jamison came behind with the flashlight, and when I glanced back I saw that the karmii were nowhere near him. No evil in Jamison, the earth-magic shaman.
I heard Gabrielle screaming. I tried to pick up the pace, but I was too slow for Nash. He squeezed past me and halfcrouched, half-ran up the tunnel, sure-foote
d on the rocks. The karmii flowed rapidly past him like a river of light.
Jamison reached me, panting, and together he and I picked our way more cautiously up the tunnel, the karmii leaving us alone.
We caught up to Nash and Gabrielle at the entrance between the rocks. Nash was circling Gabrielle, trying to beat back the karmii, which filled the outer cave walls, roof, and floor. Nash could clear a foot, but as soon as Gabrielle stepped there, the karmii returned full force.
“Hey, karmii!” I shouted. “You want evil? Suck on this!”
I manifested a ball of Beneath magic—not difficult because I was scared out of my mind. I raised the light above my head, and the karmii froze. I threw the bright ball of magic far back into the cave, and the karmii went for it like beetles to a corpse. I conjured another one while Nash hustled Gabrielle out, and Jamison ran after them, still carrying the flashlight.
I threw my second ball of magic, turned, and sprinted out of the cave, praying I was right that the karmii couldn’t follow us out into the open air. I had to brace myself on the thick rocks at the opening, and the karmii came for me. I pulled my hand away the split second before the skeletal fingers could touch me, the air of death brushing my skin.
I more or less fell out of the cave, rolling on rocks and snow and frozen ground until I landed on my back on flat land. Jamison held out his warm, solid, living hand and helped me to my feet.
I stood up, hanging on him while I tried to catch my breath. Gabrielle sobbed with terror. Nash’s method of comforting her was to shake her by the shoulder and shout, “You’re all right! Stop that.”
Gabrielle flung her arms around Nash’s neck and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you, Sheriff. You saved my life.”
Nash looked embarrassed and annoyed. “Just give me back my keys.”
Gabrielle lifted them out of his reach with a little smile, and as she did so, something dove at us from the night, firing flame before it with the precision of a laser beam. The stream of fire hit Nash’s SUV, and before we could move, the truck exploded into a blue white fireball.
The dragon that had targeted the truck winged his silent way skyward, no screech of triumph following. It was a huge black dragon with a silver white eye, Mick’s fiery aura clinging to it like a second skin. He flapped his wings once and disappeared into the desert night, leaving us stunned, shivering, and Nash swearing in frustrated rage.
Nash called Lopez to come and get us, stating that the deputy had the only other vehicle in the county capable of traversing the road. Nash was furious, and stormed around in the snow, saying many choice words about dragons in general and Mick in particular. Hopi County didn’t have a lot of money, and Nash had wrecked two trucks in the space of a week.
At least the oily fire was warm. I hunkered in my leather jacket and waited next to Jamison, who’d morphed back into a mountain lion to better take the cold.
“What dragon was that?” Gabrielle asked me in anger. “Can’t your boyfriend keep them under control?”
I looked at her in surprise. “That was Mick.”
“Really? What happened? You two have a fight?”
“No.” I put my hand on Jamison’s furry back, drawing strength from him as well as warmth. “Are you telling me you don’t know?”
“Know what?” Gabrielle seemed genuinely confused. Maybe my grandmother was wrong about her involvement.
I swallowed, hating to say the words. “Mick has come under a witch’s thrall. She enslaved him—I don’t know why. I mean, I know she wants his power, but I don’t know why she chose Mick.”
Gabrielle stopped. “What witch?”
“Pretty sure it’s a woman called Vonda Wingate.”
Gabrielle’s mouth dropped open. “What? That bitch! I’ll kill her!”
“You do know her, then.” So my grandmother and Elena hadn’t been wrong after all.
Gabrielle’s eyes flared green, and for a moment, I saw my mother very clearly in her. “I’ll kill her,” she repeated, her voice low and firm.
The Beneath power was strong in her, and I knew she could kill Vonda without blinking. Which meant Mick would die too, and Gabrielle wouldn’t care.
I grabbed for her, but Gabrielle stepped back, her face flooded with rage, and disappeared. My hands closed on empty air.
Damn it. I don’t know how Gabrielle did that or where she went when she did. All I could do was stand at the end of a snow-covered road next to Nash’s burning truck and fume and worry.
I knew Gabrielle hadn’t reached Vonda Wingate, because when Lopez arrived with the fire department, he casually mentioned that Vonda and Ted had left the county that morning, Ted up and quitting his job. Where they’d gone, no one knew, but no one was very sorry they’d left.
Nash remained with the firemen to answer questions, and Lopez drove me and Jamison back home. My cell phone didn’t work all the way out here—someone else had reported the fire, probably the owner of the ranch—or I would have called Colby and Drake to fly me out of there so I could hunt for Gabrielle.
As it was, I had to sit moodily in the back of Lopez’s SUV with Jamison, dressed again, right next to me. While I wasn’t a touchy-feely kind of girl, Changers liked to be tactile, touching for greeting, comfort, friendship, love. Jamison had comforted me, leaning against me in his mountain lion form as we waited; now he comforted me with his warm hand on my shoulder and his stoic silence.
It was dawn by the time Lopez dropped me off at the hotel. Jamison, tired, got back into the car to return to his own house, where I’m sure Naomi would first hug him, then ream him out for going to the caves by himself. Elena, up and dressed, made me a staggeringly wonderful breakfast while she and Grandmother grilled me about what had happened.
“The karmii,” Grandmother said. “I might have known.”
“What can they do?” I munched savory beans and eggs in fresh corn tortillas and washed it all down with rich coffee. “They didn’t follow us out of the caves, but there were plenty of boulders for them to slide through just outside it.”
“They thrive in darkness,” Grandmother said. “They search for evil, and they absorb it. They don’t like light or good earth magic, so they avoid it.” Which explained why they’d fled from Mick’s light spell in the sinkhole and didn’t bother with Jamison at all.
“Can they be considered a good thing, then?” I asked. “If they absorb evil? They tried to kill Gabrielle.” And me.
Elena returned to her stove. “Karmii are neutral things. Mindless. Shamans use them to detect the presence of evil, but karmii are tricky. If they believe the shaman has evil magic, they’ll turn and kill him, even if he invoked the karmii to protect him. They have no mercy or compassion.”
I’d seen Elena run people out of her kitchen at knifepoint without mercy or compassion. I supposed such things were relative.
“You saved Gabrielle,” Grandmother said, giving me a hard look. “Why?”
I remembered my panic when I saw the hands flowing toward Gabrielle, and the real terror on her face.
“I don’t know. I didn’t want to watch them kill her. She doesn’t deserve that.”
“Why not?” Elena demanded. She turned from the stove, her spatula dripping. “She killed her own parents, after all.”
Twenty
My hand jerked on my coffee cup. “What?” I rapidly reviewed the information Nash had spouted to us last night at this very table. “Nash said her parents had been killed in an accident while Gabrielle was living in Albuquerque.”
Elena shrugged and turned back to whatever she was frying. “I had a long talk with my daughter about her last night. She remembers the incident plainly—I was working in New York at the time. Gabrielle was living in Albuquerque, yes, but she’d come home that day to argue with her parents about something. My daughter doesn’t know what, but the Masseys’ neighbors talked about screaming and shouting coming from their house. Then both Gabrielle’s parents ran outside and jumped in the car, terrified, and drove away
fast, her father driving, as drunk as he was. Gabrielle never came out, and no one in Whiteriver saw her again. But her parents drove into the mountains north of town and had the accident on one of the hairpin turns. Car flipped down the hill and burned. Gabrielle wasn’t reported at the scene of the accident, but you tell me that she can appear and disappear at will.”
I sat back, my chest tight. I imagined the Masseys, Gabrielle’s human parents, frightened by their monster of a daughter, fleeing her, only to have her manifest in front of them on a mountain road. Her Beneath magic could certainly have wrecked the car, flipped it, burned it. I’d seen how casually she’d blown up Cassandra’s car.
To be fair, Elena didn’t know this for certain, going on four-year-old hearsay from neighbors and her daughter. The roads along the Rim could be perilous, especially in any kind of bad weather, and accidents happened. But I shivered as I met my grandmother’s gaze.
“You see why you shouldn’t defend her, Janet?” she asked.
I warmed my freezing hands on my coffee cup. “You thought I’d be like that, didn’t you, Grandmother?”
“When your father carried you home, you stinking of Beneath magic? Of course I did.”
“You could have killed me,” I said. “No matter what Dad wanted.”
“I could have.” Grandmother acknowledged this with a nod. “But I also knew you had your father’s blood, and Peter was always a good boy. My son has a river of kindness in him, as did his father.”
I caressed my coffee cup to hide my surprise. Grandmother rarely talked about her late husband, my grandfather, who had died before I was born. There was one photo of Jacob Begay in the house, a stern-faced Navajo, long hair neatly braided, who looked much like my father. There was wisdom in my grandfather’s face but not arrogance. He’d been the sort of man, my father had told me, who helped others without demanding anything in return, not even thanks or acknowledgment. The fact that he’d made someone else’s life better was reward enough, my father had said.
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