Shadow Walker

by Allyson James

  Dad had always thought of himself as falling short of his father’s legacy, no matter how hard he tried to be like him. The fact that my dad hadn’t abandoned me, but kept me and raised me, without fuss or demands, in defiance of my grandmother, told me he’d achieved his father’s status.

  “I wish I’d met Grandfather,” I said.

  “You have. In your father. Which was another reason I let Peter keep you. I didn’t have the heart to take you away from him.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “You proved yourself,” Grandmother said. “Finally. Though you must be diligent at all times about your magic. And about Gabrielle. We need to find her and trap her. Go tell that witch of yours to come up with some kind of binding spell. She’s good enough.”

  The words were a dismissal, my grandmother loving but never sentimental. I chewed the last bite of my meal, carried my dishes to the sink, and left her and Elena whispering together again.

  Cassandra couldn’t put a binding spell on Gabrielle if we couldn’t find her, and I couldn’t help Mick if I couldn’t find him either. I went to the saloon to have a serious talk with the magic mirror.

  “Micky doesn’t have a piece of me with him,” the mirror said. “I’d know. I bet the witch told him not to bring one, in case you could spy on them.”

  “Then why did he try to take you from me when we fought at his lair?”

  “To use me against you. Micky wanted to kill you, honey, that was for sure.”

  He had. I’d seen it in his eyes.

  “Could you help him get free if I could get you to him?” I asked.

  “No, girlfriend. I’d still need his true name, and he never told it to me.”

  Wise of Mick. I wouldn’t trust a magic mirror with something that powerful, especially a magic mirror as mouthy as ours. “He told me he saw the sheriff’s department lift pieces of my bike out of the sinkhole. What happened to that mirror?”

  The magic mirror hummed to itself for a few minutes. “Got it. It’s in a big room. Dust. Not much light. Nowhere near Micky.”

  “A warehouse, maybe? Can you show me?”

  More humming, then the mirror clouded over. When the mist cleared, I was looking at a strange angle down to a floor about six feet below. It was a warehouse, all right. Shelves, daylight filtered through dust, metal walls. Not a big one, because I could see three of the walls and blue sky outside the high windows. Probably storage at the sheriff’s impound lot.

  “Does Mick know it’s there?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  “I wasn’t really.” I chewed on my lip. “I was thinking out loud.”

  “Well, honey, how am I supposed to know the difference?”

  “If Vonda wanted you, she would have sent Mick or Ted to fetch the piece by now. Which means that she doesn’t consider you important.”

  “Not important? Oh, I am so offended.”

  “I mean you aren’t what she’s after. So why did she try to drive me out of the hotel?”

  The mirror cleared its throat. “Are you asking me, or are you still thinking out loud?”

  “I’m asking you. What’s in this hotel that she could want?”

  “Its location? It’s on the Crossroads.”

  I knew it didn’t mean the hotel’s convenient placement at the intersection of two highways. The Crossroads was a magical crossroads, Jamison had told me, the defunct railway built along a ley line that traversed the desert. A magical place, where the line between the real and the psychic blurred.

  “Could be.” I’d have to ask Cassandra’s opinion on that. But Vonda’s motives were of secondary concern to me while Drake’s twenty-four hours ticked by. Once I got to Mick, I could worry about what Vonda truly wanted.

  The image of the warehouse shelving dissolved, and I found myself looking again at my thoughtful face, hair still damp from my shower, the saloon lit with morning light behind me.

  “I’m going to the sheriff’s department,” I said. “Keep an eye on the place, especially on Drake, and help Cassandra with anything she needs, all right?”

  “If I do all that, will you give me a good polish?”

  I patted its frame. “Of course.”

  “Will you be naked?” it asked hopefully.

  “No.”

  The mirror sighed. “I can never catch a break.”

  I caught a break because Maya arrived to continue her work on the wiring, and she had no problem driving me to Flat Mesa and the sheriff’s department instead.

  “How are things between you and Nash?” I asked her as we drove up the cleared road.

  The heavy snowfall was melting, but the land to either side of the black strip was still white and unbroken. The sky was white gray, but the clouds were thin and high, not storm clouds. No blizzard today.

  Maya shrugged. “All right, I guess. He took me to that fancy restaurant in Winslow a couple weeks ago. We stayed the night at the hotel.”

  Winslow had a Harvey Girls railroad hotel that had been restored to its former glory, with a restaurant with food to die for. “Romantic,” I said.

  “Briefly. Then we went home.”

  “Nash is getting used to having someone to care about,” I said.

  “Bullshit, Janet. Nash has had years to get used to me. How much time does he need?”

  “He’s is afraid of powerful feelings, and the feelings he has for you are powerful. I know about that kind of fear, Maya. It’s frightening to know that another person has such control over your emotions, your very life. You try to push away, but you never can do it.”

  “Is that what you did with Mick?”

  “Pretty much. I walked out on him, stayed walked out for years, because he’d had all the control in the relationship, and I had none.”

  Maya looked at me, her beautiful eyes telling me she wanted to hope. “Are you saying that I have all the control with me and Nash? Are you serious?”

  “You do, which is why he keeps pushing you away. He’s not afraid of you taking care of him; he’s afraid he’ll like being taken care of, which to him means weakness. I think in that thick skull of his, he’s afraid of weakness, because it might make his PTSD flare up again. Nash loves his job, and he doesn’t want to lose it.”

  “Wow,” Maya said, gripping the wheel. “I had no idea I was so threatening with my albondigas soup.”

  I grinned. “I’m not saying he’s not an idiot. I’m saying you need to feel sorry for him, not yourself. Keep at him. You’ll tame him.”

  “Janet, the relationship counselor.”

  “Yeah, I’m one to talk.”

  “I’m really sorry about Mick, but you know that he loves you. I’ve seen the way he watches you. He’d die for you.”

  Would I die for Mick? I hid my sudden tears by looking out the window at the bright snow. Yes, I thought I would. But I hoped I wouldn’t be called upon to do it.

  Lopez went with me to the impound and let me take the mirror from the box on the shelf. I swallowed as I saw the other pieces strewn in the boxes. Six years of my life, a pile of metal parts. I stuffed the mirror into the pocket of my leather jacket and left the warehouse.

  “Jones wants to see you,” Lopez said before I could rejoin Maya.

  “What for?” I asked, but Maya had heard and was already leaping down from her truck.

  Without waiting for me, Maya strode into the sheriff’s department and down the hall. I hurried after her, catching up to her on the threshold to Nash’s office.

  Maya walked inside, plopped down on one of the visitor’s chairs, and yanked off her hat. Nash glanced at her briefly, without surprise, and transferred his gaze to me.

  “Close the door.”

  I complied. “What’s up?”

  “I think I found Gabrielle. Where she’s living now, anyway.”

  “Gabrielle?” I heard the sharpness in Maya’s voice. “The one Janet claims is her half sister?”

  “Severely dangerous half sister,” I said. “Where?”

/>   “Snowflake. Close enough to her home in Whiteriver, but far enough away that people might not recognize her. She’s renting a room under an assumed name—Janet White.”

  I jumped, and the magic mirror in my pocket said, “Ooh, girlfriend, that’s just mean.”

  “Her idea of a joke, maybe,” I said.

  Maya tapped her hat on her thigh. “Weird sense of humor.”

  “If she hadn’t used that name, I might not have taken a closer look,” Nash said. “My friend at the Snowflake police—I went to high school with him—told me there was a Native American woman of the same age who’d moved there a few months ago, calling herself Janet White. It raised my suspicions, so I followed up. She took a room with people renting out space behind their garage. She hasn’t been there in the last couple of nights, though.”

  Woe to anyone who tries to hide out in a small town, where almost everyone drew pictures together in the first grade. I’d grown up in such a place, made even more fishbowl-like by connections—clan, cousins, grandparents, extended to the nth degree. Gabrielle would have been noticed and talked about, though if she kept to herself there was less risk that people in a town off the reservation would recognize or remember her.

  But while Nash had provided a good lead, I doubted we’d find Gabrielle in Snowflake. She had disappeared last night vowing to kill Vonda Wingate, and I didn’t doubt that Gabrielle was putting all her energy into hunting her.

  “I put out a warrant for her arrest,” Nash said, finishing.

  “What for?” Maya asked.

  “Blowing up my truck out on the S.J. Ranch.”

  Maya’s mouth was a round O. “Your new black truck?”

  “The sheriff department’s SUV.” Nash’s mouth was a thin line. “Criminal damage to county property.”

  “Gabrielle didn’t do that,” I broke in. “Mick did.”

  Nash gave me an unblinking look. “I didn’t see Mick out there last night. I saw Gabrielle.”

  “Mick was a dragon.”

  “There’s no such thing as dragons,” Nash said. “At least not according to Hopi County’s judge. He’d rather I give him a vandal with a record of vandalizing than claim that the SUV was blown up by a fire-breathing dragon.”

  I opened my mouth to keep arguing, but Nash gave me a steely look and I stopped. Nash would do what he wanted.

  “Fine,” I said. “If your friend in Snowflake manages to corner Gabrielle, tell him to be damn careful. And call me. Maya, you need to take me home.”

  Maya was on her feet. “What about this Gabrielle and Nash on S.J. Ranch? Why didn’t you bother telling me about that, Nash?”

  I opened the door and all but dragged Maya from the office. “Nash was helping me find Jamison. I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

  Maya gave Nash one final glare, which Nash returned with a spirited one of his own, and I pulled Maya out and down the hall. I swore those two would combust one day.

  Out in the truck, I asked Maya, “What are you doing for the rest of the day?”

  “Working for you. And listening to you explain about your half sister and Nash.”

  “And I promise to explain, if you drive me to Snowflake. I doubt Gabrielle will be there, but I’d like to have a look at where she’s living.”

  Maya agreed with a little too much enthusiasm. As we left Flat Mesa and took a route around the sinkhole to the highway south, I told her about what had happened at the cave where Nash and I had found Jamison. Maya had been an Unbeliever, like Nash, for a long time, but she drank in my story. She couldn’t hide her flash of pride when I explained how only Nash could make the karmii back off enough for us to get out safely.

  Maya still wasn’t thrilled that Nash hadn’t told her about the adventure, but she agreed with my need to find Gabrielle.

  Snowflake sits on the highway from Holbrook to the mountains, on a fairly flat area of the plateau, the highway cutting through the heart of the old town. The town was so named, not because it gets much snow, but because its founders’ last names were Snow and Flake. We passed tall statues that honored the men, and Maya turned off into a residential street.

  “I don’t remember Nash giving us an address,” she said.

  I shrugged. Nash hadn’t given me the address because I knew he didn’t want me trying to find Gabrielle myself. He had very firm ideas about what was police business and what was civilian business. “We’ll ask around,” I said.

  I’d gotten very good at asking, in a casual way, for information. Before I’d moved to Magellan, I’d helped out people who were desperate to solve puzzles that the police couldn’t or wouldn’t—missing persons, strange hauntings, inexplicable events. Some problems turned out to be supernatural, some decidedly human. In any case, I often had to begin in a town I didn’t know, with people I didn’t know, and I’d learned to ingratiate myself. I wondered whether Gabrielle had learned the same skill.

  It didn’t hurt that Maya had a few friends here, and within half an hour, Maya and I had learned that Gabrielle was renting from people called Thompson. Maya, who knew the streets of the town better than I did, drove me back to a small house in a late-twentieth-century development.

  The Thompsons looked normal enough, a late-middle-aged couple whose children had grown and gone. Photos of said son and daughter and grandchildren dotted every available surface, along with photos of the Thompsons vacationing and several group photos in front of a church.

  They didn’t know much about Gabrielle, however.

  “She keeps to herself,” Mrs. Thompson told me. “We don’t see her often. Her room has a separate entrance, and she has her own key.”

  “Has she been here lately—in the last few days?”

  Both Thompsons looked at me blankly. “Haven’t talked to her,” Mr. Thompson said. “You say you’re friends of hers?”

  “I never met her,” Maya volunteered. “I’m just the driver.”

  “I’m a friend.” I debated whether to float the “half sister” relationship, but decided not to. “I’m getting worried about her.”

  “Why?” the woman asked sharply. “Is she in trouble? She seems nice. What’s she into?”

  “Nothing.” Well, besides Beneath magic, blowing up vehicles, and threatening to kill a witch I needed to keep alive for a while longer.

  “She said she was Apache,” Mrs. Thompson said. “Are you Apache?”

  “Navajo,” I answered, holding on to my patience.

  “I thought you two tribes hated each other.”

  What kind of stuff did she read? “I really need to find Gabrielle,” I said. “Can you let me into her room? She might have left some sign of where she was going.”

  “Sign?”

  I nodded. I’d noticed the well-thumbed paperbacks beside an armchair, on ghosts and haunted places. “I’m a bit psychic.”

  The woman looked suddenly interested, and Mr. Thompson, who’d gone back to watching television, said, “Don’t see why not. She doesn’t have anything to steal.”

  I wondered how he knew that. Maya and I followed Mrs. Thompson out and down a flagstone path to a door behind the garage. She knocked on the door then opened it to reveal a small room, about ten feet square, that held a bed, a cabinet, a small chair, and not much else. Another door led to a tiny bathroom.

  I felt a stab of pity for Gabrielle as I walked inside. The room was clean, the bed stocked with pillows and blankets, but the space was stark, without personality. No television, no books, no pictures. The bathroom held essentials only: toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, shampoo, hairbrush. No makeup, jewelry, perfume. It was as though Gabrielle went through the motions of being human but nothing beyond that.

  Mrs. Thompson watched us curiously, then I told her I could sense the vibrations better if we were alone. She left, still looking interested, and Maya rolled her eyes.

  I noted that Gabrielle had put no warding over the doors, or anything that felt magical and would alert Gabrielle that someone had entered. I had to won
der why—either Mr. Thompson was right that she had nothing to steal, or else Gabrielle felt safe from all comers. Or she simply didn’t care.

  Maya sat on the bed, while I went into the bathroom again to open the medicine cabinet. Nothing in that either, not even aspirin. I wondered whether Gabrielle got magic hangovers as I did or if she managed to avoid them. She certainly hadn’t stocked up on painkillers.

  “Janet.”

  Maya’s voice held a strange note. I left the bathroom to find her standing in front of the cabinet that she’d opened. I stopped.

  Gabrielle kept no clothes in her closet, not even empty hangers. Instead, the walls and doors were coated with newspaper clippings, blown-up photos, printouts from Internet sites, and glossy sheets from magazines. The subject of these photos wasn’t me, but the stern face and cool gray eyes of Hopi County’s handsome sheriff, Nash Jones.

  Twenty-one

  It was a bizarre shrine. Gabrielle had taken some of the photos herself: of Nash’s house, of him walking out to go to work, of him washing his truck in his driveway, clad in shorts and shoes and nothing else. One had been snapped through Nash’s half-open blinds while he pumped iron on his exercise machine. The others came from articles on Jones as the youngest sheriff ever elected to Hopi County, on Jones the war vet, on Jones who’d made drug busts, uncovered a human traffic smuggling ring from Mexico, stopped small-arms dealers, and generally kept the populations of Flat Mesa and Magellan safe. Handsome Nash in his uniform, shooting at the range, Nash driving his SUV over desert roads, Nash talking into his radio.

  “She’s stalking him,” Maya said, her face stark with shock. “She’s stalking my boyfriend.”

  I sat down on the bed, my legs suddenly weak. “Yeah, she is. We need to tell him.”

  “How can you be so calm? Why is she doing this? What does she want?”

  I remembered the woman in the hospital in Flagstaff who’d claimed to be Nash’s mother. She’d gone for Nash before Mick had killed her, but I don’t think she’d been human. I still wasn’t certain what she’d been, but she’d fed on my Beneath magic and became stronger. I’d assumed the woman had been trying to kill Nash, but now I wondered whether Gabrielle had sent her to kidnap him.