Between falling from a window and the first incident of the sinkhole, I was developing a healthy fear of heights—or rather, of falling from heights. But I couldn’t afford to let Mick be in too much control. If he chased me until I fell into the hole, I’d be flailing around trying to save myself and possibly die. I needed to gain some advantage here, much as it terrified me.
When Mick turned his motorcycle to take another run at me, I took a deep breath, whirled wind and snow around me like heavy blanket, and jumped straight into the sinkhole.
I didn’t scream this time but curled my arms around my body and tucked my face to my chest. The storm cushioned my descent a little, but still I landed hard on the rocks that had snagged me and Nash the first time.
The storm swirled away from me, shooting upward to join the winds above. Everything went quiet.
And dark. I struggled for breath, noting how the air, though cold, was more bearable down here than on the surface. I had my leather jacket against the elements and the rocks, but I groaned as I sat up and brushed dust from my hair.
I didn’t want to risk a light spell. I couldn’t do light spells with storm magic, and using Beneath magic would alert the karmii. I stilled my labored breathing, hoping that, if I used no magic at all, the karmii would leave me alone.
But I was too agitated, and Beneath magic swam through my body, filling it like the magic that filled Vonda. Both of my magics were whirling inside me as much as the snow and ice whirled in the blizzard above.
Mick hadn’t followed me down, and I no longer heard the throb of his motorcycle. He hadn’t even glanced in to see whether his prey lived or died. Maybe he figured that I couldn’t get out, that the karmii would finish me. Or that I’d be trapped here while he went to get Vonda.
The sinkhole began to glow. Dread clogged my throat as drawings of wiry hands appeared on the rocks in front of me, then behind me, then above, then below. The breath went out of me at the same time I felt a hot draft over my shoulder from the beating of massive wings.
Mick floated by, above me in the night. I forced myself to my feet and hunkered as close to the rock wall as I could, nearly whimpering when the karmii reached out to me. Mick turned and dove at the hole, his fire burning a streak through the dark.
Here it was then. Mick and me. Facing each other, alone.
Me in a hole with the karmii dancing around me, Mick above, trying to burn me alive. The hole was plenty big enough now for Mick to dive into it, but he kept flying, sending his flame roaring down to roast me.
There was nothing to save me from him. Mick, a dragon, was able to take my Stormwalker magic and resist it. I pressed my hands together, drew them to my chest, and closed my eyes.
I saw inside me what I’d seen when I’d saved Mick last fall, my Stormwalker magic and my Beneath magic twining around each other like black and white, yin and yang. Whirling together into one solid foundation.
When I opened my eyes again, my entire body sparkled. Earth magic and Beneath magic, a powerful combination. As far as I knew, I was the only being in the world who had it. I thought Vonda wanted it, thought that her desire for my magic would keep me alive. But Mick didn’t seem to care about keeping me alive. He was going for the kill.
“Ice,” I whispered, and the ice in the storm bent to my will.
It flowed through my fingers, freezing my body. Ice crackled through my hair and my skin and shot upward from my hands to meet Mick’s arrow of flame.
Fire and ice met with an explosion that rocked the sinkhole. The impact tried to lift me off my feet, but I held on to the tight braid of both my magics and stayed put, my hands together. Mick screamed and beat the air before he swooped down for another pass.
I laughed up at him. “Come on! Let’s see what we can do!”
We were going to kill each other. Him by burying me in fire, me by burying him in snow. Legends would be sung about this battle between the dragon and the Stormwalker, the flame and the ice.
Mick laid down fire to incinerate the hole. Rocks crackled and broke, tree roots burst into flame, and the fire sucked oxygen from the air. I would have burned alive but for the bubble of ice I formed around me to deflect the fire. Mick blasted me again and again, trying to wear me down, but I held on, my sweat forming into instant ice on my skin.
My next stream of ice hit Mick’s flame, and he had to fight his way skyward, roaring with rage. Mick wheeled back, sucked in a breath, and blasted me with fire.
The heat of the volcano that had created him flowed down at me like molten lava. My defensive shield of ice was enough to deflect it, but the rocks around me couldn’t hold. They crumbled and melted, sandstone not strong enough to withstand the heat.
Rocks jerked out from under me, and I fell. And fell and fell. This rockslide, if anything, was bigger than the first that had opened the sinkhole. Tons of rocks cascaded around me, battering me, smothering me. My magic snapped and broke, and so did one of my ribs. The pain made me sick, but I didn’t have time for that as I rolled and tumbled down the shaft.
I hit hard at the bottom, and I had enough presence of mind to scramble out of the way of the rocks coming down on top of me. I crawled through sharp gravel toward a light, moving mindlessly, and wriggled through a small hole as rocks filled the shaft behind me.
The impact of the last rocks propelled me forward, and I landed on my stomach, my broken ribs aching. There was light in here, and I saw why when I managed to roll over.
I was in the cave in which we’d found Jamison. Petroglyphs had been chipped into the reddish walls in thick clusters, stars and comets and constellations. I could see them because of the karmii, thousands of them, skeletal hands flowing down the walls and across the rock floor in a race toward me.
“No,” I whispered. I reached for the storm, managing to let my body vibrate with it. The karmii sensed my earth magic and paused, as though debating.
I rolled over, groaning, and got to my knees. Cradling my arm across my stomach, I climbed painfully to my feet. The karmii gave me a clear circle about two feet in diameter, but they waited, watching. When the storm died, I would too.
The circle of karmii followed me as I hobbled through the cave, searching for the rockslide that led up to the tunnel Nash had brought me through. Outside, a dragon waited to roast me alive. Down here, petroglyphs waited to freeze me to death.
Janet.
“Coyote!” I screamed.
Where was he? I scanned the cave but saw nothing, no tall naked man, no large coyote. Damn him. I swore I was taking a rolled-up newspaper to his nose when I faced him again.
Janet.
“What? I’m right here! Where are you?”
Here.
I raised my head to look in the direction of the voice and found him. Sort of. Among the dense whorls of petroglyphs on the ceiling, someone had drawn the face of a coyote.
“What are you doing?” I shouted. “Get down here. Blast these things away from me. Help me get out of here. Help me fight Mick.”
I’m not really with you, Janet. I’m projecting. I’m thousands of miles and an age away.
“An age? What’s that supposed to mean?”
It means I can guide you, but you must do this yourself.
“Oh, of course.” I started crying as I spoke, tears smearing on my cheeks, and my rib cage hurt. “Do you see anyone else in this cave to help me? No. It’s just me, with broken ribs, surrounded by drawings who think I’m some kind of walking evil lodestone. Mick is trying to kill me, and my friends are trying to keep my sister from killing the witch who enslaved him—so Mick can stay alive to kill me. Now my strongest ally is saying he’s nothing more than a chippedout drawing on a wall?”
Only you can save Mick, Janet. You must use his true name.
“I know that! What is it?”
As I told you, dragons can hide such things even from the gods, especially from gods that are not theirs.
I kicked the floor, spattering gravel over the karmii who didn’t
move or even notice. “Then what good are you?”
You know Mick’s true name.
“No, I don’t! That’s why I wanted you to find it, that’s why Colby took me to Mick’s lair. The name is not at his lair, it’s not in the ring, it wasn’t in the wards at the hotel. It’s not even in his toothbrush. Trust me, I checked!”
He tells it to you when he makes love to you.
“That’s not what Mick says when we make love.” Various dirty suggestions and graphic descriptions of how I made him feel, yes; names that sounded like strings of music, no.
I know what he says. That is different from what he tells you.
“Oh, very clear, thank you. And why haven’t you bothered to tell me this before? I might have had time to figure it out.”
I didn’t know. It is one thing I learned on my travels through the earth and time.
“Where the hell are you? What did my grandmother send you to do? Why aren’t you helping me instead?”
That is between me and the lady crow. I’m helping her because she doesn’t like the word ‘no.’
Tell me about it. “Wait—you said you traveled in time? You can do that?”
Gods can. Time isn’t linear to us as it is to you. Remember when I said Mick and I had tangled, that he claims I violated his territory? It was on this search. It happened just now. Or back then, whatever is your perspective.
I’d have to think about that later, if I lived long enough. “That’s all you can tell me? That I already know Mick’s name, except I don’t know what it sounds like, how I know it, or how to use it?”
Yes.
“I’m developing a serious dislike for you.”
Aw, Janet, don’t be like that.
“If I get out of this alive, you and I are going to have words. And when we’re done, you’re going to wish I’d been my grandmother with a broom.”
I’m sorry you have to be alone for this, but it’s the only way. You have to face Mick, and you have to face him naked—without magic and without tricks. Just you.
“Literally naked?”
Well . . .
“Go away if you aren’t going to tell me anything useful.”
Alone. I’m sorry. You have to go out there and face him.
Or face him in here. The dust at one end of the cave stirred, the karmii lighting it like sun inside a cloud. Through that cloud stepped Mick.
Twenty-five
When you have sex with someone, it changes your relationship with them forever. You might think you’re keeping something casual, but after sex, you know things about that person that no one else does, and they know many things about you. If you break up, even if you say you want to keep things friendly, knowing that you shared a private part of yourself with the other person can lead to resentment or outand-out rage. The rage is especially strong if the other person betrayed you—you gave them all you had, trusted them with your secret self, and they turned that knowledge against you.
I faced Mick knowing that I’d shared things with him I’d shared with no one else in the world. He’d taken a naïve young woman, alone and vulnerable, and shaped her into a confident magic wielder and experienced lover. I’d surrendered myself into his capable hands; and Mick had taught me more about myself than I would have ever discovered on my own.
Now Mick stood before me, tall and naked and beautiful, and he’d use the knowledge he’d acquired to hurt me. The thought was already breaking my heart.
“Does Vonda want me dead?” I asked him. “I thought she wanted my magic.”
Mick said nothing as he came toward me. He held no fire in his hands, but I sensed it lurking below the surface, his dragon tattoos writhing with it. The tattooed eyes glittered, not in a friendly way.
The karmii backed off from Mick—to them, he was the good guy, an earth-magic being—and kept their circle around me. If the storm outside died, or if Mick beat me back so that I lost my grip on it, the karmii would leap upon me and smother me with their burning cold.
“You must know,” I continued. “Why go to all this trouble? Gabrielle thinks Vonda enslaved you to kill her, but you’ve never gone after Gabrielle. Only me.”
“You need to be eliminated.”
Gods, he sounded like the Terminator. But that movie villain had nothing on a tall dragon-man who could incinerate me in the space of a thought.
“Why?” I asked him. “What am I standing in the way of?”
“The universe.”
I’m sure that meant something. “The universe. Right. I have a lot of power, yes, and I can open vortexes, true, but if Vonda kills me, I won’t be opening any vortexes for her.”
“It has nothing to do with the vortexes.”
I hated that he answered in Mick’s familiar voice, the one that tickled inside of my ear when he whispered my name in the night. But the voice was without inflection now, as Mick stated simple facts.
“With what, then?”
Mick closed his mouth. The witch had probably put a silence spell on him as part of the enslavement, allowing Mick to answer only questions that didn’t come under the spell’s umbrella.
“The hotel deterioration was all a diversion then?”
Mick didn’t answer, but the answer told me something. If he wasn’t allowed to say, then it might not have been a diversion after all.
Did Vonda Wingate want my hotel? Not my dragon, my powers, my sister, or my magic mirror. The hotel itself.
“If I’m going to die here, I’d like to at least know why,” I said.
“I don’t want to kill you, Janet.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Although I’d believe it more if you didn’t say it in that robotlike voice.”
“But I have to kill you. You’re in the way.”
“Which means that if I’m alive, I can stop Vonda and her evil plans—whatever they are.”
“I’m a fighter, a warrior. I don’t give a damn about her plans. I just want the kill.”
He did. I saw it in his eyes, which were black but swimming with white sparks. He wasn’t my beloved Mick anymore. He was a dragon at the height of his powers, and I was a Stormwalker with a broken rib surrounded by entities that would kill me the minute I used my Beneath magic.
“She believes that I love you enough to not kill you,” I said. Tears formed in my eyes as my emotions slipped. “But she’s wrong. I do love you, but if I have to kill you to survive, to keep the witch from what she wants, I will.”
Mick didn’t wait. No last-minute taunts, no “Let’s do this.” He simply let fly with the fire.
I grabbed the wind whipping around on the surface, sucked it down the tunnel behind him, and buried the fire in whirling white snow. The flame easily burst free and flew around the room, encircling the karmii that encircled me.
“Oh, this is so not fair,” I said.
I yanked the piece of magic mirror out of my pocket, called a handful of the Beneath magic and Stormwalker magic mixed together, and directed it at the mirror. The mirror screamed, and I didn’t blame it, because I had no idea what this would do to it.
The mirror absorbed my magic, screeching and moaning, and then it fed it back tenfold. The flames receded a little, the circle of them drawing back, and the karmii did too. Mick watched me, his head tilted to one side, studying me with that dragon curiosity.
Curiosity. While we were fighting to the death.
I slammed more magic into the mirror. The piece started to shudder and then it broke apart in my hands.
I followed the pieces down, grabbing the shards even as they cut my hands. Breaking a magic mirror doesn’t diminish its power—it simply means that you have more pieces to work with.
I swept the shards into my hands, all but one. That piece had landed in the middle of the karmii, and I couldn’t reach it. The karmii pulled back from it, because the mirror had been created by solid earth magic, silicon and silver. The mirror was a good guy in the karmii’s opinion.
A snake of flame reached the shard, and t
he mirror slid to Mick. Mick calmly picked up the piece and directed a thin spire of flame into it.
The mirror kept screaming as Mick turned the mirror to me and released the magic. The flame, doubled in strength, came straight for me.
I yelled and hit the dirt, frantically pulling wind and ice over me to deflect the fire. They did, barely. The heat of the flames singed my hair, made my clothes so hot the fabric melted to my skin.
I got to my feet, eyes stinging with heat and smoke. Mick had figured out the perfect way to kill me. He’d driven me down here where the karmii would keep my Beneath magic penned, and he’d absorb any storm magic I threw at him. He could use the magic mirror we’d both awakened against me, and I’d die.
The dragons for years had been afraid of me, but Mick, who knew me and loved me, was the only dragon who’d figured out how to destroy me. He’d stripped me of everything, and I had nothing left.
You have to face him naked, Coyote had said. Without magic and without tricks. Just you.
Mick had effectively rendered my magic useless, except for a thin layer of defense. And Coyote wanted me to drop that too?
I drew a long breath. Coyote drove me crazy, but he was a god. He’d been right before, and there was a good chance that he was right now.
There’s always a first time for him to be wrong, the practical voice inside me said. He’d admit that.
I pushed my hair out of my face, dismayed when part of it came away in a burned mess. I flung away the hank and, in a fluid move, stripped off my jacket and half-disintegrated shirt. The clips that held my black lace bra closed were burning my back, and I ripped off that too.
Naked and alone. Without magic.
I knew that Coyote had meant naked metaphorically, but I couldn’t help think he’d appreciate me stripping off half my clothes to face Mick. I could picture Coyote’s grin, the shine to his dark eyes.
I drew another breath. I deliberately dropped the pieces of the magic mirror, tossing them to land smack among the karmii. The skeletal hands drew away from them like bugs skittering back from a growing pool of water.
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