Shadow Walker

by Allyson James

  Mick made a raw noise in his throat. I pulled him closer, deepened the kiss, sliding my tongue into his mouth. It had been too long since I’d touched him, too long since I’d held him and taken comfort in his body.

  He kneaded my back, pulled me up into him. Our lips brushed and bruised, the kiss awakening our hunger instead of slaking it.

  I knew Mick wouldn’t push me, because he worried about hurting me. He always worried about hurting me. I opened my jeans myself and wriggled out of them, and Mick’s hands landed, warm, on my thighs. I wrapped my legs around him, touching him with hands that were whole and healed, thanks to him.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Mick’s eyes were black again, but the sparks in them bore the red of fire, not the white of shadow magic. Mick got to his feet and pulled me up with him. Both of us were coated with dirt and sweat and spattered with blood, and half my hair was singed. I didn’t care. Mick lifted me in his arms, and our mouths sought each other, the warm kissing turning to craving.

  “Ground’s too rocky,” Mick said between breaths.

  I nodded, not really hearing him. Mick was hard and ready, and I was open, and all my pain went away as soon as he slid into me. I threw my head back and shouted for the pure joy of it.

  Mick leaned me against the smooth cavern wall, the stone cool on my back. He cushioned me with his arms so I wouldn’t get scraped, considerate of me even in the madness of passion.

  We’d never been quiet lovers, and we saw no need to hold back now. I knew the magic mirror was listening, but it was tiny and pointed at the ceiling, so anyone watching would see only the ancient glyphs. They’d hear us, yes, but let them eat their hearts out.

  I wrapped my legs around Mick’s hips, held on to his shoulders, kissed his throat. My mouth fastened on his neck, me suckling him while he loved me hard. I could tell Mick was entirely free of Vonda because he took joy in every moment.

  I gasped in sudden release, too quickly, Mick groaning right along with me. I had no memory of finishing, only me falling, landing on Mick in sudden and blissful exhaustion, and the shard of magic mirror crooning, “Oh, lovers, that was good.”

  Colby was still at the hotel. His frown filled the small shard of mirror, his light blue eyes angry under dark brows.

  “No one’s here but me and Drake.”

  “No one?” I asked in alarm. “Where’s Maya? I told her to stay with you.”

  “Probably in New Mexico. She and that wolf-girl took off out of here not long after they got back. With Maya driving. Your grandmother and your cook went with them. It was their idea.”

  “What? And you let them?”

  “ ‘Let’ isn’t the word for it. Your grandmother snuck out the back while I was trying to keep Maya from going out the front. The Changer woman started fighting me, and Maya made a run for it. I couldn’t run after them because I’m under the effing binding spell. I can’t leave the hotel without Drake, and I can’t shape-shift. I tried to contact you, but you were . . . busy. Take a bigger piece of mirror next time. I couldn’t see a damn thing.”

  “What about Drake? Why did he let them go?”

  “They’re not dragons, so he couldn’t be paid to care. Drake called off the vendetta on Mick, but not on Vonda. Drake’s on his cell right now, conference calling with the dragon council. They’re debating what to do. That should take about five years.”

  Or five minutes. When dragons decided to act, they acted swiftly. I didn’t mind the dragons taking down Vonda, but my grandmother and Maya and everyone I cared about were with her. And as Colby said, Drake couldn’t be paid to care about anyone but dragons.

  Mick took the mirror from me, and I paced the cavern, trying to keep my Beneath magic from flaring out in my rage and panic.

  “Hey, Micky,” Colby said. “You look like your old self.”

  “I am my old self. Get Drake off the phone and tell him I’m using my dragon lord status to call dragons to converge on the site in New Mexico, but they are not to engage until my command. Understand? Do not engage. We have civilians involved, plus a witch who is an expert at dragon enslavement. And we’ll need someone to pick us up at the rock cave on the S.J. Ranch. Got all that?”

  “Fine. Only, don’t keep me in the dark—let me see what’s going on.” He growled. “I hate being out of the action.”

  “I’ll buy you a beer,” I promised.

  “Yeah, yeah. Good hunting.”

  The mirror went dark, Colby gone.

  “You trust the dragon council?” I asked. “How do you know they won’t use whatever dragon army you call to burn down the casino?”

  Mick looked up at me from where he’d stretched out on the cavern floor, calm and quiet even though the rocks must be cutting his backside. “Using my status means the council is honor-bound not to override my orders. I’ll hold them to that.”

  Damned dragon honor. Mick fully believed the council would do as he wished, and I knew enough now to believe it too. Even Colby, who bent rules to suit himself when he could, wouldn’t violate dragon honor.

  “Why did you tell Colby to have someone pick us up? We can’t wait. My grandmother, my cook, and my best friend are rushing into the arms of an all-powerful witch.”

  Mick got to his feet, easily, casually, as though we had all the time in the world. Dragon arrogance. “I can’t become dragon yet. Notice that I still can’t conjure a light spell.”

  “You healed me.”

  “I did, and it took the last bit of magic I had. But I’d have been compelled to heal you, even if I hadn’t wanted to. Now that you have my name, I’m honor-bound to help you. And you me.”

  He turned and made his way to the rockslide we had to climb, his tattoos looking normal again. No more shivering.

  My mouth went dry as I watched him go, his last words ringing in my ears. I had the feeling this was going to get complicated fast.

  Deputy Paco Lopez picked us up in a sheriff’s SUV. He averted his eyes when he saw Mick stark naked and me topless under the jacket I’d retrieved, and I knew he was adding this incident to his list of weird things he knew about Janet Begay.

  Lopez gave Mick a blanket, pretended to buy his explanation that he’d lost his clothes trying to save me from the caves, and politely didn’t arrest either of us. He drove us from the ranch to the Holbrook road and the sinkhole, so Mick could fetch his clothes and his motorcycle.

  The sides of the sinkhole had caved in during our fight, filling the hole with debris and ruining the straight-sided effect. I wondered whether the caverns below would buckle some more, possibly across the whole valley, and bury the rock caves. That would be too bad, because all those petroglyphs would be lost, and I had a feeling they were important as well as being beautiful.

  Mick had left his bike well back from the lip of the sinkhole, his clothes folded neatly next to it. He’d taken time to do that before he turned dragon and came to kill me.

  The bike I’d stolen was wrecked and unusable. We left Lopez frowning over it, mounted Mick’s bike, me zipping my jacket to my chin, and prepared to race back to New Mexico.

  As soon as we were out of Lopez’s sight, Mick opened it up, and we flew down the road at an astonishing speed. The snow had stopped falling, but the road was covered with it and icing over. Mick somehow kept his Harley under us as we sailed down the highway toward Holbrook, me clinging to him like a spider.

  An accident west of Gallup clogged lanes on the 40 with halted eighteen-wheelers, snowplows, and DPS. Mick charged around all of these at about a hundred miles per hour, catching the attention of every cop in sight. They were too busy to chase us, but I knew they’d radio ahead. Sure enough, several cars full of New Mexico’s finest sprang out at us on the other side of Gallup, lights blazing. As soon as we hit the reservation, the tribal police joined in.

  Mick never slowed. He ate up the few miles to the casino and swung into the parking lot, skidding out the bike as he stopped. I was off and running toward the hotel as three state police
cars and two tribal dove into the lot with us.

  “They’ve got my grandmother!” I screamed as men with weapons leapt out of patrol cars and tried to surround me and Mick. “They’ve kidnapped my grandmother and are holding her hostage upstairs!”

  My panic wasn’t faked—Grandmother’s earth magic was well-grounded, but I had no idea whether she could hold her own against a witch like Vonda. The fact that Cassandra hadn’t contacted me in any way meant that things were bad on their end. And not only was Vonda in there, but also Gabrielle, my not-so-stable half sister with powerful magic and violent tendencies.

  The cops tried to stop me, of course, but I was strong and wiry and slipped by them. I was in the elevator in short order, leaving Mick to deal with them, doors closing on their warnings to me to stop.

  All was quiet on the seventh floor as I hurried down the hall. The door to suite 726 was closed, and I heard only silence behind it.

  But I could sense the auras in there—the bright white one of Gabrielle, the strange shadowy one of Vonda, Cassandra’s pale cream. I didn’t sense Nash, but that was normal. I also sensed the auras that shouldn’t be there—Maya’s tinged with angry red, Pamela with the white spark of her wolf, the dark green of Elena, and the crackling black and red of my grandmother.

  The door wasn’t locked. I opened it and walked right in.

  There was a vortex in the middle of the floor. How it got there, I had no clue, but there it was, swirling away in the center of the beige carpet, my friends and family and all the furniture pressed against the walls. The white-hot evil I sensed from the vortex made my scalp prickle. Though I’d heard no sound in the hall, the room, now that I stood in it, was filled with sound—a roaring, screaming, maddening sound that poured up from the vortex.

  I realized that the room was missing one person. “Where’s Ted?” I shouted over the noise.

  For answer, Gabrielle pointed at the vortex. The rest of my friends turned to me, either furious or terrified. All except Vonda, who stood quietly, unperturbed.

  “Gabrielle,” I yelled. “What did you do?”

  Gabrielle looked up at me with a mixture of horror and anger. “I didn’t do anything! It was her.” Gabrielle pointed to Vonda, who stood casually, her gray silk outfit as pristine as ever. “She opened the vortex and fed her own husband into it.”

  Twenty-seven

  This was all kinds of bad. That the vortex had opened here meant that the hotel had been built on one.

  What had the hotel builders been thinking? Hadn’t the shamans warned them? Or had someone had the great idea that building a hotel on a vortex would attract more business, maybe make the odds in the casino favor the house more?

  Though I didn’t sense my mother’s unique brand of evil in this vortex, who the hell knew what was down there?

  Vortexes are evil, no matter where they open. They’re gateways to Beneath, but Beneath isn’t all one place. It’s a series of places, like different pieces of hell, each with its own gateway. You can jump into a vortex a few yards away from another and find yourself in a completely different world below. It will still be Beneath, still evil, still full of gods pissed off because they were left behind when the rest of humanity made it out to this world eons ago.

  I didn’t ever want to visit the world of Beneath again. It had been terrifying and, let’s face it, just plain weird. My storm magic didn’t work there, and the chances of me getting out once I was in weren’t good.

  “Gabrielle, what’s down there?”

  Gabrielle shrugged, her face so wan it was tinged with green. “Demons, I think. Probably a demon master. I don’t know. I haven’t seen this one before.”

  “Janet,” Grandmother said from Elena’s side. “You can’t leave Mr. Wingate down there.”

  I glared around the room. “Please, someone tell me why you all let her open a vortex?”

  “Like we had a choice,” Maya said. She stood with Nash, who looked furious, not at Vonda, but at me. Of course.

  I pointed at Gabrielle and at my grandmother. “You two had a choice. Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “I couldn’t.” Gabrielle’s voice was small.

  I focused again on Vonda, who coolly lounged against the bed, which had been upended.

  “I took away your dragon,” I told her. “Mick is free of you. If he tells me that you hurt him in any way, I’ll kill you slowly and enjoy it.”

  Vonda looked bored. “Ted will be fine. I needed his sacrifice to open the vortex. Once I imbibe its magic, I’ll be finished, and you all can go home. Safe and sound.”

  Sure, I believed her. “You can’t imbibe the magic of a vortex. It will kill you.”

  “Not if you take precautions and know what you’re doing. I’m experienced at this, Janet Begay. I find it interesting that you have so much magic inside you, and yet you never try to enhance it, never try to build it to its fullest potential. You’ve gotten misguided advice.”

  No, I’d gotten good advice from wise people who had compassion. I could barely handle the powers I already had. Why go looking for trouble?

  “If you suck down the power of the vortex, you’ll destroy this hotel and everyone inside it,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t like to throw away lives like that.”

  “But you don’t have to. I could teach you much.”

  “Janet, don’t listen to her,” Grandmother said. “She has a silver tongue, that one.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  Vonda smiled. “These people all claim to care about you. It’s sweet.”

  “Let them leave.”

  “I will. Really, I will. They don’t have much power that interests me—well, none that I haven’t already taken from others.” She glanced dismissively at Pamela, Cassandra, and Elena, not even seeming to see Maya. “Except Nash. And you.”

  Maya broke in angrily. “Why the hell does everyone want to get their hands on Nash?”

  “Because he’s unique,” Vonda said without heat. “What I couldn’t do with power like his. The bargain is this, Janet. You and Nash stay, and all the rest of these people can go home.”

  “I’ll stay,” Nash said at once. “If everyone, including Janet, leaves.”

  My friends, being my friends, all started arguing at once. Gabrielle’s voice rose above the others. “You don’t want me?” She sounded hurt.

  Vonda answered. “Gabrielle, sweetie, you have powerful Beneath magic, but Janet’s is as powerful, and she’s wrapped it around earth magic, something no one else has ever done. I want that.”

  Gabrielle started for Vonda, but I grabbed Gabrielle and pulled her aside, speaking rapidly in a low voice. “Stop it. I need you. I don’t trust her not to kill everyone as soon as you all walk out, so I need you to protect them. Especially Grandmother and Maya. Got it? Find Mick, tell him what’s going on. But protect them. All right? You’re stronger than anyone here, the only one who can keep them safe.”

  Gabrielle just looked at me. No eager happiness that I was trusting her, no anger that I wanted to use her. Only a thoughtful light in her eyes as she studied me.

  Finally she nodded. “All right.”

  I didn’t smile in relief or throw my arms around her. Gabrielle played her own game, and if she’d agreed, it was for her own reasons.

  “Please,” I said.

  “Let it go, Janet. I said I would.” Gabrielle turned to the others. “You heard her. Out. When Janet takes down the mean old witch, we can come back and dance on her entrails.”

  I needed to have a serious talk with Gabrielle.

  I thought I’d have to fight Maya again, but Nash laid his hands on Maya’s shoulders and spoke to her in a quiet voice. I saw Maya nod and Nash bend to kiss her. When Nash let Maya go, she walked away with tears in her eyes, but she went.

  Grandmother gave me a long and defiant look as Elena followed Maya out. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Grandmother said to me in Navajo.

  “I don’t, but this is the best chance I have to keep y
ou safe. Watch Gabrielle.”

  “Oh, I intend to.”

  “And then we’re going to talk about why you came out here in the first place,” I said.

  “I had my reasons. I’m not a stupid old woman, you know.”

  “I never said you were. Now let me and Nash deal with Vonda.” I didn’t want to mention the dragons Mick had put on standby, not knowing how much Navajo Vonda might know.

  Pamela almost dragged Cassandra out of there, the only one who didn’t protest about leaving me and Nash alone. Pamela’s world was Cassandra, and when Cassandra was safe, Pamela was happy.

  Nash gave me an inquiring glance, and I knew he wondered about Mick. Mick hadn’t come charging up here, which meant he was planning something. Those cops wouldn’t have distracted him for long. I hoped that Mick was quickly and quietly evacuating the hotel.

  I shrugged at Nash, and he closed the door, leaving us with Vonda and a vortex.

  “Now,” Vonda said. “Would one of you please fetch Ted for me? I like him and want to keep him around.”

  I questioned her taste, but Ted was human, a civilian, as Mick termed it, and he didn’t deserve to die a horrible death in a vortex. Really, he didn’t, I told myself.

  “It should be me that goes down there,” Nash said. “Magic can’t hurt me.”

  “Maybe it can’t hurt you,” I said. “The rules Beneath are different.”

  “Then what do you suggest?” he snapped.

  Vonda didn’t help; she watched us with cool indifference.

  I sighed. “You have a rope?” I asked Nash.

  “In my truck. With a grappling hook.”

  Of course he did. “Something in your truck doesn’t help us much.”

  “Yes, it does,” Vonda said. She didn’t move, but suddenly, a rope and grappling hook rested at her feet.

  My heart beat rapidly in surprise. Teleportation magic didn’t exist, or shouldn’t. Witches pushed and bent reality to make things happen—they cast spells that defended or healed or attacked or simply revealed something—but they weren’t like television witches who popped in and out or snapped their fingers to produce what they wanted. The laws of physics still applied to mages. Moving something through space took vast amounts of energy, and it was easier to simply pick up something and carry it.