“We’ll send them all away and lock the doors, then I’ll cook you a kick-ass breakfast.”
“Now, that I can go for.”
I snuggled under his chin and basked in the beauty of standing with my lover, mine once more, with the rising sun illuminating the New Mexico landscape. This was happiness.
“Hey!”
I jumped at the harsh voice. A large human male in a T-shirt and biker vest had approached us. He had shaggy hair, a salt-and-pepper beard, huge arms covered with tatts, and he carried a gun in a shoulder holster under his vest. Several similar-looking men backed him up.
“I think you took something of mine,” he said.
The motorcycle. Well, shit.
I did not want to tell this tall, angry, armed man that I’d wrecked his Harley on a lonely road seventy miles from here. “Hopi County Sheriff’s Department,” I said, trying on a smile. “You’ll find it there.”
“Hopi . . . Where the hell is that?”
“Flat Mesa,” Mick said, voice rumbling. “Arizona.”
“It was an emergency,” I put in.
The biker drew out his pistol. “Listen, bitch, you’d better take me to this Podunk town, and you’d better hope that nothing happened to my ride, or you’ll owe me for the rest of your life. Your boyfriend too. Got it?”
Damn it. I’d tried to help him; really I’d tried. I didn’t want to use Beneath magic so near a vortex, but I couldn’t risk the man shooting Mick.
Before I could raise even a spark of magic, another pistol pressed into the man’s temple, and I heard the click of a handcuff.
“I’d be happy to escort you to Hopi County to locate your bike,” Nash Jones said. “At my sheriff’s department. And you’d better hope that the weapon I just witnessed you threaten my friends with is registered and that when I search you, you’re clean. Your colleagues can come with us, if they want. Or they can go. Now.”
The other bikers backed away and left their fellow to his fate. Nash plucked the pistol out of the biker’s hand and clicked the second cuff around the man’s other wrist.
“Take her home,” Nash said to Mick, and then gave me a severe look. “We’ll talk about the stolen motorcycle later.”
Without further word, Nash started pulling the biker toward his truck, his voice droning the man’s Miranda rights.
Maya, who’d been waiting for Nash, threw up her hands in exasperation. “Really, Nash? I thought we were going to spend the night here. Don’t you ever take vacation?”
Nash didn’t answer but shoved the perp into his black pickup. He turned around, crushed a kiss to Maya’s mouth, then left her with a stunned but glowing look on her face.
One month later
Early March brought rain but an end to the frigid weather. I’d reopened the hotel a week after our New Mexico adventure, and business was booming, with a backlog of reservations that would last me all the way through the summer.
Elena was back in the kitchen, as prickly as ever, behaving as though nothing unusual had happened. She still glared at anyone who interrupted her prepping, and now that I knew she had amazing magic at her disposal as well as sharp knives, I gave her all the space she wanted.
Colby hung around as well. Still bound to the dragon council, but at least allowed to come and go between the hotel and the dragon compound near Santa Fe, he decided it was fun to drink in my saloon and irritate me. But strangely, Elena started to like him, and even let him into the kitchen. I wondered if Elena was gearing up to enslave a dragon now that she had all the magic Vonda had accumulated. So far, though, it looked as though she only enslaved Colby with sweet tamales and cornbread fritters.
Grandmother had taken the recovering Gabrielle back to Many Farms, and I wasn’t certain how I felt about that. On the one hand, I knew that if anyone could keep Gabrielle under control, it was my grandmother. On the other, I worried about the rest of my family with Gabrielle’s destructive magic. But then I thought about my nosy, gossiping aunts visiting the house every day, and I had to smile.
Mick and I . . .
Mick took me to the Winslow hotel for a much-needed vacation, and we rarely left the bedroom. I showed him how much I’d missed him, and he showed me how grateful he was to me for rescuing him. We had to put sound-smothering spells on the room so we wouldn’t be asked to leave.
Sometimes we simply held each other in the moonlight and listened to the trains rumble by. Mick would touch the ring on my finger, and I’d sing notes of his true name. We were bound in the dragon way, he said, and the way he whispered that made me shiver in delight.
My promise to marry him still held, but we hadn’t told anyone about our engagement. It was fun, having a lover’s secret.
I didn’t see much of Nash Jones, except for when he sternly summoned me to the sheriff’s office to lecture me about stealing the motorcycle. He’d found meth on the biker he’d arrested, plus learned that the biker had stolen the gun he’d waved in my face. Said biker was languishing in Nash’s jail, unable to make bail, on charges of assault, possession, dealing, theft, and other things. I’d have to be a witness, Nash told me, but he let me off with a warning about the motorcycle.
He said nothing about Vonda, or the vortex, or his rescue of Ted, who was in jail in New Mexico for shooting Gabrielle. Nash brushed me off coldly when I tried to ask him what had happened inside the vortex.
So I asked Maya. She breezed into the hotel on a morning in early March, ready to check the maintenance work she’d done in the basement. Once she and Fremont had restored everything from Vonda’s last deterioration spell, my electricity and plumbing had worked like a dream.
The basement fascinated me now that I knew magic had been sunk there, though I couldn’t discern anything different about it. I found no spots where magic dragged at me or jumped up and down and screamed at me, and even the piece of magic mirror I flashed around couldn’t distinguish the long-dead shaman’s magic from any other. Elena never said that she’d tapped into it, or even mentioned it at all. Maybe the Apache’s magic had so long permeated the bones of the hotel that the magic simply had become part of the structure.
“Did Nash tell you?” I asked Maya as she checked her wiring. “About what happened to him in the vortex?”
“Yes,” Maya said. “And he told me not to tell you.”
“It might be important. I’m worried about him.”
“So am I.”
“Maya . . .”
Maya took off her work hat, ran her hand through her hair, and leaned one foot back against the wall. “You’re right. It was awful. Nash has been spending nights at my house, and one time, I woke up and found him crying. He was pretty pissed off that I’d caught him, but I made him tell me what was wrong.” She gave me a heartbroken look. “Janet, when Nash went down into the vortex, he found himself back in that building in Iraq, the one that blew up when he and his men were in it. It happened all over again—the explosion, the fire, the walls collapsing, his men screaming. Only this time, Nash knew he’d be able to save one man: the asshole Ted Wingate. Nash said he knew none of it was real, but at the same time, he didn’t have a choice about who he could save. He had to bring Ted back, and all the others had to die. Again.”
I listened in horror. “Oh, gods.” Whether some demon Beneath or Vonda herself had made Nash relive the worst day of his life, it had been an act of pure cruelty. “Poor Nash.”
“He’s getting better. Slowly. Don’t you dare tell him I told you.”
“No.” Some secrets needed to be kept.
“Nash doesn’t blame you,” Maya said. “But he doesn’t want to see you. Or Mick, or anyone really, because . . . well, Nash isn’t good with letting people see him vulnerable.”
“At least he’s talking to you.”
“Yeah.” Maya put her hat back on, her eyes soft. “He’s talking to me. I’m going to move in with him.”
That caught me by surprise. “Yeah?”
“We talked about it and decided we’d
live in his house in Flat Mesa. It’s closer to his office. Besides, I need to do something about his décor. The whole weapons and weight machine look has got to go.”
Wow. Maya’s house was beautiful, and I imagined she’d work her magic on Nash’s plain one.
Nash Jones shopping for furniture and curtains. It boggled the mind.
I left her, my thoughts whirling, and went back upstairs.
Mick met me in my bedroom and gave me a long, bonemelting kiss. I loved this man, this dragon-shifter with the hard body, who stood in front of me in jeans and nothing else. I knew there was nothing else, because Mick’s jeans rode low on his hips, no underwear in sight.
“Can we tell now?” I asked him. “Our friends will drive us crazy, but I think they should know. Happy secrets should be shared.”
Mick kissed me again and shrugged. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Now I was excited. I knew the first person I wanted to tell, so I took out my cell phone and called the number of my home in Many Farms.
Gabrielle answered. “Hey, Janet. Your grandmother is one amazing bitch.”
I agreed. “How’s it going?”
Gabrielle made a sound of disgust. “She wants me to do all these rituals, morning, noon, and night. Tedious, timeconsuming rituals. Gods, tell her to at least let me go to the movies once in a while.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Do the rituals. I hated them too, but they helped me. A lot.”
“Snotty big sister,” Gabrielle said. “Come on up to Many Farms and take me out of here. I want to have some fun.”
“Only if you can control yourself. No killing people.”
“Oh, all right. If you insist.” I knew by her tone that Grandmother had already had an effect on her.
“Is my dad there? I need to talk to him.”
“He’s here. He’s the only nice person around here. Your aunts are just scary.”
This from the crazy daughter of a crazed hell-goddess. I smiled. “I know they are. Put him on.”
“Janet?” Pete Begay’s gentle voice came to me through the line, and my eyes got misty. “How are you?”
We had to go through a discussion of about how Mick was and what he was doing, and Elena, and my friends, and all my aunts and cousins. Mick had his arms around me the whole time, distracting me by pressing little kisses to my ear, my neck.
My father said, “Gabrielle is doing better. Your sister is . . . interesting.”
I wanted to laugh. Interesting was one way to describe her, and I’d never, ever have let her anywhere near my father without my grandmother around. “Yeah, she is.”
I closed my eyes, picturing my father staring at the wall as he always did when he talked on the phone, clutching the receiver in a death grip. “I need to tell you something, Dad,” I said before he could speak again. “Mick asked me to marry him. I said yes.”
“Janet.” I heard his happiness as well as a tug of tears. “I am so very happy.”
My stoic father would never jump for joy, but I could tell he was pleased. I heard my grandmother in the background yelling, “What? What are you so very happy about?”
“I have something to tell you myself,” my dad said, ignoring her. “I too have met a woman and have asked her to be my wife.”
I stopped, words dying in my mouth. Mick had heard too, and he looked at me in surprise.
“Are you still there, Janet?” my dad asked.
“Dad.” I coughed. “What did you say?”
“I said, I have asked a woman to marry me. She consented. We will marry this year. You have never met her, Janet, but I know you will like her.”
“Who?”
My grandmother snatched away the phone. “Her name is Gina Tsotsie, and she’s from Farmington. She’ll do well enough. Now, what is this about you?”
The rest of the conversation was surreal. I’d been chuckling to myself about the bombshell I’d dropped, and Dad had dropped a bigger one on me.
My father, getting married. I told myself that it was about time. He’d never had a wife, not really—my goddess mother seducing him hardly counted. I had to meet the woman who’d worked through Pete Begay’s shyness enough to get him to agree to marry her. It must have taken her some time. So why hadn’t he—or my grandmother, who I now wanted to strangle—told me?
“Are you all right, Janet?” Mick asked after I hung up. He lounged against the dresser, his body distracting. We’d done some deep, satisfying lovemaking well into this morning, and the loose feeling of it lingered in my bones.
“Fine. A little anti-climaxed, but fine.”
“Then maybe it’s a good time to give you your engagement present.”
I touched the ring, which I treasured, not only because it contained a piece of Mick’s aura, but because he’d given it to me. “Wasn’t this it?”
Mick grinned, sliding heat up and down my spine. “Not quite.”
His jeans’s dipping waistband showed me the sharp-lined fire tattoo across his lower back as he turned and led me down the short hall outside my bedroom to the back door. Mick took my hand in his, opened the door, and took me outside.
I stopped.
Parked behind the hotel was a gleaming, beautiful, hearttugging little Harley, all shining in the morning sunlight. It was a Softail, customized by Mick, obviously, beautiful black with red flame highlights.
“Mick . . .”
He touched the handlebars. “A little over 1500 CCs, modified to make the ride smooth as silk. I figured you were about ready.”
I’d never forget my little Sportster that had died a violent death in the sinkhole. We’d been through a lot, that girl and me. Losing it had been like losing my closest friend, and you don’t replace your closest friend without grieving for a while.
Mick had known that it was time. And he’d brought me exactly what I needed.
I squealed like an eight-year-old and launched myself at Mick. I threw my arms around his neck and my legs around his hips, and he laughed as he held me. I wiped the smile from his mouth by covering it in kisses.
Mick’s strong hands cupped my hips, his laughter going low as he caught my lips with his. The kisses turned promising, but he lowered me to my feet. “You can thank me later,” he said.
And I would. Later would be the best he ever had.
Before I could grab the helmet and gloves that Mick had included, a Native American woman I didn’t know walked around the hotel, saw us, and came over.
She was tall and broad-shouldered, a Changer, I saw in her aura. Bear, I guessed, from her large build, her dark eyes, her careful but powerful way of moving. She set down the overstuffed suitcase she carried and fixed a steely gaze on me.
“Are you Janet Begay? The Diné who owns this hotel?”
“That would be me,” I said.
Mick watched her, hands on his hips, saying nothing, but subtly readying his fire magic.
“You can stand down, Firewalker,” the woman said, sounding amused. Her voice was contralto, her words slow and deliberate. “I mean no harm to you, or your Stormwalker. I am seeking my ex-husband.”
“Ex-husband?” I ran through a mental list of my guests, wondering which of them had a Changer for a wife. There was always Ansel, my Nightwalker—I didn’t know much about him, apart from his fondness for stamps and old movies.
Coyote walked through my back door, a beer bottle in his hand. Why he’d been coming to my room with a beer I didn’t know, but that was Coyote.
He saw the woman, and stopped dead. The bottle slid from his fingers to shatter on the hard dirt.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered.
“Coyote?” I exclaimed. Even Mick looked stunned. “Wait—you mean Coyote is your ex-husband?”
The woman smiled, showing sharply pointed teeth. “I knew I’d find him here.”
“Shit,” Coyote said.
“Coyote,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “You were married?”
“A long time ago,” he growled.
“In due time,” the woman said. “First you, Janet Begay, will give me a room.” She shot Coyote a look that made him turn brick red. “And then you will tell me all about what he’s been up to.”
Dear Reader,
Please turn the page for a sneak peek of Primal Bonds, from the Shifters Unbound series I write as my alter ego, Jennifer Ashley.
Twenty years ago, shape-shifters of all kinds were rounded up and made to live in Shiftertowns. They are forced to wear Collars—half-magic, half-tech—designed to keep their violent tendencies at bay.
The Shifters are tamed now, Collared, safe . . . but are they?
Primal Bonds is the story of Sean Morrissey, Feline Shifter and Guardian of his Shiftertown—the man who sends Shifter souls to the afterlife. When Andrea Gray, a half–wolf Shifter, seeks refuge in the Morrisseys’ Shiftertown, Sean agrees to claim her, sight unseen, so the humans will allow the transfer. He never dreams that the challenging Andrea, with her gray eyes and fearless attitude, will be the woman that stirs the wild mating frenzy within him.
Primal Bonds, available now, will be followed by Wild Cat in January 2012. Also look for Pride Mates, re-released by Berkley Sensation in July 2011.
See the Shifters Unbound website for excerpts, book blurbs, “The Human’s Guide to Shifters,” and more: http://www.jennifersromances.com. (Choose “Shifters Unbound” from the right-hand menu.)
Allyson James, aka Jennifer Ashley
One
Andrea Gray had just set the beer bottle in front of her customer when the first of the shots rocketed through the open front door. The bar just outside of the Austin Shiftertown had no windows, but the front door always stood wideopen, and now a cascade of gunfire poured through the welcoming entrance.
Shadow Walker Page 28