From Jennifer Ashley, With Love: Three Paranormal Romances from Bestselling Series

by Jennifer Ashley

  When the man said sister he meant cousin, as Anglos term it. It wasn’t unlikely that a cop from Farmington would be related to the woman from Farmington who’d agreed to marry my father.

  Gina Tsotsie would become my stepmother this autumn. I’d met her this spring, a woman taller than my slender father, quiet but strong. I’d not had a chance to truly get to know her yet, because every time I went to Many Farms, there was either a melee of people at my house, or my father and Gina had gone off to Farmington to visit her family.

  “She is the daughter of my mother’s sister,” Frank said, clarifying. “Do you want to stick to your story of your bike malfunctioning?”

  “Not so much a malfunction as a possession.”

  Another skeptical look in the rearview mirror. “The gods or demons aren’t to blame for everything we do, you know.”

  “Not always in my case.”

  “My cousin told me about your family’s shaman ability. Don’t shame it by using it to cover up for your mistakes. I’ll let you off with a warning this time, but don’t let me catch you speeding like that again, family or no family.”

  Once again, I was being blamed for the weird things that happened around me, out of my control. But I kept my annoyance to myself. Frank could have hauled my butt to jail and called my dad. “Thanks,” I said with sincerity.

  He slid his bulk out of the front seat, opened the back door, and helped me out again. “I’ll take you and the motorcycle to Gallup or Farmington and let you call someone from there. I don’t want you riding home.”

  I hadn’t thought he’d let me back on the bike. But I didn’t want to leave Chaco Canyon just yet. I needed to find out why I’d been brought here—what entity had bothered to yank me up the road and across the desert to dump me into the middle of it?

  Would whatever wanted me here possess Frank’s car if I tried to leave? Or hurt Frank in some way? I couldn’t risk that. I needed to stay, as much as the canyon’s aura was coating my skin like thick oil.

  Before I could open my mouth to suggest that I call my boyfriend from the visitor’s center instead and wait for him there, Frank stiffened, his gaze focusing on the ruins behind me. Like an animal that scents danger approaching, he went still, unmoving except for the breeze stirring strands of his hair.

  I turned and followed his line of sight. I saw the natural walls of the canyon, the tumbled rocks and walls of the ruins. Everything stood stark in the morning light as they’d stood for a thousand years. The ancient road, smooth and straight, running to nowhere, lay empty except for my motorcycle lying forlornly in the middle of it.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Frank said, his words murmured so they wouldn’t carry. His hand was on the butt of his gun, but he didn’t draw. “Spooky out here.”

  I tried to find a hint of what had alerted him, but I couldn’t feel anything apart from the intensity of the place, which I didn’t dare touch more closely. The thousand years of people living, working, praying, and fighting piled upon the canyon like layers upon layers of paint. Gods had been here, and humans, and the demonic. One more demon, human, or god wouldn’t put a dent in what I already felt like whips all over my skin.

  After a long moment, Frank eased his hand from his gun. “Come on. Let’s get your bike into the SUV.”

  “What did you think you saw?” I asked as I followed him across the dirt back to the motorcycle.

  “Don’t know. Someone poking around where he shouldn’t be.”

  “People camp here. Could be an early hiker.”

  “Maybe . . .” Frank glanced at me, his eyes went flat again, and he walked to the motorcycle.

  “Aren’t you going to check it out?”

  Frank turned back to me, easily and neutrally, as he’d been doing everything else. “Why do you want me to?”

  I wasn’t sure. Frank needed to get out of here, before he got involved in anything concerning me. A demon might toss Frank aside as collateral damage in order to get to me.

  Then again, perhaps the entity had only wanted me to follow Laura’s path. Ansel had said they’d taken the highway north toward Shiprock—had Laura meant to come out here? Driving all the way to Shiprock, then to Farmington and back south to Chaco Canyon gave a regular car better roads than the way I’d come.

  On the off chance, I took Laura’s photo out of my pocket and held it out to Frank. “Have you ever seen her?”

  Frank’s eyes widened, and he snatched the picture from my hand. “Where did you get this?”

  “You recognize her, then?”

  “What do you know about her?”

  Frank was a good cop—he wouldn’t give up anything about Laura until he knew who I was and why I had this picture.

  “I’m looking for her,” I said.

  “Why? You a friend? Relative?”

  “I’m looking for her . . . for a friend. I’m kind of a private detective.” Unpaid, doing favors for people when they were at their most desperate.

  Frank didn’t change expression, but his eyes managed to radiate disapproval. I probably shouldn’t have said private detective. My grandmother always had the same reaction. “What friend?”

  “Client confidentiality,” I said, pretending I used the phrase all the time. “This friend is worried about her and asked me to find out whether something supernatural had happened to her.”

  “Because you’re a shaman?” he asked, voice ringing with skepticism.

  “Something like that. I can sense psychic residue.”

  His look said, Don’t bullshit me, but he decided to nod. “That why you were riding out here this early in the morning?”

  “I was heading this way, then my bike brought me here. I can’t explain it, but I’m thinking I was brought for a good reason. Will you let me look around?”

  Frank’s eyes narrowed as he studied me. I couldn’t read minds, but I didn’t have to be telepathic to see that he knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth. He didn’t believe in my so-called ability, and he wondered if he shouldn’t arrest me. Maybe a night in jail along with a psychiatric evaluation might straighten me out.

  “Please,” I said. “If something’s happened to her, we should find out what. Maybe I can help.”

  I tried to sound helpful. I knew Frank had read my entire record, which said Troublemaker with a capital T. But that was all in the past, which I’d put well behind me. Right?

  Could my innocent look convince him, or the fact that my dad was such a nice guy and we were about to become family?

  Frank assessed me, the man not impatient, arrogant, or surly. He knew his job, he knew right from wrong, and he understood the gray area in between. Some people grow wiser as they grow older, and middle-aged Frank was one of them.

  “Tell me everything you know about her,” he said.

  Again, I decided to go with as much truth as I could. “I know she owns an antique store in Santa Fe, that she was driving this direction after having dinner in Gallup a week ago. She’d been talking to my friend about something she’d found, but she never said what.”

  “This friend was with her?”

  “He doesn’t know what happened to her,” I said.

  “Was he with her?”

  Frank had the stubbornness of deep water. “He had dinner with her in Gallup. You’d probably find that out anyway.” At this point, I had to veer from the truth. “But she drove off and left him, and he hasn’t seen her since.”

  Frank just looked at me, his gaze going all the way down inside me. I’d never met anyone who could stare at me with such unmoving exactness, no one human anyway. Mick could do it, and now Frank Yellow.

  “She was camping out here,” he said.

  The words were flat and uninflected, but I read in them that he was prompting me for whatever information I could give him.

  “Camping?” I asked.

  “In the campground over there.” He pointed to the east of the ruins. “She told a couple other campers she was
driving down to Gallup to meet someone.” He looked at me again. “She never came back. Witnesses in Gallup say she ate at a diner with a slim white man with brown hair. She never made it back here.” More staring deep inside Janet. “I’d be interested to find this slim white man and ask him a few questions.”

  “Mind if I look at the campsite? I might be able to pick up something.”

  Frank kept staring at me, his dark eyes glittering in the morning sunlight. I could imagine tough criminals facing him across an interrogation table and wilting more every second.

  He also struck me as a guy who’d use any resource he could no matter how bizarre to get to the bottom of a matter.

  “I’ll take you there,” he said. “But you stand next to me all the time and you touch nothing. Understand?”

  I raised my hands. “Got it.”

  He nodded once and turned back to the SUV. He wasn’t doing me a favor, his broad back told me. He was milking a source.

  Frank loaded my bike into the back of his SUV, a strong man who didn’t need any help. He let me sit in the front seat while he drove me back across the ruins to the main road and around to one of the camping areas.

  “It’s a hike from here,” he said, setting the break and turning off the engine.

  I was still sore from my fall, but I clumped along after him, down a trail, through a dry wash, and along another fairly flat mile to the camping area. Part of the site had been cordoned off and emptied of campers’ gear, but the dirt was filled with footprints, too many for individual sets to be distinguishable.

  A few tents had been erected in the far part of the campground, and campers were already up, eating or pulling on big backpacks to hike out. They went early, because the summer day would get blistering hot, and rains could come in the afternoon to fill the washes, stranding anyone on the wrong side of them.

  Frank took me to the corner of the campground. Whatever tent had stood there had been removed, along with Laura’s gear, leaving only the stake holes in the ground and burned out ash in a fire pit.

  I’d wished I could hold something that had belonged to her, but I made do with standing inside the four points of the stake holes and closing my eyes. To make it look to Frank like I was doing something, I raised my hands, palms down, over the place her sleeping bag would have been.

  At first, I felt nothing but the same blinding, pounding presence that had been beating on me since I arrived, grinding through me like a toothache.

  My problem with ancient sites is that I don’t see auras from only the last few days. I see them through the ages, some bright, some faded, all overlapping until they swirl like a vortex in my head. This campsite wasn’t as overwhelming as the ruined pueblos, but I felt a wave of humanity from the builders who’d laid the first stones to the last vacationer from Ohio.

  I tried to concentrate. Many people had lain here over the years in this very spot, men and women, talking, laughing, sleeping, having sex.

  But the young woman from Santa Fe had been the only one abducted. I sucked in a breath when I saw it—not the incident itself but her fear.

  Stark terror, rising up like blackness in the morning. I sensed her struggling and saw the aura of what she struggled with.

  The stench of blood, the black outline of fear—Nightwalker.

  But overlapping the Nightwalker aura was another aura, which sent my heart pounding. Sharp, fiery, with a bite of hot ash.

  Dragon.

  Chapter Four

  Frank, of course, wanted to know what I’d sensed. I couldn’t very well tell him I suspected that Laura had fought not only a Nightwalker, but a dragon, one whose aura was very much like my fiancé’s.

  “Um,” I said. “Not much. Are the campers sure she never came back?”

  He gave me his keen stare. “They’re sure. The campground was crowded that night. Plenty of witnesses. Why?”

  Because I’d sensed Laura being dragged from here. The campers might have missed seeing her return from her dinner in Gallup, or maybe she’d gotten back here very, very late.

  But . . . if Ansel had been with her, what had happened to him between the time he’d blacked out in the car and Laura fighting him in the campsite later? If Ansel had gone into blood frenzy he most likely would have killed her right there in the car, not ridden with her the many, many miles to Chaco Canyon. At some point, he’d left her and woken up alone in the middle of the desert.

  And a dragon had most definitely disturbed the campsite.

  The auras had been left at the same time. Dragon, Nightwalker, and Laura had been there together that night.

  I seriously needed to talk to Mick.

  * * *

  I convinced Frank to drive me back over the rutted road and down to Gallup. He left me with my now silent motorcycle at a large coffee shop that had just opened up, where I and a mixture of Indian and white travelers ordered breakfast.

  From there I called Mick on a payphone—I could never find my cell phone when I needed it—told him what happened, and asked for a ride home. Mick’s voice went rough with rage when he heard about my possessed bike, and said in clipped tones that he was leaving immediately.

  I’d have an hour and more to kill before Mick arrived, so after consuming a breakfast burrito way too fast, I walked a few doors down the street to Jeff Benally’s store. He wasn’t open yet, but he was there, saw me, and let me in. He wrote me a commission check for a few photos he’d sold since he’d sent the last one, and I took it gladly. Running a hotel was expensive.

  “I need more,” he said. Jeff was a large Navajo who wore plenty of turquoise and silver, a walking advertisement for his store. “I can’t keep your pictures in stock.”

  I hadn’t sent much more lately than the few photos I’d taken of Canyon de Chelly in the snow last winter. I thought of the sunrise I’d just seen at Chaco Canyon and decided it would be a good place for my next shoot, if I could dampen my reaction to the place long enough. Plus it would be a good excuse to go back out there and look around.

  “Soon, Jeff. You can’t hurry art.”

  He gave me a grin. “Sure, Janet. That’s what they all say.”

  Mick pulled to a stop in front of his door, in a truck with Fremont Hansen: Plumbing and Fix-It on the side. Fremont wasn’t with him, for which I was grateful, because Fremont could talk, talk, and talk some more, and I wasn’t in the mood right now.

  Mick pulled me into a hard embrace outside the shop, with Jeff looking on interestedly, then stood me back and checked me over for bruises and abrasions. Satisfied that I wasn’t as near death as I sometimes had been in the past, he lifted my bike into the roomy truck bed and drove us west into Arizona.

  I told him the whole story, slowly and with more details than I’d been able to convey on the phone, ending with me standing in the campground, taking in the aura.

  Mick listened to me without interrupting, and when I’d finished he said, “Hmm.”

  “That’s it?” I asked as his eyes flicked between road and speedometer as he drove around an eighteen-wheeler. “I’m carried off by my possessed Harley and sense that Laura was abducted possibly by a Nightwalker, possibly by a dragon, and all you can say is hmm?”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Not the word I used. My language was more colorful.”

  Mick moved his strong hand to rest on my thigh. “The fact that you’re all right is what’s filling my mind, Janet. The rest of it—the bike, the abduction, the missing woman—all that is noise.”

  I suddenly wished we weren’t in a pickup racing at eighty down the freeway. Mick’s blue eyes darkened, and he gave my thigh a warm caress.

  “Did you hear what I said about sensing she might have been taken by a dragon?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Mick calmly drove on, but his eyes changed from blue to deep black. “Do you know which dragon?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I was hoping you would know. What is this dragon business you keep going out to the compound for?”

&nb
sp; “Nothing to do with abducting antiques dealers from Santa Fe.”

  I waited, but it was clear he wasn’t going to tell me. I kept my temper in check and asked, “Do you know who could have done this?”

  “No. But I’ll find out.”

  “You know, if you turn this truck around, we can be at the compound by this afternoon,” I said.

  Mick kept stubbornly driving west. “No way am I letting you near the dragon compound again. They tried to hold you hostage before, and there’s nothing to say they won’t again. I can get there faster on my own, and I’ll interrogate a certain obnoxious dragon out there until he gives me some answers.”

  “You mean Colby? I was thinking more of Drake.”

  Drake was the assistant to Bancroft, one of the dragon council, which consisted of three dragons who pretty much ruled dragonkind. Drake’s position as Bancroft’s eyes and ears gave him a lot of power but also meant that Drake did whatever dirty deed Bancroft didn’t want to handle himself.

  Colby, on the other hand, though a troublemaker, was not an evil bastard. He inked his human body like a yakuza, lived to harass Mick and other dragons, and was currently serving a sentence at the dragon compound for some crime he hadn’t told me about. Probably hadn’t genuflected to his dragon highness Bancroft fast enough, or something.

  I conceded that Mick should approach Colby alone, because he was right—the dragons didn’t like me. I was not the most popular person at the dragon compound that rested high on a cliff outside Santa Fe.

  Mick took the turnoff at Holbrook and drove us back south through Flat Mesa to my hotel at the Crossroads. By the time we rolled through the dirt parking lot, the tourists were up and wandering about, taking pictures of the view, the hotel, and—after I stepped out of the truck—me, the Navajo woman who ran the place.

  Mick unloaded my motorcycle, saying he’d check it over before he started contacting dragons and getting them to talk. He pushed it toward its shed while the guests snapped pictures until they’d had enough and headed out for their destinations of the day.