She cheerfully walked away, and Coyote dug into his burger.
I’d lost my appetite. “Are you going to sit there and eat like nothing happened?”
“Yep,” Coyote said around bites. He glanced at my plate. “You going to finish that?”
I pushed it at him. “I can’t believe I was grieving for you. What a waste of time.”
Coyote put down his burger, wiped his fingers, and laid his hand on mine. “Did you truly grieve? Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! How would I not be sure?” I thought of how torn up I’d been after his body had vanished, and I wanted to smack him.
“I appreciate that,” Coyote said. “I really do.” He looked straight into my eyes. “I won’t forget.”
“Good.” I poked at my own burger, but I didn’t want it anymore. I plucked a fry or two from his plate and ate them. “When you’re feeling less hungry, I need to ask you about something.”
“What’s that?”
“Eat, then come with me.”
Coyote grinned, his lewd look back. “I like the sound of that.”
I didn’t bother with an answer.
Coyote didn’t hurry. He ate his burger and fries, bantered with Jolene, waved at and talked to other diners, and downed the other half of my burger. Pamela finished her dinner without saying much and left without me, not being too fond of Coyote. She didn’t like to stay away from Cassandra long either.
Coyote finally finished and pushed both plates away. He actually paid for his meal with a crumpled twenty instead of foisting the bill off on me or some other gullible person in the diner.
I took him outside and to my bike, unlocked one of the saddlebags and pulled out my wadded up coat, which I’d wrapped around the pot. I unfolded the coat, baring the pot for Coyote’s scrutiny.
Under the weak lights of the diner’s parking lot, the vessel looked as ancient as it was supposed to. The crumbling paint, faded bear and tortoise designs, and even the cracks where Colby had repaired it, made it look old and valuable.
“Where did you get this?”
Coyote’s voice was harsh and cold, all trace of teasing or affection gone.
I gave him a startled look. “From Richard Young, a collector in Santa Fe. He got it from a woman named Laura DiAngelo, who’s an antiques dealer, and Ansel, my Nightwalker. The collector thought he was buying an ancient Indian pot, and instead they gave him this and hid the real one.”
Coyote took it from me. He turned it around in his hands, his expression fierce. “Where did they find the original?”
“In a museum—a private one in Flagstaff.”
“Where did they get it?”
“I have no idea.”
“You need to find out. Now. Then destroy this thing.”
I stared at Coyote as he shoved the pot back at me. “It’s only a replica.”
“Doesn’t matter. They’ll be coming for it. They’ll take this from you because it points to the real thing—it tells the world what it looks like. They won’t care if they have to kill you to get it, or how rough they are when they tear the knowledge of it from you.”
Coyote rarely showed his anger, but he was showing it now. All trace of the affable storyteller who high-fived kids and swapped greetings with people in the town square had been replaced by a towering man with burning eyes. Coyote the god had returned.
“Who are they?” I asked. “What am I fighting this time?”
“Everyone who’s ever wanted power. The mages, the skinwalkers, Nightwalkers, dragons, Changers, the gods. Destroy this copy, find out how the museum in Flagstaff got the original, and then find the original and bring it to me.”
I couldn’t stop staring. “You’re saying that every magical being in existence could start a free-for-all over a pot?”
“It’s not just a pot. It’s a vessel of the gods. Full of power. Anyone who possesses the real thing could have unlimited access to magic, which means unlimited power. Whoever gains it can kill all other rivals, or start a magical war that scorches the earth. They could open the vortexes and let loose the evil Beneath. They could shake apart the world.”
Not good. Not good at all. “If this vessel is so dangerous, then why am I just now hearing about it?”
“It was supposed to have been destroyed. Tossed into the volcano that’s now Sunset Crater to be buried between the layers of this world and the one Beneath. And it turns up in a museum in Flagstaff.” He snorted. “Humans will stick anything into a glass case and charge admission to see it.”
I held the pot out to him. “If all magical beings will try to kill me to get to it, why don’t you destroy it for me?”
Coyote raised his hands and took a step back. “Because I’m a god. I can’t be found near the thing. Even a replica. Or the other gods will strike.”
“So I have to do all the dirty work?” I asked angrily. “Figure out where it came from and where it is, all by myself? And if you can’t be found near it, why should I bring you the real one?”
“Because I’m strong enough to make myself destroy it before I’m tempted by it. No one else will be. No one. That’s what you need to understand.”
I lowered the pot, which, though light, seemed to drag down my arm. “Laura—and maybe Ansel—knows where the real one is. Wait, that means Ansel already wants this thing?”
“Ansel has rendered himself powerless to live among you in peace. He likes you and trusts you. But if he could have unlimited magic at his disposal, if he could gain revenge for everything that’s been done to him, and no one could stop him. . . What do you think he’d do?”
Dismay was pouring over me, followed by a good dose of alarm and anxiety. “Shit.”
“You must keep it away from him. Even if Ansel thinks he’d doing the right thing by hiding it, he won’t be able to resist it for long.” Coyote held me with a hard look. “When I said no one is strong enough not to be tempted, I meant it. Including Mick.”
My heart sank. “I can’t do this without Mick.”
“Mick has a lot to worry about, including convincing a Stormwalker that she wants to spend the rest of her life with him. Mick’s one of the top dragons. Think what he could do with a talisman that built up his magic into a powerhouse.”
“Mick also has a load of common sense. He’s worried about the real pot falling into the wrong hands. We’ve already had a run-in with a mage.” I told him what had happened with Pericles.
“You see?” Coyote said, not sounding very surprised. “It’s started. The sooner you find the pot, the better.”
“Oh thanks. And anyway, what about me? What happens when I get my hands on a vessel of the gods, full of magical juju? I have volatile Beneath magic in me, and I’m sure the Stormwalker side of me wouldn’t mind a boost either. I have a lot of scores to settle.”
Coyote’s grim expression fled, and he relaxed into a smile. He closed the space between us, cupped his hands around my face, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Because you’re Janet. You’re the only one I trust.”
My mouth popped open. “Me? Why?”
“Because you grieved for me.”
I blinked at him a few times, Coyote’s callused hands warm on my face. “That makes no sense at all.”
“Yes, it does. Find the vessel for me, sweetie. And don’t let anyone else get their hands on it. At all costs.” He released me and settled his jeans jacket against the breeze that had sprung up. “Oh, by the way, get your magic mirror fixed. You’ll need it.”
I wrapped the jacket around the pot and tucked both into my saddlebag, locking it again. “You toss off these impossible tasks like they’re nothing. Find the real pot before anyone else does. Fix the magic mirror. Like I can snap my fingers, and all this will just happen.”
I found myself talking to an empty space. Coyote was gone, nothing but the prints of his cowboy boots left in the dust where he’d stood.
“And I hate when you do that,” I said, but my words died on the rising wind.
<
br /> * * *
When I got back to the hotel, Pamela was there, lounging against the counter in my lobby while Cassandra finished her spreadsheets for the day. Pamela’s long body, comfortable in jeans and boots and tank top, matched the rangy look of her wolf.
“Mick called for you,” Pamela said when I walked back in, the pot still wrapped in my jacket. “He said he wants you to meet him on the 40 a few miles east of Holbrook. He’ll flag you down.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked in alarm.
“He didn’t say,” Pamela said. “I just took the message. Cassandra was too busy to answer the phone.”
She never moved from leaning back on her elbows, but her annoyance that she had to wait for Cassandra to finish for the night rang clear. Pamela liked her alone time with Cassandra, and didn’t want one minute to go to something else.
“Cassandra, if you have time, do you know a mage—one I can trust—to fix the magic mirror?” If Coyote said it was important, it was important.
“Problematic,” Cassandra said without looking up.
Always a problem telling other mages about a magic mirror. They’d all want it. Like the feeding frenzy Coyote said would happen with the pot.
“Well, any ideas you have, I’m willing to hear,” I said.
Pamela flashed me another look, becoming more possessive of her mate and their time together by the second. I decided to leave them to it. I gave the fake pot to Cassandra to put into the safe, then ducked down the hall to my private rooms to use the bathroom and wash the ketchup from the corners of my mouth before I left to find Mick.
My route, as always, took me through Flat Mesa. I obeyed the slow speed limit through and around the little town, because I knew Nash had trained his deputies to happily write me a ticket for going one mile per hour over and demand the fee be paid before I left town again.
As much as I throttled back my bike though, a sheriff’s SUV pulled in behind me. Lights flashed, and he was pulling me over.
When Sheriff Jones hopped out of his SUV and walked to me, I took off my helmet and pointed at my speedometer. “Thirty-five,” I said. “Not thirty-six or thirty-four. If you changed the speed limit, it’s not posted.”
“I didn’t pull you over for speeding,” Nash said. “I pulled you over because you’re a witness. Or maybe an accessory.”
“Witness to what?”
Nash stood calmly in the glare from his headlights, minus the sunglasses he habitually wore during the day. The lights brushed over his close buzz of black hair and made his eyes a clear gray.
“To murder,” he said. “What else?”
Chapter Seventeen
I went ice cold despite the balmy wind blowing over us. “What murder? Who? When?” I thought about Ansel pushing his way out of the hotel past two powerful mages, and tried to stem my panic.
“A man with a crossbow,” Nash said. “Found dead on the side of the freeway not half an hour ago. He’s pretty torn up.”
Crossbow meant slayer. Maybe normal people enjoyed running around in the desert after dark, shooting at things with crossbows, but I doubted it. The question was, which slayer?
“How am I a witness or accessory?” I asked. “Half an hour ago, I was leaving the diner in Magellan. Plenty of people can attest to that. Jolene. Pamela. Even Coyote.”
Nash didn’t look impressed. “A man with a crossbow was seen running down the railroad bed heading away from your place yesterday morning. Then there was that vigilante I arrested who was after Ansel. I’m sure there were more incidents.” He gave me his cold stare. “You knew about these attempts, and you didn’t report them.”
“Because this is supernatural stuff—Mick and I handle that.”
“This is where we disagree,” Nash said. “I want to know everything that goes on with you. Why are these hunters hot and bothered enough to try to kill Ansel? Is he going crazy again?”
“I hope not.” I prayed not. My Nightwalker had rushed out into the night, Cassandra and Elena unable to stop him, and now a slayer had been killed.
“This have anything to do why you drove at top speed into New Mexico two days ago, and why you and Mick went back there this morning?”
I figured Nash would know all my comings and goings. I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank Yellow had called him after he’d released me. I imagined their conversation—Frank: You know about this woman? Nash: Yeah, she’s trouble. Leave her to me. I’ll keep her in line.
I hadn’t wanted to bring Nash into this, but I knew he’d find out sooner or later.
I told him the story, as I knew it, up until now. I didn’t mention Ansel’s fear that he’d killed Laura, now groundless, because Laura was still alive. I also left out the part about me destroying Young’s house and his collection. I’m sure that incident had made it onto a police report somewhere, and Nash might already know, but I didn’t want to talk about it.
Nash listened—with no reaction, just his stare—and I don’t know whether he believed all I told him or not. He wasn’t one to accept facts without checking them out.
“Let’s get up to the scene of the crime,” he said when I finished. “I’ll be right behind you.” He made it sound like a threat.
I sedately rode the rest of the way out of Flat Mesa and up the highway to Holbrook. That town was already buttoned up for the night, and we didn’t meet much traffic as we wended through it and drove up onto the freeway.
We rode about five miles east on the 40 before I saw Mick and his big bike, and state police cruisers as well as county sheriff’s cars, lights flashing, on the shoulder.
This stretch was out of Nash’s jurisdiction, but the state police sometimes called him for his opinion, because Nash had a good reputation for thoroughness. He also wasn’t competitive about who caught the bad guy. As long as someone got locked up somewhere, he was happy.
Nash turned on his cop lights as he eased his SUV over, and I pulled up alongside Mick. I yanked off my helmet. “What happened?” I asked him.
Mick steadied my bike as I killed the engine, got off, and hung my helmet on the seat. “I smelled him out there while I was looking for Ansel,” Mick said. “A Nightwalker did this, Janet.”
I looked at him in disquiet. “You’re going to tell me you haven’t found Ansel, aren’t you?”
“Haven’t found him—yet.”
I hated this more and more. “Was the scent Ansel’s?”
“Couldn’t tell. Too much dead slayer. I think it’s the slayer you fought a couple mornings ago, the first one.”
I remembered the guy sticking a crossbow in my face while he fired the other one at Ansel. Now he was a heap of bone and flesh on a stretcher being carried to the waiting ambulance. Poor guy. Dying by Nightwalker was not a good way to go.
“Come and look at the scene,” Nash said to me before he climbed down the gully on the side of the road and headed for the lights in the desert.
Recent rains had filled the dry washes, and though the water had receded, the ground was still slick and muddy. By tomorrow afternoon, unless another storm rolled through, the land would be bone dry again, but for now, I had to slosh through mud and wet grass.
A generator-run light had been set up where Mick had found the body. We were about thirty yards from the freeway and well hidden by dips in the land and overgrown brush.
The lights fell on flattened grasses stained with blood. Quite a lot of blood. The very young state police trooper who’d been left to watch over the scene kept trying not to look at it.
The slayer hadn’t died that long ago. Maybe a few hours, not more, and Nash said that the medical examiner had agreed. The blood had congealed on the grasses but hadn’t been washed away yet.
I was aware of scavengers gathering around the perimeter of our light—tall turkey vultures unworried by our presence, and coyotes that yipped and snarled in the darkness. They wouldn’t find much when we left the scene to them, but they smelled the blood, and they were hungry.
I knew without
asking that Nash had brought me here to examine the aura of the scene. The psychic residue was already coming to me—violence and fear, desperation, terror, and then pain, horrific pain, followed by a blank.
I was already shaking before I stretched out my hands over the kill site and closed my eyes. Mick’s bulk beside me reassured me somewhat, but I was still queasy.
I saw the aura of the slayer himself—faint, yellow, no rage in him. He’d hunted Ansel because he’d wanted the money and thought Nightwalkers were vermin. He was like a glorified rat catcher.
The Nightwalker aura was there too, black with orange streaks, smelling of blood and death. And fear. I saw fear in the aura, a Nightwalker thinking he was about to die.
Which posed the question. Did Ansel kill the slayer in blood frenzy? Or fight in his nice guy persona, in fear for his life?
I opened my eyes. “I don’t think Ansel did this.”
“Why not?” Nash asked. “The man was trying to kill him. Ansel fought back, went into his Nightwalker rage, and killed him.”
I stared down at the torn-up grass. “Too much blood,” I said. “Nightwalkers drain their victims completely. Once they start feeding, they can’t stop. Ansel goes into his blood frenzy because he wants blood, not just a kill. He might break apart the corpse afterward, but by then it’s dried skin and bones.”
The trooper, who’d turned to watch me in curiosity, looked shocked and sick. First body, I suspected.
Mick said, “Janet’s right. Too much blood.”
“But a Nightwalker was here,” I said. “Maybe the slayer tried to kill Ansel but Ansel got away.”
“Or whoever killed the slayer took Ansel,” Mick said.
Nash looked skeptical. “Who else would want to kill a vampire bounty hunter besides a vampire? Vigilantes are tough. They don’t go down easily, and this guy didn’t even get a chance to fire his weapon.”
“A supernatural killer then,” I said. “Let me look around.”
I didn’t want to walk beyond the circle of light where the coyotes and the birds waited to scrounge for whatever they could get. But the aura of death and Nightwalker was so strong that if a third person had been there, his or her aura had been masked.
From Jennifer Ashley, With Love: Three Paranormal Romances from Bestselling Series Page 30