Nightwalker (11 page)

Elena looked disapproving. She, like Cassandra and my grandmother, didn’t like séances. I had the feeling I’d get a phone call from Grandmother soon.

“She must have faked it,” Elena said. “The sister. So she’d have justification for hiring these slayers to kill Ansel. She might believe her sister is dead but not be able to prove it.”

“You will tell Paige she’s all right?” Ansel asked.

“First call I make.” Second call, I meant. For the first I wouldn’t need a phone.

I told Ansel to stay in tonight, to be safe, and he nodded. He’d have his DVD machine cranking out classic movies in no time.

He looked so unhappy and guilty as I started to leave that I came back and gave him a hug and a kiss on the top of his head.

Quick ones. Ansel smelled like blood, his aura had my magic screaming, and he was dancing too close to blood frenzy for any lingering touch.

I left his room, and Elena marched upstairs behind me, heading off to check her kitchen for damage. Whatever she found, I was sure the dragons would hear about it. Loudly.

The firemen were still in my saloon, trying to decide what had started the fire.
Lightning
was one man’s speculation. The fire was completely out, wisps of smoke drifting in the night breeze.

“Can I go in?” I asked a guy in his oversized yellow suit, still wearing his hard fire hat. He was one of the Salas family, related to Magellan’s Assistant Chief of Police. Emilio Salas himself was outside in the parking lot talking to the other firemen.

Emilio saw me and came walking up with his usual energy. “You know what happened, Janet?”

“I wasn’t home,” I said, sticking to the literal truth.

“A couple of your guests saw a fireball come out the sky, and the place went up. Heat lightning is what will go in the report. A freak of nature.”

I’d be sure to tell Drake he was being listed as a freak of nature. I wanted to watch his face when I said it.

“Am I allowed in?” I asked again.

“If you want to take a quick look right inside the door, you can,” the fireman said. “But don’t go all the way in, and don’t touch anything. There’s a lot of glass fused to the floor and what’s left of the tables.”

Glass.
I ducked past him and stepped inside the saloon.

It was a complete wreck. The long wooden bar, barstools, and tables were nothing but a pile of black lumps. The walls still stood, but they were black all the way to the tin ceiling, which had buckled and melted under the volcanic heat of dragon fire. Dragons were born in volcanoes, and the room looked as though one had erupted inside it.

The glass the fireman mentioned had come from the rows of glasses that had hung above the bar, the bottles of wine and liquor that had lined the shelves behind it, and the windows that had imploded.

The magic mirror hung above the bar in its usual place, and I relaxed a little. It was still intact.

The frame had warped and half melted away, but the frame wasn’t part of the mirror. The magical part was the glass itself, the silver backing it, and the ton of spells a long-ago mage had poured into it.

The face of the mirror was black. I couldn’t tell from the doorway whether it was filmed with soot, or whether the darkness was inside the glass itself.

The fireman was standing right next to me, and so was Emilio, so I couldn’t very well launch into a conversation with the mirror. But I risked one question.

“Are you all right?”

Silence. The mirror didn’t respond, not even with a tinkle of broken bits.

Emilio’s big hand landed on my shoulder. “I know it’s hard, Janet. But it will be all right. Fire chief says the saloon’s structure is still sound, so get on to your insurance company and start clearing things up.”

Emilio Salas was a cheerful sort, always optimistic, in spite of his job, and in spite of living in the weirdness of Magellan all his life.

He patted my shoulder again, his work done, and went to the kitchen to see if Elena was good. Emilio was one of the few people Elena liked—maybe because sorrow, sarcasm, and anger bounced off him and didn’t leave a mark. Emilio seemed to absorb negativity like Nash absorbed and annulled spells.

The fireman told me my guests could come back in, but of course, the saloon was off limits. He’d told me to have someone board up the door right away.

I went back outside to the clustered guests to find that Cassandra had returned. She’d already handed around coffee and was talking to everyone about their options, whether they stayed here or moved to another hotel.

With Cassandra was her girlfriend, Pamela, a tall woman with black hair in a tight braid and wolf-gray eyes. Pamela was a Changer who could become a wolf. And like a wolf, she was insanely protective of Cassandra, who was, in Changer terms, her mate.

I was happy that Cassandra had someone to keep her safe, but Pamela sometimes decided that Cassandra should be kept safe from
me
. A Changer thinking someone threatened her mate was a dangerous thing.

“Who did this?” Pamela asked me in a low voice. She had her arms folded and regarded me with coldness.

“Dragons,” I said.

Her eyes flickered. “Mick let them?”

“I wouldn’t say he
let
them. But don’t worry, they’ll pay.”

One way or the other. Pamela returned to helping Cassandra calm the guests—though why Pamela thought
she
could calm anyone, I didn’t know. I went inside and into my office, opened the desk drawer, and took out one of the shards of broken mirror I kept in there.

When the mirror had been broken, Mick and I had pried pieces out of it out to carry with us or keep stashed around the hotel in case we needed them. Mick and I could communicate through the mirror over long distances much better than we could on cell phones. The mirror never hit a dead zone.

I took the piece of mirror out of the leather bag in which I kept it, carefully laid it on the desk, and peered down into it.

Darkness. The mirror had gone black all the way across, as though this piece had burned along with the others.

The mirror didn’t answer me when I again asked if it was all right. I even apologized to it and told it I’d take the damage out of Drake’s hide.

Still nothing.

I stroked the surface of the mirror, but I didn’t even get a shiver of delight or a string of lewd comments.

I was cold with misgivings as I put the mirror shard away. The thing drove me crazy with its drag-queen drawl, sexual suggestions, insane laughter, and stupid jokes. On the other hand, it had saved my life several times over. Without the mirror, I’d have been very definitely dead a while ago. But not only would losing a magical talisman be bad for me, I’d miss it.

Magic mirrors could be repaired. The trouble was, any mage strong enough to repair a magic mirror would also be strong enough to kill you for it.

I had hoped that the mirror would be well enough for me to use it to spy on the dragon compound. Last year, when I’d been taken to the compound, the mirror had told me how to finagle the shard so it could look through all the mirrors in the dragons’ mansion. I’d discovered later that the mirror had maintained the contact so it could look into the dragon compound any time it wanted.

Mostly the mirror enjoyed watching the human houseboy, a buff twenty-something called Todd, strip for his showers. But I sometimes used the mirror myself to keep track of what was going on with Bancroft, Drake, and their cronies.

I’d have to wait for Mick before I could talk to the dragons. He was the only one who could get me in contact with the compound without me being fried. But Mick was taking his time out there while he recovered from the crossbow wound, and I started to worry about him too.

I called Heather Hansen, listened to five minutes of her distress about the fire—she’d seen something dark in my aura, she swore it, and she was so sorry she’d been distracted by the séance and hadn’t warned me. I let her run down—she did truly feel bad—and then I asked her for Paige’s phone number.

She gave it to me readily, telling me it was so nice of me to help with Paige’s sister. Heather offered her services as medium to me any time I wanted them, gratis. Perhaps I’d like to speak to my deceased mother, to tell her I was all right?

I managed to give her a polite answer before I hung up. The last thing I needed was Heather trying to conjure the spirit of my evil-goddess mother. She might show up.

I called Paige and got her voice mail. I left a message, urging her to call me, telling her I’d had word that her sister might be fine and well. With any luck, Paige would call off her slayers until she found out what I knew, but I didn’t hold my breath. The slayer marks had been cleaned off the doorframes—I hadn’t seen any new ones as I’d run around outside, apart from the ones made by the slayer Nash had arrested. Maybe they’d think Ansel had perished in the fire and give up. Hey, it could happen.

I helped Cassandra settle the guests who were staying into their rooms again. She offered to spend the rest of the night here, and because we weren’t full—we’d just lost a hiking couple to the motel in Magellan—I put her and Pamela in the usual room they took when they stayed overnight.

Emilio, who was hanging out in the kitchen talking to Elena and eating the mess of chilaquiles she’d decided to whip up, cheerfully said he’d sent for some of his nephews to come over and board up my doors and windows.

They arrived soon, along with Maya Medina, who did my electrical work. Maya eyed the damage from the lobby as Salas’s four nephews started hammering.

Maya had the kind of figure that managed to make even jeans and a simple pullover top look sexy. She had lavish curves and a nicely formed behind, her blue-black hair fell in gorgeous waves down her back, and her eyes were the color of strong coffee.

Sheriff Jones loved this woman, though he didn’t always like to admit it—he pretended emotion was what happened to other people. Maya loved him back with fierce intensity and didn’t care who knew it.

I’d inadvertently walked in on Maya and Nash once when they’d been
in flagrante,
and I’d seen vividly that Nash was both a virile man and an enthusiastic one. I’d also kissed him when I’d been high on storm magic and needed the magic siphoned off. Mick hadn’t been around to help me calm down, and Nash with his magic-sucking ability had been right there. Unfortunately, when I get too storm-crazed, I don’t have a lot of control, and inhibitions are blown away.

But the seemingly cold Nash made it clear to all that he preferred the volatile Maya. Maya had actually softened him a little and he her, though you’d have to know them very well to be able to tell.

“How do you do it, Janet?” Maya asked, hands on hips. “I get this place into better shape than anywhere else in town, and you go and destroy it. Every time.”

“I’m a victim of circumstance,” I said. “Not my fault.”

She gave me the skewering look that only Maya could manage. “It never is.”

“Think you can fix it?”

“Of course, I can fix it.” She trailed off into mutters. “I’ll never get out of this town, not when I have to repair your hotel all the time.”

“I thought you were living in Flat Mesa with Nash.”

“Same difference.”

She still owned a house in Magellan, though, with a nice garden and painfully neat interior. Nash had lived like a bachelor for a long time, and Maya was disdainful about the state of his house. Something they needed to work out.

Finally Salas’s nephews finished closing off the saloon. Cassandra and I worked a spell to rid the rest of the hotel of lingering smoke, seal off any bad gasses that might have collected in the saloon, and sweeten the air. To the scent of sage and sandalwood, I went to bed.

It was three a.m., and still no Mick. I looked out windows, hoping to see a dragon winging his way home across the desert. Given our history, I went a little crazy when I didn’t know where Mick was. I knew, though, that I couldn’t keep a leash on him. Our relationship would never make it if I tried to do that.

The hotel was silent now, the guests and Cassandra in bed, the spectators gone. When I’d gone down to the basement to look in on Ansel—who’d been enjoying a viewing of the original
Thirty-Nine Steps
—I discovered Elena sleeping on a folding cot near his room, like a guard dog. She’d been sound asleep when I passed her, but I had little doubt she’d awaken if another slayer went down there after him.

I didn’t think I’d sleep again with so many things on my mind, but I was out by the time I pulled up the covers.

I awoke to a sensation I couldn’t mistake. Mick’s mouth on me between my legs. The wild friction of it brought me to a half-awake state, to a place of joy I never wanted to leave.

He’d stripped the sheets from my sweating body, and now he lay on the lower half of my bed, my legs over his arms. I made a sound between a gasp and a moan. “Welcome back,” I said.

Mick smiled up at me, his eyes hot and blue. Not black, not his dragon eyes, which was good for now. Mick the man was enjoying me, and Janet the woman lay back and let him.

He worked on me, his mouth talented, until my body was rising to his mouth. The coming was good. Black and purple lights danced at the edges of my vision, my body one point of squeezing ecstasy.

When I collapsed, trying to catch my breath, Mick pulled me up to him, him on his knees on the bed, me with legs locked around him.

I loved watching Mick have sex with me. He would gaze straight into my eyes, his so blue, his face relaxed, his skin damp.

He wasn’t a quiet lover though. “Janet, you’re a fire in my heart. It burns me when I’m not with you.”

My replies weren’t as poetic. We crashed down onto the bed, me on my back, his big body weighting me into the mattress.

He finished, and everything went still.

We ended up with me on my side, Mick cradling me back against his chest. I loved moments like this. I thought I could stay forever curled into the curve of him, Mick’s arms around me and protecting me from harm.

The world didn’t work that way, but for now, I could bask in his warmth and let the world go to hell. And hope it didn’t, not literally.