Nightwalker (26 page)

As we thrashed around the floor, Jamison’s huge back caught his sculpting stand. The thing teetered, and the chunk of black basalt he’d been working on came down.

I rolled desperately, managing to separate myself from Jamison. The basalt piece hit the floor between the two of us. The intricate wing Jamison had almost finished broke off, shattering into several pieces.

I was sure the loss of his artwork would shake Jamison back to himself, but the red eyes that turned to me didn’t give a shit about art. The beast wanted me dead.

I scrambled to my feet, trying to get to the door, but Jamison was on me again. Claws raked my back as I went down for the second time.

My Beneath magic wanted to rampage. I could stop Jamison, as I’d stopped the slayer from shooting me and Ansel, but I might kill Jamison. I’d had to use all my willpower to keep the burst of Beneath magic tiny when I’d blown up the crossbow bolt. I hadn’t been angry then, or fighting for my life, just annoyed at a human.

If I hit Jamison with the magic, I’d kill him. I’d try not to, but I couldn’t guarantee it. I had no storm with which to stabilize myself—the magic would be raw and pure, like Gabrielle’s.

I closed my eyes, trying to tamp down the white ball that rose inside me into something less than lethal. I needed to knock out Jamison, nothing more.

But the evil goddess buried within me, the she-witch I battled every day, surged up in fury, wanting to
kill
. The same wildness in this hogan that was calling to Jamison started calling to me. The Beneath magic rose into incandescence, the power of it searing my hands.

“Jamison!” Naomi’s voice rang through the slammed-open door, the heat of the desert sweeping in with her.

I opened my eyes. The sudden sunlight hurt my sensitive retinas, but I saw Naomi in the doorway, sighting down the tranquilizer rifle in her hands. Julie peered around her, her eyes wide with terror.

“Jamison,” Naomi said again.

I fought down my Beneath magic, but the stuff glowed and pulsed, building up into a wild ball of lightning in my hands. It wanted me to slam the magic into Jamison, to watch him burn and writhe like Pericles had, except that Jamison wouldn’t be able to shrug it off.

“Naomi!” I screamed. “Shoot him!”

The tranquilizer gun popped. The dart hit the mountain lion right between his shoulder blades, missing my hand by an inch.

Jamison gave one final snarl of rage, then his eyes clouded over, and he collapsed, unconscious, right on top of me.

I pushed at him, jiggling on my elbows and hips, trying to squirm out from under several hundred pounds of limp mountain lion. Jamison heaved a little sigh in his sleep. His wildcat receded, and I had Jamison, my best friend, stark naked on top of me, with his wife and stepdaughter standing over us.

Naomi leaned the tranq rifle against the wall, reached down, and rolled Jamison off me with gentle compassion. I sat up, panting, shoving my hair from my face. My hands came away covered in blood.

Jamison, one of the most modest men I knew, lay sprawled on his back, his privates out for everyone to see. Julie, the sensible girl, snatched up one of the tarps he used to keep his work covered, and draped it over him.

Naomi didn’t try to help me up. She let me sit on the floor, breathing hard, as I fought my magic back down again.

“Janet,” Naomi said, her eyes soft. “Thank you.”

“For what? Enraging the nicest guy in the world so he’d turn into a mountain lion and attack me?”

“For not killing him. I know you could have. You might have had no choice.”

I shuddered, swallowing bile as I forced the white magic buzzing in my body to
go away.
It trickled off slowly, angrily. “Yeah, well, it came close.”

Naomi smoothed Jamison’s hair back from his face, her love for him plain to see.

Julie picked up the sculpting stand and the basalt, grunting a little as she lifted the stone back into place. She picked up the pieces of the broken bird’s wing and gazed at them mournfully. “He was making this for me.”

“Julie, I’m so sorry.” I scrubbed my face, finding more blood. “Tell me what happened,” I said to Naomi. “Were you here when Laura brought the pot?”

“She showed up in the middle of the night,” Naomi said. “Jamison went down to meet her, but I followed him. I didn’t know who she was—Jamison hadn’t met her face-to-face before—but she was terrified. She gave him this thing, wrapped up in a leather bag, telling him to keep it secret. Then she was gone.”

“That’s it? You didn’t ask any questions?”

“She didn’t give us a chance. She said she couldn’t think of anyone else she trusted besides Jamison, and that we were to tell
no one,
including you. She said it was dangerous for anyone to know about it—especially you. Jamison promised, and I promised too. I’m sorry.”

Explained why Naomi had shown up at the séance. She’d wanted to know whether Laura was truly dead, or at least why her sister thought so. Julie had seemed oblivious to everything at the séance, which meant she hadn’t known about Laura and the pot until Jamison performed the spell the next day. Naomi should have said something about Laura to me then, but if she’d thought she was helping Jamison, I understood—reluctantly—why she’d kept silent. I didn’t agree with her, but I knew that with Naomi, Jamison and Julie always came first.

“After she’d gone, Jamison took the pot out of the bag,” Naomi said. “It looked like typical pottery to me. Antique and valuable, yes, but not dangerous. Jamison carried it out here and locked it up. I couldn’t figure out why Laura was so worried about it. The pot had sat up in that museum in Flagstaff for years—why wasn’t it dangerous then?”

“Hidden in plain sight,” I said, speculating. “No one working for the museum or visiting the museum was magical, I guess. Or magical enough. No one knew about it until Pericles hired Young to start poking around looking for it.”

“Jamison didn’t talk about it. I got busy with the nursery—it’s one of our busiest seasons—and I didn’t notice that Jamison was spending so much time out here. I figured he was doing a new sculpture. I know how he gets when he’s excited about a new piece of art, and I leave him alone.

“Then yesterday morning, Jamison called us to the hogan and told us he’d found a spell he wanted to try. He didn’t say what the spell was for, but he said that Julie alone could be there for it. I was supposed to wait outside. But I didn’t like how Jamison looked—his face was almost gray, and his eyes kept going yellow, like his mountain lion’s. I didn’t know what was wrong. So I refused to leave.”

“Wise,” I said.

Julie broke in. “Jamison got mad at Mom. And Jamison never gets mad. But she wouldn’t go. So finally Jamison did the spell with us all in here.”

“At first, it didn’t look any different than any other shaman spells I’ve seen him do,” Naomi said. “I like when Jamison lets me watch him do magic. It’s soothing, peaceful. But this spell scared me. Jamison went into a trance—when he meditates or lets his magic take him, he usually is very calm and relaxed. This time, I could tell he was in pain. The designs on the pot started moving, and then little tiny shards rose up out of the pot and swarmed him. I tried to push him out of the way and maybe break the pot, but he opened his eyes and yelled at me to get back, that I’d be hurt if I did that.”

“I was scared,” Julie said. She sat down cross-legged between Naomi and Jamison, resting a comforting hand on Jamison’s inert shoulder. “It was so powerful. But I didn’t run. I didn’t want to leave Mom and Jamison alone with that magic.” She rested her other hand on her mother’s knee.

“Jamison finished the spell,” Naomi said. “And the shards cutting him flowed back down into the pot. He was exhausted, but all right. And then Julie started screaming. I thought she’d been hurt, that maybe the shards had attacked her somehow.”

Julie smiled sheepishly. “I was scared. All the sudden, sound started pouring into my ears, like it was beating at me. I never realized the world was so
loud
.” The smile became one of pure happiness.

“Naomi,” I said, trying to finger-comb my hair. “Where did Jamison look up this spell? I know he doesn’t have spell books lying around.” Jamison was a shaman, and his knowledge of magic came from oral tradition. “But he couldn’t have known how to do this without some research. Please tell me he didn’t look up spells on the Internet.”

“Yep,” Julie said. “He asked me to show him how to use the search engines. He borrowed my laptop and was at it for days.”

I groaned. “Oh, Jamison, my stupid old friend.”

“He was trying to help me,” Julie said, defending him.

I climbed painfully to my feet. “Do either of you know where the pot is? You need to give it to me.”

Both Naomi and Julie nodded without asking me to explain why. Julie picked up a key ring from Jamison’s now-ripped shorts, went to his supply cabinet, unlocked it, and pulled out a leather-wrapped bundle.

Julie said as she brought it to me, “You’re worried that if he searched the Internet for such a powerful spell, any astute mage would find out, right? They’d know Jamison wasn’t a powerful mage himself and wonder why he was searching for these spells. They’d guess he’d found some way to enhance his power. And this mage you yelled at him about would be looking for people who’d found some way to enhance their powers. Right?”

I took the bundle. The strength of the pot inside jolted a shock through me as hard as any lightning strike. What I’d felt come out of the hole where Laura had started to bury it was nothing compared to this.

“You’re smart, Julie,” I said, my throat tight.

“You okay?” Naomi asked, worried.

“No. This is . . . bad. Which is why I’m taking it away.”

I headed for the door. Naomi got in front of me. “Janet, if you hide the pot or find some way to destroy it, what will happen to Julie? Will the spell die without the pot?”

My chest hurt as I struggled to breathe. Julie watched me quietly. She’d been handed a piece of the world she’d been denied all her life, and now I had to tell her she might have to let it go again.

“I don’t know,” I had to say. “I’m sorry. The spell might fade as Jamison’s power does. Or it might be permanent. I just don’t know.”

Naomi nodded once, her throat moving. She’d watched her daughter lose her hearing once, long ago. Now she might have to do it again.

“Take it, Janet,” Julie said. “I don’t want this if we lose Jamison for it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“Will Jamison be all right?” Naomi asked, still in front of me.

I looked down at him slumbering so peacefully on the floor. “I hope he wakes up the Jamison we all know and love, but I don’t have any idea what this thing does, or what residue it leaves. Watch him. Call me, or call Mick, if he doesn’t come out of it.”

Naomi nodded. Her eyes held a bleakness that I hated.

I clenched my teeth against the rising magic of the pot, pushed past Naomi, stepped into the hot afternoon, and got the hell out of there.

As soon as I walked out and stashed the artifact in my saddlebag, I felt the eyes of the supernatural world upon me.

The driveway behind Naomi’s house was empty, the workers in the nursery moving with the slow ease of men doing physical labor in the heat. None of them looked my way.

I started up my bike and slowly rode down the drive back toward the road. One of the workers raised his hand in farewell. I made myself wave back, everything normal.

Sweat trickled from under my helmet as I rode along the highway through town. Magellan looked no different than usual—the lunch crowd at the diner was thinning out, people going back to work, tourists fanning out to hike to the vortexes or along the old railroad bed. RVs rocked ponderously past me, summer vacationers on their way to view the next natural attraction.

All the while, the pot screamed to me. Its aura rose around me like a bubble shot with red and blue flame, muting the rest of the world, broadcasting its whereabouts to everything magical.

It couldn’t be broadcasting, though. Jamison had kept it hidden in a cabinet in his studio all week, and the magical hadn’t swooped down upon him to grab it. I hadn’t felt a thing, and I’d been looking for it. No one had found it in Flagstaff either, where it had sat for years.

Then again, the pot hadn’t yet been in the hands of anyone as magical as me. Normal humans ran the museum; Laura wasn’t a mage; and Ansel, though he was magical by nature, couldn’t actually work magic. Jamison had power, but nowhere near the kind of power I could draw.

I had to stash it somewhere. But while I ran through ideas for where to take it, the artifact called to me.

Part of me wanted to know why it had been made and how. The other part of me was busy imagining all kinds of ways I could use the pot to make myself powerful beyond imagining.

I realized now that the artifact singing away in the cabinet while I’d fought Jamison had enhanced my Beneath magic, which was why I hadn’t been able to damp it down as I had when fighting the slayer.

The Beneath magic was now throbbing and humming through me, not having subsided in the least. Crackles of it moved through my body, popping in my ears. The magic leaked out through my fingers, contacting the handlebars and lighting up the bike in electric arcs.

If I didn’t contain the magic, I was going to fry myself. My beautiful new Softail would be a melted heap on the highway, and I wouldn’t be in much better shape.

The bike sped on, fed by power. I checked my rearview mirror, hoping no police decided to try to pull me over. I was afraid of what I’d do to them if they did.

My right-hand mirror—the one with the piece of magic mirror in it—was still dark. The mirror still hadn’t recovered from the fire, or it had buried itself too deep to be reached.

And I suddenly knew exactly how to fix it.

Yesterday, I’d worried about hunting for a mage powerful enough to bring the mirror back to life, yet trustworthy enough not to try to kill me and Mick to steal it. Today I knew with clarity that I didn’t need another mage.

All I had to do was—