Nightwalker (30 page)

I drove past the entrance to the visitor’s center, now closed, and around on maintenance roads past the ruins. My dad’s sturdy truck, used to washed out-back roads, soldiered on.

Something huge rose in the headlights and slammed into the front of the truck. Gabrielle screamed, and I hit the brakes.

Grandmother and Emmett did little more than inhale sharply. Emmett opened the passenger door, balanced himself on the doorstep and pulled himself up to look over the top of the truck. Wouldn’t want to get his precious shoes dirty getting out to see what was wrong.

“It’s nothing,” he said after a moment. “Just a dead coyote.”

A dead coyote.

I set the parking brake, scrambled out, and ran to the front of the truck. Lying in the dirt, illuminated by our headlights, was a large coyote, bloody and definitely dead. Its head was half cut off, and entrails snaked out of its belly.

I fell to my knees beside it. The corpse stank, as though it had been out here a day at least. This animal hadn’t run in front of our truck—someone had hurled him there.

“Coyote?” While the beast was covered in blood, it was giant for its species, and I was pretty sure the face, still intact, was Coyote’s.

“This isn’t time for your weird games,” I shouted at him. “Come back to life already. I need you!”

Gabrielle stopped at my side, her motorcycle boots a match for my own. “You all right, sis? It’s dead.”

“He’s Coyote.” I shook the body. “Come on. Wake up.”

The beast shimmered. Gabrielle drew back, but I didn’t take my hand from his bloody body.

When mist cleared, Coyote the man lay on the ground. A deep gash cut through his neck, now coated with dried blood, and his belly lay open and pathetically exposed.

“Stop this,” I babbled. “I need you.”

Coyote opened his eyes. As when I’d found him dying behind the railroad bed, his dark irises were filmed over, and I knew he couldn’t see me. “Bear,” he said.

“I know. You explained about your bizarre ritual. But I need you. I have the pot. Or will have.”

“You must destroy . . .”

“I know that. But how do I destroy it?
Tell me.
”

“Bear . . .”

“She knows?” Tears spilled down my cheeks. “Coyote, stop this, and get up.”

Gabrielle bent to me, her hands on her knees. “Give him a break, Janet. He’s dying.”

“No, he isn’t.” I shook Coyote’s shoulder. “Tell me what to do.”

“Bear.” He covered my hand with his. His strength, even in this state, nearly crushed my fingers. “Love you, girl,” he said, and he called me by my spirit name—the name known to no one but my father and me. Gabrielle didn’t hear it, because Coyote whispered it straight into my mind.

The word gave me a burst of strength. Coyote’s form shimmered again, then the hand holding mine relaxed, and Coyote vanished.

I shuddered as I rose to my feet. Gabrielle remained staring down at the spot where Coyote had lain. “Well, that was weird.”

I turned away in silence and got back into the truck. Gabrielle climbed into the bed again, and I drove on.

“He’s dead then,” Emmett said.

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

“Shut up.” I took the truck down a slippery track and stopped at the bottom.

The moon thrust itself out from behind the clouds and bathed the valley in subtle light. The rocky outcrops to either side of us became stark silhouettes.

One of the roads to nowhere, built for the gods, seemed to stretch toward the pile of clouds on the horizon. Lightning licked the clouds, flashing them purple and gold before the world faded again to black.

A figure stood at the foot of the road just inside the circle of my headlights, like a tall, upright monolith in open ground. At first I thought a bear stood there, a giant grizzly up on its hind legs.

As I got out of the truck, I saw that it was Bear. She was in human form, with a bearskin wrapped around her body, the dead bear’s face forever fixed in a carnivorous snarl. Under the skin she wore flowing skirts like my grandmother’s and her usual silver and turquoise jewelry. She’d tied three hawk’s feathers in her black hair.

Her bangles, rings, and necklace caught the moonlight as she raised her hands, throwing the reflection at us in wide bands. The stone knife she’d used to slay Coyote hung on her belt, the aura of it thick and black against her otherwise clean silver.

“What the hell?” Gabrielle had stopped by my side.

Emmett, who’d gotten out of the truck in spite of the dirt, adjusted his glasses. “Bear goddess. Interesting.”

Grandmother was walking toward Bear, her stick tapping the earth. She stopped about ten feet in front of Bear who watched us, her dark eyes quiet. “Did you know we were coming?”

Bear said nothing. I’d never seen her like this, not in her goddess persona. She’d always appeared to me as the large, rather placid Indian woman in her old-fashioned dress and jewelry, ready with her gentle strength and good advice—her hunting of Coyote with the knife notwithstanding.

Now she radiated power, the aura of her stronger even then the aura of Chaco itself. I felt her strength and her compassion, but also a power beyond measure, plus the crushing knowledge all deities had that they were far stronger than any creature on the earth.

She, like Coyote, had lived in the worlds before this one, the Beneath worlds, out of which the first men and women had climbed. She’d been one of the gods who’d sealed the Beneath worlds behind them, trapping the more evil gods and goddesses—my mother being one of them—inside.

But though Coyote and Bear and others had thus protected the world from the evils of Beneath, that didn’t mean the gods who’d stayed in this world were wholly benevolent. They had their good sides and their frightening sides.

I was starting to get frightened.

Bear watched me as I stopped next to Grandmother, both of us sensing we shouldn’t move closer.

“Stormwalker,” Bear said. Her rich contralto rolled across the valley. “I’ve come for my vessel. Bring it to me.”

“
Your
vessel?” I asked in surprise, though Grandmother didn’t look astonished in the least.

“I created it,” Bear said, her voice filling the spaces around us. “I’ve come to take it back.”

“And do what with it, exactly?” I asked. “Destroy it?”

“No.”

Emmett and Gabrielle came up beside us—Emmett must think hearing this worth the dust on shoe leather. “A vessel fashioned by a Native American bear goddess?” he mused. “My price just went up.”

“Price?” Grandmother scowled at him. “I thought you wanted it for yourself.”

“I was speaking figuratively. Let me put it this way—the price for me helping you keep it away from her.”

“You can’t let her have it, Janet,” Grandmother said, ignoring Emmett.

“Why not? I certainly don’t want Emmett or the dragons getting their hands on it.”

“Gods can’t be trusted,” Grandmother said firmly. “Even friendly ones. What
she
thinks is right to do with it might destroy half this world. She’s originally from Beneath, remember? She doesn’t have good, solid earth magic to ground her.”

“Hey,
I’m
from Beneath,” Gabrielle said hotly.

“Exactly my point.”

I took a step forward, trying to shut out the distractions. “What do you want the pot for?” I asked Bear.

She fixed a gaze on me like the power of seventeen suns. “For? Why must things be
for
, human child?”

“I’m trying to understand why you didn’t destroy a thing that dangerous a long time ago. It tried to turn me into something I didn’t want to be. If I’d kept resisting it, I’d have died.”

“Because you are human, Stormwalker. Though god blood beats in your veins, you are held to the earth, as is your sister. Humans are too weak for my vessel. The shamans who decided to destroy it in lava many years ago were unable to throw it away, so I took it from them and hid it. But it uncovered itself eventually, and so your Nightwalker’s friend found it.”

“You’re going to hide it again?”

“Bring me the vessel, Janet.”

“Janet.” Another rumbling voice assailed me, one I was relieved to hear.

Mick walked out of the black shadows of the canyon walls, Elena with him. Mick was dressed, so he must have had Elena carry clothes for him, but the aura of his dragon flight was pungent—the familiar taste of fire and smoke wrapped up in the music of his name.

I tried not to hurry as I went to meet him. “Did you bring him?” I asked in a low voice.

Mick took my hand. “He’s coming.”

Elena wore her usual look of disapproval. “The Nightwalker insisted on accompanying us.”

Ansel walked shakily out of the shadows, as though he’d been waiting until summoned. He folded his arms over his lanky body, his sandstone-colored Sedona T-shirt making his skin even starker white.

“This was my fault,” he said. “I want to put it right.”

I didn’t agree with him, but Elena broke in before I could answer. “Whatever you do, don’t give the vessel to the goddess.”

“So Grandmother advised me.”

“Ruby is correct. The bear goddess has infinite power, maybe more than Coyote himself. She made that vessel to contain some of her extra power so she could hold onto her shape and live more easily in this world. But she didn’t know how to temper her strength. She gave it to shamans of a tribe, trying to help them. They found that the pot enhanced their magic, but the magic built to dangerous levels, and then the pot, made to siphon off excess power, sucked it all back out of them until they were dead. Mortals simply can’t handle those kinds of forces.”

Made sense from what Jamison had told me, and what I’d experienced. “How do you know all this?” I asked Elena.

“Bear told me.”

I blinked. “She told you? Why didn’t she tell
me
?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she likes my cooking.”

Elena shut off her stream of information then and walked away to be with Grandmother, leaving me with Mick and Ansel, Mick still holding my hand.

Elena’s irritability aside, I agreed with her and grandmother that Bear shouldn’t have the pot until we understood more what she’d do.

Ansel unfolded his arms. “I’m only here because one of these people has Laura. I’m not leaving until I find her.”

He moved away from us and the rest of the group, his Nightwalker speed carrying him out of sight into the shadows before I could ask him to stay.

I squeezed Mick’s hand. “We could go,” I said softly.

We could fly away from here, to another continent or a remote island to lie in the sun or in a cool-sheeted bed together. We could leave god magic, ancient pottery, and power-hungry mages to themselves.

Mick wanted to. His eyes flicked from black to the deep blue I’d fallen in love with.

I looked from him across the space of ground to Grandmother and Gabrielle, in a cluster with Elena, taking themselves apart from Emmett. My family.

As a child, my grandmother had been hard on me. I realized much later she’d been hard because she’d known I possessed powerful magic, more powerful than the earth magic she’d inherited from her shaman ancestors. She’d been afraid, I understood now, that I’d turn out to be an evil being like my mother, or at least arrogantly powerful like Emmett.

Now Grandmother had taken in Gabrielle, born of our goddess mother and an Apache man who’d been weak and cruel. Gabrielle was a handful of trouble, but Grandmother was teaching her and protecting her as she’d taught and protected me.

They were my family. Vulnerable. Here because of their own stubbornness, but here. To help me.

I swung Mick’s hand. “Afterward? You and me? Beach?”

He sent me a sinful look that licked heat through my body. “I have the perfect place in mind.”

Knowing Mick, it would be remote, quiet, and romantic, and we wouldn’t resurface for days.

I let out a sigh. “Let’s survive this first. We need a plan.”

Mick grinned. “You brought us here without a plan? What am I going to do with you, sweetheart?”

“My plans always screw up. You know that. I hoped you’d have some ideas.”

Mick studied the group with cool calculation. “Kill Emmett, kill Pericles if he comes. Tell Nash how to destroy the pot and have him do it for us.”

“That sounds easy and dragon-y. What about Bear? She’s insisting we bring the pot to her. I’m betting she’s responsible for making my motorcycle carry me out here in the first place, so I’d get curious. Or maybe she planned to talk to me, but Officer Yellow got in the way. The mirror said a person hadn’t been responsible, but Bear’s not a person, she’s a god.” I let out a breath. “Would you fight her? I don’t think we can.”

“I’ve fought gods before.” Mick studied Bear, who still stood patiently in the moonlight, the bearskin around her looking almost alive. “But with Bear, I was thinking about using reason.”

“Good luck with that.” Gods would listen to reason, true, but you never knew how they’d twist your reason to their own purpose. They might nod and agree with you, then walk away and carry on with whatever they’d planned in the first place.

Headlights broke the night, a vehicle winding down the canyon road. I couldn’t tell at this distance what kind of vehicle, but I knew that Nash had come.

“We’d better decide fast,” I said.

“We defend Nash from physical attack,” Mick said. “He’s our primary objective. When the others exhaust themselves trying to keep each other from the pot, then we disable them and decide what to do with it.”

“What about if dragons join in?” I asked, looking up.

Mick snapped his attention to the sky. Two giant silhouettes blotted out the starlight, both with wings spread. One dragon was midnight black—Drake—the other fiery red—Colby, still under compulsion to obey.

Drake’s fire streaked down and caught Nash’s black F250. The impact lifted the truck a few feet into the air before dropping it again, the entire truck engulfed in incandescent flame. Dragon fire was magical, so it couldn’t hurt Nash directly, but it could incinerate the truck he was in, or push it over the edge of the road into the canyon.