Black Moon Sing (The Turquoise Path Book 1) (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

“
S
kinwalker!” Ellery’s answer was half laugh, half shout. “
Hah!
Shows what you know: not a damn thing.”

“But your eyes,” Hosteen said. He still sounded shaky, awed.

“But nothing. I’m
not
a skinwalker. There’s a proper word for what I am: a Changer. Or to be more specific, a trader.”

“You’re a shapeshifter. Everyone knows—”

Ellery donned her shades again. Hosteen relaxed visibly when the eerie red glow of her eyes vanished behind the lenses.

“Yes, I am a shape-shifting Paranormal, but that doesn’t make me a skinwalker. It doesn’t make me
evil
.”

“I never said you were evil,” Hosteen insisted, holding up his hands again in that placating gesture.

“But what is a skinwalker, according to Diné belief, if not evil?”

Hosteen grimaced. Ellery had him pinned to the mat, and they both knew it.

The Diné were certainly not the first or the only people in the world to assume Paras were bad. It had happened everywhere, in every culture, as far as Ellery could tell. In Europe and Colonial America, people had been killed for witchcraft—whether they were really witches or not. The Arab tribes had their djinn, the Hindus feared shape-shifting rakshasas, and all across Africa people had fostered fears of paranormal beings from abayifo to zimwi. Every culture in the world had its particular assumptions about paranormal beings. But none of those assumptions, as far as Ellery knew, were true.

“Look,” she said, “I’m willing to grant that maybe there is something to the Diné beliefs. Maybe some Diné practice a form of magic I’m not aware of. Maybe there are evil shapeshifting witches out there who are everything our people believe skinwalkers to be: malevolent and dangerous and not to be trusted. But just because I’m a shapeshifter, and just because I’m Diné, that doesn’t mean I’m a
skinwalker
, okay? I’m like every other Para in the world, from any given culture. I’m just trying to keep to myself, live my life, and take care of my own. Same as you. And I really
am
just a barista. So now will you please step aside and let me get on with my life? Somewhere there’s an annoying white lady named McKayla who’s waiting for me to make her an iced skinny pumpkin spice latte with no whip.”

Hosteen shuffled to one side. Ellery brushed past him, walking quickly down the dark alley, trying not to give in to the impulse that was screaming down her nerves to
run
. That would only give him more reason to suspect her of wrongdoing—to find some way to haul her back to the Navajo Nation, where he did have jurisdiction, and where, she knew, tribal law would not treat her kindly.

“I really do need your help, Ellery,” he said as she walked away. “And I hope you’ll be kind enough to assist me.”

“Not interested,” she answered without turning around. She was almost at the mouth of the alley now, nearly out on the street where she could run again if necessary.

“William Roanhorse is dead.”

Ellery froze at the alley’s mouth. A cold wave crashed over her, scouring away all her bravado, even her panic over Hosteen’s presence and her concern for Vivi. It left behind nothing but emptiness, a vast, cavernous sense of loss that she hadn’t felt in ten years.

She turned around slowly. Hosteen was still standing where she’d left him, a blocky shadow against the deeper dark of the alley.

“William Roanhorse was like an uncle to me,” Ellery said softly.

In truth, he was the last family she had in all the world, although he was no blood relation. He was the kindly elder who, when she was just a girl and her shifting abilities first began to manifest, had taken Ellery under his wing and taught her what it meant to be a Changer, how to work with the animal spirits that chose her for Trading. Roanhorse had taught all the Changers Ellery knew on the reservation—a very small group, to be sure, and one that had had to guard its secrets more assiduously than Paras did in the Anglo world, lest they be mistaken for skinwalkers—for malevolent beings.

When she’d fled the reservation at the age of fourteen, Ellery had begged Roanhorse to come with her—to escape the danger and set up a new life elsewhere, someplace where Paras could expect a little more freedom, more understanding. But the old man had shaken his head and smiled. “This is my home,” he told her, “and I won’t leave it.”

Ellery had hugged him so tightly that day, she thought she might stop the world in its tracks and freeze time right there, just her alone with the last family that was left to her. But the world hadn’t stopped turning. Time went mercilessly on. She eventually pulled away from Roanhorse and left, with nothing but the remembered feeling of his strong, warm arms holding her tightly, bracing her up with confidence and love.

She had always intended to go back and visit Roanhorse—somehow. To find him and let him know that she was okay.

But now he was gone forever.

“He’s dead?”

Hosteen nodded. “It wasn’t a… a natural death.”

“He was
killed
?”

“Why don’t we go somewhere and talk?” Hosteen suggested. “An alley is no place to discuss something as important as a loved one’s death.”

Still Ellery hesitated. The traffic flowed past, smooth and swift. She longed to run, to let go of all her concerns and sprint down the street at her greatest speed, to keep on running out of Flagstaff and far out into the desert where her fears and her darkest memories could never find her.

But she sighed, and then nodded. “All right. I can agree to talk to you, at least, as long as we stay in a public place.”

A
t the all-night diner across the street from the alley, Ellery and Hosteen settled into a booth, secluded in the back of the restaurant. The waitress filled their coffee mugs; as soon as she had gone, Ellery leaned her elbows on the table, fixing Hosteen with a stare.

“Tell me what happened to William Roanhorse. Don’t hold anything back.”

Hosteen sipped his coffee slowly, as if reluctant to talk after all. But Ellery’s stare was relentless, and finally he set his cup back on the table.

“Roanhorse was killed inside his home.”

Ellery remembered the place. Unlike most Diné, the old man had lived in a traditional hogan, a domed, roughly octagon-shaped hut made of logs and the red mud of the Colorado Plateau. A memory of the place came back vividly to her: pale morning light coming in through its open door, illuminating its simple furniture, the woven rugs on the floor, the colorful cloths hung high up near the convex ceiling, covering the chains of turquoise beads that waited there for Roanhorse’s use.

She hated to think of him being killed there, in a place that was so beloved to him and to Ellery herself—a place that had been filled with joy and light.

“They killed him in his house? While he was defenseless and alone? Why?”

“Wait a minute,” Hosteen said. “‘They’? Who do you think did it?”

Ellery shrugged uncomfortably. “You’re the cop; you tell me. I haven’t been back to the Rez in ten years.”

“You seem to have some suspicion already of who might have killed Mr. Roanhorse.”

Now it was Ellery’s turn to sip her coffee slowly. It was a useful delaying tactic. “‘They’ is a vague word.”

“You have a suspicion—I can see it in your eyes.”

She glowered at Hosteen. “I’ll put my shades back on, if you think my eyes give away so much.”

You’re damn right, I have suspicions about who killed Roanhorse
.

It wasn’t the first time a Changer had been killed on the Rez. But what did this Hosteen character actually know about Roanhorse? Did he know the man had been a shapeshifter, or did he assume Roanhorse was Typical?

Ellery’s long-ingrained instinct to avoid all talk of shapeshifting around Diné had kicked in. If Hosteen didn’t already know that Roanhorse had paranormal abilities—that he had, in fact, turned out to be the most knowledgeable and capable Changer Ellery had ever met—then she wasn’t about to supply him with that information.

But if any of the more superstitious Typicals who lived on the Rez had suspected Roanhorse of shapeshifting… of being a skinwalker… well, that could easily have spelled his doom.

“He
was
killed in his house,” Hosteen went on, “but here’s the thing: when we found him, the door was barred from the inside.”

Shocked, Ellery leaned back against the booth seat. Her breath whooshed out of her lungs, and for a long moment she couldn’t seem to draw another. But at last she managed to stammer, “Maybe… maybe he died of natural causes, then.”

Hosteen shook his head slowly, his eyes deep with sympathy below the brim of his black hat. “No, Ellery. The attack was… violent. There’s no way his death was natural. No way it could have been a suicide, either.”

Her eyes filled with tears; she blinked them away, turning her face to gaze out across the diner so Hosteen couldn’t see. “He wouldn’t have killed himself anyway. I’m sure of it.”

There was a pause. Then Hosteen said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Ellery stared despondently into her coffee. “Well, I don’t know what I can possibly do to help you. The killer—whoever it is—is on the reservation, not here. Unless—” She looked up at him with sudden astonishment, which flamed immediately into fury. “You don’t think
I
killed him!”

“No, no.” Hosteen held up his hands again, trying to soothe her anger. “But I do think a…” He pressed his lips together, obviously searching for a word that wouldn’t offend her. “I think a Paranormal person did it.”

Ellery snorted. “You think it was a skinwalker.”

“A
Changer
,” Hosteen said with delicate emphasis. “If that’s what you prefer to call yourselves.”

“It’s not what we
prefer
; it’s what we
are
. You Typs are the ones who make up creative names for us, and creepy legends that follow us around and ruin our lives. I don’t know if actual Navajo skinwalkers exist or not. Maybe they do. But I’m not—”

“Then maybe I’m not wrong,” he interjected. “Maybe
that
is exactly what killed William Roanhorse.”

“I can tell you with full certainty that a Changer definitely
didn’t
kill him.” A Changer wouldn’t take the life of another Changer unless it was absolutely necessary—in self-defense—and no Changer would attack another, so self-defense would never become necessary.

But Ellery was still banking on the hope that Hosteen had no idea about Roanhorse’s magical abilities. She said, “If something else did it—someone who chooses to call himself a skinwalker, who chooses to do evil deeds—then I have nothing to do with it, no knowledge about it, and nothing useful to tell you.”

She sipped her coffee again, studying the cop’s face for a moment. He looked kindly and honest, and the spark of drive in his eyes intrigued her. It was a hunger of sorts—to solve the mystery of Roanhorse’s death. She wasn’t entirely certain she knew what motivated Hosteen Sikaadii, but here, sitting across from her in a restaurant instead of blocking her egress from a darkened alley, she at least found him significantly less menacing.

“Why do you care so much, anyway?” Ellery asked him. “Why are you so gung-ho to get to the bottom of his death?”