Chaos Bites (18 page)

I skimmed a few Web sites. Totems watched over a particular group of people—usually a family, a clan, or a tribe—and were carved to depict the animal spirit associated with them. Totems were most often used by the Ojibwe but had been found in European, African, and Australian cultures as well.

I discovered that while the Ojibwe had once dominated the Upper Midwest from northern Michigan through South Dakota, and could easily have left something like this in the area, though doubtfully on my bed, they did not carve totems out of turquoise. Turquoise was found somewhere else.

In the land of the Navajo—the Apache, the Zuni, and Pueblo, too, but considering I was dealing with a couple of Navajo skinwalkers, we’d just stick to Navajo carvings for the moment.

Navajo didn’t carve totems but fetishes, ascribing mystical qualities to the inanimate objects. According to the light research I was able to do in ten minutes on the ’Net, a fetish gave the wearer increased powers. The carving was often kept in the medicine bundles of Navajo shamans and used in their ceremonies.

A fetish made of turquoise was especially powerful, because the Navajo believed turquoise a sacred stone that increased communication between the wearer and the supernatural.

I rubbed the tiny coyote between my fingers. “In that case, I’ll just keep you close by.”

When I left the motel, the sun had just crept past the long navy-blue line of the horizon, turning everything from violet to molten gold. I tucked the fetish into the pocket of my jeans. Who knew why Sawyer had left it, but I was certain I’d soon find out. One thing I’d learned since becoming leader of the light—everything happened for a reason. I might not like the reason, but there was always a reason.

Since I’d taken care of the necessities by having coffee in my room, I didn’t bother to stop for breakfast. All I wanted was to find the Old One and do what needed to be done.

Less than an hour later I approached Inyan Kara. I’d seen the mountain on the horizon within minutes of leaving Upton behind. It wasn’t hard considering the land leading up to it was flat and covered with low, patchy grass. Buildings rose here and there—red, white, gray—and cattle dotted the landscape like flies.

The mountain was surrounded by private land, and as the clerk had indicated, I’d need permission to climb it. So I followed the arrow on a hand-painted sign, knocked on the door of the house at the end of a dry and dusty lane, then politely asked the elderly woman who answered for her blessing.

She pursed her lips and eyed me from head to foot. “You know the mountain is ’bout twelve square miles?”

“Yes.” I hadn’t, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to examine every inch of it as she was examining every inch of me. I just wanted to find Sani.

She stepped onto the porch, her steel-gray braid swaying across her thin back, then pointed toward the crest with a hand marred by age spots and raised blue veins. “Ridge is the shape of a horseshoe, with the peak in the middle. Real steep, that ridge. The peak’s thousands of feet high, bare of grass and trees, slippery as all get-out. Big old canyon in between. You be careful.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Best be back before dark.” She eyed my bare arms. “Gets cold on Inyan Kara when the sun goes down.”

Since I did not plan to stay there after dark I had no problem agreeing.

“Whatcha want up there anyway?” she asked.

My mind went blank. For an instant I couldn’t think if I should tell her the truth or a lie, then I couldn’t recall what lies I’d told lately and to whom, which was the problem with lies. I decided to stick as close to the truth as I could.

“I heard there were black coyotes.”

“You another one of them cryptozoologists? Had one here last week looking for a new species.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Just so you know, none of them ever seen a black coyote.” She went into the house and shut the door. As I turned to leave, I murmured, “I will.”

I drove as close to the mountain as I could get in the Impala then loaded a backpack with water, granola, crackers, and a jacket. I checked my cell phone, though I doubted I’d get much reception up there. Still, never leave sea level without it.

I found it a little strange that no one had called—not Jimmy, not Summer, not Megan or Luther. Then again, two out of three had their hands full with the baby from—

I paused. I’d been about to think
hell
but that was far too possible to joke about. At the back of my mind hovered the concern that Faith could be the daughter of the last leader of the darkness. For all I knew, she could become the next one. Or even something worse.

I headed up the sharp incline that composed one arm of the horseshoe ridge. The Norway pines provided welcome shade as the sun climbed ever higher. On several occasions a quick grab for a branch saved me from sliding, maybe even falling.

Reaching the top, I glanced into the gaping canyon then up to the peak. I really didn’t want to climb that, but I’d do whatever I had to do to find that damn skin-walker.

If he was close by, if he even existed, he had to know I was here. I didn’t sense anyone, or anything, following me, but that didn’t mean they weren’t.

“I’m supposed to be a sorcerer,” I muttered. “So sorcer.”

Too bad I didn’t know how. I missed Sawyer for more reasons than one. He’d taught me a lot, but there’d been a lot still left to teach.

However, most of what I
had
learned about magic involved opening myself to the power within, focusing on what I wanted, and believing it could happen. Which wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

I closed my eyes, stilled my mind, fixed the image of a coyote in the center—a black coyote—then . . . well the only way to describe it is that I reached, sending my desire into the world and trying to pull that desire back to me.

Nothing happened.

“Sometimes you need a spell,” I said. “Eye of newt, sacrifice a goat.” I shivered. Sometimes a goat wasn’t a goat but a human. I’d seen both die for the sake of magic. I hadn’t particularly cared for either option.

Since I was alone, with no goat and not a single eye of newt, I sat on a high, flat rock and drank half a bottle of water in a single gulp as I wondered what in hell I should do. When I lowered my head, a black coyote stared at me from a few feet away.

Though I’d been hoping for just such an occurrence, the sight made me uneasy. I wasn’t Navajo, not by blood, but I was a skinwalker by magic. I hadn’t learned everything, but I had learned some things. Namely that the coyote is a bad omen as well as a symbol of black magic. Nevertheless, I needed his help.

“Sani?” I asked.

The coyote began to pant.

As the motel clerk had said, he was big. Maybe he
was
part wolf; more than likely he was merely part man.

“Can you shift? I don’t have access to a coyote . . .” I searched for a word to explain what I needed—a tattoo, a robe, something to spark the change. That I was even considering becoming a coyote showed how desperate I was. According to Sawyer, that just wasn’t done.

The animal tilted his head so far to the right, he was nearly upside down. I sighed. When I was a wolf—or anything else—I could decipher plain English.

“Do you understand me?” His head bent in the other direction.

What the hell? Either Sani couldn’t or wouldn’t shift, or this wasn’t Sani.

If I were a coyote, we could “talk.” In animal form talking was telepathy. But I’d have to become a coyote to do so. Tigers couldn’t talk to wolves and birds couldn’t talk to coyotes.

“Wait a second!” I got to my feet. The sudden exclamation and movement had the coyote skittering backward. “Shhh,” I whispered.

I tugged the fetish from my pocket, held it up to the shimmering, tree-shadowed sun. The coyote yipped and hurried forward.

“Think this will work?” I asked, but I knew it would. Why else did I have it?

If I was going to shift, I needed to lose the clothes. I narrowed my eyes at the coyote. “I don’t suppose you’d consider turning around?” He lifted his lip and showed me his teeth. “That’s what I thought.”

In the past few months I’d become less shy about being naked, but I still wasn’t wild about stripping in front of strangers. However, I needed to get past that and there was—

“No time like the present,” I said, then pulled my top over my head.

Less than a minute later, I stood naked in the dappled light. The coyote seemed far too interested in my breasts for a coyote.

Putting aside my unease, I curled my fingers around the coyote fetish, pressing the stone into my palm and waiting for the bright flash that preceded the change. The sun continued to flicker over my bare skin; the shadows made me shiver.

I closed my eyes. Centering myself, emptying my mind, opening my heart, I reached for the change.

“That isn’t going to work.”

My eyes flew open. My gaze swept the tree line. Nothing there but the coyote. I spun around. Nothing behind me but the steep, forested ridge.

“Who’s there?”

“Who do you think?”

The voice was deep and aged, with the odd cadence I associated with those who spoke English as their second language.

I turned back. The coyote remained the only living thing besides me within earshot.

CHAPTER 20

“I don’t need to ask who sent you,” he said.

A talking coyote. Terrific.

“No?” I couldn’t seem to manage any more than that.

The coyote glanced behind me. “Where’s Sawyer?”

“Actually, Ruthie Kane told me to come.”

“Ruthie.” His voice lowered to a caress. “How is she?”

“Dead,” I blurted.

The coyote yipped as if he’d been clipped in the butt with buckshot. “Impossible!”

“Not really.”

“Someone with Ruthie’s power never really dies.”

“True that,” I muttered. “She
is
dead, but she still . . .” I waved my hand. “Speaks.”

“To you?”

“Not lately.”

The coyote tilted his head again, studying me. Then his gaze dipped to my breasts. “You should put your clothes back on. It’s been . . .” His head canted in the opposite direction, though his eyes stayed right where they were. “Decades since I saw a naked woman.”

I glanced down. Crap. No wonder he’d been staring. Quickly I turned, earning a rumble of appreciation that I chose to ignore, and threw everything back on.

“You’re Sani?” I asked as I faced the coyote again.

“Isn’t that who you came here to see?”

“Question with a question,” I murmured. “Not really an answer.”

“I am Sani,” he said, and dipped his head in a bow that would have been Old World, if he hadn’t had a snout. “Now, where’s Sawyer?”

“He’s also a little . . . dead.”

Sani blew air through his nose derisively. “Impossible.”

“Do you know what impossible means?”

The coyote’s eyes narrowed. “Skinwalkers do not die.”

“Unless they choose to.”

That shut him up. For a minute.

“Sawyer
chose
to die?”

I nodded, afraid my voice would break if I spoke. “Must have been a woman.” He eyed me again. Again, I remained silent. “How did you come to possess the fetish if Sawyer’s dead?”

“Magic.”

Sani snorted.

“You’re a talking coyote and you don’t believe in magic? By the way,
why
are you a talking coyote?”

“Once, long ago, I trusted the wrong man.”

“You and about a hundred thousand women a year,” I muttered.

He ignored me. “My home was stolen from me along with my human soul.”

“How do you steal a human soul?”

“By stealing the icon where it rests when the human is in coyote form.”

“This?” I held up the carved turquoise. “You’re saying Sawyer stole your soul?”

“And my mountain.”

“Mount Taylor?” The coyote dipped his snout. “Why?”

“Because he could.”

I wanted to argue, but that
did
kind of sound like Sawyer.

“I’ve been told the Navajo don’t trust the coyote.”

Sani opened his mouth in a doggy grin. “What’s your point?”

“Why would you become one?”

“Unlike Sawyer, some of us have little choice over what we become. I dreamed of the coyote when I was a boy. I embraced the form of my spirit animal and the magic it brought to me.”

“Black magic,” I said.

“We take what we are given.”

“Oh, I’m sure you took it,” I said, and I knew exactly how. I couldn’t throw stones. I’d murdered for my magic, too.

“How did you end up on Inyan Kara?” I asked.

“I was banished from the Dinetah, from the Glittering World, from the home I loved and the mountain where I was born. I had to go somewhere, and this place called to me.”

“I hear it’s magic, too. For the Sioux.”

“Magic is magic.”

Not really, but I decided to let that pass.

“Weren’t the Sioux annoyed?” They certainly hadn’t taken kindly to the whites wandering all over these hills.

“A bit. But they had bigger problems than a trespassing Navajo. By the time they were free to deal with me, I was as much a part of the legend of Inyan Kara as they were.”

“How many years have you been a coyote?”

“More years than I was ever a man.”

“Ruthie said you couldn’t leave Inyan Kara.”

“Ruthie is often right.” He tilted his nose into a bright beam of sunlight that reached through the trees, then huffed. “It doesn’t matter.” He shook his coat, giving the impression of a deep shiver. “Coyotes are skittish, and I’ve been one so long people make me nervous.”

“What about me?”

His eyes, so dark a brown they nearly blended into his silky black fur, met mine. “We both know you aren’t a person.”

“No? What am I?”

“I would guess, since Ruthie has spoken to you, that you are the present leader of the light, and considering that tattoo on your neck, I’d say you are also a skinwalker.”

As well as a dhampir, a vampire, a psychic, and a phoenix, but I figured he knew enough, so I shrugged. “How is it that you can talk?”

Question with a question worked both ways.