Firewalker (23 page)

Read Firewalker Online

Authors: Allyson James

Tags: #Paranormal, #General, #Romance, #Paranormal Romance Stories, #Shapeshifting, #Fiction

BOOK: Firewalker
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What Jamison wanted me to do scared me. I could pretend that I’d already learned to direct the Beneath magic in me—hadn’t I done well fighting at the club, not to mention knocking out the guy in the hotel room? But I knew Jamison was right; the magic inside me was like a beast, waiting to get out.
Jamison’s low Navajo words made my Beneath magic stir. Not in fear, in anger.
The desert at our feet was also home to skinwalkers, hideous creatures of massive strength that wrapped themselves in the skins of animals or people they killed to take their form. My Beneath magic could summon them. I knew this instantly, although I’d never thought about it before.
You can summon them, control them, use them to destroy your enemies.
I didn’t have enemies. I didn’t have time for that.
Images of people flashed before me, everyone who’d ever hurt me. Girls at school who made fun of me. High school boys who were nice to me until they revealed they only wanted a free grope. My grandmother and her strict admonitions. Nash Jones, who liked to lock me in his jail. The dragons, vast winged creatures who wanted me to cease to exist. Mick.
You can command any of them. Skinwalkers, Nightwalkers. You summoned the one who tried to kill Nash.
Like hell I had. I opened my eyes, which had drifted shut. The sage glowed with hot sparks, orange and angry in the darkness. Jamison’s voice went on, low words in Navajo that enveloped us in prayer and protection.
I’d had nothing to do with that Nightwalker at the checkpoint. How could I have? He’d been there looking for easy pickings, hadn’t he?
But then, the Nightwalker had looked at me with something like fear in his eyes after I’d had the strange vision of grinding him to dust with a beam of light. What if my latent anger at Nash had manifested in me calling on a Nightwalker to finish him off? Nash’s unique resistance to magic had killed it, but I’d been uncertain about that outcome.
Or maybe I’d summoned the Nightwalker to test Nash’s ability to nullify its magic. Used it and let it die to satisfy my curiosity.
“No!” I said out loud.
Jamison jumped and opened his eyes.
I jerked my hands from his grasp. “This is crazy. It won’t work. Leave it alone.”
“What are you afraid of, Janet?”
His voice was too gentle, too understanding. It drove me crazy.
“Me.” I got to my feet. “The magic telling me how evil I am, how I can make that evil work for me.”
“Demons lie, Janet. They tell frightening lies to bring you under their power. That’s all. You’re strong enough to resist.”
“It isn’t demons. It’s
me
. And I don’t think it’s wrong about me being evil.”
Jamison got to his feet, boots grating. “It is wrong. I know you. You need to learn to separate yourself from it, to observe it, to not let it have power over you.”
“Is this what they taught you down in Mexico?” My voice had a sneer to it I didn’t like.
“No, they tried to keep me wasted on drugs down in Mexico. I learned control the hard way. But it works. Trust me.”
“You can teach me to control
this
?”
The magic leapt into my hands, white light so hot that it made my hangover beat through my brain afresh. The agony in my head was so fierce I feared I was having a stroke, but at the same time, the pain was detached and faraway.
Jamison stepped back, wariness in his eyes. I scented the Changer in him, the wildcat waiting to break free in case it needed to attack.
I kicked the bowl with the sage, scattering herbs and ashes. “You don’t know the first thing about me, Jamison Kee. Your arrogance never left you, no matter what you claim. They should have locked you in a stronger cage and spared all of us you coming back here.”
“Janet.” Jamison backed another foot or two. “This is what you need to control. Focus.”
“You focus on this.”
I scooped the white light into one hand, squishing it into a ball. Then I threw it, not at Jamison, but at the piece of magic mirror.
The mirror screamed, “Oh, no, girlfriend!” and then the light hit it. The mirror didn’t break but reflected the light back, doubled in size and strength.
As soon as the magic left my fist, it released my body, and I sat down hard. My head pounded like fury, and I wanted to vomit.
“No,” I croaked at the light. “Stop.”
Jamison’s dark eyes widened in fear as the light swept his feet out from under him. I cried out, trying to get up, trying desperately to stop it. Then the magic lifted Jamison, my oldest and dearest friend, and threw him from the roof.
Seventeen
Weeping and screaming, I crawled to the edge and peered into the darkness below. The Beneath magic had dissipated and vanished, leaving me weak. Behind me, the magic mirror sobbed.
“Jamison!” I shouted.
The growl of a mountain lion answered me. I saw eyes in the dark, glowing faintly in the twilight.
I scrambled to my feet and stumbled back inside, down the stairs, around the gallery, and down to the first floor. A couple was checking in, and they stopped and stared as I ran past, my clothes filthy and my eyes wild. I heard Cassandra behind me, reassuring the guests in soothing tones. I had to wonder what excuse she was coming up with for me.
I tore out the back door and headed for the railroad bed. A mountain lion was limping toward it, leaving a trail of Jamison’s clothes behind him.
“Jamison!”
He climbed to the railroad bed and stopped, sides heaving. The rising moonlight showed me pieces of Jamison’s shirt still clinging to his back.
“I’m sorry,” I babbled. “It’s gone. The magic has gone. Are you all right?”
Thank the gods he’d had the presence of mind to change as he fell, landing like a cat. The air shimmered, and Jamison rose on bare feet to his man shape. He moved his shirt rags to cover his privates and regarded me with a mixture of anger and fear.
“Are you all right?” I repeated.
“I’ll live,” he said wearily. “You were right. I am arrogant. I’m not strong enough to help you. My magics are nowhere near what yours are.”
“That wasn’t
me
saying that. It was the magic, whatever is inside me. I lied. I can’t control it. Jamison, what the hell am I going to do?”
Jamison’s angry look softened. Maybe he was remembering the scared fifteen-year-old again. Now I was twenty-six and just as scared.
“Coyote can help you. He’s strong enough.”
“Right. He keeps threatening to kill me if I don’t stop using the magic. But I don’t know how to stop it.”
“Mick, then.”
I hugged my arms to my chest, the evening air turning chilly. “He says the same thing. Besides, he’s gone. We had a fight.”
“Make up with him. You need him.”
“When I said gone, I meant gone as in
I have no idea where he is
. The last I saw him he was heading down the back roads of Arizona. He could have hitched a ride to anywhere by now.”
“Nash, then. If he’s this null, maybe he can help you muffle the magics.”
I had thought of that but was unsure how it could work, or whether I could convince Nash to help me.
“I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”
Jamison started to reach for me, but he thought better of it and dropped his hand.
The gesture cut my heart. Jamison had been the one person I could turn to, the one friend I could trust. Now he didn’t want to touch me, and I couldn’t blame him.
“I feel like shit,” I said.
“You need to rest. What you’re going through is . . . Well, I don’t really know what you’re going through, but exhaustion won’t help.” Jamison’s tone softened. “My shaman advice to you is to go to bed. Before you do, will you call Naomi and tell her I need a ride home? If I walk home as a mountain lion in this town, I’ll probably get shot. And if I do it as a naked man, I’ll never live it down.”
I retreated to my bedroom after I had Cassandra call Naomi, and locked the door. I sat with my back against the headboard for a long time, the thoughts in my head wringing me dry.
I’d hurt one of my best friends in the world. If Jamison hadn’t been a Changer, hadn’t managed to save himself from the fall, he’d be lying in a broken heap, possibly dead. I’d done that. The horror in his eyes had broken my heart.
This was the thing the dragons saw and feared, what Mick had been sent to stop. This past spring, they’d wanted to prevent me from meeting with my hell-goddess mother, but I realized now it went deeper than that. They didn’t want me to
become
her.
I didn’t want to either. Stupid me, thinking I had the magic under control. Just because I was now able to fight with it, to channel it to battle a threat, I thought I’d mastered it. How could I be such an idiot? This power was beyond me. It was god power, and I was a human being.
Though a goddess had brought me into existence, I’d been born of human parents, with human frailty. God power would rip me apart.
I pressed my hands between my knees, my knees to my chest. Could I be terrified now? What was I going to do? Jamison had tried to teach me to observe the magic and understand it, but I didn’t think chanting and meditation was going to help this time.
I needed Mick. He’d taught me to contain my Stormwalker power, to make it part of me. His methods had been harsh at times, but they’d worked. But I had no idea where Mick had gone. I’d thought about calling him earlier today, but when I’d walked into my bedroom, I’d found his cell phone sitting square on my dresser. The sight of it had washed pain all through me.
I could use the mirror to call to Mick, but only if Mick hadn’t thrown his piece away or would even take it out of his damned pocket if he heard it. I’d left the shard up on the roof, but I had another in its chamois bag in the pocket of my leather jacket. I could feel the mirror’s terror from it as well as all the way from the saloon. Because I’d awakened it, it had to obey me, whether it liked it or not. Right now, it feared me, and I didn’t have the heart to force it to work.
I felt so alone right then I thought I’d die.
I sat for hours while the night grew dark and the moon floated across the sky, changing the shadows. I felt the magic wanting to come out and play, but if I held myself tightly enough, I could fend it off. Maybe.
A key turned in the lock, and the door swung inward, the bright rectangle of the doorway piercing my eyes. Maya came in, leaving the door open behind her.
“You all right, Janet?” She sat on the foot of the bed. “Everyone’s worried about you, but they’re afraid to come in here.”
“And you aren’t?”
“No.” Maya wore jeans and a shirt this evening, but she managed to look as lovely in that as she had in her turquoise party dress. “The only things that frighten me are my mother’s lectures about getting married and having children. She says I’m going to be fat and ugly in a few years, so I’d better have snared a man and pushed out a couple of kids by then.”
I wanted to smile, but my mouth was too tight. “If you work out and take care of yourself, your looks will stay around for a while longer.”
“Have you eaten anything since we got back?”
I shook my head. I’d intended to grab some lunch in the kitchen, but never got around to it.
Maya held out her hand. “Come with me. We’re going to get you dinner.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m not going to bring you a tray. Your cook is a scary bitch, and I don’t want to interrupt her when she’s anywhere near her knives.”
“Maya, I can’t. I threw Jamison off the roof. I could have killed him.”
“Is that why he was standing out on the railroad bed mostly naked? You know, he’s really hot. If he wasn’t married...”
“This isn’t a joke.”
Maya grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet with surprising strength. “If you’re trying to get through something, not eating will just make you weaker.”
Right now I felt weak as a flea. Weaker—fleas can be mean.
For some reason, I didn’t try to stop Maya towing me out front and through the lobby. At least she let me bring my jacket. Cassandra watched me from the reception desk but made no move to intercept me. Pamela stood near her, arms folded, looking formidable. She was protecting Cassandra, I realized with a jolt. From me.
Maya took me out to where her own truck sat in the lot, back from its Las Vegas adventure. The Crossroads Bar was going strong, the parking lot full of motorcycles, a knot of biker men and women clustered near the door. Nash Jones liked to raid the place once in a while, looking for drugs and arms dealers. I hoped he didn’t tonight, because I didn’t want to see him.
I thought Maya might take me to the diner to stuff a cheeseburger and milk shake into me, but she passed the diner and turned down the road that led to her own home. The white frame house stood back from the road in a neat patch of lawn, flowers blooming in the tiny garden under the front window.

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