Shadow Walker (13 page)

Before I could push the button to dial Emilio, I heard a yell and swearing in Spanish from the basement. Dropping phone to desk I sprinted out and down the basement stairs.

Maya and Fremont had returned early to work on repairs, going downstairs before I’d even gone up to wake Cassandra. They didn’t know yet what had happened to Mick, because I was hoping Cassandra would have a quick fix and it wouldn’t be necessary to tell them.

“What?” I asked testily as I hit the bottom step.

“This!” Maya pointed to wires that looked as corroded as the ones she’d showed me yesterday. “I replaced those. Yesterday afternoon.” She flipped the dead wires and more copper crumbled from them. “Let me put it in an English phrase you’ll understand: It’s all fucked-up again.”

“Same thing here,” Fremont said. He sounded sad rather than angry. “Brand-new PVC, the kind that’s flexible, and it’s as disintegrated as the copper.”

The three of us studied the ruin of my pipes and wiring, our combined frustration and defeat keeping us quiet.

“It’s a spell,” I said, my voice hollow. “It has to be.”

Fremont poked a green encrusted pipe with a wrench. “Like Penelope.”

Maya glared at him. “What? Who the hell is Penelope?”

“In the
Odyssey
,” Fremont said. “She promised she’d chose a new husband from the men who hung around her house—they wanted her to declare Odysseus dead and marry one of them so they could get their hands on Odysseus’s estate. But they agreed to let her hold off deciding who she’d marry until she finished weaving her tapestry. So every night she unwove what she’d done that day to buy herself more time.”

“Oh, thanks, Fremont.” Maya scowled. “Very helpful.”

“Only none of us are doing this on purpose,” I said.

Fremont adjusted his hat. “But Janet, there’s a problem with it being a spell. You and Mick have magic wards all over the hotel. Wards are like a net,” he said to Maya. “Or a barrier against malevolent magic. Nothing magical can get in, and if someone is strong enough to penetrate the wards, Janet and Mick are alerted, like a magical burglar alarm. Only you haven’t said you were alerted.”

“No.” I touched the brick wall, feeling the magic, Mick’s and mine, running through it. Strong, tensile, unbroken. The fiery bite of Mick’s magic made me want to cry. But the taint that came when I touched the wiring was there. Faint, but destructive, like a colony of termites.

Termites
. I was pretty sure we’d find those too.

“Mick let the spell in,” I said, realizing.

Even Maya gaped at that, and Fremont looked at me in confusion. “Why would he? Mick lives here too.”

I explained to them about Mick’s enslavement. I deluded myself that I kept an even tone and relayed the information with calm detachment, but I must have sounded as dejected as I felt. Maya, who disliked hugging almost as much as my grandmother, came to me and enfolded me in her strong arms.

I didn’t want her to do that, because I didn’t want to cry. I would be useless if I broke down. But Maya’s warmth comforted me, and I allowed myself to rest against her for just a moment.

I felt Fremont’s shy pat on my back. “But Janet, Cassandra and Pamela don’t have to scour the town looking for the mysterious blond woman. I know who she is.”

I pushed away from Maya. Of course. Fremont, the biggest gossip in Magellan, knew everything there was to know about everyone.

“Who, then?”

“If I’m right, she’s Vonda Wingate. Ted Wingate’s wife.”

Thirteen

Ted Wingate.

My Beneath magic woke with rage. A streak of white-hot power shot from my hand, and Maya and Fremont jumped as bricks behind them exploded.

I grabbed Fremont’s wrench from him and tossed it into his open toolbox. “Enough. Don’t work on this another second. I’m going to make Ted tell me everything he knows, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

“Janet,” Fremont said quickly. “All I know is that I saw Wingate’s wife talking to Mick behind the library.”

If that was supposed to calm me down, it didn’t. “I’m going to find the Wingates and see if they have Mick, and I’m getting Mick back. If Ted had any part in this, I swear to the gods I’m roasting him whole.”

“But . . .” Fremont looked fearful, but even fear couldn’t keep Fremont quiet. “Why would Ted Wingate have his wife put a spell on your hotel? To give her something to do?”

“To make me close and move out.” I shoved more tools into Fremont’s toolbox and slammed it shut. “Mick and I are the strongest mages around; maybe Ted’s helping his wife move into my territory.”

“Why?” Maya asked. “It’s
Magellan
.” She spoke with the incredulity of someone who has lived in a spectacular place all her life and doesn’t understand what other people see in it.

“Because of the vortexes,” I nearly shouted. “You know, the swirls of mystical energy that tourists flock to see? A powerful witch could do so much with vortexes. She might even try to open them, which would seriously suck, trust me.”

If Vonda Wingate opened the right vortex, my mother would come out to play. Mother dearest would kill Vonda immediately, of course, which might kill Mick in turn if Cassandra was right. After that we’d have a bigger problem. My mother.

Maya, of all people, was the calmest of us. “You’re saying that Mrs. Wingate captured Mick so she could do witchy magic on some pipes and wiring, so you’d give up and move out? That’s far-fetched, Janet. If Ted’s wife wanted you out, why wouldn’t she just have Mick burn down the hotel?”

“I don’t know.” It was a good question, and it frustrated me that I didn’t know the answer. A witch who could enslave a dragon could do much more to me than mess with my plumbing. “The best way to find out whether Vonda Wingate has Mick is to ask her. If getting to her involves strangling Ted, so much the better.”

I started up the stairs. I’d read the phrase “towering anger” and never understood what it meant, but I did now. I felt tall, burning, strong, unstoppable.

“Talk to her, Maya,” Fremont said behind me.

“When she’s being crazy Indian on the warpath? No, thanks.”

“We have to stop her.”

I looked down the stairs. “Why don’t you come with me, Fremont, if you want to keep me calm? After all, I don’t have any transportation.”

“Okay, but I’m driving.” Fremont came for the stairs. “I just changed those flats you put on my truck last night,
and
you blew up Cassandra’s car. You’re hard on vehicles, Janet.”

Maya, at the last minute, caught up with us and jumped into the cab of Fremont’s truck beside me. I think she was more worried about me than her cynical comments let on.

Fremont drove to Flat Mesa far too slowly for my liking. The road had been plowed, but the current thaw filled it with dirty slush and standing water. Fremont navigated carefully, and the twenty miles seemed to take forever. The sky was clear and blue, but the snow had been so thick that it still blanketed the desert, blinding whiteness stretching to the horizon.

Once we reached Flat Mesa, Fremont drove to the residential area. I looked around at the old bungalows mixed with modern houses, some yards pristine, others filled with junked cars, old tires, and snowed-over swing sets. “How do you know where they live?” I asked him.

“They moved into my cousin’s best friend’s house,” Fremont said. “She sold up and moved to Albuquerque.”

Fremont’s knowledge of the comings and goings in the two towns would make an FBI agent green with envy. He turned down a slushy street, past kids throwing snowballs and dogs chasing up and down. Fremont finally halted in front of an ordinary suburban house half-hidden by a squat cedar that took up most of the front yard.

I felt the wards on the house as soon as I hopped out of the truck. I could see the white blue aura of them, rippling and sizzling, wanting to keep me out. My heart almost broke when I recognized a touch of Mick’s fire in them.

I didn’t need to charge in through the wards and start fighting to find out what was going on. I simply walked to the front door and rang the doorbell.

Ted answered it. I was surprised he wasn’t at his office on a weekday, with the roads now clear, but I was too angry to care. Ted’s tan was as pristine as ever, his hair as well styled, his handsome face as irritating. He didn’t look pleased to see me, but he gave me a smug look, knowing I couldn’t hurt him while he stood safely behind his wife’s wards.

“Well, now, little gal, changed your mind about my offer, have you?”

“Where is he?” I demanded.

“Where is who?”

I tried to look past Ted, but it was gloomy in his house, and it smelled a bit. “Why don’t you let me in, and I’ll tell you?”

“I’d be a fool to do that. We can talk fine with you out there.”

I reached for him, not with magic but with my outstretched fingers. Some wards won’t let magic through, but a human body can penetrate them with no problem.

Fire snapped around my hand, and I jerked back. Ted smirked. “Talk or go. It’s getting cold. I want to shut the door.”

I yanked one of Ted’s checklists out of my jacket pocket, tore it into shreds, and threw it at him. The wards let the harmless papers through to flutter to the floor at his feet.

“Fuck you and your inspection. If you want war with me, you’ve got it, but you leave my hotel and Mick out of it.”

“I didn’t come here to make war, little gal.”

“You’ve got it anyway. Tell me why your wife wants me out of the hotel.”

Ted tried to give me an innocent look, but he wasn’t good at innocent looks. “My wife’s got nothing to do with it. I’m just doing my job.”

“Bullshit. There’s a spell on the hotel to keep me from bringing it up to code so you and the county can shut me down. You tell me why.”

Ted shrugged, smiling. I had the sudden feeling that he wasn’t stonewalling me; he really didn’t know why. He wasn’t the one with the power here. He’d been assigned a role and was playing along.

“Janet,” another voice rumbled behind me. “I told you what to do if you saw me again.”

I turned. Mick stood in the front yard next to the cedar, in shade cast by the bright sunshine. He wore his leather jacket, hiding his tattoos, but I sensed them beneath the coat, writhing and shivering as they’d done last night. His eyes were dark, dragon eyes, in his hard face, and they watched me with no friendliness.

“Mick.”

He regarded me with a coldness I’d never seen in him. Correction, a coldness I’d never seen him direct at
me
. I’d watched him take down plenty of enemies while wearing that expression—calculating, intense, deadly.

“Grandmother and Cassandra explained the enslavement to me,” I said hurriedly. “I can break it, but only if you give me your true name. I’m strong enough to get you free, but I need the name to do it.”

Mick’s expression didn’t change. “Give my true dragon name to
you
? How stupid do you think I am?”

The words cut, but I held it together. “I could kill the witch who holds you, but if I do that, you might die too. Your name is the only way.”

Mick’s lip curled. “You have no idea how to use that power locked inside you, Stormwalker. What would happen if I gave you my true name? You’d blunder around and shatter the name, and me, trying to figure out what to do with it. I’m not idiotic enough to give the gift of my name to someone like you. You’d kill me with your incompetence.”

More cutting. I swallowed. “It’s the best I can do. If the dragon council finds out you’ve been enslaved, they’ll come for you, and they won’t care who dies. You, the witch, Ted, the kids playing down the street. I kind of want to prevent that.”

Mick’s black eyes flickered in annoyance. There was nothing of the blue in them, nothing of the Mick who’d smiled at me so devilishly in that restaurant in Las Vegas, before he’d taken me back to his hotel room to make deep love to me.

“Do you remember what I told you when I left?” he asked. “I said that when you saw me again, you should run? You’d better start running, Janet Begay.”

I folded my arms. “If you think I will roll over and give you to a witch, especially one with the bad taste to marry someone like Ted
,
you don’t know me.”

“No.” Mick smiled. “You don’t know
me
.”

I sensed his surge of magic the split second before a fireball shot from his hand. I dove desperately behind the cedar, landing flat on my face in the mud, and the tree took the brunt of the blast. The cedar burst into flames, its dry branches sucking in fire, a sharp, sweet smoke rising from it. I heard Maya shriek and Fremont shout. Ted swore and slammed the front door.

As I climbed to my feet, Mick stood calmly on the other side of the burning cedar, his eyes still deadly cold despite the red tinge in them. The tree hemmed me in between the house and a corner of the six-foot block fence that separated Ted’s yard from his neighbor’s. Mick blocked my escape to the street.

Mick started for me. No sympathy, no love showed on his face that the fire illuminated. His expression was blank, determined, his eyes going gray white again, and I had no doubt about what he was determined to do.

Mick opened his hand and let fly fire. I was up the six-foot wall, toes desperately scrambling, fingers scraped raw as I climbed the fence like a rat. I made it to the top as the fireball struck below me, the cement blocks popping as dragon flame melted them.

I jammed my feet under me and sprinted along the top of the wall, praying to keep my balance. I reached the back of Ted’s yard and leapt to the ground on the neighbor’s side. The neighbor hadn’t fenced the rest of that property, but a stand of cottonwood trees lined a narrow creek behind it, water trickling between frozen banks. I ducked into the trees’ shadow, my feet breaking through the ice, freezing water pouring into my boots.

I stopped, panting, realizing that I heard no one chasing me. Not Mick, not my friends. Mick had let me go, but who the hell knew what he was doing to Maya and Fremont?

Tears froze on my cheeks as I burst from the trees and sprinted through another yard back to the road. As soon as I stepped onto the asphalt, Fremont’s truck roared toward me, tires screeching as he pulled up. Maya flung open the door, and I leapt in beside her, my feet so numb I could barely feel them.

Fremont accelerated before I’d managed to close the door, and the momentum snapped the door shut.

“He just stood there,” Fremont yelled as he tore out of the neighborhood. “Mick watched you run, but he didn’t try to follow. He didn’t seem interested in us at all.”

“Not that we’d know,” Maya said, throwing Fremont a dark look. “Fremont took off the minute Mick started throwing fire around.”

“I decided we should get the hell out of there,” Fremont said.

“Good call.” I folded my arms across my chest, my hands bleeding and smarting.

“What now?” Fremont asked. “Still want to interrogate Ted?”

I’d never get to Ted with Mick protecting him. I hadn’t even learned whether the witch was in the house at all, but the visit had at least confirmed Vonda Wingate as the witch who’d enslaved Mick. Mick’s magic had been mixed in the wards guarding the Wingate’s house, and Ted had looked so damned smug.

I bunched my hurt hands. “Back to the hotel,” I said. “I need to change the wards.”

I held myself together while Cassandra lit the sage smudges. Then she and I traced runes over every door and window and on every beam, wafting sage smoke into every corner of the hotel. My grandmother watched this witch magic with a scowl on her face, but she didn’t interfere.

It hurt me to work the wards, because not only was I erasing traces of Mick, Mick was the one who’d showed me how to do wards in the first place. He’d taught me so much, not only about magic, but about myself, and now I was clearing the walls and rooms of all traces of him.

Cassandra and I finished, meeting in the lobby. She chanted a final spell, and we left the sweet-smelling sage burning in a bowl on the reception counter. I excused myself to clean up and made for my bathroom in the back.

The hot water still worked, thanks to Maya. I filled the tub, poured in scented bath salts, stripped off my clothes, and sank into the water’s warm embrace.

My unbandaged hands stung, and my bruises complained. I paid no attention. I drew my legs up to my chest, rested my head on my knees, and cried.

I cried hard, sobs racking my body. My chest kept on heaving even when I had no tears left, my throat raw, my face wet.

At Ted’s house, Mick had looked at me not with hatred but with cold indifference. He’d viewed me as an enemy to be stopped, nothing more.

I could have fought him. I could have gathered my Beneath magic, hurled it at him, hurt him, shut him down. But none of that would have brought him back to me. All the strength of my magic wouldn’t have broken the spell and made Mick look at me again with love in his eyes.

Unbidden came the warmth of his voice when he’d said,
I’m in love with you, and you alone. My crazy, beautiful Stormwalker.

My tears returned full force.

Someone walked into the bathroom. I raised my wet face to see my grandmother seat herself on the closed lid of the toilet, the folds of her long skirt falling modestly about her feet. I curled into myself, not wanting her to see me like this but not having the strength to tell her to go away.

She spoke in Navajo. “Janet, you need to do something about this.”

I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. “I did do something. I erased Mick’s wards and covered them with mine and Cassandra’s. He can’t come back here to hurt anyone. I shut him out. Do you have any idea how hard that was for me?”