I broke in. “Mick, who is this guy?”
The man grinned at me. “The name’s Colby. Mick’s a friend in need.” His grin widened. “And I’m a friend, indeed.”
“Colby the dragon?” I asked in a dubious voice. “Nice name.”
“It’s the one humans can pronounce,” Colby said. “But, hey, sweetheart, he’s the bad guy. When the dragon council was handing out the assignment of tracking you down and offing you, I refused. Cold-blooded murder’s not my thing. But Micky here volunteered. Jumped at the chance. Said he couldn’t wait to break the storm bitch’s sweet little neck. The storm bitch would be you, by the way.”
Of course Colby would say something like that. He’d walked in here right through our wards, scared my mirror, and challenged me and Mick. I wasn’t about to whirl around and scream, Mick, is this true? That’s what he wanted. Divide and conquer.
“Janet, go run your hotel,” Mick said. Even the eyes of his dragon tattoos glittered with rage. “I need to talk to Colby.”
“Forget it.” I folded my arms. “I want to know who he is and what he’s doing here. And I don’t want to see any fire. Too many flammable things in here, and I already had to restore the place once.”
“I heard about that,” Colby said. “Good fight. I’m sorry I missed it.”
“Talk or get out.”
“She’s a feisty one.” Just to piss me off, Colby shot a flame skyward, but it was a small one and dissipated before it reached the tin ceiling. “She this feisty in bed?”
I let electricity dance on my fingers once again. “Have you ever seen a Stormwalker’s power enhanced by a magic mirror?” I hadn’t, but it might be fun to find out what would happen.
“All right, all right.” Colby lifted his hands in surrender. “I really am here to help you, Micky. The dragons want to burn you to a crisp, and while I wouldn’t mind seeing that, they’re determined not to let you have all the rights that go with a trial, and I don’t like the precedent that sets. No way do I want us all to be little slaves to the dragon council. So I’m here to take your side.”
“What do you mean, not all the rights that go with a trial?” I asked in alarm.
Colby’s eyes narrowed, but his anger wasn’t directed at me. “The council consists of three sticks-up-their-asses dragons who have been alive since the beginning of time and think they own us. They want to control everything every dragon does. They need to learn that the times, they are a-changing.”
“So, what, you came here to gang up with Mick and fight them?”
“She’s precious, Micky. No, I’m going to be his defense attorney, sort of. Find precedents and stuff the rules down the elders’ throats. I may need your help, honey, though you might not do well in front of the council. You’re way too smart-ass.”
In spite of Colby’s nonchalance, I sensed his nervousness. Mick’s eyes had gone black all the way across, and Colby didn’t like that, in spite of the loose-limbed way he lounged in the chair. To an ordinary human, they might look like two biker buddies there to catch up on old times. But Colby’s uneasiness screamed itself to me—he was like a wolf who’d wandered into another wolf’s territory and had unhappily come face-to-face with the head wolf of the pack.
I pulled back a chair and sat down. “So, talk. What exactly do you have planned?”
I could tell Mick didn’t want me there, but there was no way I was letting him keep me out of this. I folded my arms and waited, and finally Mick gave Colby a resigned look.
“Why the hell you are so interested in getting me free?” Mick asked him.
Colby shrugged. He leaned back and put his feet up again, and Mick sat casually on the other side of the table, but the two men might as well have been circling each other, hackles raised.
“Because this trial could make life bad for me, for all dragons. What they do to you, they can do to everyone.”
“I don’t plan to let them win,” Mick said.
“They weren’t even going to let you have a team, did you know that? I had to go to the archive, pull records, prostrate myself in front of the Mighty Three to convince them they’d get lynched if they didn’t at least pretend to follow dragon law.”
Mick watched him narrowly. “You don’t care about the greater good; you’re helping me so you can save your own ass over something. What did you do to piss off the council? This time, I mean.”
Colby laughed, but the laugh was nervous. “Couple of things. Like I said, I don’t want them to set a precedent of frying a dragon’s hide without a defense.”
“What makes you so sure you can help me?”
“I have some ideas. And I know things. Things that could give you leverage.”
“And what do you want in return?”
Colby chuckled again. “You’ll owe me one, Micky. And I’ll call in the favor when it’s the most hell for you.”
“As long as that favor doesn’t involve Janet.”
Colby’s gaze flicked to my cleavage, bared by my tight black top. “She’s a tasty morsel. I’d like to lick her from neck to knees, and I don’t even like humans.”
“Just what I want,” I said. “Dragon drool.”
Colby chuckled, but Mick leaned forward. “Janet is my mate. Touch her and die.” He didn’t even have to raise his voice. I knew he’d do it, and so did Colby.
“Hey, you kill me, no one will be on your side at the trial.”
“I won’t care. So long as Janet is safe from you, I’ll die happy.”
Colby shook his head in amusement. “Oh, man, she’s really knocked you on your ass, hasn’t she?”
“More than once.”
I didn’t know whether to warm at Mick’s fond glance or get irritated at them for talking about me as though I weren’t there. “Excuse me,” I said. “Can we concentrate on you surviving the trial? And I choose what dragon I end up with, not either of you.”
Colby chortled. “Oh, I like her. I really do. I remember when you were all hot to kill her, Micky. You said we had to do anything to keep the Beneath-goddess’s get from opening the vortexes, even if the girl had to be slaughtered. You were ready to off her without a second thought. So what happened?”
“Yes, Mick,” I said in a hard voice. “What happened?”
Mick’s gaze was all for me, and this time, I chose to warm to it. “I watched you fighting,” he said. “You were alone, up against assholes who were ready to throw you on the floor and gangbang you. You boiled with power, but they were human, magicless. You could have wiped out every single one of them and brought the roof down to bury them.” Mick’s eyes went blue and hot, the hint of his smile making me remember him hard and good inside me last night. “But you didn’t. You pulled your punches, tried not to hurt them.”
“Stupid of you,” Colby said around a sip of beer.
“I didn’t have a lot of choice,” I said. Mick might claim I’d been oozing power that night, and I had just come off a big storm, but I’d felt sick and weak and desperate.
“Janet was cornered. She knew she might have to kill to get away, and I saw on her face that she didn’t want to.”
“And this made you want to claim her as mate?” Colby sounded skeptical. “I get that she’s a hot lay, but mate is forever, Micky.”
I gave him a deprecating look, but Mick was still studying me with a tenderness that heated my blood. “Mate came later,” he said. “After I got to know her better.”
I shifted in my chair, wishing Colby far away so I could tell Mick how much I appreciated his sentiments.
Colby heaved an exaggerated sigh. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing, Micky. Mate or no, you did let her open the vortexes. The dragon council plans to screw you to the wall for that.”
“And you want to keep me alive,” Mick said, turning from me. “When did you fall in love with me?”
“Trust me, I don’t care what happens to you, my old friend. I only care that you get a fair trial and a by-the-book defense. I don’t give a de
mon’s dick if they end up pinning one of your wings to the wall in the trophy room.”
“You inspire confidence.” Mick leaned across the table, putting his face close to Colby’s. “But you touch Janet, and you’re toast. I don’t care if we’re in the middle of the dragon high court.”
Colby lifted his hands, tipping back in his chair. “Fine. I get it. Talons off your mate.” He flashed me a grin. “Oh, girl, this is going to be fun.”
Mick escorted Colby out of the hotel, saying he wanted to find Colby a place to stay, and I let them go. It was with mixed feelings that I leaned on the bar in the empty saloon watching them ride off on motorcycles toward Magellan. Colby didn’t exactly inspire trust, but he’d already told me a hell of a lot more about the trial than Mick had. In spite of Mick’s warm praise of me and my compassion, I didn’t let that blind me to the fact that he was stubbornly trying to keep me out of all this.
“He scared me,” the mirror said over my shoulder. “But, sugar, what a bod. I wonder if those tattoos go all the way down?”
“Why didn’t you ask him to do a striptease?” I asked sourly.
“Ooh, do you think he would?”
“I think he really would melt you if you suggested it. Can you tell where they’ve gone?”
“Want to do a little eavesdropping, do you?”
I shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt.”
“Well, I don’t know, sugar. Micky never takes his piece of me out of his pocket. I like it in there, but I can’t see where he is. Sorry.”
Of course Mick would realize I could use the magic mirror to spy and make sure he kept his shard hidden. “That’s all right. Never mind.”
“Tell Micky to go commando,” the mirror said. “And work a little hole in his pocket...”
I was debating whether or not to bother with an answer when somewhere upstairs, a woman began screaming. I jumped, and the mirror shrieked response.
“Shut up!” I shouted at it and ran out to reception.
Cassandra was already halfway up the staircase. The lobby itself was mercifully free of guests at the moment, no one there to hear our maid Juana’s screams die off into a string of unhappy Spanish.
The stairs went up to a railed gallery around the main lobby, the guest rooms opening onto it. The screaming had come from room nine, the very last one, which lay next to the stairs up to the third floor.
As Cassandra and I ran along the gallery, the Changer Pamela emerged from another guest room, watched us pass, and followed us.
Room nine was my most spacious. Two open shoulder bags lay on the king-sized bed next to a pile of clothing and what I knew to be an expensive camera. A pair of dusty hiking boots rested on the floor.
As soon as she saw us, Juana ran for me, her eyes wide. “It’s terrible, it’s evil. I don’t touch it. I don’t touch this room.”
She ducked past us and out, and neither Cassandra nor I tried to stop her.
Pamela sniffed. “I smell blood. Dry, not fresh.”
“This is Jim Mohan’s room,” Cassandra said. “I asked Juana to pack up his clothes. I was going to have you look over the bags and the room and then put the bags down in storage.”
I approached the bed. Juana had been sorting through clothes and had folded shirts, pants, and socks into neat piles. The rest she’d dropped in an unorganized heap.
It wasn’t difficult to find what had scared Juana. A T-shirt lay crumpled on the small pile of folded underwear. The logo on it read “Sedona,” the town southwest of here that also boasted vortexes and mystical energies. The shirt had been dyed what was called Sedona red, the color of iron-rich earth.
I lifted the shirt and shook it out. The back of it was entirely coated with dried blood.
I dropped the shirt as the aura of it crawled up my arms and tried to invade my body. I saw movement in a mirror across the room, darkness that rose and swallowed the reflection of my blood-drained face and wild eyes.
The blackness squeezed me in a freezing embrace, my crackling storm magic trying to drive it away. The aura held me tighter, and cold lips touched my ear.
“Help me,” it whispered, and then it dispersed and was gone.
“Janet? Are you all right?”
I found both Cassandra and Pamela staring down at me in concern, Pamela’s eyes shifting to wolf white.
I blew out my breath. The darkness dispersed, and I was left sitting on the bed, holding a T-shirt in which a man had been murdered.
Eleven
“So, did this shirt belong to Jim?” I asked. “Or did he kill whoever was wearing it?”
The shirt in question lay on my desk in my office, bathed in sunlight that had started tearing through the clouds. Cassandra refused to touch it, but Pamela spread the cloth in back to show us the slit in it. Someone had been stabbed to death in that shirt. Maybe clawed, Pamela suggested, but if so, very neatly. A Changer, who had human intelligence and could control its strike, could do that.
“Can you smell whether the blood is Jim’s?”
I pushed the shirt to her, but Pamela shook her head. “I don’t need to bury my nose in it. It smells like everything else Juana was packing. That could mean it belonged to Jim or sat around his things long enough to transfer the scent. As for the blood—I wasn’t paying attention to Jim closely enough. Humans smell alike to me, unless I’m focusing on a specific one.”
Cassandra folded her slender arms. “If this Jim skewered someone, why not leave the shirt on the victim? Why take it off, bring it back here, and put it in the closet? And if Jim is the victim, same question.”
“Maybe there was something incriminating on the T-shirt,” Pamela suggested. “Like the killer’s own blood or hair. A DNA test would find the difference.”
I shook my head. “Then why wouldn’t he go to a laundry and wash it? Or burn it?”
Pamela went on speculating. “What if Jim murdered whoever it was in his room and had to remove the shirt to take the body away without leaving a trail of blood?”
“No, Jim’s room was clean,” Cassandra said. “When I went up there after he didn’t return that night, there was no blood, no mess. Only one towel used in the bathroom. The killer wouldn’t have cleaned the place from top to bottom and then left a bloody T-shirt for us to find when we packed up. That doesn’t work.”
While she spoke, a voice whispered in my head. You can find out what happened. It’s easy.
And I knew exactly how to do it.
“Reveal,” I said.
Darkness poured out of my hands and engulfed the T-shirt. The darkness coalesced around the shirt like a bubble, and movement flickered inside it.
I knew right away that Pamela couldn’t see the magic. She remained sitting passively on the love seat with an uninterested look. On the other hand, Cassandra’s eyes widened, and she leaned forward to watch.
The darkness cleared a little, and a man I didn’t recognize stood in profile to us. He had the lean, ropy build of a runner, limbs tanned from the sun, carried his state-of-the-art camera in one hand, and wore the Sedona T-shirt, walking shorts, socks, hiking boots, and a baseball hat. In the background I saw the blocks of stone that formed ancient pueblo ruins, reddish dirt, and dry desert grass.
The man’s arms were out slightly, his chest thrust forward, and he had a knife buried to the hilt in his back.
As Cassandra and I watched, mesmerized, the man folded quickly and silently to the ground, the costly camera landing beside him. The man lay in a motionless heap, wind stirring the ends of his hair and the grasses around him. A hand came into view, a man’s muscular hand. He yanked the bloody knife from the man’s back to reveal the slit, covered in blood, that we’d found in the shirt.
I couldn’t see who held the knife, but the hand and forearm was definitely a man’s. The golden brown skin could belong to an Indian, but he could also be Asian, Latino, Mediterranean, or of mixed descent. The knife was plain, dull steel, nothing distinguished about it except that it had been in another man’s b
ack. The killer took it with him as he stepped back, out of sight.
The corpse lay there for a long time, but by the way the wind moved through the grass, I could tell that time had sped up, as though we were watching a film in fast motion. I was about to blink, to try to banish the vision, when Jim’s eyes popped open.
Cassandra and I both jumped. Jim slowly lifted himself from the ground, limbs stiff, and then he stood up straight, blinking at the horizon. He drew a deep breath, put his hand to his back, and then stared in amazement at the blood that coated his fingers.
The image and the magic vanished the next second, leaving me breathless and staring at a T-shirt covered with blood on my desk. Pamela was on her feet.
“All right, what the hell just happened?” she demanded. “You two jerked like you saw something that scared you. What was it?”
Cassandra put her hand to her face, turning the nervous gesture into smoothing her already smooth hair. “We just witnessed a murder.”
“So, who did it?” Pamela demanded.
“Someone with a knife. I couldn’t see who.” I pretended to be less unnerved than I was. “Not very helpful.”
Cassandra studied the shirt with a bewildered look. “I don’t understand. That was Jim Mohan, definitely. But I’d swear that when Jim checked into the hotel, he wasn’t supernatural; he was human. I’d stake my reputation on it.”
“And now he’s a dead human?” Pamela asked.
“We also just witnessed him coming back to life.” Cassandra’s voice was faint.
“Not possible,” Pamela said with conviction. “Cassandra’s right; the guy was human, and he wasn’t magical. He didn’t smell like a sorcerer.”
“Let me think.” I massaged my aching temples. My mouth was dry, and I longed to suck down about a gallon of water. “I’m pretty sure that was the Homol’ovi ruins in the background. And you said the magic mirror went crazy when Jim went into the saloon, after he’d been out at Homol’ovi all day.”
“Yes,” Cassandra said. “But he was very much alive when he came back, not stabbed or covered with blood.”
Firewalker Page 10
