by L. M. Hawke
The darkness leaped to vivid life, filled with forceful odors and sounds that could only be detected by the coyote’s body. The drone of insects in the scrub rose to a clamor; the highway’s distant purr of occasional traffic now sounded as loud as the rumble of a busy city freeway. Ellery could even hear Hosteen’s harsh breathing and the rapid beat of his pulse. She could smell him, too—the scent of his warm skin and the soap from his recent shower, undercut by fresh sweat thanks to the cougar’s attack.
She could smell a strange, cat/human reek just as clearly—the odor of the creature that had attacked them. She sniffed carefully, pointing her gray-furred muzzle in the direction of the cougar’s escape.
The bright, metallic tang of blood was plain in the air.
Ellery leaped into action, trotting into the night much more boldly than she felt. She followed the track of the cougar by scent and occasionally by sight, when sagebrush shadows receded and the starlight shone down to reveal prints in the sand. She pushed on through the sage, running through thickets of scratchy, dry brush, loping across open ground where the beast had sped before her.
Now and then she could see the droplets of blood it had shed: small, dark spots like garnet beads dropped and forgotten in the sand. Hosteen had hit the cougar, all right. But it certainly wasn’t a mortal wound. The creature had run fast and far, hardly impeded by its injury.
Ellery chased the scent of her enemy for a good half-hour, long enough to be certain that the beast had gone toward Black Mesa, to the northeast, the direction of the call. She slowed to a trot, then finally stopped in the open desert, panting to cool her heated pelt, gazing at the horizon where the call still rang out—where it reached for her through the darkness of night.
There was little Ellery could do as she was then, one coyote all alone. The rogue Paranormal, whoever it was, might still remain in its stolen cougar form, and was therefore more powerful than Ellery’s coyote simply by virtue of its superior size. Or the Para had lost the shift and had returned to human form, but that human had puzzled out how to steal a Changer’s magic.
Ellery couldn’t risk her own magic, her own spirit animals. But Hosteen, and perhaps her other friends, just might be able to help her.
She turned and headed back toward Hosteen’s home, marveling as she went that she had come to trust him so quickly—that she had even come to think of him as a friend. Or if he wasn’t a true friend yet, then at least he was an ally.
Ellery wondered what had changed in him—in her—to instill that trust. Maybe it was Hosteen’s willingness to listen, instead of assuming he knew everything there was to know about Paras. Or maybe it was the way he’d unthinkingly put himself between Ellery and danger. She didn’t want to admit that she enjoyed feeling protected—goodness knew, she could take care of herself, and had done so for so many years. But it was nice to feel like someone else was on her side, instead of feeling locked as ever before into the role of the suspicious outcast.
Whatever changed, I don’t have any real choice but to work with Hosteen, anyway, she reflected. Not anymore.
On the Rez she was surrounded by potential enemies. She needed all the friends she could get.
As she approached Hosteen’s home, she could see him still out in the yard, a blocky, strong silhouette against the glow of his house’s lights. She could read the tension in his body, and even at a distance she could see that his hand never strayed from the handle of his gun, which was holstered once more on his hip. She approached slowly, one step at a time, until she was certain Hosteen had seen her, and could tell that she was not the cougar. He relaxed visibly.
Ellery came forward with more confidence, picking up the pace, covering the ground between them at a brisk trot. She made no effort to hide from him as she shifted back to her human form. She had a feeling there was no more need to coddle this Typ where anything Paranormal was involved.
“Did you find anything?” he asked when Ellery stood before him again in her human body.
“Tracks,” she said. “Just tracks. But I do know which direction the cougar was moving. And you’re right; you did hit it, but either it wasn’t a very good shot or the bullet didn’t do much damage.”
“Damn,” he muttered.
“We can search more in the morning. It’ll be easy for me to pick up the tracks again, as long as it doesn’t rain tonight—and I didn’t smell rain coming. The tracks might lead us to this jerk’s hiding place, but it’ll be much better if we both face him together. I don’t want to face him alone.” She hesitated, then added, “I don’t want you to face him alone, either.”
“You shouldn’t face him at all. You’re not trained in police work.”
“I’m not,” Ellery agreed. “But you are. And I have all the knowledge about Changers. You need that knowledge. It seems to me like we’ll be partners on this case.”
Hosteen smiled crookedly. “I thought you were just a barista. But here you are, already calling yourself my partner.”
Ellery tried to smile, but it didn’t work out too well. The night’s tension had caught up to her; she felt tired and sore and afraid. “I don’t have much choice but to take up police work, it seems—not if I want to live my life without fear of this creep. Sorry you’re stuck with an inadequate partner.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call you inadequate.” His eyes softened. Their teasing glint was replaced by the stillness of respect. After a moment, he jerked his head toward the house. “In the morning, then. Let’s get inside. It’s starting to get cold out here.”
“I should go,” Ellery said uncertainly. The mere thought of shifting into Ghost Owl and flying all the way back to Sylvia’s place nearly dropped her to her knees with exhaustion, but she knew it was the smartest move she could make.
Hosteen called over his shoulder as he went inside. “You can stay here tonight. That way, we can start as soon as the sun is up.”
Ellery bit her lip. She ruthlessly suppressed the thrill of excitement that rushed through her veins, not even certain why she felt so glad at the prospect of crashing at Hosteen’s place. She pulled her phone from her pocket and tapped out a message to Sylvia and River: I’m safe. With a friend tonight. Might have identified the culprit, more news in the a.m.
Then she followed Hosteen into his house.
Hosteen and Ellery certainly did begin tracking the creature early the next morning. The sun was still quite low on the horizon, the desert awash in deep-orange light and sharp-edged, purple shadows. The night’s chill had not yet dissipated from the air, and the scent of short-lived dew hung crisp and bright over the desert floor.
In her coyote form, Ellery trotted along the track of the cougar, watching the prints carefully, sifting the beast’s sharp reek out of the smells of the morning. Now and then, as she followed the prints up into the hills, she turned back to watch Hosteen over her furred shoulder. He looked steady and stoic, striding purposefully in her wake. Ellery did feel safer with him at her back. It was good to have someone she could trust—and especially good to know that not all Diné would forever be her enemies.
The cougar’s prints climbed up the slope of the mesa, rising toward a clear sky. The air was beginning to warm, and Ellery knew Hosteen would have a harder time keeping up with her on the slope. Humans simply couldn’t cover ground as efficiently as four-legged creatures could, especially not in warmer conditions. She paused between two thick clumps of sagebrush and waited for him. When he caught up to her, she could smell his sweat and hear his heavy breathing, but he looked tireless in spite of it, ready to continue on.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
For answer, Ellery’s coyote licked her lips and yawned in a show of casual unconcern.
“Good,” Hosteen answered. “Let’s keep moving.”
He examined a blood-specked paw print in the red sand, noted the direction of movement. “There’s a road over that way,” he said. “Just a dirt road, of course. It looks like the cougar went toward it.”
&nbs
p; Ellery led the way. After a few more minutes of bush-whacking, she could see the road before them. The hard-packed red earth climbed steeply up the side of the mesa. At the road’s side, the cougar’s tracks changed suddenly—from one stride to the next, they became human feet instead of a big cat’s deadly paws.
She stood over the first human footprint and gazed carefully down the road’s length. Near the foot of the mesa a vehicle was approaching, kicking up a small cloud of dust from beneath its tires.
Ellery shifted back into her human form and sat on a large, flat-topped rock on the roadside, catching her breath and wiping sweat from her brow. Wherever her human body went while she shifted, it still felt the strain of exertion. She was breathing as heavily as Hosteen was, and her palms and feet ached from covering the rough terrain that was so easy for Dusty to manage with her long-experienced paws and strong, wiry body.
Hosteen drew up beside her. He folded his arms across his chest and gazed silently down at the car, saying nothing.
“Coming this way,” Ellery said.
He nodded.
They waited in silence as the car approached. It was a white minivan, and Ellery could see several people inside. Most of them were Anglos—unlikely to be citizens of the Navajo Nation—and so their presence this far into the reservation was more than a little unusual.
The van slowed as it drew level with Ellery and Hosteen. The passenger window rolled down. A young woman with blonde braids and a distant, strained expression leaned out the window.
“Are we headed in the right direction?” Her voice sounded almost desperate. It raised a chill along Ellery’s spine, and she reached instinctively for her knife, for the spell-cast bead tied at its hilt.
“The right direction for what?” Hosteen asked, his voice carefully neutral. “What are you looking for?”
But Ellery didn’t wait for them to answer. She could sense their magic. A force exactly like her own: it called to her, like to like, running over her skin and vibrating a sympathetic harmony long her spine. They were not only Changers, but traders.
She stood and approached the van.
There were five people inside, but Ellery could see all their faces clearly. Vivi was not among them.
“Don’t go,” Ellery said.
The blonde girl scowled at her.
Ellery went on, more insistently “I know what you’re feeling. I know what’s out there, calling to you. But you have to resist it. Fight it!”
“You don’t know anything about it,” said a man from the back seat.
“I do. I’m just like you. You can’t go toward… whatever that thing is that calls to us. It’s dangerous.”
“It’s not,” the blonde girl insisted. But tears appeared suddenly in her eyes, and she clutched involuntarily at her necklace. It was her token, unless Ellery was mistaken.
Hosteen moved in close beside Ellery. He laid a hand on her arm. “Let them go.” He added in a whisper, “We’ll follow them.”
“I can’t just let them go!” Ellery turned to him, desperation nearly choking off her words. “You know what’s out there in the desert, waiting for them. You know what it’ll do to them! You have to do something. You’re a cop; stop them!”
He pulled her gently away from the van, and the driver punched the gas. It pulled away, climbing the ridge rapidly as a shower of red gravel flew from beneath its tires.
“Damn it!” Ellery shouted. She clenched her fists until her nails bit into her skin.
“I can’t detain them without a legal reason,” Hosteen said. “And we don’t know for sure that they’re going toward that cougar thing.”
“We do know.” Tears stung Ellery’s eyes. “The same force that’s summoning me is calling to them, too. They’re all Changers, all traders, just like me. Hosteen, you know what’s going to happen to them! They’ll be killed, just like Roanhorse. And my friend Vivi—”
He wrapped her in his arms. Ellery gave in to her fear and grief, sobbing against his chest.
“We don’t know that Vivi is in any danger,” he said. “We can save her, Ellery, I know it.”
She wished she could believe Hosteen. How could any Changer fight this force? Even her spell-cast bead was only a small shield. Even now, Ellery could clearly feel that summoning power. It grew stronger by the moment; it pulsed and swelled just outside the protective force of the Sylvia’s spell. And she was desperately afraid that soon her resistance would break, and she would be sucked back into the call.
She held tight to Hosteen, trembling as she cried. In that moment, it seemed she could do little else.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
After the van had disappeared and Ellery had regained her composure, she and Hosteen continued following the rogue Para’s tracks.
The footprints had continued up to the top of the mesa, but once there, in the open space below the glaring blue sky, the tracks had simply vanished. Either the rogue Changer had shifted into a bird and flown away, or some other magic had taken hold, concealing his tracks from view. Even back in her coyote form, Ellery could detect nothing—not even the faintest whiff of the Para’s scent.
But the location itself had given her a distinctly eerie feeling, trembling her knees and sending a shiver of sick dread up her spine. The top of the mesa offered a commanding view of much of the desert. The highway and the town of Kayenta were tiny in the distance, and far beyond, the land folded into ripples of shadow and light, concealing far more than was revealed.
The mesa’s top seemed a place of great power, though Ellery couldn’t pinpoint exactly why she felt that way. But she knew that she wanted no part of whatever power dwelt there. Its strength felt corrupted, uncontrollable—dangerous. She had been relieved when Hosteen suggested they would be better off leaving. There was no more evidence to gather, and it was a long walk back to his home.
By the time they’d made it back, Ellery was overwhelmed with exhaustion. She fell into a deep sleep on Hosteen’s couch, waking late in the evening to the sound of fingers tapping steadily on a keyboard. She lay still for some time, curled under a wool blanket that Hosteen had evidently tucked around her while she slept. There was a pause in his typing, a sigh, and the shuffling of papers as he looked through one of his files.
Ellery sat up slowly. “How long was I asleep?”
“Most of the day. But you needed it. Shifting is tiring, or so I imagine.”
She gave him a tiny smile. “You’re being remarkably cool about my shifting.”
“I guess I’m getting used to it. It’s not as shocking now that I’ve seen you do it a couple of times.”
He took a sip from one of his ever-present mugs of coffee, then stood from his desk and stretched. Ellery couldn’t help eyeing him—his body was both strong and graceful, and she liked his hands, which were blocky and rough-looking, but had nevertheless held her gently when she’d lost her composure and cried.
She blushed, remembering the scene. She was still embarrassed by her emotional display on the mesa. Maybe she really had needed all that sleep. The strain of the past couple of days was getting to her. But she was glad Hosteen didn’t seem to mind—or at least, he had enough grace to pretend he didn’t mind.
Hosteen disappeared into the kitchen and returned a minute later with a second cup of coffee. He held it out to her
“You drink a lot of coffee,” Ellery said, accepting the cup. “That can’t be good for you.”
“As vices go, it’s pretty minor.” He sat on the couch beside her.
Ellery noticed that her knife was unclipped from her belt, lying on the coffee table next to her steaming mug.
Hosteen saw the direction of her gaze and said apologetically, “I didn’t want your knife to fall out while you were asleep. Didn’t want you to get cut.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s a nice knife.”
Ellery smiled sadly, twisting the blanket’s fringe between her fingers. “William Roanhorse gave it to me when I was a kid.”
&nbs
p; “It sounds like he was a really good man.”
She stifled a sigh of despair. “I hope we can catch the bastard who killed him.”
“We will,” Hosteen said quietly. “I promise. I won’t rest until I’ve got that beast behind bars.”
Ellery looked into his eyes for a long moment. It felt good to hold his gaze—too good. She shivered and looked away, reached for the cup of coffee—a welcome distraction.
“I believe you,” she said. “You won’t rest. You really are dedicated to justice, aren’t you?”
“Of course. Not every cop is a corrupt asshole. Some of us actually do care.”
“Care about Paras? No Typs care about Paras. Not this much.”
“I’m perfectly okay with being a-Typical.” The corner of his mouth quirked at his own pun.
Hosteen met her eye again, and this time Ellery found she didn’t want to look away. She liked the deepness of his eyes, his air of quiet thought. He chewed his cheek for a moment as if considering some dilemma. Then, narrowing his eyes with an expression that said he had come to a definite decision, he leaned toward her.
Ellery leaned in, too, surprising herself with her eagerness to kiss him. She wanted to feel his lips against her own, wanted him to wrap his arms around her again and make her feel protected, secure.
But at the last moment her better sense caught up to her. She pulled away.
“I’m sorry,” Hosteen said quickly.
“No, it’s… it’s all right.” Ellery stood and hurried for the front door. “I just need some fresh air.”
Out in his flat, bare yard, she stretched the old aches from her limbs and breathed deeply in the evening air. She paced slowly around the yard with her hands in the pockets of her jeans. The sun had just set; the cool of night enveloped the land, but the shiver that raced along Ellery’s skin had little to do with the temperature.
She scolded herself—this was no time to be thinking about useless stuff like kissing. So many people, including herself, were in grave danger. She was no fool, but there she was, acting like a perfect idiot.
