by L. M. Hawke
And she certainly shouldn’t even consider anything romantic with a Typ. Para/Typ romances never worked out; everybody knew that.
No matter how nice Hosteen was, no matter how thoughtful and capable and strong, nothing could ever develop between them. It was asking for trouble, and Taylor and William Roanhorse hadn’t taught Ellery so carefully, only to see her throw all her caution away for a kiss.
Lost in her thoughts, Ellery was only vaguely aware that she hadn’t stopped in Hosteen’s yard. She had kept on walking, moving restlessly toward the mesa she had climbed that very morning. She paused out in the sagebrush, her thoughts hazy and thick, feeling as if she’d forgotten something—something important. But she couldn’t determine exactly what it was, and didn’t know why it was so crucial that she go back, find what was missing, keep it close…
She gazed up at the mesa’s summit. Stars were beginning to blossom over its flat crest, but there was no moon.
A black moon.
Through her cluttered, misty thoughts, Ellery recalled that a black moon was a time of great magical power… at least according to Sylvia, though how a witch might use the phases of the moon, Ellery could only begin to guess.
Suddenly the call surged with a ferocity that made Ellery gasp. It took hold of her with a grip like an eagle’s talons, cutting into her spirit, dragging at her being with a force she could not deny. She cried out in wordless alarm, then staggered toward the mesa, drawn on by the summons.
Ellery forced her way through scratching sagebrush, simultaneously struggling against the call and pushing herself toward it. She could feel the spirits of animals crying out all around her. They too were drawn toward that magnetic force. Dusty and Ghost Owl were beside themselves with panic, clamoring inside her mind. But Ellery was helpless to comfort them, disconnected from her own thoughts as if in a trance.
As all those animal spirits cried around her, she could hear fear in their voices—one terrible chorus of chilling, soul-searing terror. But though she knew the call could only lead to ruin, she was helpless to resist it. The force was twisted, grotesque—but more compelling than anything Ellery had ever faced before. By instinct, barely conscious of the gesture, she reached down for the hilt of her knife. Her hand closed on nothing.
She staggered on through the desert, going obediently toward the mesa. Only the dimmest corner of her mind was aware of Hosteen’s voice, calling to her, shouting her name desperately through the dark of the night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ellery was aware of little as she climbed the mesa, save for the power of the summons itself and a faint recognition of Hosteen beside her. He had caught up to her just as she’d found the foot of the hill. He had spoken to her then—words she couldn’t understand through her strange disorientation—but now he kept his silence, as if aware that Ellery could focus on nothing save for the draw of that mysterious force. Knowledge of his presence beside her, his steady pace and solid strength, came to her in fleeting glances. He was the only thing that filtered to her consciousness through the wall of that unspeakable power, the call she responded to so eagerly even as her heart quailed at its strength.
Though she was dimly aware that she was grateful for Hosteen’s presence, she couldn’t speak to him. Speech was beyond her in her frenzied state, her desperation to climb the mesa. It was just as well that she couldn’t say a word; she had no idea where she would have begun. How could she explain the compulsion to a Typical? Even a Typ who was as understanding and open-minded as Hosteen couldn’t grasp the towering desire inside her now, the naked desperation she felt to go toward the thing that summoned her. So she climbed in silence, by turns grateful for Hosteen’s presence and annoyed by him, sensing distantly that he would try to prevent her somehow from meeting the source of the call—and hoping beyond hope that he would.
The climb was tiring. Long before she reached the summit, Ellery had begun to tremble with the effort. Her bare arms stung from scrapes inflicted by the sage brush, and now and then she stumbled against a rock, distracted by her trance; her shins felt thoroughly bruised. The sweat of her effort cooled her—too much. The night felt cold and vast, unspeakably hostile, and she shivered as she struggled up the mesa.
When she reached the crest and found its flat top awash in starlight, Ellery nearly walked right out into the open. But Hosteen seized her by the hand, holding her back among the sagebrush and boulders.
Ellery flinched, and not only because his sudden touch surprised her. A snap twanged through her skin, vibrating along her bones. A buffer fell between Ellery and the call, as thick and solid as a brick wall. She panted in short gasps, staring around her wide-eyed. The long walk and climb now seemed like a distant memory, a fading dream, even though her body still shook from the effort.
What had jerked her out of that trance?
She stared at Hosteen in confusion, and her eyes drifted from his face down to the hand that held her own. And then to his other hand.
Hosteen had her knife—her knife! The spell Sylvia had worked into the turquoise bead was like a dome of protection that surrounded her, body and spirit.
He held the knife out. Ellery took it gratefully and clipped the sheath to her belt.
“Are you okay?” he whispered.
Shivering, Ellery nodded. “I am now.”
“What the hell is going on here?”
He stared beyond her, to the clear, bare rock that crowned the mesa. Ellery turned and followed his gaze. She could see now what hadn’t registered just moments before, while she moved under the spell of the trance: people were stumbling out of the scrub, forming a rough circle around the open space. There were six or seven of them, and they all looked dull-eyed, shambling, every bit as much under the terrible enchantment as Ellery had been before the knife was returned to her. Relief swept her in a wave so strong that she felt nauseated. She crouched behind the nearest boulder, struggling not to retch. Hosteen sank down beside her.
When Ellery could speak again, she whispered, “I don’t know what’s going on. But I think those people out there are traders. They’re being called, just like I was.” She squeezed the knife’s hilt in her hand, comforted by its presence.
“I recognize a few,” Hosteen said. “The kids from the van…”
Ellery risked another glance around the boulder. Hosteen was right. She recognized the girl with the blonde braids who had spoken to her from the van’s passenger side, and other faces were familiar, too. They all shuffled toward a central spot, a focal point—and now Ellery could make out lines in the sand, curving patterns of various colors laid out on the mesa’s crown.
A chill wracked her again. In her childhood on the Navajo Nation, she had seen sand paintings used at traditional sings—the ceremonies that had been a major part of her spiritual life, up until the persecution that had claimed her sister. She hadn’t been to a sing in many years, but she recognized a sand painting with a single glance.
But there was something terrifying about this sand painting—something wrong. She stared at the swirls of color, unable to identify what those shapes might represent. Fear gripped her ever harder the longer she looked.
Hosteen pulled Ellery back behind their shelter. They stared at one another, wide-eyed.
“A sing?” she asked, voice trembling.
“Of sorts… I think. But I’ve never seen a ceremony that looks like that. I don’t like it.”
“I don’t, either. It feels… twisted. Like a perversion of a true ceremony.”
“And who’s leading it?” Hosteen said. “Who’s responsible for this?”
Ellery thought of the cougar-shifter mocking them with its half-human growls, remembered the way its tracks had changed from cat to human between one stride and the next. “I have a feeling we don’t want to know,” she said, her stomach clenching.
Again they edged around the boulder, just far enough to make out the figures moving woodenly in the starlight. As the traders approached the sand painting, Ellery co
uld feel Dusty’s spirit growling and snarling inside her. Dusty had worked with Diné traders for generations; clearly this twisting of ceremony was as upsetting to the old coyote spirit as it was to Ellery. Dusty’s powerful fear shook the last vestiges of the trance from Ellery’s mind.
She watched as the summoned traders began removing their tokens from their bodies. They dropped those precious links to their animal spirits one by one onto the sand painting, discarding them as if they were worthless baubles. Soon a pile of bracelets, rings, and other tokens lay among the patterns of colored sand, glimmering beneath the stars.
Ellery gasped as a familiar figure emerged from the darkness and walked toward the circle. She would have recognized that tall, curvaceous woman anywhere: Vivi. Ellery dodged partway around the rock, trying to get to her friend, but Hosteen caught her arm in a firm grip. He pulled Ellery close to his side and wouldn’t let her go.
“That’s my friend!” Ellery protested. “She’s alive; let me go to her!”
“Wait. We don’t know what’s going to happen yet—what might be coming. We need to know what we’re dealing with before we act. Who we’re dealing with.”
Ellery gritted her teeth as she sank down beside Hosteen. She knew he was right, that caution was best until they had some idea of what exactly they would face. But still, the inactivity galled her. Ellery couldn’t take her eyes from Vivi’s face—as empty and vacant as a doll’s—as she, like the rest of the traders, threw her token on the pile.
Her connection with Dusty, a long-experienced spirit, allowed Ellery to sense the presence of the traders’ animals. They lingering around their tokens, confused and hurt, none of them understanding why those links to their human traders now lay discarded in a heap.
And that water-like rush, the force Ellery always felt when she shifted, seemed to grow around her, bearing down on her stronger than ever before. Something was coming through to this world, falling from above, pouring in a terrible current through the ley line Ellery couldn’t see, but knew was there, high above their heads like a spider web crack in the wall between this world and the next.
As Vivi backed away from the sand painting, joining the other traders in their ragged ring, another figure emerged from the desert. But this one didn’t move with the wooden gait of the entranced. Ellery could see from its height and the broadness of its shoulders that it was a man, robed in black, walking with an upheaded pride and a smooth grace that set him well apart from the others. Hosteen sensed the difference in the new arrival, too; Ellery felt him tense beside her, and his hand lowered to the butt of his gun.
The figure strode to the eerie sand painting and pulled back the hood of his robe. Even with the moon in its black phase, Ellery could make out his features clearly by starlight. Caught between wonder and horror, she stared at his eerily well-proportioned face. The flawless white skin, hardly marred by wrinkle or line that would have denoted his age. The lush, dark hair falling in waves to his shoulders. The eyes, blue and cold as the stars themselves. Through their unnatural calm and perfect confidence, Ellery could see a spark of triumph shining as the man gazed down on the tokens left like offerings at his feet.
Even from her hiding place several yards away, Ellery could tell the man was a Chanter. His preternatural good looks and impossible-to-guess age were clear indicators. But she knew at once that he wasn’t a fae. The fae were peaceful people, never more involved with others than they needed to be. A fae man wouldn’t summon traders, wouldn’t make them behave like puppets on a string. A fae would never force traders to give up their tokens, those precious lifelines to their magic.
So, then, there was only one kind of Para this man could be.
She leaned closer to Hosteen, unsure whether she was trying to get closer to preserve their fragile stealth, or whether she was shrinking against him to seek his protection.
She whispered close to his ear. “Vampire.”
The last of the summoned traders dropped their tokens into the ring. All told, there were eleven of them gathered on the mesa. The vampire bent low over the sand painting to examine the offerings. His dark hair obscured his face, but as he leaned lower, several strands of turquoise beads slipped out of the neckline of his robe. The beads swung slowly above the tokens.
Shock like an electric current jolted through Ellery’s body. The bead on her knife hilt seemed to vibrate subtly under her palm. Sylvia had broken that bead’s link to the others as best she could, but perhaps some vestige still remained. Ellery could all but hear the bead calling to its mates—trying to call to them. She wondered, with a swell of nausea, whether the vampire could feel his beads calling in return.
He has the turquoise.
In that moment, Ellery was certain, beyond any hope of doubt, that this vampire was the one they’d been looking for: the beast who had stolen Roanhorse’s tokens and his sacred beads. The bastard who had used her old friend’s own cougar spirit against him, to tear out his throat and take his life. It was impossible; it went against everything Ellery had ever known to be true about the Paranormal world. But there the evidence was, looped around the vampire’s neck, calling to the bead that hummed with desperate need in Ellery’s hand.
Her breath came short. Her heart nearly seized inside her chest. That creature was a Chanter, not a Changer. And no Chanter could shape-shift.
Until now.
Sylvia’s wild theory had been right after all. Ellery stared across the night at the most dangerous being she had ever faced: a Para who had, against all odds, unlocked the secret of someone else’s magic.
He was more than just a vampire. He was a monster.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
With an unconscious surge of furious energy, Ellery gathered herself, ready to spring out from behind the boulder and attack. The scrap of her mind that still remained rational howled at her to stop, to slow down, to think it through. To attack was foolish—but Dusty was growling ferociously inside her. She felt ready—more than ready—to abandon all conscious thought and give herself over to pure, animal instinct.
Hosteen’s grip on her arm tightened. She pulled against him, but he was stronger by far.
“Stay here,” he said quietly. “If anybody’s going to attack this guy, I am. I’ve got the gun.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ellery muttered. “Vampire.”
“You said Paras can be killed like anybody else.”
“Changers,” Ellery said shortly. “Traders. I don’t know how to kill a vampire. I don’t know if you can kill a vampire at all.”
But she was ready to find out. Dusty’s growls grew to snarls, and Ellery had to concentrate to remain silent, to keep from snarling herself.
The summoned traders swayed in their loose circle, their faces stricken and sickly. The vampire straightened, gazing around his ring of captives with an air of gloating so palpable Ellery could feel his triumph crawling along her skin. Then, with a serene smile, he bent again and began gathering the tokens into his hands.
The moment the tokens made contact with his skin, the animal spirits cried out. Ellery gasped and shuddered as their screams of terror—even pain—ripped through her. She choked back her own cry and fell against the boulder, wrestling with her shock and fear.
Hosteen bent over her. “Ellery! What’s going on? Talk to me.”
But it was impossible to speak. The panic of the spirit animals washed through her like an icy river; she felt certain she would drown in that terrible current.
Fighting to regain control, Ellery sucked in a deep breath of cool night air. But that breath served only to fuel her scream. The wild, panicked cry ripped out of her, going on and on until her throat was raw and her own ears hurt. Hosteen clutched her, trying to silence her, but it was no use.
One by one, the other traders joined her as they fell out of the vampire’s enchantment. Aware now of what had happened to them, some of them dropped to their knees in the dust, clutching their heads against the pain that wracked them. Others clawed at the a
ir or rolled on the ground in agony as their animal spirits were ripped away by the vampire.
Ellery struggled to her feet and pushed herself out of Hosteen’s arms. With barely a thought, with hardly any awareness of what she was doing, she reached through the coyote-tooth necklace and shifted into Dusty’s body.
With the coyote’s ears, the sound of the screams was even sharper and more terrifying than before. But Ellery ignored the clamor and charged across the mesa toward the vampire, running faster than any mortal coyote could move. She bared her fangs to the starlight, ready to tear the Chanter’s beautiful face, ready to sink her teeth in his throat and rip and sever and spill his foul blood until the mesa ran red with it.
For the briefest moment, as she hurtled toward him, Ellery saw the vampire stare at her in shock. His sudden misgiving was clear to read on his perfect face: one trader hadn’t obeyed his enchantment. How could that be?
Then, a heartbeat later, Ellery launched herself directly at the vampire.
Even as she leaped through the air, she knew—in the small corner of her mind that still retained some rationality—that a coyote had no hope of killing a vampire. But the pain of all the suffering animal spirits, and the human traders who had lost them, filled her with a rage that blotted out all caution and could never be controlled. Her paws extended toward the Chanter; her jaws opened wide to tear at him.
She heard Hosteen shout her name, and knew he must have pulled his gun.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Time slowed as Ellery leaped over the perverse sand painting. Below her hurtling body, the colored sand seemed to writhe and twist, as if even the elements of the ceremony suffered and tried to free themselves from the vampire’s dark influence.
The vampire opened his mouth, shouting something Ellery couldn’t hear over the roaring of her blood in her ears, and she saw the starlight glint on his sharp-pointed fangs.
