by Dinah McCall
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
WINDWALKER
by
Dinah mccall
Copyright 2012 by Sharon Sala
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or if real, used fictitiously. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author or publisher, except where permitted by law.
All Rights Reserved.
Book cover: Kim Killion of HotDAMN Designs
www.hotdamndesigns.com
With regard to digital publication, be advised that any alteration of font size or spacing by the reader will automatically change the author’s original format.
Dedication
As with all of my stories, this was a dream. It is meant to entertain, not to depict any historical information used in this story as fact. Some of the references are true to different Native American tribes, but none of this story is based on any legend.
I am dedicating this book to my Bobby. He gave me the dream, and now I’m sharing it with you as the story was meant to be told. Rest in peace my brown-eyed warrior and know my heart is with you until we meet again.
Chapter One
New Orleans, Louisiana: The witching hour
The gang zeroed in on the lone woman like the curs they were and the moment Layla Birdsong saw their faces, she knew was in trouble. There were nine of them, three blacks, four whites, and a couple of Asians - an odd amalgamation of affirmative action losers armed to the teeth.
She was never going to see home again.
The skinny white man with the pock-marked face rubbed his fly.
“Come to Papa,” he jeered.
“Back off, Rabbit, I get her first.”
Layla’s gaze jerked to a skin-head wannabe with a swastika tattooed on his neck. Where in hell were the cops when you needed them?
Thunder rumbled overhead as the storm that had been approaching drew closer.
“Hell to the no, Fuck-face, you went first on the last one,” another man shouted.
Layla tried to dodge the black man but it was to no avail as he grabbed her breast, squeezing it so hard she screamed. Then he shoved her backward, laughing as Fuck-face swung a knife. He crowed as it cut through the fabric of her blouse into the smooth brown skin on her belly. As she turned away, he danced around her and swung again, this time slashing the back of her arm from shoulder to elbow.
Layla screamed. “Nooo… oh God… stop! Someone! Anyone! Help! Help!”
“That’s how I like ‘em, screaming and bleeding,” he said in a sing-song voice, and moved a step closer.
Layla’s belly and arm were burning where the flesh had been cut. When she swept her hand across the point of pain and it came away covered in blood, panic shifted into rage. She didn’t have a weapon and didn’t stand a chance, but she came from a long line of warriors. If this was the day she died, they would have to take her in a fight.
She shifted her stance, looked down at the blood on her hand and in a moment of defiance, swept two fingers across each cheek, leaving behind two swaths of blood as war paint.
Now she was ready. All she needed was a weapon and launched herself at the one with the knife.
The impact took him by surprise as they went down in a tangle of arms and legs. The others whooped with delight as Fuck-face’s head bounced off the pavement. All of a sudden he was seeing double and on the defensive.
Pulled by bloodlust, the gang drew closer, shouting out encouragement to their man while telling the woman in every vulgar term they’d ever heard what they would do with her before she took her last breath.
Layla heard nothing but the grunts and curses of the man beneath her as she battled for control of the knife. She had hold of his wrist with both hands, using every ounce of her strength to turn it downward, until the knife was only inches away from his face.
In a panic, he began cursing and yelling at his friends, ‘Help me, damn it, help me. The bitch is going to put out my eye.”
She had his wrist in a bind, pushing it continually downward in an abnormal position, and no matter how hard he hit her with his other fist, she didn’t give.
Her eye was swelling and the cut he’d opened on her cheekbone was bleeding. A rumble of thunder rolled across the rooftops as she lunged, and when she did, her blood dripped into his eyes, momentarily blinding him.
It was his loss of focus that gave her the edge. She threw all her weight onto his wrist and heard the bone snap as the blade plunged downward into his neck.
Fuck-face’s eyes bulged, then rolled back in his head. His body was still jerking in death throes when she crawled to her feet; the bloody knife in her hand. She was bleeding profusely, but there was a rage in her eyes.
“Who’s next?” she shouted.
Thunder struck before she got an answer. A blinding flash of lightning hit the street behind them. A gust of wind exploded within their midst then rapidly turned into a whirlwind, spinning violently as it grew larger before their eyes. The force of the wind pinned Layla up against the wall. The knife dropped at her feet.
One gang member flew backward, slamming into the light post and snapping his neck like a toothpick. Another went airborne a good thirty feet up before he came down. The sound of his body hitting pavement was lost within the roar of the wind. Another man’s clothes were ripped away. He was screaming in blood-curdling shrieks as the skin began to peel from his body.
And that was when she began hearing drums – Native American drums. That’s when she knew this was more than a storm.
The whirlwind ripped through the gang, leaving one after the other lifeless. When they were dead, it moved toward Layla and then stopped, hovering feet above the ground.
Her heart was pounding – her gaze fixed on the swirling mass. Breath caught in the back of her throat as the whirlwind shifted, then parted like curtains, revealing something inside!
She could see brown skin and black hair and a flash of fire where his eyes should have been. The pull between them was strong and almost familiar, and then her focus shifted to the hand he extended. She never thought. She just acted. One moment she was an observer, and then the next she was within the wind, face to face with something for which she had no name.
He wrapped his arms around her and then they were gone.
****
The alarm was going off when Layla woke. She rolled as she reached out to stop it, then winced at the pain in the back of her arm, and shut it off with her other hand. Then she saw the blood - all over the sheets – all over her.
She flew out of bed, her muscles protesting as she tried to stand. There was a pain in her belly as sharp as the one on her arm. Her head was throbbing, and she had an overwhelming urge to cry. She staggered to the mirror; staring in disbelief.
One ey
e was swollen shut, there was a cut on her cheekbone, and her face was a mass of dark bruises and abrasions. Even more puzzling, she was still wearing the clothes she’d worn yesterday to the conference on early childhood education. She remembered going to dinner afterward with some of the other teachers attending the conference, and leaving the restaurant just before midnight to go back to her hotel. But then she took the wrong turn out of the parking lot and got lost. Before she could find her way back, the rental car died. So how had she-
And then it hit her!
The gang!
The attack!
She turned her hands palms up, looking at them for answers. They were covered in scrapes, bruises, and cuts.
Did she really kill a man or was it all a bad dream?
Did they rape her?
How the hell did she get to the hotel?
She began tearing at her clothes as if she could remove the horror along with them, and when she was naked she looked back in the mirror.
Shock rolled through her as she stared at her body in disbelief. She looked like she’d been in a battle and vaguely remembered thinking she had prepared herself to die. There was a cut across her stomach that was still seeping blood, as was the slash along the back of her arm.
The man with a knife!
She remembered fighting with him, then plunging the knife into his throat right before the storm hit. It brought wind – a wind so strong it had peeled the flesh off a man’s body. After that, everything was a blur.
She began to shake. So how did she get here?
Suddenly her ears popped as the air inside the room began to shift. She saw movement in the air behind her; and watched in disbelief as an image began to appear.
When she looked again, there was a man with skin as brown as hers, dressed like a ghost from the past. He was naked from the waist up with hair as black as a raven’s wing, hanging well below the middle of his back. He wore buckskin leggings and a breech-clout down to his knees. A large chunk of turquoise hung from a rawhide strip around his neck, centering the span of a massive chest, and once they locked gazes, her panic ended.
At the least, she should have been embarrassed. She was naked and yet felt protected as she turned to face him. When she started to cross her arms over her breasts, she stopped. He’d already seen all there was to see. The moment that thought went through her mind, his eyes narrowed.
“Am I dead?” she asked.
“No. Spirits do not bleed.”
“Are you a spirit? Was it you who saved me?” she asked.
“You will call me Niyol, and you, Layla Birdsong, saved yourself.”
The rhythmic cadence of his voice was as hypnotic as his physical appearance. It did not go unnoticed that his name was also the Navajo word for wind. A coincidence? She thought not then realized he was still talking.
“You need to prepare yourself for what’s going to happen. You will be questioned. Answer as truthfully as you know how. They already have proof of what happened to you. It will be seen on what you call security tapes. You were out-numbered, and yet you fought bravely and killed your enemy. You are a red-feather warrior.”
Layla had heard the term before, from her Muscogee father. It meant that she’d killed an enemy in battle, but thought it pertained only to men. And then the realization of what he’d said about tapes sank in.
“The police will come? Am I going to be arrested?”
“No, but I must warn you. These tapes will appear on all of your communication devices. You will be called a hero, and a witch, and a woman not of this world. People will come looking for you… bad people. Do not be afraid. When it is time, I will come back for you.”
“What do you mean, you’ll come for me?”
His eyes narrowed even more as his nostrils flared. “You belong to me. When it is time, I will be back.”
Panic shifted through her. She didn’t want to be claimed by anyone, especially some spirit from another world.
“I belong to no man,” she muttered.
“I am not any man and you are a red feather warrior. We will be together,” and then he took a step toward her.
Despite the pain she was in, Layla felt heat between her legs, like he was already there. He was before her then moved through her, as if she was smoke.
The joining was shocking and instantaneous. Her legs went out from under her as a bone-jarring climax dropped her to the floor. She was on her hands and knees, still shuddering from the impact when his hand, or what felt like his hand brushed down the length of her back. Another climax rolled through her, shattering every concept she had of human existence. When it had passed, so had she. She was belly down, unconscious on the hotel floor.
****
Two blocks of city streets had been marked off with yellow crime scene tape. What was left of the nine gang members were right where they’d fallen – some of them in pieces, a couple of them too damaged to identify. The one with the skin peeled off his body was the most puzzling, but the Coroner, Dr. Chin, was already doing initial observations with the detectives right behind him, hoping there would be identification in the clothing.
Detective Billy Wallis of the New Orleans P.D. was a twenty-year veteran on the force; fifty-one years old with a thick head of graying hair and a body as square as his jaw. He caught lead on the case, and met up with his partner, Thomas Pomeroy on scene. They’d been trying to make sense of it ever since. Pomeroy was leaning toward it being some kind of gang fight caught by the storm, when a beat cop appeared with a handful of security tapes that blew through the theory.
“Technology at its finest,” the cop said. “All of the businesses on this street were closed when this happened, but four of the nine coughed up security tapes. I think you need to see these. There was another person here. I saw her on the tape and I think you need to see it ASAP. Also, there’s a purse and a knife over there behind that trash can pertaining to the case.”
“A woman was in the middle of this? Son-of-a-bitch. We’ve got another body to look for.”
Wallis walked over to the trash cans and looked behind them. Sure enough, there was a woman’s tooled leather purse right where he said it would be, and a pig-sticker knife with a wicked looking blade.
“There’s a purse here all right, but some pickpocket could have dumped it there after stripping it clean. If there was a woman in all this, then where is the body?”
The cop shrugged. “Watch the tape and figure it out for yourself.”
Wallis frowned. “This is no time to go all mystic on me. What do I need to see?”
The cop shrugged. “On the tape, it looks like she got sucked up into some kind of whirlwind and disappeared.”
“Fuck,” Wallis muttered, then yelled at his partner. “Hey Pomeroy! Call the weather bureau and ask if there was a tornado down here with last night’s storm.”
Pomeroy pulled out his phone as Wallis waved at a crime scene tech.
“Yo! Rivera. Come get a shot of this purse and knife, then see if you can find any ID inside the bag.”
The crime scene tech stepped back from the bodies he’d been photographing and moved over to where the detectives were standing.
“Where?” he asked.
Wallis pointed.
Rivera took a trio of shots, then moved the trash can, bagged the knife, and squatted beside the purse. He lifted the loose flap with his pen and poked inside.
“There’s a wallet,” he said, then gloved up and pulled it out by the edges. It fell open, revealing the face of an attractive young woman with an Arizona driver’s license.
“Layla Birdsong, twenty-eight years old, out of Arizona. Name and face looks Native American. What in hell was she doing down here?”
Rivera saw the edge of a plastic room key sticking out of the wallet and pushed it out with the tip of the pen.
“Here’s a room key. She was staying at the Marriott.”
“Hold that wallet still,” Wallis said, and took a photo of the driver’s license and
room key with his cell phone, then stood up as Rivera bagged the purse as well. “You got a couple of extra evidence bags?”
Rivera dug them out of his shoulder pack.
“Security tapes,” Wallis said. “I’ll log them into evidence after we stop by the hotel. We’ll be viewing them in investigations later today.”
Rivera made a note in his notebook. “Anything else you want me to shoot here?”
“No. Carry on,” Wallis said. “Pomeroy and I are going to the Marriot from here.” Then he waved Pomeroy down and headed for the car.
“Find out anything from the weather bureau?” Wallis asked, as Pomeroy slid into the seat beside him.
“Definitely no tornado warnings, only what they called a brief downburst as the storm cell collapsed.”
“What about top wind speed?”
“Gusts up to 40 to 45 mph. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Wallis frowned. “That does not help the theory of a storm causing this bodily destruction.”
“Maybe it’ll be on those mysterious tapes,” Pomeroy said.
“Maybe, but I’m stopping at the Marriot first. If we’re lucky we’ll find answers in Birdsong’s hotel room.”
It wasn’t far from their crime scene to the hotel. They pulled up at Valet Parking, flashed their badges as they got out, strode into the hotel and up to the check-in desk where they flashed their badges again.
“We need to speak with your manager,” Wallis said.
A clerk hastened to fill their request. Moments later, a tall, elegant black man appeared, smiling cordially.
“Detectives. I’m John Samuels. Would you mind coming to my office so that we don’t block check-in lines?”
“Lead the way,” Wallis said, as he and Pomeroy followed the man into his office.
“Please, have a seat,” Samuels said. He sat then leaned forward. “How may I be of assistance?”
