Nightwalker
Page 21
“After she’d gone, Jamison took the pot out of the bag,” Naomi said. “It looked like typical pottery to me. Antique and valuable, yes, but not dangerous. Jamison carried it out here and locked it up. I couldn’t figure out why Laura was so worried about it. The pot had sat up in that museum in Flagstaff for years—why wasn’t it dangerous then?”
“Hidden in plain sight,” I said, speculating. “No one working for the museum or visiting the museum was magical, I guess. Or magical enough. No one knew about it until Pericles hired Young to start poking around looking for it.”
“Jamison didn’t talk about it. I got busy with the nursery—it’s one of our busiest seasons—and I didn’t notice that Jamison was spending so much time out here. I figured he was doing a new sculpture. I know how he gets when he’s excited about a new piece of art, and I leave him alone.
“Then yesterday morning, Jamison called us to the hogan and told us he’d found a spell he wanted to try. He didn’t say what the spell was for, but he said that Julie alone could be there for it. I was supposed to wait outside. But I didn’t like how Jamison looked—his face was almost gray, and his eyes kept going yellow, like his mountain lion’s. I didn’t know what was wrong. So I refused to leave.”
“Wise,” I said.
Julie broke in. “Jamison got mad at Mom. And Jamison never gets mad. But she wouldn’t go. So finally Jamison did the spell with us all in here.”
“At first, it didn’t look any different than any other shaman spells I’ve seen him do,” Naomi said. “I like when Jamison lets me watch him do magic. It’s soothing, peaceful. But this spell scared me. Jamison went into a trance—when he meditates or lets his magic take him, he usually is very calm and relaxed. This time, I could tell he was in pain. The designs on the pot started moving, and then little tiny shards rose up out of the pot and swarmed him. I tried to push him out of the way and maybe break the pot, but he opened his eyes and yelled at me to get back, that I’d be hurt if I did that.”
“I was scared,” Julie said. She sat down cross-legged between Naomi and Jamison, resting a comforting hand on Jamison’s inert shoulder. “It was so powerful. But I didn’t run. I didn’t want to leave Mom and Jamison alone with that magic.” She rested her other hand on her mother’s knee.
“Jamison finished the spell,” Naomi said. “And the shards cutting him flowed back down into the pot. He was exhausted, but all right. And then Julie started screaming. I thought she’d been hurt, that maybe the shards had attacked her somehow.”
Julie smiled sheepishly. “I was scared. All the sudden, sound started pouring into my ears, like it was beating at me. I never realized the world was so loud.” The smile became one of pure happiness.
“Naomi,” I said, trying to finger-comb my hair. “Where did Jamison look up this spell? I know he doesn’t have spell books lying around.” Jamison was a shaman, and his knowledge of magic came from oral tradition. “But he couldn’t have known how to do this without some research. Please tell me he didn’t look up spells on the Internet.”
“Yep,” Julie said. “He asked me to show him how to use the search engines. He borrowed my laptop and was at it for days.”
I groaned. “Oh, Jamison, my stupid old friend.”
“He was trying to help me,” Julie said, defending him.
I climbed painfully to my feet. “Do either of you know where the pot is? You need to give it to me.”
Both Naomi and Julie nodded without asking me to explain why. Julie picked up a key ring from Jamison’s now-ripped shorts, went to his supply cabinet, unlocked it, and pulled out a leather-wrapped bundle.
Julie said as she brought it to me, “You’re worried that if he searched the Internet for such a powerful spell, any astute mage would find out, right? They’d know Jamison wasn’t a powerful mage himself and wonder why he was searching for these spells. They’d guess he’d found some way to enhance his power. And this mage you yelled at him about would be looking for people who’d found some way to enhance their powers. Right?”
I took the bundle. The strength of the pot inside jolted a shock through me as hard as any lightning strike. What I’d felt come out of the hole where Laura had started to bury it was nothing compared to this.
“You’re smart, Julie,” I said, my throat tight.
“You okay?” Naomi asked, worried.
“No. This is . . . bad. Which is why I’m taking it away.”
I headed for the door. Naomi got in front of me. “Janet, if you hide the pot or find some way to destroy it, what will happen to Julie? Will the spell die without the pot?”
My chest hurt as I struggled to breathe. Julie watched me quietly. She’d been handed a piece of the world she’d been denied all her life, and now I had to tell her she might have to let it go again.
“I don’t know,” I had to say. “I’m sorry. The spell might fade as Jamison’s power does. Or it might be permanent. I just don’t know.”
Naomi nodded once, her throat moving. She’d watched her daughter lose her hearing once, long ago. Now she might have to do it again.
“Take it, Janet,” Julie said. “I don’t want this if we lose Jamison for it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Will Jamison be all right?” Naomi asked, still in front of me.
I looked down at him slumbering so peacefully on the floor. “I hope he wakes up the Jamison we all know and love, but I don’t have any idea what this thing does, or what residue it leaves. Watch him. Call me, or call Mick, if he doesn’t come out of it.”
Naomi nodded. Her eyes held a bleakness that I hated.
I clenched my teeth against the rising magic of the pot, pushed past Naomi, stepped into the hot afternoon, and got the hell out of there.
Chapter Twenty-Two
As soon as I walked out and stashed the artifact in my saddlebag, I felt the eyes of the supernatural world upon me.
The driveway behind Naomi’s house was empty, the workers in the nursery moving with the slow ease of men doing physical labor in the heat. None of them looked my way.
I started up my bike and slowly rode down the drive back toward the road. One of the workers raised his hand in farewell. I made myself wave back, everything normal.
Sweat trickled from under my helmet as I rode along the highway through town. Magellan looked no different than usual—the lunch crowd at the diner was thinning out, people going back to work, tourists fanning out to hike to the vortexes or along the old railroad bed. RVs rocked ponderously past me, summer vacationers on their way to view the next natural attraction.
All the while, the pot screamed to me. Its aura rose around me like a bubble shot with red and blue flame, muting the rest of the world, broadcasting its whereabouts to everything magical.
It couldn’t be broadcasting, though. Jamison had kept it hidden in a cabinet in his studio all week, and the magical hadn’t swooped down upon him to grab it. I hadn’t felt a thing, and I’d been looking for it. No one had found it in Flagstaff either, where it had sat for years.
Then again, the pot hadn’t yet been in the hands of anyone as magical as me. Normal humans ran the museum; Laura wasn’t a mage; and Ansel, though he was magical by nature, couldn’t actually work magic. Jamison had power, but nowhere near the kind of power I could draw.
I had to stash it somewhere. But while I ran through ideas for where to take it, the artifact called to me.
Part of me wanted to know why it had been made and how. The other part of me was busy imagining all kinds of ways I could use the pot to make myself powerful beyond imagining.
I realized now that the artifact singing away in the cabinet while I’d fought Jamison had enhanced my Beneath magic, which was why I hadn’t been able to damp it down as I had when fighting the slayer.
The Beneath magic was now throbbing and humming through me, not having subsided in the least. Crackles of it moved through my body, popping in my ears. The magic leaked out through my fingers, contacting th
e handlebars and lighting up the bike in electric arcs.
If I didn’t contain the magic, I was going to fry myself. My beautiful new Softail would be a melted heap on the highway, and I wouldn’t be in much better shape.
The bike sped on, fed by power. I checked my rearview mirror, hoping no police decided to try to pull me over. I was afraid of what I’d do to them if they did.
My right-hand mirror—the one with the piece of magic mirror in it—was still dark. The mirror still hadn’t recovered from the fire, or it had buried itself too deep to be reached.
And I suddenly knew exactly how to fix it.
Yesterday, I’d worried about hunting for a mage powerful enough to bring the mirror back to life, yet trustworthy enough not to try to kill me and Mick to steal it. Today I knew with clarity that I didn’t need another mage.
All I had to do was—
“No!” I yelled it out loud, clenching the handlebars to keep myself from reaching for the mirror.
If I healed the mirror, Cassandra and Mick would know instantly—the loudmouthed thing would make its presence known in every mirror and every shard in the hotel. Neither Cassandra nor Mick would take long guessing how I’d done it. The surge would be so strong that the dragons might sense it in their compound, through the mirrors my mirror had penetrated there.
The dragons would fly straight for me, and if Pericles had an eye on them, he’d follow. And then there was the Nightwalker Paige harbored. He wouldn’t be up during the day, but he’d be coming for the pot as soon as he woke. Why he or Paige wanted it, I didn’t know, but magical talismans could cause a feeding frenzy.
Then the artifact told me exactly how to deal with Pericles, dragons, and the Nightwalker. In one of the visions it gave me, I saw myself holding the pot in one hand, while building up a ball of my goddess magic in the other. The vision showed me Pericles rising higher and higher on a vortex of my magic until he was a speck in the sky. Then the magic disappeared, and Pericles fell down, down, down to splatter across the ground.
The goddess in me laughed.
Thunder rumbled behind me and spread to fill the land. A glance into my good rearview mirror showed blue-black clouds building up on the southern horizon and racing toward Magellan.
The artifact explained that I’d no longer have to wait for storms to form to use them—I could create and build them myself.
The first icy balls of hail fell on me as I sped out of Magellan toward my hotel. Traffic dried up and disappeared as I left town, and I raced toward the Crossroads alone.
Sheets of rain mixed with hail fell with the intensity only a desert storm can bring. I could barely see the road through the hail and the mist boiling up from the hot pavement. Hailstones crashed against my helmet and beat on my exposed body.
A sensible motorcyclist would stop and wait for the wave of rain to pass. I kept going. I needed to reach the hotel . . .
And then what? At my hotel I had Cassandra, a mega-powerful witch and her Changer girlfriend. Then there was Elena, an Apache shaman who guarded a huge pool of magic in my basement. And of course, the Nightwalker. Even the two low-level witches who’d stayed on after the fire would sense the aura of this pot, and if things went as expected, they’d fight me to get it.
Coyote’s words came back to me: When I said no one is strong enough not to be tempted, I meant it. Including Mick.
I trusted Mick. I trusted him with my life.
I thought of Jamison, one of the good guys, and the madness I’d seen take over his kind eyes. He’d been using the artifact to help Julie, and he’d fought me to protect her. Good motives, and still it had driven him to kill.
Mick was a stronger person physically than Jamison, and he had far stronger magic. I’d also seen what Mick could do when magic turned him against me, and I never wanted to see it again. The fact that I held his true name might stop him, or the pot might tell him exactly how to wrest the name back from me and be free.
The aura from this thing was already sliding under my skin, urging me to call down the storm and mix it with my Beneath magic. If I did that, I’d be unstoppable. The Hopi gods and Coyote had warned me they’d crush me if I used my powers to hurt or kill, but too bad for them. I’d be too strong for them to stop me.
In fact, I’d be the strongest magical being in the world. The ununculous? Ha. I’d stand toe-to-toe with Emmett Smith and blast him out of existence. And then I’d go find Bear and tell her what I thought of her horrific game with Coyote.
No. I bit back a scream. I’d been down this road before, and it hadn’t ended well.
My hotel was in view. I gunned the bike, flew past the now-wet Crossroads, and kept on toward Flat Mesa.
Ten miles of open road lay between me and the next town. Ten miles of lightning, hail, and driving wind, while the artifact called me to link my powers with it and make myself invincible.
I was babbling to it, begging it to stop, when I roared into the parking lot of the Hopi County Sherriff’s department fifteen minutes later.
I didn’t want to open my saddlebag and pick up the leather-wrapped vessel. I didn’t want to touch it, even with the layers of my riding gloves and the bag between me and it.
I started sobbing, but I made myself open the hatch and reach inside. I couldn’t risk leaving the pot out here even for a minute—if Pericles or Drake had been following me, they’d grab it as soon as I ducked inside.
The vessel’s power beat on me. I stumbled from bike to front door, not having the strength to close the saddlebag. The pot howled at me, calling me a coward, making my mind start whispering words of power to bring it to life.
“No, no, no, no, no!”
“Janet?” Deputy Lopez looked up from where he was taking particulars from a large but dispirited-looking biker. “You all right?”
“No!” I flung my helmet to the counter as I crashed my way behind Lopez and down the hall, not stopping until I reached the door marked, Nash Jones, County Sheriff.
Nash never locked his door, so I burst inside, praying he was there. He was, and he got to his feet when I ran inside, drenched and wild-eyed, clutching a dirty leather bag to my chest.
Nash swept up all the folders on his desk and slammed them onto his filing cabinet, not because my crazed entrance scared him, but because he wouldn’t want me to get his beloved paperwork wet.
I dumped the leather bag onto the middle of his desk. “Pick that up. Please.”
Nash stared at me with his winter-gray eyes. “Why?”
“Please! Damn it, Nash, just do it!”
Nash regarded me with stone-faced suspicion, but finally he reached down and touched the top of the bag.
The noise of a thousand screams filled my head, winding up into piercing shrieks. I covered my ears and yelled with them.
Nash continued to pin me with his flint-hard gaze, but he finally opened the bag, frowned into it, reached inside, and pulled out the pot.
Tiny shards of pottery—white, black, and red—leapt from the vessel and flew up to surround Nash. The instant before they hit his skin, they stopped, hovering in midair like a swarm of indecisive bees. Then they reversed, flowing back to the surface of the pot. I heard the click, click, click as they fell into place, then the pot went dormant.
The voices ceased. The hail, which had been grating on the window, died away to a soft summer rain.
I fell into a chair and pressed my hands to my aching head. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
*** *** ***
“Want to tell me what this is?”
Nash scraped the bag away from the pot and set the pot on top of it.
It was a perfect match for the fake. Ansel had been right to call Laura a talented forger.
The real pot had the same slightly rounded bottom, the wide flare of the sides, the perfect pull in to the opening, plain without a lip. The inside of the pot was black, the outside white with red and black designs—the tortoise, the bear, and lines representing lightning.
Now that the pot’s aura wasn’t beating on me, I could appreciate its beauty. It was very old, but the colors were still vivid. The designs had softer and more curved lines than newer pottery, which could be sharp and abstract. Care and skill had gone into the pot’s making. And power. Lots and lots of power.
I couldn’t know whether the magic had gone in as the woman potter had formed the vessel or whether the power had been added afterward. I only know it had fixed on me as a being with goddess magic and had wanted to teach me to do amazing things.
It had recognized the powerful magic in Nash, but too late had realized the nature of that power.
Nash was a negative—a magic null. Even the most immense magics in existence were cancelled out when Nash touched them.
“Janet?” he prompted, and he didn’t look patient.
I sighed and told him everything that had happened since I’d left him next to the dead slayer on the 40, ending with Coyote tasking me to destroy the pot.
“Easy enough,” Nash said. “I have a hammer.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple. I’m guessing breaking it or even grinding it to powder wouldn’t stop it.”
“Then how?”
“I don’t know. I need to talk to Coyote.”
Nash drew the bag up around the pot again and closed the drawstring mouth. I could still feel the faint hum of its aura, but Nash’s negation was keeping it from tearing at me.
“I’m guessing you want me to keep this,” Nash said, sitting down again, the wrapped pot on the desk between us.