By mid-afternoon, Mick had dropped the college professor mode and suggested we stop in a town and rest a while. My young heart beat faster with anticipation—he really meant we should hole up and spend time in bed.
Mick tucked us into a room in another tiny motel, securing our bikes right outside the door. This motel was popular with bikers, and the ones wandering around the place were big, scary-looking guys. When they saw Mick, however, they broke into grins and greeted him with enthusiasm.
I swore Mick knew everyone on the planet. I bet myself that if we hiked to the highest, remotest place in the Gobi desert, a Mongolian would come striding along and say, “Mick! Hey, how you doing?”
That night a big thunderstorm blew up. The clouds were volatile, a tornado forming in the storm’s heart.
I wanted to pull that tornado wind to me and ride it. I wanted to blow apart every building, fly away high to freedom. I grabbed the lightning and sent it around the room, laughing.
“Shh.” Mick held my face in his hands as he took me down to the bed. His kisses were firing instead of calming, he aroused and wanting me.
Mick pressed my palms to his chest and took the lightning I gathered straight into him. I zapped him as I had the first night we’d met. Then he’d only laughed as arcs crawled all over him, crackling in his fingers.
His fingers danced with electricity now, and his smile was wild. Mick growled as the lightning ate into him, and he began to love me. A gust of wind burst through the room before I could stop it, rattling the walls and smashing pictures to the floor.
Mick had never made love to me like this before. Shrieking wind and crashing thunder filled the night as he held me down, his eyes changing from blue to soot black, fire sparkling deep inside them.
His body was hard under my hands, his skin slick with sweat. He spoke to me in languages I didn’t know, as though he’d forgotten English, but the phrases sounded highly complimentary.
I could only cry Mick’s name, because I pretty much forgot how to speak anything at all. I arched into him and enjoyed the crazy, intense lovemaking, the intimacy of being together, seizing every bit of enjoyment out of each other we possibly could. Somehow both of us had known it would soon be over.
I crashed into sleep as the storm died away and woke a long time later in his arms.
The part of me that knew this was a dream suddenly shut up. There was absolutely no reason to take myself back to the present. Mick lay beside me, sleeping deeply, a faint snore coming out of his mouth. I smiled to myself. I should record that—Mick swore up and down he didn’t snore.
It was a beautiful moment, moonlight strengthening as the tattered remnants of the storm clouds dispersed. Mick looked so normal beside me—as normal as a large man with a fantastically hot body lying naked on bedsheets could look. The dragon tatts around his arms were stark in the moonlight, seeming almost separate from him. But even they were quiet, Mick in profound slumber.
This was when I’d been the happiest in my life. I had no idea what was to come, what Mick’s true mission was, no idea he was a dragon. In this reality it was just Mick and me, no magic mirror butting in, no phone calls to tell me of another disaster at the hotel. No dragons trying to kill me, no sisters threatening to tear the world apart, no goddesses trying to drag me down to the underworld and siphon off my power. No Nash Jones butting into my business; my grandmother, the same.
My world was Mick and his world was me. I was happy, blissfully, ignorantly so.
A person could blind herself to the rest of the world when she wanted to hold on to illusion. I grabbed this illusion with both hands and hugged it to me. My true life, the Crossroads Hotel, Emmett, demons, and the rest of it, blurred and faded away.
***
We left the little motel in the morning and journeyed on through the Black Hills and into Wyoming. Ranches spread against sharp mountains in the distance, grasslands rolling by in heart-stopping splendor.
I pulled alongside Mick on the mostly empty highway and glanced over at him. He turned his head, black hair snapping out from under the helmet, his blue eyes covered with dark sunglasses. He shot me a wide grin, and my heart filled with an ache like a hot blue star.
The next morning, when I woke in another motel room, this one in Wyoming, Mick was already up and out of the shower. He’d pulled on jeans but not a shirt, the flame tattoo across his lower back peeking above his waistband.
I sat up groggily, the sheet tucked around my chest. I never tired of looking at him.
“Mick,” I said softly. “I need to tell you something.”
Mick glanced at me through the mirror above the dresser, where he was trying to smooth down his hair—never worked. He caught my expression and turned around. “What’s that, baby?”
He wasn’t expecting anything important. Just me going on about something or other.
I studied him a moment, getting lost in eyes blue enough to drown in. The dragon had receded.
I sat there wondering what past Janet thought was so urgent to tell him, then I realized.
Gods and goddesses, it was that day. The day that changed everything.
Chapter Six
Mick waited. He was always so patient with me, and yet so watchful.
It had been the watchfulness that had started to drive me crazy, on top of days when he’d simply disappeared and refused to tell me where he’d gone. At the time, I’d put down his watchfulness to him being older than me and restraining himself around a less experienced woman. I hadn’t realized at the time how much older. I’m talking a couple hundred years.
The Janet at this moment knew nothing of that. My chest was tight, my throat dry. I wet my lips, took a courageous breath, and blurted out:
“Mick, I love you.”
Mick stilled, his smile dying. His eyes flickered, and for an instant, the black depths of the dragon looked out at me.
The me in the past felt her heart plummet, embarrassment mixing with my outpouring of emotion. I got myself off the bed. “Shit, I just freaked you out, didn’t I? Forget it. Forget it. Forget it.”
Wrapped in the sheet, I headed for the bathroom door, my feet trying to take me out of this awkward situation. I’d been raised to keep my emotions close to my chest, and gushing that I loved a guy wasn’t in character. I don’t know to this day what made me tell him.
Mick got himself around in front of me. “Janet. Stop.” His voice had gone soft, a little bit growly.
“I’ll shower, and we’ll pretend I never said a thing,” I babbled, my eyes fixed on the hollow at his collarbone. “Promise me you’ll still be here when I get out.”
I tried to duck around him, but Mick caught me. “No,” he said in the gentlest voice I’d ever heard him use. “I don’t want to forget it.”
He put his hands on my face and looked down into my eyes as he liked to do. The me of the past didn’t understand what he was searching for. The me of the present did. He was looking for signs of the evil goddess who’d spawned me. Trying to discover if I were just as evil, if everything I said or did was a cover as I waited to explode onto the world and destroy all in my path.
Mick had learned that I wasn’t that evil being. We’d gone through hell before he’d understood that—we were still going through it in some respects.
At the moment the two of us Janets, juxtaposed and both confused, waited while Mick tried to figure out what we were.
One thing Janet past and future shared was love for Mick. That hadn’t changed. In the me of the future, that love had broadened and deepened, until we had understanding between us that I’d never dreamed possible. The Janet of the past had simply been blown away by him, as giddily in love as a young, unworldly woman could be.
This Mick didn’t know me. He even feared me, big-bad dragon that he was.
His eyes flickered again. I saw fire there, anger, and a tiny flare of hope.
Mick closed his eyes, cutting himself off from me. He bowed his head, his unruly black hair brushing my
lips.
When he looked up again, something had changed inside him. The me of the past didn’t know what. The me of the future did.
This had been the most important day for me, changing everything.
What I hadn’t known then was—that day changed everything for him. That day, Mick made his choice.
He cupped his hands around my neck, caressing, and his blue eyes moistened. “What am I going to do with you, baby?”
Standing here with him in a bedroom, I could think of a lot of things he could do with me. Mick’s smile came back, full of wickedness. He wound his arms around me and dragged me up for a long kiss.
I found myself in a few minutes, not on the bed, but sitting on the dresser, the mirror cold at my back while Mick loved me with an intensity that rivaled even the storms of the night.
***
That was the day I started to forget. I rode off with Mick an hour later, pleasantly sore, and was both Janets. As the day and the ride went on, the Janet in my future began to fade, my memories of what was to come blurring and receding into dust.
I didn’t fight it too much. These days with Mick had been the happiest of my life. Why not let them take over? Unhappiness and bad times were coming. I would enjoy the hell out of what I had right now, and who cared if I never woke up?
Before present-day Janet slipped into the mists, though, she realized now why the first day I said I love you was significant for both Mick and me. I’d opened myself up, made myself vulnerable to another, for the first time in my life.
That had been Janet growing up. For Mick, the day had been still more important.
I knew now that Mick finding me in a fight on a back road in Nevada, and me trying to kick his ass, hadn’t been a happy coincidence. We hadn’t simply met by chance and hit it off.
Mick had been watching me. Following me. He’d been assigned to do so by the Dragon Council, because they’d been afraid of what I, a slip of a Diné girl, would do to the world. They were right to be worried—I hadn’t exactly been in control.
The day I’d declared my love, though I hadn’t known it, had been the day Mick decided to defy the dragons.
That morning he’d looked into my eyes and seen the real Janet, a young woman on the brink of life, horrifically powerful but innocent. I had the power to destroy the world and the latent anger to do it, but I saw no reason to. I wasn’t the crazy bitch my mother was. I was just … me.
That was the moment Mick decided to tell the Dragon Council to go screw themselves. That day, he stopped protecting the dragons from me, and began protecting me from the dragons.
He set in motion a long chain of events that culminated in Mick nearly dying for his choice.
For now, I was oblivious, happy to be out on the road, riding next to him, the miles of backcountry unrolling under us. I was with the man I loved and was free to do whatever I liked. That was all I needed.
Future Janet forgot, and lost herself in the pleasure of the past.
I dreamed, and never wanted to wake.
***
“Janet.” A voice not Mick’s whispered through my head.
Mick lay beside me on the hotel bed. We were in Montana, having ridden north all day and well into the night. We’d stopped for a while by the side of the road and looked up at the stars—a big patch of them between the tall trees.
Mick had pointed out constellations to me, showing me what humans saw—Orion, Cassiopeia, Andromeda. He even had powerful binocs so we could study the stars and moon more closely.
After that, we headed sleepily into the next town and found a motel with a vacancy. There were other bikers here, normal humans, fellow vagrants of the open road.
Mick, who didn’t know a stranger, soon made about twenty new friends. We shared beer with them, then finally went to bed.
Was Mick too tired to make love? Of course not. He never was.
He loved me far into the night, then held me as we drifted to sleep.
I woke in the small hours to the whisper of my name. I opened my eyes in the dark, puzzled, but the call wasn’t repeated. Mick hadn’t spoken—he lay heavily next to me, sleeping so hard he didn’t even snore.
I lay quietly and listened to the sounds of the night. I heard wind in the trees, the constant rush and roar that was a staple of mountain country. Out on the highway a lone truck rumbled by. Far beyond it came the ghostly drone of a train’s whistle.
A coyote was howling in the woods. Yip-yip-yip-yip-owoooo …
Coyotes were trouble, Grandmother always told me. They killed sheep, they dragged off lambs, they carried disease, they got into garbage. Basically they were overall pains in the ass, though Grandmother would never use those words.
I’d always envied the coyotes, running free and wild but never alone. They had packs, took care of each other, and adapted to changes in the world without missing a stride.
Yip-yip-yip-yip owoooo…
The coyote came closer. I hoped it stayed away from the motel, because some of the guys we’d met last night had guns, and they might think it fun to shut up the animal permanently.
Yip-yip-yip-yip owoooo … Janet!
I opened my eyes again as the howl coalesced into the syllables of my name.
Mick apparently heard nothing. He lay on his back, one hand behind his head, his hair a pleasant mess, and slept on.
I slid out of bed, snatched up Mick’s big T-shirt to cover my naked body, and padded to the window.
The curtains were open. Strange—Mick always made sure to close them before we went to bed. While he enjoyed making love to me in various and exciting ways, he had no intention of letting anyone else see. I knew the curtains had been shut.
I peered out to the back of the motel and a view of a big garbage bin, a slope of rocky soil, and the woods beyond.
Moonlight turned the view stark white with sharp-outlined shadows. The trees were black, lifting evergreen limbs high into the sky. The thick, lush vegetation was vastly different from the dry, flat lands around Many Farms, with its monolithic hills rising into blue, blue sky. Both were beautiful, but in distinct ways.
Janet …
The whisper floated among the trees. Just the wind, I told myself. My imagination.
A coyote came out of the woods. It trotted along as though minding its own business, then it looked up and saw me.
Moonlight touched the animal as he stood poised, every limb firm, his gaze finding mine. His coat was silver in the pale light, his eyes dark and intense. So beautiful.
He started for the motel, moving slowly, sauntering almost. Every paw was deliberately lifted and pressed down, his movements mesmerizing.
He reached the edge of the gravel. Stared at me. Probably wants food, I told myself. He knows humans leave it behind.
The window pane in front of me wavered, then dissolved and was gone. I blinked, wondering what had happened, but I was strangely unworried.
Behind me, Mick began to snore, a soft, comforting sound, telling me I wasn’t alone. Mick would never leave me alone …
The coyote walked right up to the window. A breeze stirred my hair, strands floating about my face. The coyote put his paws on the windowsill, hoisted himself up, and sniffed me.
I didn’t move. It was a magical moment, human woman and wild animal connecting, acknowledging.
Then it licked my face.
Rabies, my grandmother had told me. Some coyotes carry rabies. Or they’re just up to no good. You can never trust a coyote. That god is all-powerful and complete trouble.
“Ew!” I shoved the coyote away. He jumped back up on me, licked again. I shoved him harder.
The coyote growled and launched himself through the window. Paws met my shoulders, shoving me down, the coyote landing on top of me on the carpet.
“Mick!” I tried to yell. My voice was a whisper, stuck in my throat. Mick …
The coyote was licking, licking, nose and tongue all over my face. I twisted and turned, but I couldn’t get away from him
.
Janet. The voice returned, edged with a growl. Time to wake up.
No! Let me stay. Mick was here, loving me without restraint, and I loved him, unconditionally, not knowing the pain and heartbreak of the future. I want to stay.
The voice and the coyote started to fade. I smiled, relaxing. I would remain here with Mick, and we’d ride forever.
Fire. It started in my hand then snapped through me, pain kicking aside sweet contentment.
“No,” I moaned. “No, leave me alone.”
“Wakey-wakey, Janet!”
I knew that voice. Belonged to a shit of a dragon called Colby. But I wasn’t supposed to know him. Not yet.
The coyote pinned me down, licking my face, getting it disgustingly wet. His mouth opened, bathing me in roadkill breath and letting me see very large teeth set against his scarlet gums.
“Janet.” A deeper, very familiar voice slapped at me, and along with it came another rip of fire in my hand.
I screamed.
“Janet!” The voice roared. “Come back to me! Please.”
The coyote bit my face. But it was the voice that jolted me from the haze of deep comfort and rocketed me toward pain.
Mick’s voice. The call I’d always answer.
I coughed as air poured, dry and hot, into my lungs. Darkness slammed into me, and I groped my way through it. Electricity crackled in my fingers. A storm …
Thunder cracked, and a flash of light penetrated the darkness.
My eyes flew open, my gasp sending more grating air down my throat.
I levitated up a foot and then slammed back down—into a mattress on a wide bed, in a white room I knew. I was surrounded by people, both human and supernatural, and my hand still held fiery pain.
Chapter Seven
No more cool woods, Montana, motel room, moonlight. It was full day at the Crossroads Hotel, light glaring through dark clouds outside my window. Thunder rumbled through hot, humid air.
Colby, a man with straight black hair and a tatt-covered body, stood at the foot of the bed, peering worriedly at me. Cassandra, pale and rigid, stood next to Colby, her arms folded across her gray raw silk jacket. Next to her was a rangy-looking woman with her black hair in a braid.
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