Stormwalker

by Allyson James

  After we’d run through our art discussion, Jamison sent Julie off to help Naomi. Perceptive Julie rolled her eyes and left the studio. She knew we’d talk about the exciting stuff once she was gone.

  “How is Naomi dealing with you being a Changer?” I asked as we watched Julie stride toward the Garden Center. “She thought she was getting a good-looking Diné and ended up with a mountain lion.”

  Jamison laughed. He had a warm smile, black hair pulled into a braid, beautiful dark eyes, and a deep, smooth voice. I’d known Jamison since high school, when he’d been kind to me, a scared, messed-up teenage girl. Jamison had some shaman powers, and he’d helped me learn how to control my storm magic. Not only that, but I’d discovered a friend with a warm heart. I’d have fallen in love with him myself, but I was too terrified of hurting people to pursue relationships. Not that Jamison had ever suggested we go out or be more than friends. I wasn’t his soul mate. I’d been happy for him when he met and moved in with Naomi, eventually marrying her. Jamison deserved the love Naomi lavished on him.

  “She’s fine with it.” Jamison’s smile made me envious. He and Naomi had a love and a trust that had been tested and stood firm.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets, hesitant about broaching the next subject. “Jamison, how did Mick fight the skinwalkers?”

  Jamison picked up a cloth and started polishing the black rock he’d been working on. “With some damn good fire magic. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Did he change into anything? He stripped off, so I wondered . . .”

  Jamison shook his head. “I think he just didn’t want to burn up his clothes and have nothing to walk home in.”

  I sighed. “It’s embarrassing, Jamison. I sleep with the guy, and I don’t even know what he is.”

  “I think he’s some kind of firewalker, as far as I can tell.”

  The mirror had called Mick a firewalker, but I’d never heard the term. “So, what is that? Do firewalkers look like dragons?” Dragons might not be real, but that didn’t mean a demon or something couldn’t resemble them.

  “I met a firewalker in Mexico, a human, not a shape-shifter. They can tap into fire for their own purposes, bend it to their will, the same way you can with lightning and wind. Mick is similar, but not the same. The firewalker I knew couldn’t conjure fire from nothing. With Mick, it was like the fire was inside him.”

  “I’m not an Unbeliever,” I said, frustrated. “Why won’t he tell me?”

  “Now, that is a relationship issue. Which means you two have to work it out for yourselves.”

  “Thanks a lot, Jamison.”

  “It’s wisdom I’ve learned the hard way. Don’t keep secrets from Mick and then wait for him to be honest with you. You either trust him with all you’ve got, or you walk away.”

  I touched a mountain lion carved from red sandstone that stood prominently in the middle of the room. It was unfinished—the lion’s head and shoulders flowed toward me out of jagged red orange rock.

  “This is beautiful. Would you let me display it at the hotel?”

  “No.”

  The answer was immediate and without thought. “I’ll make you something else,” Jamison said when I looked at him in surprise. “The lion—it’s special to me and Naomi.”

  I stroked the animal’s smooth forehead. “I can see that it’s special.” I could feel so too. Its aura was one of strength and wildness and, at the same time, peace. “I’m sure whatever you come up with for me will be beautiful.”

  I kept running my fingers over the sandstone as I gathered my courage to broach the next subject. “By the way, if you’re going to Chinle anytime soon, would you mind driving on up to my dad’s to pick up the photographs I have stored there? I want to display them in the hotel when it’s done. I’d pay for your gas and tell them you’re coming so they can get them ready for you.”

  Jamison picked up his chisel and turned to his black stone. “No.”

  “It’s just that you go home so often, Many Farms isn’t far from you, and I can’t leave the hotel . . .”

  I trailed off as Jamison looked at me, his brown eyes intelligent. “You have to go back sometime, Janet. Face your ghosts. Believe me, it’s worth it.”

  I wondered what Jamison’s ghosts had been and if he could possibly understand about mine. He looked at me awhile longer before he turned to his stone and gently chipped a bit from it.

  I swallowed, thanked him again for agreeing to do a sculpture for me, and left before I started whimpering.

  Instead of driving back to my hotel, I drove to Amy McGuire’s house and parked in front.

  Amy lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a small white house with a short driveway in front. The back of Amy’s house faced the empty railroad bed, which ran north-south on the eastern edge of town. Magellan folk now used the railroad bed as a handy place to walk their dogs, jog, and hike from one end of town to the other. Beyond that the desert stretched to a low ridge, the sky above it vast and blue.

  The McGuires still owned this house; they had not wanted to rent it out or sell it after Amy vanished. All her stuff was still in it, locked away, waiting for her return. I’d investigated the house during my first week in Magellan, even spending the night to listen to it, but it had told me nothing.

  Amy had planted flowers to either side of the driveway, but they’d long since died and no one had bothered to pull them out. They lay like dried straw in the unwatered beds, food for the birds.

  As I walked up the driveway, a large crow flapped toward me and perched on the chain-link fence. It cocked its head and watched me, as if waiting to see what I’d do. I still had the key to the house Chief McGuire had given me, and I unlocked the door and went inside.

  The small house had a short hallway just inside the door, which led to the living room on the right and two bedrooms on the left. Straight ahead was the kitchen, small and functional.

  Amy had photos all over her living room—of herself and her parents, of herself in the middle of her blue-robed church choir, of herself with her arm around Nash Jones. The few pictures with her and Nash never showed him smiling. They were candid photos—in them he contemplated a cup of coffee, or was listening to someone else, or looking at something beyond Amy. None of them showed him looking at her, smiling at her, paying any attention to her.

  I took out the smudge stick I’d bought from Heather Hansen, propped it in a coffee cup, lit the stick, and let the sage smoke fill the room. I closed my eyes, breathing in the scent, letting my mind and body become attuned to the house and the faint noises inside and out. I heard the crow hopping along the fence, and I knew without opening my eyes that it had moved so it could watch me through the living room window.

  The aura of the house wrapped around my senses. It was clean and soft, a little lonely, but patient, waiting. I sensed no violence, no despair, no struggle. Just Amy living day after day through her routines, her choir practice, the preparations for her coming wedding.

  I sighed and opened my eyes. I hadn’t really expected the house to tell me anything more than it already had. I let the sage stick continue to burn while I stepped out into the yard. I felt nothing there either, just the inky aura of the crow as she stared at me. I don’t know how I knew that the crow was female—I just did.

  “Do you know what happened?” I asked it.

  The crow regarded me silently, black eye shining.

  “I know.” I sighed. “It’s something I have to work out for myself. But if supernatural beings are going to hang around me, they could at least help.”

  The crow sidestepped in its ungainly way, then it took off, soaring on outstretched wings into the very blue sky. Its hoarse caw drifted back to me, sounding for all the world like an admonishment.

  If my mother had anything to do with Amy’s death—for example, if Amy had died because my mother had possessed her in order to have form in this world—I’d expect to find more signs of darkness in Amy’s house and in the nearby deser
t. Her body might have been found after all this time, as dried out and spent as Sherry Beaumont’s walled up in my basement. I had grave suspicions that my mother had possessed Sherry Beaumont, and Sherry had died of it, though how the woman had ended up in my basement I still had no clue.

  I let myself out of Amy’s back gate, trudged over the railroad bed, and set off across the desert, angling north and east toward the place we’d battled the skinwalkers.

  Under the bright light of day, with a few white clouds hanging far to the south, the land was starkly beautiful, the miasma of last night’s fear gone. A few hikers wandered in the distance or on the railroad bed, likely following maps to the vortexes they’d picked up at Paradox.

  The trail I took and the vortex I found wasn’t on any map. A mile or so from Amy’s house, I stood at the top of the little rise where I’d heard my mother last night and looked down to the narrow wash between gentle slopes. Sunshine burned the earth orange red, the grasses green. It was mid-May, and wildflowers were out in a profusion of red, blue, yellow, purple.

  A nonmagical person walking here would see a pretty scene, nothing more. A vortex didn’t actually look like anything to the mundane eye; it was more a feeling, a prickling sensation, a warmth that didn’t come from the blazing sun.

  The sensations pounded me like a dozen shovels on the top of my head. I walked down the hill to the heart of the vortex, where I’d been afraid to go last night, and put my hands on a boulder that jutted out of the ground.

  The vibrations from it nearly jarred me off my feet. This was an entrance, all right. Closed and sealed, but if it opened . . . Well, I had no idea exactly what would happen, but I imagined it wouldn’t be good.

  A click of rocks above me announced a presence, but I didn’t turn around. I knew who it was even before he stopped behind me like menace manifest.

  “Why were you and your boyfriend starting fires out here last night?” he demanded.

  I took my hands from the rock, rubbed them on my pants, and walked past him up the hill. Nash Jones fell into step behind me, for once not in his sheriff’s togs but in shorts, T-shirt, and hiking boots. He had well-muscled legs, strong and tanned, and his sunglasses were firmly in place.

  “Day off?” I asked him when we reached the top of the hill. “I didn’t know you took them.”

  “The fire department came out to investigate,” he said, ignoring my question. “And called me. Why do you keep giving me excuses to arrest you?”

  “I didn’t start any fires, Sheriff. Besides, they were out before the fire department arrived.”

  The flat black of his sunglasses was unnerving. I hated not being able to see a person’s eyes. “I asked what were you doing out here,” he said.

  “What are you doing out here now? Hiking is a popular pastime in Magellan.”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  “It’s pretty under the stars.”

  “Don’t mess with me, Begay.”

  “Don’t mess with me, Jones. You are so out of your league I can’t believe it.”

  The scar pulled at his upper lip. “It’s my fiancée who’s missing. I don’t need an outsider telling me I’m out of my league.”

  “Why do you think she’s dead?”

  “What?”

  “You told me when you interrogated me in your jail that you thought Amy was dead. The case file said you had a PTSD blackout that day.” I hesitated, but I needed to ask. “Are you afraid you killed her?”

  I doubt I would have asked so bluntly if Nash had been carrying his gun. I figured, in his civvies, maybe he couldn’t hurt me as much. Maybe.

  “That’s none of your damned business.”

  “So, are you?”

  Nash opened his mouth to roar at me. Then he stopped and flinched, as though some pain twisted his gut. “I don’t know.”

  “For the record, I don’t think you did.”

  My statement, if anything, made him even madder. “What the hell do you know about it?”

  “Because I don’t think Amy’s dead. I was just at her place, reading it again. There’s no sign of a struggle, no blood, nothing. And no ghosts.”

  “There aren’t any effing ghosts.”

  “Houses have an aura just like people do,” I said patiently. “They retain an imprint of those who live there, of the emotions the house witnesses. Violence and death leave a vivid mark. A friend of mine, a Navajo, once toured Auschwitz. He said the aura there was so black and sticky that it was like walking through tar. He couldn’t stand it and had to leave. And he has only a little bit of shaman magic.”

  “Your point?”

  “Amy’s place has no aura of violence, death, or fear. I felt nothing there but her quiet life, day in, day out. Which could mean she left on her own, her choice.”

  “Her car never left her house, and no one came to pick her up,” Nash said in a tight voice, repeating what I had read in the files.

  “That anyone saw,” I said. “She could have gone when no one was looking out their windows. Even the nosiest neighbor has to go to the bathroom sometime.”

  “Then she must have walked somewhere,” Nash said.

  “No one walking the railroad bed that day saw her. Plus, I’ve hiked through the desert out here several times and sensed no trace of her, psychic or physical.”

  “Then how do you account for this?” Nash pulled out his wallet and extracted a photo. “I found this in this very spot a year ago. In a place you were compelled to come to last night and again today.”

  He held the photo in front of my face. It was Amy, wearing a dark blue strapless gown, her hair pulled up and styled in golden ringlets. She smiled, eyes sparkling, lips red and smooth. The photo was stained and creased, one fold across Amy’s face like a knife cut. It had also been savagely torn in half, obliterating the man who’d had his arm around Amy’s waist.

  Thirteen

  I reached for the photo, and Nash handed it to me with reluctance. I got nothing from the physical picture, no aura, no presence of magic. It could be that the tingling sensation of the nearby vortex erased what I might have felt, but somehow, I didn’t think so. I hadn’t seen a twin of this picture in Amy’s house, nor had it been mentioned in the police file.

  “Is this you in it?” I asked. Strong, tanned fingers that could have been Nash’s curled on Amy’s waist.

  He shook his head. “We weren’t together then. It’s from a formal dance when she was down at U of A.”

  Amy’s escort had been effectively erased from the photo. Had Amy done that? Or Nash in a fit of jealousy? Or my deranged mother?

  “Who was the guy?”

  “My brother, Kurt.”

  I looked at Nash in surprise. “Your brother?”

  “Kurt dated Amy in high school and college. They broke up, and he got married and moved to North Carolina. Three years ago now.”

  Kurt Jones hadn’t figured in any of the reports McGuire had let me read. Maybe because the brother had already married and gone, and therefore was not a suspect? “What did he have to say about Amy’s disappearance?”

  Nash snatched the picture back. “Kurt hadn’t left home in months; he hadn’t seen her. He had nothing to do with it.”

  “And he was fine with you getting engaged to her?”

  “Why the hell wouldn’t he be? He fell in love with someone else and is happily married. His wife has a daughter on the way. Kurt and Amy both moved on.”

  “Kind of an odd match, you and Amy.”

  Nash stuffed the picture back into his wallet. “She was good to me.”

  But were you good to her? Had Amy started dating one brother because she was still hung up on the other? Or had it been a clean break as Nash so emphatically stated? And who had torn Kurt out of the photograph?

  I didn’t voice my questions, because this was the most Nash had opened up to me about Amy, and I didn’t want to ruin it. Maybe being out of uniform softened him a little. I looked at the grim set to his mouth. Only a litt
le.

  “Why didn’t you give the picture to McGuire?” I asked him. “It might be evidence.”

  “I know. That’s why I kept it.”

  “You’re a confusing man, Sheriff. Why shouldn’t the chief of police have the evidence?”

  “Because McGuire is too upset to run a proper investigation. He always has been. He confirmed it by asking you to come here. I don’t care if this is Magellan, it’s not good procedure to bring in a psychic.”

  “Police departments do it all the time,” I countered. “Especially on missing-persons cases.”

  “The last resort of the desperate. Investigators should find answers based on logic, facts, and a knowledge of human nature.”

  I wondered how much Nash understood human nature. He didn’t seem understanding of any point of view but his own.

  “Are you saying you aren’t too upset to investigate? You were going to marry her.”

  “McGuire and I both conceded conflict of interest. We asked for it to be investigated under state jurisdiction.”

  “Then why are you still investigating on your own?”

  “Because no one else has turned up a damn thing,” he said. “I’m not too upset to do my job.”

  “A building fell on you out in Iraq. That could mess up anyone.”

  “It’s what happens in war.” Nash spoke with his jaw so tight, I thought it might snap.

  I had a sudden vision of Nash’s face under an army helmet paling as explosions ripped around him. I saw plaster rain down, his arms coming up to stave off the falling beams. I smelled the dust, the smoke, heard noise so loud it drowned out his shouting and the screams of the others.

  I shuddered, and the vision vanished. I found myself back in the desert, the sun beating down on me, the wildflowers pungent. I knew the vision had been a real one. Psychic distress didn’t cling only to buildings; it clung to people too.