Stormwalker

by Allyson James

  I’d assumed she entered human women simply to be ambulatory and able to communicate, that her encounter with my father had been a chance thing. Now my grandmother’s story revealed a more sinister truth. My goddess mother had always been trying to make a child—a child she could use, control, manipulate. A child who would be her liaison and minion in the world above. A child like me. You are the key, she’d said.

  She’d tried it with Harold Yazzie. When that baby had died, she’d found another man to seduce. My father. This time, the child had lived and thrived. Me.

  “Why?” I asked with dry lips. “Why did I survive when Harold Yazzie’s child died?”

  “The women on my side of the family have powerful magic in them. My mother was very strong, like you. Your aunts barely have any magic and neither do your cousins. But you inherited it through me.”

  My eyes were burning. “How did you know? About my mother? How did you know what she was?”

  “A goddess from Beneath? Because I’m not stupid. Young people think the old are fools, but I remember when your father brought you home with his story of the woman he’d been seeing in secret. You stank of her sorcery. And then power manifested in you stronger than I’ve ever seen it. The two magics—the Stormwalker power and the Beneath power—war with each other inside you. If you hadn’t been strong—if I hadn’t made you so strong—the struggle would have killed you by now.”

  “It is killing me.” Tears slid down my cheeks. “I don’t know how to stop it.”

  “You can’t stop it. You can only control it.”

  I dashed away tears with the back of my hand. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you explain that you knew everything?”

  “I didn’t know, not for certain. Not until Harold Yazzie told me his story. Your true mother needs a child, one she can control. Tell me why.”

  I rubbed my aching forehead. “I’m not sure. She’s said things to me, that I’m a key of some kind. A key to the vortexes.”

  “Well, you can’t let her have her way. She obviously doesn’t mind using and killing people to get what she wants. You make sure you don’t let her use you.”

  “Easier said than done, Grandmother. I’ve met her—or at least, a glimmer of her. She’s very powerful.”

  “As I say, there are strong magics on my side of the family. Maybe not as potent as hers, but good, earth-grounded magic. That Mick creature, he has great earth magics, though his have an evil taint. Watch him.”

  “You only just met him.”

  “I know enough. I haven’t decided whether I like him yet, but he can keep your magic from killing you and keep your mother from using you. Or at least he’ll try.”

  I couldn’t take much more of this. My heart was breaking into little pieces.

  “Gods, the woman in my basement.” I didn’t explain what I meant, because Grandmother had seemed to know all about Sherry Beaumont when I’d called to announce I was coming home. The gossip network out here was wide.

  “She was pregnant,” I said, remembering what Nash had told me. “She was pregnant with a baby, not her husband’s. And she died.”

  My mother must have been using Sherry to make another baby, I realized. I’d proved to be rebellious and willful, so my mother had tried again to get a child, maybe one who’d grow up to be obedient this time.

  Another thought trickled through my fear, dismay, and anger.

  Who had been the father?

  Fifteen

  By the time Grandmother and I returned to the house, my father and Mick were inside, sitting in the living room in companionable silence. Both rose when we came in.

  My father, Pete Begay, was not a demonstrative man. He had an ageless face and dark hair, a slim body, and quiet ways. After I’d met my mother, I’d grown angry with him for letting her use him, and for not putting her out of his mind and getting on with his life, for not marrying someone else. I hadn’t seen him from the day I fled her to this.

  I decided now, watching him with new understanding, just how strong a man he was. He’d loved my mother with a deep, quiet love that he’d then transferred to me. I saw that now when he came to greet me.

  “Ya’at’eeh, Janet.”

  “Ya’at’eeh, Dad. How’s everything going?”

  He shrugged, which was his way of dismissing his early mornings, backbreaking work, nursing sick sheep, keeping watch over the lambs, being on the lookout for coyotes. “Your grandmother told you about Harold Yazzie?”

  I felt cold. “You know?”

  He nodded. Mick watched, not understanding, but he kept silent.

  I didn’t want my father to know. I didn’t want him to realize he’d been one in a string of my mother’s lovers, men she’d essentially used as sperm donors. I wanted him to be innocent of the fact that she hadn’t loved him. “Dad . . .”

  “We will speak of it later.” He started down the hall for my room, returning with an armful of photographs.

  I knew that when my father didn’t want to talk about a thing, we didn’t talk about it. He’d inherited his stubborn streak from my grandmother, all right, though his manifested in taciturnity.

  After we’d stacked the first load in the SUV, I returned to the house to find Mick pinned against a wall by my grandmother. The man who could have incinerated her with the flick of a finger was looking down at her, nonplussed, like a huge dog might regard a kitten that knew it had the upper hand.

  “I don’t care if you have big earth magic or how strong you think you are,” Grandmother was saying. “I’ll hunt you down. Do you understand me?”

  “Grandmother,” I said in alarm.

  Mick gazed down at her in quiet seriousness. “I do.”

  “Those tattoos.” Grandmother tapped a dragon tail that snaked out of Mick’s sleeve. “That’s just showing off.”

  “It’s a fault I have. I like to show off.”

  “I can see that.”

  Grandmother poked him in the chest, then turned her back on him and walked away. “Janet, you will spend the night. Mick can sleep in your truck.”

  “I’m not letting Mick sleep outside,” I said in protest.

  “Well, you’re not sharing a bed under my roof.” She started banging open cupboards in the kitchen. “Now, leave me be. I have to cook dinner.”

  Grinning, Mick ducked out of the house to help my father with the pictures. I hurried out after him. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be. She’s trying to take care of you.”

  “You’re a guest.”

  “She’s a matriarch. She’s telling me she dominates here, and I respect that.” He gave me another grin. “I like her.”

  He swung away to help my father load more pictures, and I knew then I’d lose all the arguments for the rest of the day.

  After our dinner of stew with fresh vegetables, which I hadn’t realize how much I’d missed, my father pushed back his chair.

  “Come out with me, Janet.” He walked outside without waiting for my answer.

  I hated to leave Mick alone with my grandmother, but he threw me a look that told me I should go. He started clearing the plates off the table, and Grandmother turned her entire attention on him, fearing he’d break everything. I left Mick to it and went out to where my father rested against his truck.

  Without words, we got in, and he drove north and east. About five miles on, he turned down a dirt road that wound toward a mesa rising from the desert floor. He stopped and turned off the engine, and we sat still, watching the moon sail over the mountain.

  My dad and I had come out here to watch almost every full moon rise when I was a child. A lump formed in my throat. I’d been so eager to run away from my life here and the hard times with my family that I’d also abandoned the good things.

  As usual, Dad and I didn’t talk. We drank in the beauty, the bright moon, a little fuller than half, the blue and purple shadows of the mountain, the fading twilight, the carpet of stars that emerged overhead.

  “Why did
you come back here?” My father’s voice was quiet, smooth like the night.

  I looked at him in surprise. “To get the pictures. And to see you.”

  He didn’t answer me directly. He watched the night a few moments, then he said, “This Magellan place, this hotel. Is that your home now?”

  “I don’t know.” I hadn’t decided. Once I figured out what I could do against my mother, if anything, I wondered whether I’d want to stay in Magellan or go.

  “They’re not your own kind there. Your own people.”

  “Who is my own kind, Dad?” I asked, frustrated. “I don’t have any people. I rode all over the country looking for somewhere to belong, and I never found it. At least out there in the world, I can help people. Here, I’m nothing.”

  My heart felt hollow. All my life my grandmother and aunts had viewed me as a constant reminder of my father’s failure, of him allowing himself to be bamboozled by a femme fatale. The kids at school had known I was illegitimate, that I had no mother, that I had no idea who she was. I’d been rejected by my own people.

  My father glanced over at me, eyes shining in the moonlight. “You will always be strong, and free, Janet, as long as you remember that you are Navajo, of the earth.”

  “I wish I had your faith in me.”

  “Mick, he will help you. Don’t send him away. Swallow your pride. You need him.”

  So Mick had managed to get my father on his side. Mick had an uncanny knack for making everyone trust him.

  “Why don’t you hate her?” I asked my father. “She used you, she tried to kill you, and you always talk about her as though you were still in love with her.” I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I let my anger bubble free. “She tried to kill us outside of Gallup that time. I know it was her now. She sent skinwalkers, and Grandmother drove them off with her magic.”

  My father shook his head. “She wasn’t trying to kill you. She wanted to take you away from me. I was foolish then, taking you too close to her realms. She’d tried to kill me before that, the night I’d driven to Albuquerque to fetch you.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I was driving back, and I had to stop for gas. All of a sudden, she was there, coming at me with a knife. She tried to kidnap you.”

  “What did you do?”

  He shrugged. “I fought her off, and I drove very fast, up into Navajoland. That’s all. I knew that if I got you home, I could protect you.” My father smiled. “You didn’t like being protected.”

  I’d never minded him being protective, but with Grandmother it had been stifling. “You let me leave home.”

  “You were riding away from her realms entirely, and I knew that the storm power would serve you well.”

  “How can you talk about all this so calmly? She’s still doing it. If you know about Harold Yazzie, you’ll know she’s still trying to create another daughter, maybe one who’s more easily controlled than I am. I hate that Grandmother told you.”

  He smiled, with another shrug. “It explains why a goddess was interested in an awkward Diné boy like me.”

  Tears sprang to my eyes. “You’re not awkward. You’re wonderful. You’re the best man in the world, and I hate her for what she did to you.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  I slammed back into the seat. “Shit, Dad. Why the hell not?”

  My father laid one strong hand on my knee. “Because she gave me you.”

  I stared at him in shock. Dad just kept smiling at me, and then I burst into tears.

  When we returned to the house, it was to discover that Mick had taken his bike and disappeared into the night, likely to find a more comfortable place to sleep than my SUV. He called me as I was getting ready for bed, telling me that he knew I was safe at my father’s house and that he had something he needed to take care of. He didn’t bother telling me what, of course. He said he’d meet me back at the hotel, wished me sweet dreams, and hung up.

  I got into bed, but I remained awake long into the night. Lying in this bed again dredged up too many bad memories, and my grandmother’s revelation about my mother haunted me. Had she succeeded in breeding more children, more daughters? Were there other Janets out there? The thought chilled me.

  I started back for Magellan after breakfast. Two of my aunts dropped by as I helped my grandmother tidy up before I left. They told me what they thought of me opening a hotel in a white town (mixed opinions, from admiration to portents that I wouldn’t last a week), that they’d visit the place, expecting a (free) bed, and when Grandmother described Mick’s blue eyes and tattoos, they warned me against my obviously deviant boyfriend. “He’s a bad seed, Janet,” my aunt Alice said. “A man like that will bring you nothing but grief.”

  I noticed my father slipping away from the babbling of women, murmuring something about animals that no one paid attention to. I extricated myself, got into my SUV, and breathed a sigh of relief as I headed south.

  I reached the Crossroads Hotel after lunch, went inside, and found people working but no Mick. His bike wasn’t out front either. Fremont was there looking a little better. He greeted me almost like his old chipper self, though he still seemed tired.

  “Where’s Maya?” I asked him.

  “Who knows? That young lady, she does her own thing.”

  I ground my teeth. Maya had taken to showing up or not as she felt like it in the last few days. My appliance installation wasn’t finished, and I still didn’t have working lights on the first floor. It wasn’t as though Magellan was loaded with qualified electricians. I needed Maya.

  Fremont helped me carry the pictures inside, and we put them in my bedroom for safekeeping. He admired the orange and pink glory that was a slot canyon—a narrow slit that curved into mysterious shadow.

  After we stashed the pictures, I hopped back into the SUV and headed for town.

  I’d learned my way around by now, remembering what was on each curve of the highway. Hansen’s Garden Center lay just beyond the one-screen movie theater and the small grocery store. Paradox nestled in the next curve, next to the diner and the gas station, which was plastered with posters offering a $12 lube and oil change.

  Residential streets curved from the business-filled corners, running back into the desert. Amy’s home lay at the end of the last turnoff in the town, and Maya Medina’s small house sat closer to the intersection on the same road.

  A few houses back here had landscaped yards, probably courtesy of Hansen’s Garden Center, with big mesquites, cottonwoods, and junipers to bring much-needed shade. Clumps of cactus and desert grass highlighted open ground, and some residents had dug out gardens for scarlet geraniums and purple petunias that they kept watered. Wildflowers grew in profusion along the road and into yards—yellows, reds, purples, and dark blues.

  In this glory of color, Maya’s small house with painted clapboard siding looked fresh and neat. Her truck was the only thing in her pristine carport.

  I parked, slamming the door hard to let her know I was coming. I’d been taught growing up that it was rude to startle someone with a surprise visit, to rush to a front door and start banging on it. Better to give the person inside time to ready themselves or let them come out and invite the guest inside. On the other hand, Maya was stiffing me work, and she could put up with a little rudeness.

  When I stepped up to the small, square porch, I noticed that the front door wasn’t closed all the way. At home I’d not think this strange, but even in a small town like Magellan people kept their doors closed and locked.

  Maya’s living room window was perfectly positioned to overlook the road. Easy for her to see who drove in and out of this neighborhood all day. The day Amy disappeared, Maya had been home, but she’d told Chief McGuire she hadn’t seen a soul that day.

  Cold formed in the pit of my stomach. Maybe she had seen something in truth and lied for her own reasons. Maybe the person she’d seen had some kind of hold on her. And then I’d come to Magellan, poking around and asking questions.
And Maya had come to work at my hotel . . .

  I quickly pushed open the door and stepped inside. I saw an empty living room with a nice set of upholstered furniture and a flat-screen television, a kitchen behind a breakfast bar, and a small dining room. All were tidy but empty.

  A narrow hall led to more rooms in the back, and a fan wafted cool air through the house. I hesitated, wondering whether to announce myself. Then I heard Maya cry out.

  Pulling out my cell phone, I barreled into the back and shoved open the nearest door. I stopped in astonishment, my grip on the phone going slack.

  Maya, stark naked, her dark skin a lovely contrast to the white sheets, was on the bed, straddling an equally naked Sheriff Jones. I stopped in my tracks, struck by how beautiful they were together. Maya’s black hair spilled to her hips as she tilted her head back, enjoying what Nash did to her. Nash’s skin shone like burnished bronze, gleaming with sweat, his brown fingers splayed on Maya’s thighs. He gazed up at her, his gray eyes dark with sexual excitement.

  I’d moved my thumb from my phone and turned to leave them in peace when Nash spotted me. Maya looked over her shoulder, saw me, and screamed.

  I hurried down the hall, but Maya came flying out of the bedroom and thwacked me with a pillow. I stumbled, and my shoulder caught the corner of the wall.

  Maya swore at me in a string of Spanish. I wasn’t fluent in Spanish, but I’d lived in the Southwest long enough to pick up a few phrases, especially the rude ones, like Indian skank. Rich, considering Maya had been the one bouncing up and down on top of Nash.

  I regained my balance in time to fend off another attack with the pillow. Jones, every inch a law enforcement officer—and I do mean every inch—caught Maya around the waist and dragged her back.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he roared at me.

  I didn’t bother explaining I’d been trying to. I rushed out of the house and slammed the door, gaining my truck before I realized that my feet had covered the distance.

  I sat down heavily and blew out my breath. Maya’s front door was firmly closed this time, probably locked by now. Why had it been open in the first place? Had they been so frenzied they hadn’t bothered to check the door?