Stormwalker

by Allyson James

  Amy blinked in confusion, her eyes clear and sane but filled with pain. “Nash?”

  My heart hammered. My mother had left her, but damn it, where was she?

  Sirens erupted into the night air, help racing toward the hotel from Magellan. The storms converged as well, the two from the south and the west meeting that of the north. Chill wind cut across the desert, followed by a shower of hail.

  When the paramedic team burst into the kitchen, one of them the woman who’d patched me up after the wreck on the highway, Nash dragged me out through the saloon, past the groaning mirror, and out the front door, not caring how much I tripped and stumbled on the way. When we reached the sheriff’s SUV, Nash slammed me into the backseat, locking me inside.

  He opened the driver’s door, grabbed his radio, and started talking. He was going to lock me in jail and toss away the key, probably giving his deputies orders not to feed me either. This was the thanks I got for saving Maya’s life.

  Lightning forked into the wash beyond the railroad bed, the air crackling. I laughed as the power surged through me. Electricity sparkled through the handcuffs, and I pulled them apart as though they were made of butter.

  Ah, this is perfect.

  Cold knifed through me. Well, there wasn’t much doubt where my mother’s spirit had gone. She’d always said she wanted to get chummy with her daughter.

  My body was icy with fear, the fear growing as I watched myself hook fingers around the grill that separated front from back seats and with one tug loosen it. I let it go, making it look as though it was still fastened in place so Nash wouldn’t notice.

  I waited while Nash went to help the paramedics, lounging with my feet up and yawning in boredom. I watched Amy being carried on a stretcher from the hotel to an ambulance. Chief McGuire and his wife had come, Maude McGuire leaning against her upright husband while McGuire spoke to Nash. No doubt he was telling them the whole story. They’d never understand what I’d done—that I had to hurt Amy to save her life as well as Maya’s. I wondered if they’d ever speak to me again.

  They don’t matter, you know. They’re ants, crawling on the earth. Are you upset if one ant gets hurt?

  “I am, actually,” I said out loud. Proving I could still use my mouth to talk made me feel a little better.

  Janet, the compassionate. You can’t bleed for every living creature, my dear. There will never be enough time for that.

  “I can bleed for some of them.”

  Of course you can, darling. Where is that Nash? I need him.

  “Leave him alone.”

  Do you not understand how powerful he is? He can resist the strongest magic of this earth. Think what someone with both his power and mine could do. He can help break us out from Beneath and resist those who try to stop us—like the dragons. You saw what happened when that dragon you keep as a slut poured fire into Nash. Nothing. The dragons will bow before me now. And you.

  Gods help me, she was right. Nash could resist my magic and Mick’s, my strongest lightning and Mick’s hottest fire. If Nash could be commanded by those Beneath, nothing could stop them.

  Nash got into the SUV, slamming the door. He didn’t look at me or acknowledge my presence, but I felt rage boiling from him. He started the truck and roared off onto the dark highway, leaving the other vehicles behind.

  Halfway to Flat Mesa, where the road dipped to accommodate a winding wash, my mother said, Now.

  Unable to stop her, I ripped the grill from between the seats and laced one arm around Nash’s throat.

  Nash was strong, fast, and well trained. He had me hauled over the seat with his elbow in my neck before I could think. I grabbed the steering wheel and yanked it, feeling the SUV careen off the road and out onto the rocks. We hit the bank of the dry wash and plunged straight into it.

  In silence, Nash fought me off and reached for his radio. I fried it with one zap of lightning magic and, for good measure, fried his cell phone as well.

  We make a good team.

  “We don’t make any team, bitch.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Nash was on me, his breath hot on my face. “And why are your eyes green?”

  “Nash, just run,” I urged.

  He had my shoulders pressed to the seat. Oh, nice. He’s making it easy.

  Lightning flashed overhead, and the boom of thunder split my ears. The truck lit up brighter than day, showing Nash’s eyes clear like diamonds.

  My magic wouldn’t work on him—that was a slight comfort. Nash, of course, could strangle the life out of me if he needed to. He’d be safe, and my mother would have to dissipate, since his null magic probably wouldn’t let her possess him. She’d have to limp, somehow, to a crack in the earth to seep Beneath. I’d be dead, of course, but the world would be safe for another day.

  I wasn’t in the mood for self-sacrifice. I fought Nash as he pinned me.

  With a sudden burst of strength I rolled Nash over on the seat, grunting with the effort of it. Then I was on top of him. He was a trained fighter and struggled hard, but he was no match for my doubled physical strength.

  I broke his belt, ripped open his pants, and dragged them and his underwear down his thighs. Nash fought me like crazy. His cock sprang out, and I closed my hand around it, stroking until it hardened. Nash was gone on adrenaline, fear, and fury, but his body still responded to both my touch and the pheromones from my storm magic.

  “Janet, damn you . . .” Nash jabbed his thumbs at my throat, trying to cut off my air, but I batted his hands aside.

  “Don’t fight me, you idiot—get away from me!” I shouted. Then my voice changed, and my mother said through my lips, “We’ll make a fine baby together, and you’ll be a consort in my kingdom. You’ll have everything, even that Hispanic whore as your slave, if you want her.”

  “Jesus H. Fucking Christ, what is wrong with you?”

  Nash was a fighter. He wouldn’t go down easily, which I guess was the point. I laughed with my mother’s voice and cried Janet’s tears.

  “Stop me,” I whispered.

  The door behind me was ripped from its hinges, and the storm came pouring in. Freezing hail pounded on my back, and a lightning bolt struck a tree not twenty feet away.

  A rock-hard arm wrapped around my waist and ripped me from Nash. Nash sat up, pale in the dome light that somehow still worked. He was breathing fast, his penis deflating quickly against his abdomen.

  Mick’s strength squeezed the breath out of me as he turned me directly into the hail. “Let her go!”

  “No, Dragon,” my lips said. “She’s my daughter. I love her, and you can’t have her.”

  I realized that Mick had me positioned so that he could quickly snap my neck.

  “Don’t make me do it,” he rasped. Tears streamed down his face and mingled with the rain. “Please, don’t.”

  “Poor Dragon,” my mother said through my mouth. “This is what you were sent to do, wasn’t it? To kill her so I couldn’t use her. But, foolish Dragon, you fell in love. And now you must make a sacrifice. You should have killed her all those years ago and been done with it.”

  Lightning strikes multiplied until the sky was almost constantly white. Mick’s eyes had gone black, his dragon tattoos writhing like live things.

  “Mick, I love you,” I shouted. “If you have to, stop her.”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” my mouth said. I jerked my head up to gaze into the heart of the storm, and I called it to me.

  The storm was huge. As it descended on me I sucked every bit of its essence into my body.

  I’d never handled anything so gigantic before. I became living lightning. I had my mother’s strength inside me, and even as I knew her strength would eventually kill me, as it had my biological mother and Harold Yazzie’s lover and Sherry Beaumont, I reveled in every second of it.

  Nash had sprung out of the truck, gun in hand. I didn’t bother to throw anything at him, not knowing how much he could suck down until it had an effect on him. I
nstead, I tried to destroy Mick.

  Mick roared as the storm magic poured into him. He’d taken a lot from me before, but never in the heart of the storm, when I was at my strongest. He’d always drawn off the remainder of my magics, not the whole, living stream, and never with the impact of my mother’s Beneath magic mixed with it.

  Nash pointed the gun at my head, the flares of the electricity around me bouncing off him. “Let her go, Mick.”

  A bullet to my brain probably wouldn’t stop me. I was swimming with so much magic that it would probably animate my body for as long as it took. Nice try, Sheriff.

  Mick whipped me away from the gun. His body chilled as it began to swell and grow. Nash jumped back, and Mick spread enormous dragon wings and lifted himself—and me—off the ground.

  My stomach dropped as we rose abruptly, straight into the apex of the storm.

  Mick fought the wind. His dragon fire flamed out, clearing a path through the chunks of ice pouring from the clouds.

  I kept drawing the lightning into me, sending it surging into his body. I don’t know why my mother wanted to do that—if Mick dropped me, it could kill me.

  More fire shot from Mick’s mouth as he struggled to gain height. I didn’t know where he’d try to take me, and I wondered whether it would be to whatever volcano had created him. Drown the magic from Beneath in the magic of the earth’s bones—that was a good idea. However, that would mean flinging me into molten lava, which would be a pretty final solution.

  My mother realized this too. Together we sucked lightning into my body, she laughing maniacally. Mick roared in pain and dipped toward the ground.

  I felt a suction down there, a faint, swirling light that rose to meet the black clouds. A vortex, the one between the small hills, where I’d found the animal bones.

  Open it, she whispered to me. Then we’ll be safe.

  I’m not letting you win.

  We’ll retreat there. Let the dragon go.

  Oh, sure, you’d never lie to me.

  You are my key. Open the vortex, Janet.

  “Screw you,” I screamed out loud.

  Mick bellowed in reply, though I don’t know if he heard or understood me. My mother threw all the swirling hail, wind, and lightning at Mick.

  Open it, or I kill the dragon.

  Damn it. I believed wholeheartedly that she’d kill him, but if I opened the vortex and let her fully manifest, he’d die anyway, and so would Maya and Fremont and Jamison and Naomi and the rest of the friends I’d made since arriving in Magellan. This was my place now, and I wanted to protect it.

  I thought I now understood why, the night I’d stood near this vortex when we’d fought the skinwalkers, my mother hadn’t simply possessed me, thrust me into the keyhole, and turned me. That night I hadn’t had a storm. Now this intense storm and the Beneath magic made a perfect mixture—my mother drawing on the mystical energy of Beneath, me drawing on the wild magic of the earth. That was why she’d sent the Nightwalker to drag me to her on a stormy night, why she’d sent the skinwalker to waylay me during another storm.

  It took both magics to open the vortex. My mother needed me, Janet, and my unique heritage. She couldn’t open the vortex by herself, nor could I open it without her. She needed a child with Beneath magic that she could tap, but also one with strong earth magic. In this moment, above and Beneath tied together and could rip a hole in the fabric of the universe.

  The vortex flared, and a crack spread from it to follow the little arroyo that snaked from it. Twists of electricity swallowed Mick’s body, and his dragon voice echoed across the plateau as he faltered. He plummeted downward.

  Jump, my mother screamed in my head.

  Right. We were at least a hundred feet up.

  Mick rolled, one wing folding up under him. He was weakening, tail lashing as he fell down and down. His right wing swept out and uprooted a line of trees, branches and roots crashing into me as I huddled inside his dragon claw against his chest.

  At the last minute, my mother took charge and pushed me free of Mick. We plummeted through the gnarled body of a juniper hugging the side of the arroyo, then fell to hard ground. I rolled as soon as I hit, doing everything to survive the fall.

  Mick wouldn’t survive it. His wings dragged uselessly against the ground, legs limp as he fell. A fork of lightning hit the crack in the ground and it widened with a groaning sound. Mick fell inside the widening wash and disappeared into the light.

  “Mick!” I screamed. Torrents of rain beat on my face. My hair and clothes were plastered to my body and the wind threatened to lift me from my feet.

  A big coyote bounded toward me, snarling. I took off running toward the hole that had swallowed up the man I loved. My mother had vanished, leaving me alone, weak, and wanting to vomit. I was screaming and crying, unaware of doing either.

  Debris swirled around Coyote and he became a tall, naked man. His snide, good-humored self was gone, and Coyote the warrior god stood in his place.

  “No!” he shouted.

  “Get out of my way!”

  He lifted his hand. He’d kill me, and Mick would die, falling through the cracks to whatever lay Beneath. I knew my mother would tear him apart.

  “Let him go, Janet,” Coyote said sternly.

  “Screw you!”

  I gathered the storm magic and shot it at him. Coyote leapt out of the way faster than I could contact him, and the tree I’d fallen through exploded with light.

  The crow burst from it in a flutter of black feathers, cawing in rage. The bird circled me once, fighting the wind.

  As it flapped frantically for safety, a line of winged creatures appeared against the sky. The next lightning flash glinted off the scales of five huge dragons, wings beating as they flew toward me.

  Dragons coming to do what Mick couldn’t and what Coyote didn’t want to. They were going to kill me. I saw Nash struggling toward me, gun in hand—to stop me or help me, I couldn’t be sure.

  One of the dragons swooped, and unbelievably, the crow flung herself between it and me. The dragon sent a fire stream straight at the crow, but Coyote threw a nimbus of blue light around the crow’s body, deflecting the flame harmlessly into the night.

  I used the distraction to sprint for the edge of the wash. Water spilled through it, the torrents of rain making the dry creeks flow. In the desert, water didn’t sink into the hard ground—it ran along the path of least resistance to collect in rivulets and washes, canyons and rivers. Anything in its path, the water simply took with it.

  Like me. My boot heel slipped on the muddy bank, and I slid on my backside into the deep arroyo. I scrambled to my feet and ran through the water toward the glowing vortex.

  Fire rained around me, and I heard Coyote shout, “Janet, no!”

  I took a running leap and jumped feet first into the crack. I was falling, falling, I heard a resounding snick, and then all was silent.

  Twenty-seven

  Beneath was nothing like what I’d expected. I stood on damp loam in a wood of towering trees, humidity surrounding me like a heavy cloak. The patches of sky I could see were leaden gray, though the rain had abruptly ceased.

  I couldn’t identify the trees—they were huge, the foliage beginning many yards above my head, the leaves almost fernlike. Flowers as big as my hands brightened the branches with scarlet and primrose. The forest’s floor was covered with decaying leaves and flower petals, but there was no scrub, no undergrowth. Likely enough light didn’t filter down to sustain plant life on the sodden floor.

  Primeval, that was a good adjective. If a dinosaur had come blundering through, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  The trees stretched in all directions, no paths, no break, no sign of a clearing anywhere I looked. It made me claustrophobic—I’d grown up under soaring skies, with visibility for many miles, nothing blocking the view. The air under the trees didn’t move. It was heavy, wet, and warm. Suffocating.

  I shivered, despite the heat, and put my hands int
o my pockets. I yanked them out again with a grimace, my jeans still soaked from the rainstorm.

  The land of Beneath was dull, hot monotony, and all was silent. Very silent. No birds or insects. A faint breeze moved the trees far, far above me, but other than that, nothing.

  Logic told me that this landscape was wrong—plants depended on insects and birds to spread pollen so they could propagate. Didn’t they? But then, this was Beneath. The rules might be different.

  Somewhere in the dense clouds high above was the slit that led to the world I had left. The snick I’d heard was likely the vortex snapping shut behind me. I had no clue whether I could reach it again, or whether I could open the vortex from this side or not.

  I closed my eyes against a cold wash of panic. I couldn’t lose my nerve, not now. I’d come down here to find Mick. I had the magic of Beneath in me as well as that of the earth above. I wouldn’t be helpless here.

  I pretended to believe that as I started walking. I had no clue where to go. All directions looked the same. I moved around clumps of dirt and fallen branches, discovering the hard way that there was, in fact, some undergrowth hidden by the dead foliage. Fungi spread everywhere, a white variety that seemed to glow. Trailing ivy also carpeted the ground, threatening to trip me at every step.

  After fifteen minutes of walking, everything still looked the same. I didn’t think I was going in circles; there was just so much of this forest flowing toward every point of the compass, on and on in endless tedium.

  I knew from school science classes that the desert where I’d grown up had once been primeval forest, a very wet place until geologic events had drained lakes and changed the weather. Somehow, I preferred the new, drier look. I was panting in the heavy air, nauseated by the smell of rotting vegetation.

  I’d lost track of how long I walked—more trees, more vines, more decaying leaves and flowers, more mushrooms—when I saw something out of place. Ahead of me, partially hidden by a tree trunk, a pale shape moved against the monotone of the woods.

  I hurried toward it, not caring whether I’d found a demon or one of the nastier gods of Beneath. Even if it tried to kill me, at least I’d have someone to talk to.