Shadow Walker

by Allyson James

  “I’m new,” Ted said. “The wife and I moved to Flat Mesa a few weeks ago. I work for the county now.”

  I strove to remain polite. “Welcome to our little corner of the desert. What can we do for you?”

  “I heard you had an accident last night.” Ted gave me a once-over as though he’d add the fact that I’d wrecked my bike to his report.

  “Out on the highway, yes. I was lucky. The sheriff, not so lucky. We’re still waiting for news of him.”

  “That’s too bad.” Ted set his soft leather briefcase on my desk and extracted a clipboard. “Now let’s get down to business. I have a few questions for you about your little hotel.”

  I bristled at “little hotel,” but I tried to remain calm. “All the reports are filed at the county records office,” I said. I looked to Cassandra for confirmation, and she nodded.

  “They are.” Ted kept up his jovial smile as he started flipping pages on the clipboard. “But there are a couple of discrepancies you need to clear up.”

  Discrepancies? What the hell was he talking about?

  “Discrepancies of what nature?” Cassandra asked smoothly.

  I knew that Cassandra would know what was on every word of every sheet of every record for the Crossroads Hotel. She was that kind of manager. She’d worked in luxury hotels in Los Angeles and knew every aspect of the business, many that I didn’t. I couldn’t pay her one-tenth of what she’d made in California, but she seemed content to live in this backwater and run my hotel with breathtaking efficiency.

  Ted flipped pages. Watching him, I decided that his clean khaki work trousers and white polo shirt were obnoxious. The last inspector had been as threadbare and grimy as the workers whose work he’d checked, and he’d been easygoing, the kind of guy you said hi to in the diner. But he’d retired to end his days fishing on Lake Powell, and now, apparently, we had Ted.

  “I’ve a whole list of things.” Ted smoothed his hair with nails that had been manicured. “Your piping is out of date, electric boxes are old, you’ve got smoke damage on the walls of the saloon—not to mention a broken mirror that should be taken down before the glass falls out. Speaking of that, the alcohol permit doesn’t look right. Your parking lot—if it can be called that—is a mess, you don’t have enough outdoor trash receptacles, your roof is too easily accessed and doesn’t have a guardrail. Windows too small for the fire code, and you have inadequate fire escapes. If you had a fire on the first floor, it would draw through that gallery like smoke up a chimney.”

  Cassandra and I stared at him. He cleared his throat to go on, but I interrupted. “This is a historic building. Some of those things, like the windows, are waived to keep the property as close to its origins as possible.” Small windows in a hot climate made sense, and this building was solid brick and adobe, not a fire hazard.

  “You’ll have to take that up with the preservation branch,” Ted said. “I’m safety, and I’m here to tell you little gals that this hotel is unsafe.”

  Cassandra fixed him with a cold gaze. I could have told Ted that the “little gals” remark was a big mistake. I half expected the ultra-feminist Cassandra to turn him into a toad.

  “I’m sure we can come to some sort of agreement,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t be trying to bribe me now, would you, sweetheart?” Ted asked her.

  I winced, waiting for Ted to turn green and start croaking. “Of course not,” Cassandra said. “Most of those things you mention have been fixed since the last inspection, or we’ve acquired a waiver for them. It’s all in the records.”

  Ted waved the clipboard. “These are the only records I’ve got, honey. And they say you’re in so much violation, I could close you down right now. So what are you going to do about it?”

  Three

  I ground my teeth, resisting the temptation to toss him out the nearest window, but Cassandra gave him a cool look and held out her hand. “May I?”

  I’d have ripped the clipboard from Ted and smacked him over the head with it, but Cassandra took it calmly and started flipping through the papers. Her sangfroid wavered as she continued to read. “This makes no sense. These records have to be old, or tampered with.”

  “Nope,” Ted said. “My checklist, which you’ll find on top, I made while conducting an inspection this morning. They match the records. Did you know that you have two gallons of fresh blood in your walk-in refrigerator? Sitting in gallon milk jugs. What the hell are those for?”

  I knew what the blood was for—Ansel, my resident Nightwalker—but I couldn’t very well tell Ted that. Ansel had been staying here for a few weeks, and he was perfectly civil, and even nice, as long as he got his daily dose of cow blood. My cook, Elena, who thought I was crazy—and I thought she was too, so it was mutual—agreed to keep the blood stocked for him.

  “My cook trained to be a gourmet chef,” I extemporized. “She uses it in specialty dishes. Ask her.”

  “I tried. She threatened me with a knife. I couldn’t understand a damn thing she was saying. She Hispanic?”

  “Apache.”

  “Whatever she is, she’s dangerous. I fired her.”

  “What?” I sprang from my seat, all injuries forgotten. “You can’t fire my employees!”

  “You had no authority,” Cassandra said.

  “Yes, I do, gals. You’re lucky I didn’t call the police.”

  I had the benefit of knowing that calling the police on Elena wouldn’t do any good. Assistant Chief Salas would have showed up and calmed her down, because Elena, for some reason, liked Emilio Salas. Elena liked him, and she liked Mick, and that was it. Everyone else in Magellan, including me and Cassandra, she didn’t consider worth her time.

  I sensed Mick come into the office before I saw him. Usually he left me to conduct hotel business on my own, but he must have returned from the crash site in time to hear my shout of outrage.

  Mick made the room smaller, not only because he was tall and a big man but because Mick dominated any room he walked into. Lesser men faded to nothing in the face of my biker lover with his black hair, blue eyes, leather, and tattoos.

  Most people, upon seeing Mick approach like an animal stalking a kill, would swallow and take a nervous step backward. Ted Wingate gave him a little smile that was almost a sneer.

  “I see,” he said to me. “Having your bodyguard threaten me won’t help you keep your hotel open.”

  Mick’s eyes were changing to black with little sparks of red swimming inside them, the dragon in him ready to come out and play. “Whatever business you have here is one thing,” he said. “How you conduct it is another. Tell Janet what she needs to know and go.”

  Ted consulted his clipboard. “You are Mick Burns? You aren’t listed on the title deed or the payroll.”

  “I don’t work here.” Mick folded his arms. “I live here.”

  “You don’t seem to have a lot of documentation anywhere, Mr. Burns.”

  “I like to keep a low profile.”

  Ted’s eyes almost gleamed. “No one’s profile is that low. Nice tatts.” He cast a glance at the dragons, bared by Mick’s short-sleeved shirt. “My wife is always after me to get tattooed, but I don’t care to.”

  Tattoos might mess up his pretty tan, I guessed. I had tried several times myself to get inked to match Mick, but the etchings always faded by the next morning. My magic, maybe, healing my skin whether I liked it or not. I never scarred, either.

  “Tattoos are not for everyone,” Mick said in a mild voice.

  Mick’s calm told me how angry he was. If Cassandra had fond thoughts of turning Ted into a toad, Mick would be waiting to flame him to a cinder. Between them, we’d have roasted Ted–frog’s legs.

  “Why don’t you leave your list with me?” I suggested. “We’ll look it over and make the necessary repairs. How’s that?”

  “That’s exactly what you’ll do.” Ted took back the clipboard, ripped off the top sheet, and handed the paper to Cassandra. “You don’t, you get shu
t down by the county sanitation and safety department. You have one week to come up to code.”

  “One week? How am I supposed to have all this done in a week?”

  “Well, now, that’s not my problem, little gal,” Ted said. “It’s my job to make sure it gets done. Here’s my card.” He handed Cassandra a small rectangle and walked past us, tapping his clipboard to his thigh as he went. “Have a nice day.”

  I slammed my office door behind him and started to swear. I swore long and hard in English and in Navajo and every other language in which I knew bad words. Mick and Cassandra watched me in silence until I collapsed to my desk chair and buried my head in my hands.

  Mick, bless him, came up behind me and gently kneaded my shoulders. Cassandra, still the cool professional, flicked a pristine nail down the checklist Ted had left.

  “We can appeal most of this,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. The wiring is up to code, and so is the plumbing. That was all checked. And many of these things are open to interpretation.”

  “But we’ll have to fix some of it,” I said. “Like the parking lot.” It was a dirt lot, full of potholes, and I shared it with the Crossroads Bar. Barry, who owned the bar, didn’t seem in a hurry to grade his half, and his side was where most of the trash collected. Sure, I’d love to have my half of the lot leveled and graveled, but that took money.

  I’d used the money I’d made from years of selling my art photographs to buy this place. I was making enough to pay bills and the salaries of my small staff, of which Cassandra was my only full-time employee, but I had nothing left for extras. I could have footed a few repairs, sure, but not a complete overhaul.

  “Don’t worry about the cost, Janet,” Mick said. “I’ll help you.”

  Mick always did seem to have money—cash money, no plastic for my dragon shape-shifter. I never asked him where he got it, and I wondered whether he, like dragons of legend, had a cave somewhere piled with gold. He’d told me he had a territory on some island out in the Pacific, but never much more than that.

  “I don’t want to take your money,” I said to him. “We agreed.”

  Me not accepting money from Mick and running this hotel on my own was my way of taking control of my life. Abandoned by my hell-goddess mother, I’d been raised by my grandmother and my father, my grandmother never letting me forget that I was different and dangerous. I had never fit in anywhere and believed I never would. Becoming a photographer and buying this hotel was my way of establishing my independence.

  Cassandra broke my thoughts. “You may not have a choice, Janet. How badly do you want to stay open?”

  “Bad enough.” I looked up at Mick. “We’ll talk about it.”

  “I’ll start going through this and make notes for you,” Cassandra said. “Don’t worry. We’ll make that inspector eat this list.” She walked out, high heels clicking on the tile floor.

  “In a weird way, I think she’ll enjoy this,” I said.

  “Cassandra likes a challenge,” Mick rumbled.

  “What about you? Do you like a challenge?”

  Mick smiled at me in a way that made my heart feel light. “I do, baby.”

  I hoped Mick would follow up on the wickedness in his smile, but he merely kissed the top of my head and picked up his jacket. He took a camera from his pocket and set it on the desk in front of me.

  I stared at the camera in astonishment. “It survived?” The camera had been in one of my saddlebags.

  “DPS was lifting out the remains of your bike when I got there, and they let me take this.”

  I didn’t like the word “remains.” The camera, an expensive digital model, looked whole and unblemished, but when I clicked the on switch, it did nothing. I pulled a cord from a drawer and hooked the camera up to the laptop on my desk. Drawing power from the computer, the camera came on and obediently uploaded what was on the memory card.

  “What about the magic mirror?” I asked while the computer worked. “The one on my bike, I mean.”

  “I didn’t see it, but your motorcycle was in a lot of pieces.” Mick gave me a look of sympathy as I winced, then he gestured at the computer screen. “You got some nice shots.”

  I’d spent the day before the accident taking many photos in Canyon de Chelly. I’d planned to enlarge and frame the best of them for my friend Jamison Kee for his upcoming birthday. Jamison was a sculptor—a somewhat famous one—who’d helped me get my start as a pro photographer. I didn’t do anywhere as well selling my photos as he did his gorgeous sculptures, but I’d always been grateful to him. Jamison had grown up in Chinle, right next to the canyon, but now he lived here in Magellan with his wife. I wanted to give him something to remind him of his home.

  The pictures had turned out well, if I did say so myself, but then, it was difficult to take a bad shot of the canyon. Canyon de Chelly is full of colors, shadows, and sudden flashes of light, breathtaking spires and vistas of sheer beauty. I smiled as I clicked through the photos, happy that my work had survived.

  I stopped. “Hold on.”

  “What?” Mick leaned over me, smelling of dust and dragon warmth.

  I enlarged the photo on my screen: Spider Rock, a lone spire that stuck up from the canyon floor. Storytellers said that Spider Woman, the goddess who taught weaving to the Diné, lived there. She liked to throw people who displeased her from her aerie to the canyon floor, where they were found as a pile of bones. Not a woman to mess with.

  I zoomed in and moved around until I found the spot that had bugged me. “There. What’s that?”

  At the base of the rock was a mark that looked like a petroglyph, tiny compared to the rest of the photo. But the chill in my bones told me it wasn’t a glyph. The line of light ended in a sprawl of lines that resembled a skeletal hand.

  “It’s the same as the things that came for us in the sinkhole,” I said.

  Mick’s breath was pleasantly hot on my neck. “You sure?”

  “Very sure.”

  He reached around me and tapped and clicked to zoom in even closer. The photo lost resolution, the lines growing fuzzy.

  “You told me they moved through the rock,” Mick said. “Like fish beneath the water’s surface. They didn’t crawl across the rock?”

  “No, that’s what was so creepy. They even moved through the metal of Nash’s SUV. Silently. No skittering or scratching. I’m not sure how the last one grabbed me, but I bet my leg brushed one of the boulders as the rescue team pulled me up.”

  Mick’s brows quirked as he studied the photo. “Interesting.”

  “Not interesting. Scary as hell.” Lines on rocks might not seem threatening to a big, bad, fire-breathing dragon, but he hadn’t been trapped in the hole with them.

  “I mean it’s interesting that you snapped a picture of one, and later they’re with you in the sinkhole. Plus your camera was miraculously spared. Too many coincidences for my comfort.”

  “Don’t tell me that I captured an image and carried it with me, and then it and its friends attacked me. That’s too far-fetched.” I stopped when Mick didn’t answer. “Isn’t it?”

  “Probably. But you might have awakened something.”

  “From Beneath?”

  Mick rubbed the lines of his dragon tattoos. “Doesn’t seem right for Beneath. Too . . . dead. Beneath was so alive.”

  So alive it had nearly killed us. But when evil things from Beneath emerged in this world, they changed. Skinwalkers looked almost beautiful Beneath but were putrid and foul here. They were equally deadly in both places.

  Mick studied the picture again. “When they came toward you in the hole, were they aiming for you or Nash?”

  “I don’t know. I was too busy being terrified to notice. I don’t think they were aiming at all. Just coming for us.”

  “Nonsentient, then.”

  I gave him a blank look. “What?”

  “I mean, they didn’t have minds, couldn’t think or perceive. The hands came at you blindly.”

  “I don’
t know about that. They seemed pretty damned determined for something moving blindly.”

  “You said your Beneath magic seemed to draw them, but the fire I sent down scared them off?”

  I nodded. “When your fire started to fade, they came at me again.”

  Mick continued to study the photo, his look too inquisitive for my comfort. Mick was a dragon with a dragon’s curiosity, plus he had a dragon’s total lack of fear. He liked to solve puzzles no matter how dangerous they were.

  “Don’t you dare go down into that hole looking for them,” I said.

  He flashed me a look of innocence that was purely contrived. “Aren’t you interested?”

  “No.”

  That was a lie, and Mick knew it. I wanted to know about these things, because I needed to learn how to fight them. That didn’t mean I wanted a bunch of skeletal hands that could freeze flesh from my bones surrounding my boyfriend and smothering him with their cold touch.

  “Did you get any more pictures of them?” Mick asked.

  We looked at each photo—and I’d taken many—but as much as I magnified and searched, we didn’t see any more of the hands.

  When we finished, Mick rose and stretched. “Up for a ride?”

  I was still stiff and sore from the wreck, a little nervous about sinkholes opening up under me again, and more than a little worried about this hotel inspector. Then again, maybe a ride was what I needed. I could hang on to Mick and put Ted and skeletal hands and certain death out of my mind.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “Flagstaff. I want to talk to Nash.”

  “He’s still out. Lopez said he’d call me as soon as anything changed.”

  Mick stood up and closed the laptop. “Then we’ll be there when he wakes up.”

  I felt a little guilty leaving Cassandra with the long list of Ted’s demands, but she told me she thought I should go check on Nash. I was right about Cassandra enjoying the challenge. She waved us away and went back to tapping her computer with grim determination.

  The hour ride to Flagstaff flew by as I wrapped my arms around Mick’s strong body and gave in to the road. The high desert gets cold in January, so we both wore thick leather and gloves, but the Stormwalker in me felt the power in the icy weather. The sky was clear for now, but the wind was hard, and I felt myself reaching out to draw it in.