Shadow Walker

by Allyson James

  At three I heard Mick come in the back door and down the hall. I breathed a sigh of relief. The magic mirror cut off its hum in mid–“I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” and went strangely silent.

  Mick walked in, not looking at me, dropped his leather jacket on a chair, and sat on the edge of the bed to unzip his boots.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He didn’t respond except to pull off his boots and drop them one by one to the floor. Thud. Thud.

  I rose on my elbow. “Everything all right?”

  Mick still didn’t look at me. “Fine. Why are you awake?”

  “I was worried about you poking around in that hole. Plus worried that one of the deputies would find you out there naked if you decided to go dragon.” I laughed, expecting him to flash his smile at me, but he didn’t.

  “They never saw me,” he said.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “You mean in the sinkhole? Nothing. Just rocks.”

  “You went all the way down inside?”

  No answer. Mick had left ten hours ago, a damn long time not to find anything but rocks. I touched the small of his back, where the flame tattoo lay under his shirt. Sudden heat seared through the fabric, and I jerked away.

  “Mick, are you all right?”

  He snarled. “Damn it, I said I was fine.”

  I stared in shock. One thing Mick had never done, since the night I met him, was snap at me. He didn’t always agree with my decisions, and we could argue, even rage at each other, but he never, ever bit my head off for no reason. Something must have happened out there that he didn’t want to tell me about.

  “Mick.” I touched his back again, and he sprang to his feet.

  I sat up. “Sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  Mick swung on me, and when I saw his eyes, I fell back into the pillows. Mick’s eyes were usually human blue or filled with black. Tonight he looked at me with white gray irises, his pupils nothing but tiny pinpricks.

  “Mick, what is wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.” His voice was harsh and wrong. “Stop berating me, Janet.” He turned away, taking that awful gaze with him. “I’m hungry. I’m going to raid the kitchen.”

  His aura was flickering, white and gray weaving together. That was wrong. Mick should be solid black with streaks of fiery red.

  Shadows.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said, starting to get out of bed.

  “No!” Mick glared at me with those white eyes, and I froze.

  He stood silently over me, and I sat back down on the bed. If I had to fight Mick, I’d have to use my Beneath magic, which meant I’d either kill him quickly or lose. I didn’t want to do either.

  As Mick watched me, the white receded from his eyes. When his irises became dark blue again, he rubbed his hand through his hair. “Sorry, baby,” he said almost in his normal voice. “I just need to eat something. You go to sleep.”

  Mick turned his back on me and walked out. I was out of bed as soon as he closed the door, and as I suspected, he went nowhere near the kitchen. I heard Mick’s bike start up behind the hotel, and I yanked open the blind in time to see him ride past my window and roar off. His red taillight flashed as he slowed to turn onto the highway, then the sound of his motorcycle faded down the road.

  “Oh, girlfriend,” the mirror breathed from my nightstand. “Our Micky did not look good.”

  I snatched up the shard. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s touched evil. Or evil has touched him.”

  “What kind of evil?” There were so many different kinds.

  “I don’t know, sugarplum. I wish I did.”

  “Keep an eye on him,” I said.

  “If I can.”

  I dropped the mirror shard into the drawer and closed it and then got back into bed. But I didn’t sleep and didn’t turn off the light. I leaned against the headboard with my knees drawn to my chest, sitting in the circle of lamplight until gray dawn touched the sky.

  Mick didn’t return, and I went through my morning routine with worry lodged in my throat. Deputy Lopez called me around nine to tell me that Nash Jones had recovered enough to insist on leaving the hospital. I could imagine Nash yanking the tubes out of his arms and storming out of the ICU, demanding his clothes on the way.

  “At least he let Maya drive him home,” Lopez said. “She’s there with him now, feeding him chicken soup.” He snorted with laughter. The idea of big, bad Sheriff Jones being spoon-fed by Maya was funny.

  I thanked Lopez for letting me know and hung up, relieved that Nash seemed to be all right. As I said, the man was tough. I hoped he’d be smart enough to lie low and recover, but with Nash, who knew?

  I had other problems to face today besides figuring out what was wrong with my boyfriend. I had no cook, and though a local bakery delivered bread and muffins for breakfast, by lunch I’d have nothing.

  “The saloon’s closed for meals,” I said to Cassandra and Fremont Hansen, my plumber, who’d come in response to Cassandra’s summons. “Drinks only.”

  “Aw, no,” Fremont said, his plain face distressed. “I was hoping Elena would be fixing those squash blossom things. I love those.”

  “She’s gone for now,” I said. “Maybe permanently.” I remembered how Elena’s dark eyes had gone flat when she’d said there were shadows around me. She’d sounded pretty certain.

  “Damn,” Fremont said, with feeling.

  “Help me fix the hotel, and maybe we can persuade her to come back.”

  Fremont pushed back his cap and scratched his forehead. “But there’s nothing wrong with the hotel. The plumbing’s fine. I stake my rep on it.”

  Cassandra handed him a copy of Ted’s checklist. “According to the new county safety inspector, we have to do all this by next week.”

  Fremont’s eyes widened as he took in the long list. “You’ve got to be kidding me. This is that Ted Wingate, right?”

  I wasn’t surprised that Fremont knew the man’s name. Fremont knew everything there was to know about everyone in Magellan and Flat Mesa.

  “That’s him,” I said.

  “He’s from Seattle. What the hell does he know about buildings in the desert?”

  “Enough to shut us down,” Cassandra said.

  “I told you, there’s nothing wrong with my plumbing.” Fremont looked around the lobby. “Have you told Maya yet? She’s gonna go ballistic.”

  She would. Maya had worked for months to replace the ancient electrical system of the once-derelict hotel. She’d done a beautiful job according to our last inspector, who’d let us open. Why the hell had he retired to fish, leaving us with a jerk like Ted?

  I heaved a sigh and snatched a copy of the list from Cassandra. “I’ll go tell Maya right now,” I said.

  I asked to borrow Fremont’s truck, because I had no other transportation now that my motorcycle was gone. I tried not to think about the broken wreck of my Sportster, because I’d be lost in grief if I did. I loved my bike, which had carried me all over the country for the last six years. At times she’d been my only friend.

  I drove to Nash Jones’s house in Flat Mesa, remembering where it lay from the last time I’d come out here. That time, I had been in a panic, and it had been cool September. This time, I drove sedately, and January cold forced me to run the heat in the truck. Fremont’s truck was less than a year old and the heater was in great shape. I was toasty warm by the time I parked in front of Nash’s long, low house.

  Nash’s roof was peaked to help winter snow slide off, and his gutters managed to be free of debris from the cottonwood trees along his property. A couple of cedars dotted the strip of land that separated him from his back-door neighbor, but the yard held no sign of fallen leaves or branches. I swear Nash vacuumed his yard. Maya’s truck was out front, as was Nash’s black F-250, obsessively restored from its last adventure.

  I knocked on the door, but my knocking couldn’t compete with the shouting inside.
Maya’s voice rose, Nash’s started to drown hers out, then Maya’s screech cut through that.

  “You are one stupid, stubborn son of a bitch!” she yelled.

  I turned the knob, found the door unlocked, and pushed it open. “Quiet down now, kids,” I said.

  Nash didn’t have much in his living room but a weight machine and a rack of free weights, and he used his breakfast bar for his dining room. A folding table now reposed near the window, two folding chairs drawn up to it, Maya’s work presumably. Maya and Nash looked up at me from this table, which held the remains of a meal.

  “Tell him he can’t go back to work today,” Maya said with vehemence. “The stupid idiot had a concussion, and he’s supposed to rest for a week.”

  Nash glared at me as only Nash Jones could glare. His eyes were clear light gray, his hair black and cut short. A square white bandage covered the base of his scalp.

  “What do you want, Begay?” he growled.

  “I came to see whether you were all right. And to find Maya.”

  “You escaped FBI custody?” Maya asked, her eyes gleaming.

  I grinned at her. “He was lenient.”

  Nash, who’d been out during the attack on his hospital room, came alert. “FBI custody? What the hell have you done now?”

  “Calm down.” I hopped up on the stool at the breakfast bar. “Didn’t Maya tell you what happened?”

  Nash transferred the glare to Maya. “No.”

  Maya flushed, but she didn’t stop me as I told him, in detail, about what I’d seen in the sinkhole, the woman in the hospital room and how Mick had killed her, finishing with Coyote’s ploy that got Mick and me out of Flagstaff.

  “She pretended to be my mother?” Nash asked, enraged, when I’d finished. “Who was she?”

  “We don’t know. She died fast under Mick’s fire.”

  “You should have kept her alive for questioning.”

  “We didn’t have a choice,” I said, exasperated. “It was the only way Mick could stop her.”

  “What are your conclusions? Or Mick’s?”

  I rubbed my head. “I think she was connected to what I saw in the sinkhole. Her reaction to my magic was the same—it made her stronger, not weaker. I thought the hands in the hole were coming for me, but maybe they were coming for you. The women in the hospital didn’t seem interested in attacking me, or Mick.”

  Maya’s brown eyes widened. “Someone’s after Nash?”

  “Looks that way,” I said.

  “Why?” she demanded.

  “That’s a good question,” Nash said. “There’s no reason anyone should be hunting me, especially not someone magical.”

  “I can think of dozens of people who’d want you dead,” I said. “Every person you’ve ever gotten sent to prison, for example. And magically, you’re special. Unique. You have the ability to soak up magic, nullify it, not be hurt by it.”

  “Exactly what I mean.” Nash dismissed the drug dealers, thieves, and assaulters with a flick of his fingers. “If, according to you, a magical attack won’t work on me, why would someone try it?”

  “Maybe they weren’t trying to kill you, but capture you. To figure out how you work and how they can make your non-magic work for them.”

  “That’s a lot of suppositions,” Nash said.

  “It’s all I have right now. You need to be careful. I can ward your house if you want, or better still, Mick or Cassandra can do it. They’re skilled, and their magic is earthbased. My brand obviously makes whoever it is stronger.” Which really bugged me.

  “None of this means I need to stay home,” Nash said stubbornly.

  “Nash,” Maya began. Her voice was waiting to return to the screech, I could feel it.

  “I’ll sit behind my desk and write reports,” Nash snapped. “I’m not stupid enough to chase criminals through the desert when I know I’ll pass out after ten strides. I have deputies. I’ll use them.”

  I pitied the deputies. If Nash couldn’t run around himself, he’d make sure his deputies covered every inch he couldn’t and report every detail to him.

  “I also came to talk about this,” I said, pulling Ted’s list out of my pocket. “You wouldn’t have had anything to do with hiring the new county inspector, would you?”

  “Wingate?” Nash looked surprised. “No. Why?”

  Maya grabbed the list and read it with widening eyes. “What the hell? Is he crazy? I’ve done all this. There’s nothing wrong with my wiring.”

  “Ted Wingate is a huge pain in the ass,” Nash said with conviction.

  I was surprised. I thought he’d be the kind of guy that Nash liked—obsessive, annoying, and arrogant. “I take it you’ve met him?”

  Nash nodded. “One of the first things he did was come to my office and tell me I didn’t know how to run my jail.”

  Damn, I was sorry I’d missed that. “What happened? He looked healthy when he talked to me, so you obviously didn’t break his neck.”

  “We came to an understanding.”

  That must have been an interesting clash of wills. Nash had been Special Forces in the army, and he liked to run things his own way. His sense of his own rightness was unshakable.

  “Why is a jerk like him working for our county, anyway?” I asked. “Can’t you arrest him for something?”

  “Not until he commits a crime.” By the tone of Nash’s voice, he’d thought about it and wished he could.

  “People aren’t exactly signing up to work out here in the back of beyond,” Maya said. “Counties with bigger populations pay better. So why is he here?”

  “Maybe he likes the quiet life,” I said.

  Maya snorted. “No one likes things this quiet. Maybe no one else would hire him.”

  That was more likely. Hopi County was small, sparsely populated, and far from cities. Most people didn’t even know we existed, except that Magellan had the reputation for being steeped in woo-woo magic. The biggest industry in the county was magical tourism—though I knew that the tourists saw the façade, the fake magic. They wouldn’t be able to handle the real magic.

  “He’s nuts if he wants this all done in a week,” Maya said. “I’ll need to order more supplies. Besides, he’s a liar if he says there’s anything wrong with my wiring.”

  I believed her, just as I’d believed Fremont. “Could you take a look, though? To prove it’s fine? Then I can get a lawyer and rub Ted’s face in it.”

  “Be careful of Wingate, Janet,” Nash said. “I got him to back down, but he’s a troublemaker, the kind who will use the letter of the law to get at people. If he comes after you, it won’t be pretty.”

  I knew that. Strange, I usually only feared people with powerful magics, but plain old Ted had me sweating.

  Nash ended the discussion by standing. “You can take me to work, Janet. I agree I shouldn’t drive until the dizziness goes away, but Maya won’t take me anywhere.”

  “Damn you.” Maya jumped up with him.

  Nash walked away from her down the long hall toward the bedrooms in the back of the house. Maya started to follow, then stopped, looking unhappy, when Nash shut his bedroom door in her face.

  “Take me out to the highway,” Nash said as we pulled away from his house. “The one to Holbrook. I want to look at the scene.” He’d dressed in his sheriff’s uniform, every crease knife-sharp, his boots shining. He wore a heavy uniform coat against the January cold and his usual black sunglasses against the glare.

  “Why?”

  “For my report. I want to see it.”

  “Big hole, lots of debris. Mick went out there last night—he said he found nothing.” And Mick had returned home acting strangely, and I hadn’t seen him since. I didn’t bother mentioning that.

  “Mick had no business being out there. The area’s cordoned off. A danger zone.”

  “Like police tape is going to stop Mick. He’s a fire-breathing dragon, remember?”

  “Yes.” Nash’s lips firmed. “Now I want to see what I can
find. Turn here.”

  I took the backstreet he pointed to and, after dipping through a wash, emerged on an intersection with the highway. I guessed that Nash had probably asked Maya to drive him out here and Maya had refused. Maya Medina was the only person in Hopi County who could stand up to Nash Jones and get away with it.

  About three miles down the highway we reached a barricade. Lopez had closed the road here, but I drove around the barrier through the dirt at Nash’s instruction and proceeded to the site.

  Six

  I hadn’t gotten a good look at the hole I’d fallen into, and now that I was standing on its edge, I was glad I hadn’t. The fact that Nash and I had survived at all was a frigging miracle.

  A hole about forty feet wide gaped across the highway and into the desert beyond it. Asphalt buckled at the hole’s edges, twenty feet separating the two ends of the road. Boulders, red earth, roots, grass, and the remains of a cedar filled a ledge just inside the hole. Then that too broke off and plunged down into darkness. The sides of the hole were sheer and straight, as though cut by a razor.

  “Sheriff!” Deputy Lopez made his way around the huge hole from the other side in his usual brisk stride. He regarded Nash anxiously. “You all right, sir?”

  “Fine,” Nash said.

  “We’re holding the fort, sir. You can stay home and rest if you want.”

  “I’m going crazy doing nothing at home. I’m heading to the office to catch up on paperwork.”

  I hoped Maya never heard that Nash considered staying home with her doing nothing. “You were home, what, half a day?” I asked him.

  “I’ll rest again tonight. Any sign that someone caused this deliberately?” he asked Lopez.

  “Completely natural, sir,” Lopez said. “We had a geology professor out here this morning. Underground caves collapse, the roof over them comes down. The pavement was probably weak and ready to give, and then you two happened to drive over it. You were damn lucky to get out alive.”

  I sat down near the edge of the hole. Sitting, I didn’t get as disoriented, and I could look into the hole without feeling queasy. “Deputy, do you have a flashlight? You wouldn’t have any binoculars too, would you?”