“Gabrielle,” I said, my voice firm. “You don’t want to be with our mother. She’s evil, and I mean evil in the purest sense of the word. She has no concept of anything but coldness. She won’t accept you, and she won’t love you, no matter what you do, no matter who you bring her.”
“You don’t get it, Janet.” Gabrielle sneered at me. “I don’t want to be loved. I want what she offered you. Mother was ready to give you all the power in the world, to let you have anything you wanted, to have you live by her side as a goddess. And you said no.” Gabrielle got up off the stool. “You said no, you stupid bitch, and you sealed her in. You took what I wanted, what should have been mine, and you threw it away.”
White power crackled in Gabrielle’s hands. Gods, I wanted to knock her over the head. She needed a good talking-to about evil and the ways of hell-goddesses. After I got my friends free of her.
“What she offered me was a sham,” I said. “Mother didn’t want me ruling by her side; she wanted to use me to give her Nash.”
Gabrielle rolled her eyes. “So? Haven’t you learned, Janet, that in this life, you have to take what you can get? No one gives you anything. Nothing is free. If the price of the power that should be yours is capturing a handsome sheriff, good enough for me.”
I knew one thing—though I felt somewhat sorry for Gabrielle, that didn’t mean I’d hand her Nash or help her open the damn vortexes. Gabrielle might want to confront our mother to get over her abandonment issues, but I couldn’t risk the fate of the entire planet so Gabrielle could play Mom-likes-me-best.
“Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll help you find Vonda. You help me get Mick free. Then you can do what you want to Vonda. That’s the only bargain I’m making right now.”
“Who cares about Mick? I need to stop Vonda. She’s snared herself a dragon so she can kill me. I have to find her and kill her first.”
“Why should she want to kill you? What did you do to her?”
Gabrielle heaved an aggrieved sigh. “I didn’t do anything to her. My mistake picking a witch with delusions of grandeur. She’ll use Mick to eliminate me and go after what she wants.”
“Which is what?”
“Hell if I know. When we find her, we can ask her.”
“Only if you let Nash go,” I said doggedly.
Gabrielle hopped back onto the stool. “Sorry, sis. I’ll spare you and your precious friends, but Nash is mine.”
“No, bitch,” Maya’s voice came from the front door. “Nash is mine.”
Nash rose as far as he could from the bench, yanking at the handcuffs. “Maya, get the hell out of here!”
Maya had a gun in her hands, which I recognized as the semiautomatic with which she’d once tried to shoot me. I didn’t pause to puzzle over how Maya had gotten away from Pamela, because Pamela herself was coming up the driveway.
“Maya, I’ve got this,” I said. “Turn around and get out of here, and take Pamela with you.”
Maya fired. She had a damn good aim. The bullet went straight for Gabrielle, and would have slammed through her chest if Gabrielle hadn’t thrown up a shield of magic to deflect it.
The bullet stopped, stuck in the bubble of Beneath magic as though suspended in resin. Gabrielle studied the bullet curiously, then moved her gaze to Maya.
“Good shot, chica.” Gabrielle’s hand came up, and her Beneath magic sailed, clear and true, toward Maya.
I leapt the short distance to Maya and tackled her. We both went down, and Gabrielle’s magic blasted out the frontdoor frame, making Pamela dive aside. A tail of the Beneath magic caught me on the arm, and I grunted in pain. My own Beneath magic rose in me like fury, ready to strike back.
I reached for the wind instead. The approaching storm was still weak, but I found wind and falling snow and streamed them through my hands. I knew, based on what we’d done out on the highway, that if I started a Beneath magic fight with my little sister, we’d destroy Nash’s house and half the neighborhood.
Gabrielle’s defenses wavered under my Stormwalker magic, and I saw her realize that I wasn’t as weak as she’d thought. Furious at my attack, she wound up into a Beneath magic rage.
“No!” I shouted. “We can’t do this here.”
Cassandra made it to Nash’s side. I smelled a bite of witch magic as she opened the handcuffs. Nash was up, making for Gabrielle. Pamela, eyes wolf white, was right behind him.
“Nash, no!” I yelled. “Stop! We all have to stop.”
“I want her out of my house.” Nash kept moving fearlessly toward Gabrielle, ready to pick her up and bodily throw her out.
I grabbed him. “You can bounce her all the way out of Hopi County later, but as much as I hate to admit it, I need her to help me with Mick.”
“Why?” Maya asked. She pushed hair out of her face and climbed to her feet, still holding the gun. “She said she didn’t care if Mick died. I heard her.”
“I’m going to make damn sure Mick doesn’t die. But Vonda is a powerful witch with a dragon, and Gabrielle can keep her busy while I do what I need to do.”
“I told you, Janet, I’m going to kill Vonda,” Gabrielle said. “You can’t stop me.”
“Fine, as long as you wait until Mick is free. Maya, go home. Pamela, take her. Neither of you can help. Cassandra, start that locator spell.” I shoved Nash’s magazines to the floor, clearing a space on the counter.
Maya’s dark eyes snapped in rage. “I’m not going anywhere. Not while this bitch can’t keep her hands off my boyfriend.”
Gabrielle smiled at her. “I’ll make him happier than you ever can, sweetie. When Nash gives me his baby, I’ll make him a god.”
Maya sighted down the pistol at Gabrielle. “The only one having Nash’s baby is me.”
I saw Nash have an uh-oh-did-I-forget-the-condom moment, before he realized Maya was speaking metaphorically. “Maya, for God’s sake, do what Janet says,” he growled.
“I refuse to step meekly aside while this person tries to rape you. She can’t do it if I have a gun pointed at her brain.”
I had to admire Maya’s courage. She was the only nonmagical person in this room, and she’d already seen what Gabrielle could do. I cursed Maya’s stubborn stupidity at the same time, but admitted she had guts.
“Maya, if you’re staying, sit down over there and keep out of the way,” I said. “Pamela, make sure she doesn’t shoot anyone. Gabrielle, you stand here next to me, and I swear to the gods, if you touch anyone in this room, I’ll fry you so fast you won’t know what happened. Cassandra, start the spell.”
Cassandra, the calmest of all of us, spread out her map and opened a vial of black powder. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll need to borrow some salt.”
Cassandra couldn’t find Vonda. She tried many different variations of her spell, but at each attempt, her black sand and white salt lay in neat piles on the map and didn’t move. We postulated that Nash’s non-magic might be interfering, but taking the map out far behind the house and performing the spell again did nothing.
“She’s shielding, and the shields are strong,” Cassandra said. “Plus, I don’t have anything personal of hers.”
“Try to find the dragon then,” Gabrielle said. “We can follow him to her.”
“You can’t find Mick with a locator spell,” I answered. I knew this from experience. Once, during the five years Mick and I had been apart, I’d gone to a witch and asked her to locate Mick—I told myself that I simply wanted to see that he was all right. But I’d been missing him, heartsore, and I wanted to know where he was. The witch, a good one, had never been able to find him. It turned out that Mick had been very close, as usual, watching me, but he’d instinctively shielded the locator spell. All dragons did that, he told me later.
“We’ll go to the witch’s house then,” Gabrielle said, brow furrowed. “See whether she left something behind that will help us.”
“Not if she’s a good witch, which she obviously is,” Cassandra answered. “I keep my own a
partment meticulously clean, knowing that one stray hair could betray me.”
That explained part of Cassandra’s fastidiousness. I suspected, though, that she’d be as neat as she was regardless.
“What about Ted?” I asked. “He’s human. She’d shield him when he was near her, but the minute he’s out of her range, would he show up? And then lead us back to her? Can you—I don’t know—cast a timed spell that will show Ted as soon as he’s out from under her shield?”
I knew as soon as Cassandra looked at me that she was a powerful witch indeed. She didn’t even flinch at my crazy suggestion but nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve never done that, but I could try it. I warn you that she might be able to cast a spell that shields him always, no matter how far he gets from her; plus I’d need something of Ted’s. A shirt, nail parings, a sample of his handwriting.”
Maya reached into her back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “How about this?”
It was the list Ted had made of the faults of my hotel. The paper showed boxes ticked with neat checkmarks, and Ted’s comments written with sharp up-and-down letters. Maya had the original.
“Perfect.” Cassandra smoothed out the paper, writing side down, on the map. “This might take a while, so I urge you, don’t interrupt me.”
“Sure thing.” Gabrielle straightened from where she’d been leaning on the counter and walked purposefully down the hall to Nash’s bedroom.
Nash strode immediately after her, and Maya, with a snarl of anger, charged after him. Pamela folded her arms and leaned against the counter, two feet from Cassandra’s side.
Nash had guns back there, and Maya still had hers. Gods, I wanted to put a binding spell on the lot of them.
Cassandra found Ted Wingate after a few hours—whether Vonda hadn’t shielded him, or Ted wasn’t with her at all, or Cassandra was just that good, I never knew. She put her finger on a line on the map of New Mexico and said, “He’s there.”
There, I saw when we zoomed in, was a casino and hotel run by one of the small New Mexico tribes, located on a back highway, a little off the beaten path. I’d stayed there before, when my peripatetic life took me along New Mexico’s byways. The turnoff to the hotel was about ten miles east of Gallup, which meant nearly two hours from Flat Mesa.
“Will they still be there when we get there?” I asked. “Or are they making a pit stop?”
Cassandra rubbed her forehead, streaking it with her black powder. “I’m not good enough to know that. But they must be there for a reason, because Mick could fly them anywhere they’d want to go. Either that or Ted’s on his own, nowhere near his wife or Mick.”
“I’d like to talk to Ted, regardless,” I said with determination. “If he’s alone, he can’t move any faster than we can.”
“We have dragons,” Cassandra pointed out. “Colby and Drake.”
Letting Drake fly us there—he would never let Colby do it without him—would be risky. Drake might take the opportunity to kill Vonda while he had the chance, screw his deadline, which was four hours from now. Or Vonda might be able to discover Drake’s and Colby’s names and trap them as well. I still had no idea how she’d known Mick’s. Then we’d have three dragons to face instead of one.
I explained this to Cassandra. She nodded as she lifted the edges of the map and poured the powder and salt into a bowl. “Then we drive.”
Twenty-three
Again convincing Maya to stay behind was difficult. I needed Cassandra with me, and I didn’t want to let Gabrielle out of my sight. I also needed Nash, who would be my most formidable weapon.
“I want you and Pamela here,” I argued with Maya. “You have to make sure Drake doesn’t come after us, but tell Colby to watch in the magic mirror without Drake knowing. If everything goes to hell, we might need to call the dragons in, regardless.”
Maya was furious. “You can tell Colby that on the phone. You don’t need me to deliver messages.”
“I also want to know what Grandmother and Elena are up to. They’ve been entirely too secret in that kitchen of theirs. And I need someone to try to find Coyote.”
“Anything else?” Maya asked sourly.
“I think that about covers it. Ask Fremont to help you, and tell Colby to stay alert.”
I made a move toward Nash’s truck, but Maya stepped in front of me. “Janet, Nash thinks he’s invincible for some reason, and I don’t mean against magic. He has this idea in his head that he can’t be hurt. Either that or he doesn’t care that he can be.” She shot a vicious glance at Gabrielle, who was climbing into the backseat of Nash’s pickup. “Nash isn’t stupid enough to fall for Gabrielle, but he is stupid enough to think she’s harmless.”
“I know.” I gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Believe me, Maya, I’ll keep her far away from him. I don’t trust Gabrielle an inch, which is why I want her right next to me. And a long way from you.”
I stopped before I said anything sentimental, like “You’re my only girlfriend, and I don’t want to lose you.”
“You bring him back safe to me,” Maya said, scowling. “Or we’ll have words.”
“I will. I promise. Don’t linger here; go back to my hotel with Pamela. The witch can’t touch you there, but she might figure out what we did and backtrack Cassandra’s spell to Nash’s house. You’ll be safer at the hotel.”
She gave me a look full of fire. “And when you come back, we’ll talk about what else you haven’t told me about Nash and these women who want to make babies with him.”
I raised my hands. “Fine. I’ll bring the tequila.”
She flashed a sudden smile at me, remembering our first girls’ night at her house. We’d started out enemies and ended up . . . lesser enemies and very drunk.
I looked at Maya for a few seconds, then on impulse I grabbed her in a hug. Neither she nor I liked girly-girl hugs, but her arms came around me, and she held me tightly for a moment.
“Go,” I said, and ran for the truck.
Because Nash drove, we cruised the speed limit all the way, neither above nor below. Cassandra and I sat in the front seat with Nash, while Gabrielle lounged behind us on the half seat. When I’d ridden in this truck last fall, Nash had stashed in it a first aid kit that could have supplied an emergency room, plus enough gear for a seven-day hike in the remotest part of the earth. A glance in the back showed me the large first aid kit was still locked in place. Good thing, because we might need it.
The road into New Mexico from Holbrook ran straight across fairly flat land, the road bisected at times by shallow canyons. As we approached Gallup, canyon walls rose to line the freeway, and with them, the storm clouds. Snow began to fall gently as we approached Gallup and then passed it, the freeway looping away from the town.
I pressed my hand to the window, smiling to see the flakes of snow home in on my fingers. I let them go, not wanting to endanger us as we sped on into growing darkness.
The winter light faded, by the time we pulled into the parking lot of the hotel and casino, ten miles south and east. The high-rise hotel with its huge lighted sign was incongruous on this lonely stretch of road through a river canyon, with mountains rising to the south. But these days, tribes needed the money casinos brought in, especially the smaller tribes that had no other resources, and so there existed a swank hotel in the middle of nowhere.
We walked in to lights and noise and a swirl of people. We were a disparate bunch, Nash in his workout clothes, Gabrielle and I in jeans and leather jackets, Cassandra in her skirt suit with tasteful black pumps and turquoise jewelry. The clerk behind the desk blinked once, but her training took over, and she asked in a friendly voice whether she could help us.
As a hotel owner, I’d learned that, for both security and to protect your own liability, you never volunteer information about your guests. If someone asks to see a guest, you call the guest’s room yourself and don’t give out the room number. If no one answers in the room, you offer to leave a message from the inquirer. The last thing
you want is for some crazed stalker to go charging upstairs, endangering your patrons.
I wasn’t sure how to ask whether Ted was here without alerting him, but I saw Gabrielle open her mouth to simply demand they hand over Ted, Vonda, and Mick. I pulled her out of the way and let Cassandra smile and Nash take out his badge and show it to the woman behind the desk.
“You’re no fun, Janet,” Gabrielle said as we walked away. “We’re all-powerful, half-goddess women. We should be able to take what we want whenever we want it.”
“You watch too many movies.”
“What else is there to do in Snowflake? Oh, look, video poker.”
I felt like a mother with an unruly teenager. I let Gabrielle plop onto a padded stool in front of a poker machine. She slid a credit card into a slot, which I couldn’t grab before she’d fed it in. The lights blinked and the computer dealt a hand.
“Is that your credit card?” I demanded. “Do you even have any money?”
“Relax, big sis. I have plenty of money stashed away, and I lifted the credit card from Nash.”
I dove for the button that would cancel the game, but she batted my hand away. “Just one. He won’t even miss it.” She picked the cards she wanted to keep, chose her bet, and pushed the button for the next deal. Three different cards came up, none matching what she already had.
“You bet twenty dollars on a pair of twos?” I asked. “Someone needs to teach you how to play cards.”
“I know how to play cards. It’s called gambling. The bigger the risk, the greater the thrill.”
I canceled the next hand and pulled her off the stool. “Risk your own money. Besides, I see Ted.”
Ted was playing blackjack. My annoying hotel inspector with his tan and his golden brown hair flashed his charming smile at the dealer, a young woman who kept her smile neutral while she dealt him another card. Ted was winning, chips stacked in neat piles next to his hand.
The young woman turned over her own cards, a nine and a three, followed by a king. “House busts,” she announced. She passed chips to Ted and two others at the table.
Shadow Walker Page 21
