From Jennifer Ashley, With Love: Three Paranormal Romances from Bestselling Series

by Jennifer Ashley

  Elena had indeed cooked a big spread—everything from eggs with chiles and spices to flatbreads, corn pancakes, and fluffy syrup-dripping puffed apple pancakes that my guests loved. I looked at it all and felt sick.

  Mick made me eat. He hadn’t mentioned Coyote’s murder to Elena, and the look in his blue eyes warned me not to. He plunked me down at the kitchen table, dumped a mess of chilaquiles and corn pancakes onto my plate, and rested his hip on the table, watching to see that I ate it.

  I gulped it down with the aid of Elena’s thick black coffee. Elena paid no attention to me, busy filling plates for the horde of workers that had showed up to start tearing up my saloon.

  “Drake sent them,” Mick told me before I could ask. I figured my insurance company had nothing to do with it—days would pass before they even sent out an assessor. “He’s paying for all the damage.”

  “Did you talk to him last night when you were out healing?” I asked, eating another corn pancake, the knot in my stomach easing a little.

  “I did.” His eyes twinkled. “How did you know?”

  “Because otherwise he wouldn’t have sent someone out this fast,” I said. “Or he would have conveniently forgotten about it.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have. Whatever you think of him, Drake has honor. He lives by a rigid code of it. I admit I pushed him a little to have people out here first thing.”

  I laid my fork on my empty plate. “Well, thank you for that.”

  “While they have things in hand,” Mick said, “you and I can ride out to New Mexico and visit to Richard Young.”

  Elena stopped chopping and held up her knife. “Who is he?”

  “A rich man who might have some answers for us,” Mick answered.

  “I don’t trust rich people,” Elena said, resuming her torture of a bell pepper. “They don’t understand the importance of day-to-day work, of talking to people like they’re people. They hide in their fancy mansions, afraid to come out, afraid people might take all their money away if they ever leave.”

  I watched her plump hands working to viciously gut the pepper. “Are you speaking from experience?” I asked.

  “When I lived in Manhattan, I worked for rich folks who shut themselves up in penthouses on top of buildings, living in decadence you can’t imagine. They liked to show off their Apache cook, so I saw a lot of the rooms and their guests. Parasites living off the hard work of others.”

  But the anger with which she moved from the pepper to an onion told me that her anger was personal, not general. Someone had outraged her more than by simply existing in decadence.

  But I wouldn’t hear the story today. Elena closed her mouth into a tight line, which told me she was finished talking. In fact, her eyes had a dangerous flash, and I sensed that the kitchen was closed.

  Mick took my plates to the sink while I slipped out of the room.

  I looked in on the saloon, where workers in hard hats were prying down burned beams. I found the foreman and asked him to have the mirror taken down and moved into my office.

  He eyed the mirror skeptically. “I don’t think you can save that. Best get a new one.”

  I agreed that the mirror, its frame half-melted, cracks radiating out from a hole in the middle of the glass, looked beyond repair. But the foreman couldn’t know what finding a new one or repairing this one entailed. I doubted Drake would foot the bill for that.

  Besides, I owed it to the mirror to take care of it. I told the foreman that it was a family heirloom and to cart it to my office anyway. He shouted for two men to come and lift it down.

  I supervised the move, hovering like a mother with her hurt child as two men carried the mirror between them across the lobby. Mick joined us. I cleared space in my office, and Mick helped the men set down the mirror and lean it against the wall.

  The mirror was still smoky black. I studied it a while, hands on hips, before Mick covered it with a sheet he’d brought from the linen room and gave its frame a little pat.

  “Ready?” Mick asked me.

  “Sure.” Action was better than sitting around here looking at the wreck of my mirror and thinking about Coyote’s death. Was he dead, or wasn’t he? Were the shimmering motes I’d seen his soul disappearing back into nothingness? And dead or alive, why had Bear killed him?

  Too much for me to take in right now.

  I headed for my Softail in the shed, but Mick stopped me. “Ride with me.”

  I rubbed my arms. “Storms are coming. You want me on the back of your bike when that happens?”

  There weren’t many clouds overhead, but I could feel the tingle that meant the weather, always changeable around here, was building to something big. Yesterday I’d seen clouds over the San Francisco peaks to the west, but nothing had come down to the plateau. Unusual in this season, when afternoons could bring storm after storm.

  Today, on the other hand, clouds were already gathering to the north, over the Navajo and Hopi Nations, west over Flagstaff, south on the Rim, and far to the east. By the time noon rolled around, thunderheads would be swirling around us, and I’d want to soak up their power.

  “I can handle your lightning, remember?” Mick said with a hint of his smile. “And I’d rather you not be on a motorcycle that ran away with you before.”

  He had a point. Not that I minded snuggling in behind Mick to enjoy the ride. Mick rode a big bike, which gave me a nice space to sit and wrap myself around him. The bike throbbed under me, Mick was warm in front of me, and my heart lightened the slightest bit as we headed out.

  Santa Fe is about three hundred miles from Magellan, five hours or so, give or take weather, road construction, traffic, and how often I have to stop for the bathroom.

  It was a glorious summer morning, perfect for a long ride. The road unrolled in front of us, flat as Elena’s corn pancakes for a time, then running past low cliffs as we entered the old river valley around Holbrook and beyond. On the other side of Gallup, in New Mexico, the rise of Mount Taylor, one of the four sacred mountains of the Diné, towered to the north and east.

  We passed the turnoff I’d been forced to take toward Crownpoint. I held my breath, but Mick’s motorcycle kept going, obeying Mick.

  We came out of Navajo country and flew on by the pueblos of smaller tribes, ancient cultures that had existed long before Europeans had ever heard of this place. Along some stretches, except for the black ribbon of freeway and its caravans of eighteen wheelers and RVs, the landscape looked the same as it must have those thousand and more years ago.

  Storm clouds gathered out here too, for now mostly hugging the mountain ridges to the north and south. Behind us, in the Chuska Mountains on the Navajo lands, the sky started to turn black with rainclouds.

  After a time, Albuquerque loomed out of the desert with its glittering buildings and huge mountain behind it. Mick took the loop of freeway that headed north, and we were out of the town before we even got properly into it. The freeway climbed. And climbed, and climbed, taking us on to higher mountains and lowering storms.

  Mick leaned into the ascent, his powerful bike passing cars, SUVs, and trucks that struggled up the long, steep hill toward Santa Fe and Taos beyond it. The air cooled, mercifully, but the sky darkened to slate gray, thunderheads climbing high over flat curtains of rain.

  I loved it. When the first lightning strike hit the ground a mile from the freeway, I whooped.

  I resisted calling to the lightning bolt, because I’d only short out the bike’s electrical system, or maybe blow up the gas tank. Mick could survive that and pull me to safety, but he’d be pretty pissed off if I wrecked his Harley.

  I held myself together while we climbed to the seven-thousand or so elevation of Santa Fe. Mick left the freeway behind and started winding through the city’s streets.

  Richard Young lived in a hilly part of the town, his house the last in a secluded neighborhood of residences that hid behind walls, gates, and tall foliage. Young’s home had a big stucco wall around it pierced by ta
ll wooden gates, reminiscent of a hacienda of old. Piñon pines and dogwood lined the wall on both sides, creating a tall barrier between Mr. Young and his neighbors.

  Behind Young’s property, mountains rose against the sky. A tiny dusting of snow coated the tops like powdered sugar, despite the fact that this was July. The storm clouds were densest there, a wall of gray surrounding the green. The air was cool, soothing, smelling of rain and pine, and the slight odor of electricity.

  Mick pushed a button on a speaker near the gate. Through an intercom, he proclaimed who he was and said he had an appointment.

  First I’d heard of this appointment, but I didn’t argue. One of the wooden gates opened in silence, powered by an electronic control somewhere in the house. Mick rode us through, and the gate closed as silently behind us, its lock clicking into place.

  I didn’t like that. The walls were high, about ten feet, and those wall-hugging trees towered another twenty over that.

  I took heart that I was with a dragon, who could fly, and though the driveway between the walls was narrow, Mick wouldn’t mind breaking down stucco and concrete with his dragon body. Even if the walls had been reinforced with iron rebar, they wouldn’t be able to withstand a dragon who really wanted to get out.

  The path to the house wound through a landscaped garden, complete with a little stream and a wooden bridge spanning the stream. The gardeners had planted native trees and shrubs, which meant they thrived in high altitude and could survive brutal winters and arid seasons. This being high summer, most of the bushes and flowerbeds were in full bloom, a riot of scarlet, blue, violet, and yellow.

  Should have been idyllic. I found it sinister. The garden screamed look, don’t touch—don’t even linger. The back of my neck itched, and I was fully aware of the security cameras that trained on us as we walked.

  The front door was opened by a lackey as well-groomed as the garden. His tie was very tight, his expression tighter. The lackey looked us over in our jeans and motorcycle chaps and didn’t bother to hide his disdain.

  “Mr. Young will see you in his library.”

  Lackey walked away without further word, expecting us to follow. Since neither Mick nor I knew where the library was, we did.

  The dragon compound not far from here was a truly old Spanish-style house, with narrow corridors, stairs tucked into niches, and few windows that mostly overlooked the courtyard. Young’s house was new and modern, built within the last decade. We walked through a massive front room with a ceiling that soared three floors above us, with floor-to-ceiling windows bringing in the mountains. A ponderous iron chandelier hung from a thick chain from the planked ceiling high above.

  Carved, old-Spanish chairs stood about the room, along with a wooden couch covered with cushions. But most of the floor space was taken up with long glass cases, and inside them lay a vast stretch of Southwestern Indian history.

  Most cases held pottery, but I found one that held a line of carved fetishes, another filled with beaded jewelry from hundreds of years ago, and another showing a collection of obsidian knives, carved from hard, volcanic leavings. Wall cabinets held larger pieces of pottery, some broken, some pieced back together, a few intact.

  Many tribes were represented here—Navajo, Hopi, Acoma, Zuni, and tribes from pueblos scattered through this part of New Mexico. These things were old, not what Indian artists now crafted to sell to tourists or in museum shops.

  I’d have known they were old without even looking inside the cases, because of the auras of the things. They cried out to me, some strong, some barely shadows. These things had been handled by people, some only a few times before they’d been broken or lost, others handed down through generations for hundreds of years.

  Their history shrieked at me, making me dizzy. Though Mr. Young’s living room might not hold the weight of ages of Chaco Canyon, my stomach still roiled. The things here were alone, lost, far from where they were supposed to be.

  My feet dragged, my body slowing. Mick put his hand under my elbow and guided me along after the lackey, his warm strength comforting. I swallowed my nausea and moved with him the best that I could.

  Lackey took us up a flight of stairs and along a gallery that overlooked the room below. At the end of this was a huge, heavy, wooden door, which opened without noise, silent like everything else in this house.

  Silent on the surface. The auras continued their clamor in my head, which only built as we walked inside the library.

  The man who must be Richard Young rose from behind a desk. He was in his sixties and as nattily dressed as his lackey. On a warm summer day in New Mexico, in his own home, the man was wearing a suit and tie.

  The narrow, high-ceilinged room was lined with glass cases against white walls, high windows near the ceiling letting in light and a glimpse of the storm clouds. The pieces in the cases, I noted with a quick glance, were larger and more intact than those downstairs. I also saw more gruesome things—among the knife blades were bones, human ones, mostly fingers or whole hands, and in one was a line of shriveled skins with long black hair attached to each.

  The rattling vibrations in my head increased tenfold, light and dark auras shimmering everywhere and distracting me from why we’d come.

  Almost. A young woman turned from the glass case at the far end of the room, behind Young’s desk, and stopped me in my tracks.

  She was not Laura DiAngelo. This young woman had silky black hair that hung straight down her back, eyes as dark as mine, and Apache Indian features. She grinned at me, her white teeth flashing as I stood there gaping.

  “Hey, sis,” Gabrielle said. “About time you got here.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Gabrielle.” Not a brilliant thing to say, but the only thing that came out of my mouth.

  Gabrielle Massey is my half sister. Sort of. We share a mother, the one from Beneath, who’d instilled in both of us her blinding powers of evil.

  Stormwalker magic—earth magic—from my father’s side of my family, grounds me against the crater-blasting Beneath magic that wants to come out and play at the slightest provocation. Stormwalker magic is my failsafe. Gabrielle doesn’t have one.

  To say she’s dangerous is an understatement. At the moment, she was more or less contained—or supposed to be—by my watchful Grandmother, my dad, and my many aunts. Why Gabrielle was here, not in Many Farms, my home, I had no idea.

  I kept staring at her, ignoring Richard Young who came around the desk to shake Mick’s hand.

  A second lackey had entered with a silver tray loaded with bits of food, followed by a maid with a bottle of wine and glasses on trays. These two faded away, and the first lackey poured the wine and carried it around to all of us.

  I took the offered glass of cool white wine, my gaze still fixed on Gabrielle. She lifted her glass to me in silent toast then drank a good mouthful.

  Young’s attention was all for Mick. “You come highly recommended, Mr. Burns,” he said. “Mr. Bancroft has quite the reputation as a collector.”

  I jammed my wineglass against my lips to stop my questions. Mick had obviously fed the man some line of bull and dragged Bancroft’s name into it.

  I didn’t like white wine, but I dumped a gulp into my mouth. Then I admitted that this wasn’t bad—the expensive stuff, I gathered. But between the shaking auras and Gabrielle’s presence, even the smooth wine couldn’t calm my rebellious stomach.

  Young signaled to the lackey. The lackey set down his tray, turned smartly, and exited through a door behind Mr. Young’s desk.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I brought in another expert to authenticate the pot.” Young nodded graciously at Gabrielle. “I thought two heads would be better than one.”

  Mick had taken in Gabrielle without a change in expression, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d known Gabrielle would be here. Mick was just good at not giving away his emotions.

  We sipped wine in silence, while Gabrielle continued to shoot amused looks at me, until the lac
key returned with a large, latched box.

  Lackey set the box on a table made of wood so old it shone with age. The lackey unlatched the box then stepped back and let Young open its lid.

  Inside the box lay a pot. It was a simple vessel with a flat bottom, its sides bulging into a pleasing swell. That swell flowed back in to the pot’s mouth, which was a near-perfect circle about four inches across.

  I knew how these pots were made, though I’d never mastered the art myself. Clay was rolled into long snakes that were then coiled around and wrapped one on top of the other, the final shape finished by hand. No potter’s wheel had made this.

  The potter had then painted a line of bears and tortoises marching around the outside of the bowl—not realistic animals, but abstract, square-lined ones. Jagged patterns like lightning interspersed between tortoise and bear. For a finishing touch, black waves ran around the lip of the vessel’s mouth, every line perfect. The colors were simple—white, rich brown, black, and red.

  Once the pot had been fired, it had taken on a hardness and sheen that was enduring. The colors had faded a bit from time and weather, but they were still beautiful. This bowl, as lovely as it was, would have been used for a practical purpose—to store grain maybe. Useful beauty.

  I couldn’t, however, discern from which tribe it had originated. Ansel said he’d found it in Flagstaff, which meant it could have come from any of the tribes in a line from the tiny valleys around the Grand Canyon all the way east through Arizona and southern Utah to the pueblo tribes of New Mexico. There were plenty of ruins in the cliff-sides around Santa Fe.

  Young handed white gloves to Mick and Gabrielle and donned a pair himself. Apparently, I was the only one who wouldn’t be allowed to pick up the pot, because a pair wasn’t handed to me. Whatever story Mick had woven didn’t include me playing an expert.

  Mick pulled the gloves over his big hands and carefully accepted the pot from Young. They made a strange pair, the slim, medium-height Mr. Young, with his brushed suit and carefully trimmed gray hair, and Mick, tall, massive, with black hair every which way and in his biker clothes.