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

by Jennifer Ashley

  I made myself walk a perimeter of about twenty feet, Nash and Mick with me. Mick was right beside me, his aura smoky black shot with red. Nash was with me too, but his aura was a blank. Always was.

  I didn’t find anything else. I felt the tiny auras of the vultures and coyotes, plus snakes also attracted by the warm smell of blood. Beyond that, nothing. The fight had been intense in that one spot, but no one else had wandered out here.

  After a time, I gave up and shook my head. “Sorry.”

  Nash let out his breath. “Not helpful. What are you getting, Mick?”

  “She’s right. I don’t smell anything other than what happened at the fight.”

  “Mmm.” Nash stood looking around, but it was clear he didn’t see anything or sense anything either. “I’m interested in talking to your friend Ansel. Find him and bring him to me.”

  “Get in line,” I said.

  Nash had turned to walk back to the crime scene, but he swung around again. “No—bring him to me first. It’s important.”

  Without letting either of us answer, he walked on toward the lights.

  I looked at Mick, and he looked back at me, his eyes black in the darkness. “Do you have any idea which direction Ansel went?” I asked.

  “East.” Mick slid his hand down my arm and locked his fingers around mine. “He must be trying to find out where he left Laura, and figure out what he was doing at Chaco Canyon.”

  “Chaco Canyon,” I repeated. “That keeps cropping up. There was some reason I was taken up there in the first place.”

  “I say we find out.”

  “It’s a long way from here.”

  “Not if I fly.”

  I shivered. “Not that I don’t appreciate seeing you naked as often as possible, but I still haven’t recovered from the trip back from Santa Fe.”

  Mick’s teeth flashed in the darkness. “I’ll make it up to you.”

  His way of saying, Suck it up, Janet.

  I let out a sigh. “As long as we can leave our bikes someplace safe.”

  * * *

  We left them in the parking lot of the Hopi County Sheriff’s Department. No one in their right minds would steal anything from Nash’s parking lot, and if they weren’t in their right minds, Nash would lock them up and explain why they needed to be.

  I walked with Mick back out of town and into the desert where he could change to dragon.

  As Mick lowered his head to look at me, I reflected that I was always stunned that this sinuous black, gigantic dragon was Mick. He wasn’t a cold lizard—his scales were warm and satiny, a pleasure to touch. I rubbed my hand under his eye, which I knew he liked, and he rewarded me with a rumble, like a colossal cat who’s decided to purr.

  I’d become more used to Mick like this over the past year. I was comfortable enough to press a kiss to the end of his nose before he lifted me in his talons and tucked me against his chest.

  I closed my eyes as he took his dizzying leap into the air, and kept them closed while he took off across the night.

  We made it to Chaco Canyon fairly quickly, Mick landing on his powerful back legs, wings spread. He carefully set me down, and I rubbed my arms, catching my breath, while Mick changed back to human form.

  Dragons shift a little differently from Changers and other shapeshifters. They cause a black mist or cloud to form around their bodies, and from this emerges either the dragon or the human. I asked Mick about it once—was the darkness the magic that made the change? Or a side effect of the magic?

  Mick had blinked at me and said he didn’t know. Which meant he didn’t care. It worked, and it wasn’t important to him. If it had been important to him, Mick would have been able to tell me every single detail about it, probably more than I ever wanted to know.

  Mick came walking out of the cloud, human-shaped once more. He didn’t bother with the clothes I’d once more carried for him, but there was no one out here to see him. He took my hand, and we walked together to the ruins, which lay silent under the moonlight.

  The layers of auras began to pound at me, but Mick’s hand in mine both kept me steady and served as a conduit to the little bit of healing magic he trickled into me.

  If we hadn’t been looking for a Nightwalker, possibly in a killing frenzy, in a dark place sacred to the gods and full of ancient auras, I’d like this. My boyfriend walked tall by my side, we were alone in a night of beauty, and we were in love.

  But our lives were such that the best places for us to look for romance were generic hotel rooms, far from anything magical and anyone who knew us. Moonlit walks among ruins only meant potential trouble.

  Mick at least pulled on his jeans before I showed him the campsite where Laura had disappeared. The campground was open again, but few people were here tonight. A place where someone had recently been abducted made all but the hardiest curiosity seekers shy away. By day, fine; staying here overnight, no.

  The aura of the fight between dragon and Nightwalker had faded further, but Mick nodded at me, smelling what I’d sensed. We knew that Laura had gotten away from Colby and Ansel, but not where she’d gone.

  We tried to find her trail into the desert. The terrain was tough, it was dark, and I stumbled over rocks and scrub. Mick walked more steadily on his bare feet, which wasn’t fair, but he was Mick.

  “There,” he said.

  He started walking ahead of me, picking a trail for me across the uneven ground. Moonlight highlighted his straight back down to the flame tattoo that rode across his hips, right above the jeans’ waistline.

  Now he stopped and pointed into a crease of wash that cut across our path. I heard coyotes rustling in the darkness, watching us.

  Mick walked unerringly to a place in the soft wall of the wash where someone had been digging. Not an animal—the marks were too regular, made by a trowel or small spade.

  I crouched down. Someone had dug a hole and covered it back up again. Mick sank back on his heels and gingerly began scraping the dirt away. Out here in the cool darkness, any hole probably contained a snake, either one sleeping or one waiting to feed, so Mick moved the dirt very carefully.

  A snake did lay coiled in this hole about an inch beneath the surface. Mick said a soft, sort of hissing word I didn’t understand and lifted out, by its neck, five feet of rattlesnake. The snake slid its body around Mick’s arm, but gently, touching as though getting to know him.

  Mick carried the snake a few yards down the wash and released it. “Good hunting, my friend.”

  “He a cousin or something?” I asked Mick when he came back.

  “She,” Mick corrected me, deadpan. “No relation.”

  “You speak reptile?”

  Mick gave me a modest look. “Learned it at my mama’s knee. Now let’s see what she was guarding.”

  Nothing. When Mick cleared out the hole, we found it empty. But the aura that burst out like a comet when Mick cleared away the last of the rocks and dirt smacked me hard and sent me backward onto the rocky ground.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “It was here.”

  I lay on my back, gasping for breath. The residue of whatever magic coated the pot entangled me in its net like strands of live wire. My heart jerked, then raced, as though someone had just defibrillated me.

  Mick was instantly at my side, the moonlight showing the concern on his face. He helped me back to my feet with strong hands. “I feel it too.”

  “It’s not here now,” another voice broke in. “Neither is she.”

  I knew the voice, and when the aura that had knocked me over receded a little, I could feel him too. Tall and lanky, his brown hair shining in the moonlight, his clothes blood-free, Ansel stopped a few feet from us and gazed at us with mournful eyes.

  “Ansel,” I said in relief. “You all right?”

  “If you mean, am I blood frenzied, then I can safely say I’m not.” Ansel gazed at the dark opening in the bank of the wash, the pent-up aura still plenty strong. “I’ve been searching for somethin
g that points me to her.”

  “What about the slayer?” Mick asked.

  “Which one?” Ansel gave him the ghost of a smile. “I’m losing track of them all.”

  “The one Janet and I scared off two mornings ago,” Mick said. “He’s dead on the side of the 40, near Holbrook.”

  Ansel’s eyes widened in surprise. “Dead?” His astonishment was replaced by alarm when he looked at our expressions. “You think by me? No. I was nowhere near Holbrook tonight. I hitched a ride with a guy who was going through Snowflake and St. John’s. Then another guy out to Gallup. Then I walked.”

  Nightwalkers could move fast, covering a miles in a matter of minutes. Nightwalkers don’t need to breathe and don’t get tired. As long as the sun isn’t around, they’re stronger than any human athlete could aspire to be.

  But that meant that not only could Ansel have gotten here quickly on foot, he could have made a detour to kill a slayer.

  “How did you know to come here?” I asked him. “To this spot.”

  “Laura talked about hiding the real pot in or near Chaco Canyon. Taking it home, she said. But I wasn’t sure exactly where she had in mind, so I didn’t lie to you when I told you I didn’t know what she meant to do that night. We decided it was best that way—plausible deniability. But now that she’s disappeared, I have no way of knowing what she did with the pot. Did she take it from here? Or did someone else?”

  I pushed around Mick. “You held out on me, Ansel. You told me that the swindle with Young was that you made him pay fifty grand more than he needed to, and you and Laura split it between you. You said nothing about hiding the real pot and giving Young a fake. Explain to me why you didn’t tell me.”

  “Because it’s bloody dangerous!” Ansel, my quiet boarder, cried out into the night. “I wanted you to leave the pot alone. I thought you’d interrogate the dragons or find out they had it. I thought they must have grabbed it. And maybe Laura too.” He gestured wildly at the open hole. “I know you must feel that. And that’s from a place the pot rested only a short time. Imagine what would happen if that got into Young’s collection, what effect it would have on his other things? And imagine what would happen if the mage Pericles got hold of it.”

  “You knew about Pericles?” I asked, my temper rising. The pot’s aura was doing things to me, stirring up the nastier side of my magic. My fingers twitched, my magic wanting to strike out at Ansel and make him cower.

  Ansel folded his arms over his chest, as though protecting himself from me and my rage. “Laura and I knew that Young wanted the pot for another client. We dug around until we found out who. Young has acquired things for Pericles McKinnon in the past, and the more I learned about Pericles, the more worried I became. I decided it was important that Pericles didn’t get his hands on this pot, and Laura agreed. So we decided to give Young a replica.”

  “Who made it?” Mick asked. “Who could you trust for that?”

  “Laura did.” Ansel’s voice took on a note of pride. “She’s an excellent forger.”

  “Except that you can’t fake magical properties,” I said. “Any magical being knows instantly that your copy is a fake.”

  “Yes, but Young didn’t know, and that was the point. He never saw the real pot—we sent him photos from Flagstaff—and we delivered the replica to him. He couldn’t tell the difference. We figured that by the time Young handed the pot over to Pericles and they found out it was a fake, the real one would be long gone, out of Pericles’s reach. Or it was supposed to be.” Ansel glanced at the hole again. “Laura said she’d hide it, in a place even the gods couldn’t find it.”

  “We found it,” I said. “Without much to go on.”

  “No, you found where she started to hide it,” Ansel said. “Obviously, Laura decided to find a better place.” He scanned the moonlit world around us, letting out his breath in a conjured sigh. “Or the dragons got it from her. I wish I knew where she was.”

  Mick rumbled, “If Laura is all right, wouldn’t she try to contact you?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I think the dragons must have her. Or maybe she believes it better if she lies low. I’m dangerous, after all.”

  Standing with his hands in his pockets, his expression sad, Ansel looked about as dangerous as an unhappy puppy. But then, I’ve seen puppies rip things to shreds in the blink of an eye.

  Drake and Colby had claimed they didn’t know where Laura was. Ansel claimed not to remember what had happened the night she disappeared. Paige wanted to convince us with the faked séance that Laura was dead, and I think she believed it, which meant she didn’t know where Laura was either.

  Either Laura was perfectly fine and in hiding, or someone like Pericles had found her, or she truly was dead.

  Where would someone like Laura think herself safe? Not with her sister, obviously, but I wanted to talk to Paige. She could give me a better sense of Laura, where she might go if she was in trouble. Paige hadn’t responded to my message that Laura might be alive, and apparently slayers were still running around the county, searching for Ansel.

  I looked around the dark night, the sky brilliant with stars. I wished I could stop the madness and lie on my back to stargaze with Mick, but it was not to be.

  Mick had gone back to the hole again and crouched down next to it, talking to Ansel over his shoulder. “If Laura came up here after she left the restaurant in Gallup with you, what happened to you? She couldn’t dig out this hole with such care with you in a blood frenzy.”

  “I wish I could remember,” Ansel said.

  “We could try to hypnotize him,” I said to Mick. “Have him take us through that night in his memory.”

  “Not sure that would work with a Nightwalker,” Mick said. “But I have an idea.” He cast Ansel a thoughtful glance, and his eyes changed from blue to dragon black.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like it.”

  “Ansel doesn’t remember what he does in his blood frenzy when he’s calm and sated. But he might remember once he’s in a blood frenzy again.”

  My heart squeezed. “I was right. I don’t like it.”

  Ansel raised his hands. “Gods, Mick, you don’t want me to deliberately go Nightwalker. I’ve been doing it too much lately, and I don’t have a blood supply with me. I’ll attack you. I’ll drain you. I’ll kill you and Janet both.”

  “Not if I’m a dragon, you won’t. I can easily crush a little Nightwalker who gets out of hand.” Mick opened and closed his broad fingers.

  “But how will you bring me out of it again if you don’t let me drink? I can only calm down if I have blood.”

  “We’ll take you home and pour bottled blood down your throat,” Mick said.

  I thought Mick a little too certain this would work. When Ansel went into his frenzy and craved blood, the nearest blood-filled human would be me. Sure, Mick could stop him, but would Ansel have time to take a good bite out of me first?

  But Mick’s smile was pure dragon, showing me the cool beast that lay behind the warm man I loved. His eyes glittered with that unstoppable curiosity, the determination that could move glaciers. When a dragon wants to do something, there’s not a being on earth that can slow him down—except another dragon, and then only maybe.

  Ansel kept his hands up. “Can we try another way? I don’t like what I am when I become Nightwalker. I’m . . . cruel.”

  “Not your fault,” I said. “You make up for it when you’re not the Nightwalker. You know, you’re a very strong person for being able to keep it at bay almost all the time.”

  I had no idea if that were true, but Ansel looked slightly appeased. “If you truly think I can tell you something useful . . .” He spread his hands. “But the minute I go insane with the blood need, please kill me. Please. I can’t face the thought of waking up and seeing what I’ve done to my dearest friends.”

  Dearest friends. The guy really knew how to go for the heartstrings.

  “Tr
ust me, Ansel,” I said. “I’ll make very sure you don’t kill us.”

  Mick rose to his feet, brushing the dust from his jeans, eager to start.

  He and I coordinated what we’d do. We left the wash, walking another mile or so to put more distance between us and the Chaco campsites and ruins. We didn’t want to be too close to other humans when all this went down. Ansel and Mick moved rapidly, me jogging to keep up with them as we made our way down a little-used dirt road, into the heart of nothing.

  At least, many people would call it nothing. I called it the real world, where no buildings, paved roads, or fences marred the natural beauty of the landscape—just miles upon miles of unbroken land. I knew that eventually we’d come to another highway, a pueblo, a town, a city. But here in the heart of Indian country, the land was vast.

  When we reached a point where Mick thought we’d be safe, he told me to stay with Ansel while he walked off from us into the darkness.

  I heard a rush and a roar, then the downdraft of Mick’s wings engulfed Ansel and me like a hot summer wind. He skimmed by us, silent as darkness, then he soared straight upward, a giant dragon shape black against the stars. I craned my head to watch him as he wheeled back and forth for the pure joy of it.

  Mick loved being a dragon. Having to hide his true nature most of the time must be hell for him.

  Mick swooped by again. I was so engrossed in watching him that I didn’t notice until too late that Ansel had sidled away from me. By the time I spotted him, he was sprinting off into the darkness.

  “Ansel!”

  He didn’t respond. I guess he’d decided at the last minute not to participate in our little experiment.

  No one could outrun a Nightwalker. I started after him, but I knew there’d be no way I could catch him.

  Correction—no one could outrun a Nightwalker but a dragon. Mick swept downward, plucked the fleeing Ansel up out of the desert, and flew back to me.