From Jennifer Ashley, With Love Page 26

  The lightning struck again—not this room, but somewhere else in the house. The explosion shook the whole building, and fire leapt into the sky.

  If the lightning had hit a gas pipe, we’d be in big trouble. Still I couldn’t move.

  I needed Mick. He could steady me, but he was all the way across the room under a table.

  I closed my eyes, trying to find the calm core within myself, as the koshare—a Hopi clown—had taught me. Mick and Cassandra also had been teaching me more about Wicca magic, about the importance of grounding and centering so the magic didn’t twist me into nothing.

  The problem was, I’d been practicing these meditations in the cool calm of evening outside my back door. Easy to ground myself when I knew Elena was cooking something delicious in the kitchen, my guests were down for the night, and Mick would be waiting for me inside.

  Now I had the full force of a high-desert storm dancing around me, plus the collective magic of ancient objects I’d awakened, hot and ready to kill.

  I couldn’t anchor myself by focusing on my breathing, because I couldn’t feel anything in my chest or hear anything above the shriek of wind. Same went for my heartbeat. If I hadn’t been aware of being aware, I wouldn’t know I was alive.

  I closed my eyes, shutting out the sights of men bleeding from a thousand razor-like cuts, Mick’s bulk folded under the table, Gabrielle beside him, for once being sensible and taking cover. I needed to focus on an image, one that would calm me and stop the crazed laughter in my brain.

  Mick’s hard face and warm blue eyes usually did it for me, but the image that sprang instantly to me was Coyote, dying while I watched.

  His expression had been one of release and relief. Also surrender. I’d never seen Coyote give up, and so readily.

  He couldn’t be gone. He was a god. And yet, his last breath had held finality. Then he’d dissolved, floated away on the wind.

  He’d have wanted that. Traditional Navajo were afraid of dead bodies and their lingering ghosts. Coyote would not have wanted to upset people by leaving remains.

  Tears filled my eyes and spilled down my cheeks. A shudder went through me, and then I felt my heartbeat, which hurt. My chest burned and ached, and my throat shut up tight.

  I thought about the big man with his wicked smile and lewd jokes, and his eyes so warm. I thought about how he dressed in his jeans, cowboy boots, and button-down shirt and hung around the center of Magellan, playing Indian for the tourists. He’d tell stories, some outrageous, some sad—of the gods and of the tribes who’d populated the area for centuries. He was especially good with kids, dialing back his off-color humor for them. Julie Kee, in particular, adored him.

  Julie. I’d have to tell her.

  I pressed my arms tightly over my stomach and let sobs wrack my body. Even if Coyote had managed to save himself, and he wasn’t really dead, being a god, there was no telling whether I’d ever see him again. He came and went—sometimes, he’d told me, for centuries at a stretch. At least he’d kissed me good-bye.

  “Janet.”

  Mick was beside me. I opened my eyes. Thunder still rumbled, and lightning flickered, but farther away now. The storm had rolled on, naturally, down the valley.

  The auras were gone. The hail had softened to rain, which was now pouring in through the broken roof. The soaked floor was littered with Young and his lackeys, all bleeding, all groaning.

  Mick gathered me into his arms and pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “That’s my girl,” he whispered.

  * * *

  The storm still shook me as Mick helped me stumble from the house, back to his bike, which stood wet but unharmed at the bottom of the driveway.

  I needed release, my skin crawling with the aftermath of lightning. Mick knew it, because he kept his arm around me as we walked out, his big body shielding mine.

  Mick knew the best method to draw off the residue of the storm and keep me from having one of my bad magic hangovers. Unfortunately, it involved a private room, a large bed, a long stretch of time, and no clothes.

  Right now I was in a neighborhood halfway up a mountain, the neighbors coming out to see the storm damage. Sirens sounded as emergency vehicles raced into the neighborhood to make sure the fire didn’t spread.

  Plus, we had Gabrielle with us. She walked along beside Mick as we made our way down the driveway, her black windbreaker slung over her shoulder. Mr. Young apparently had sent a car to bring her to his house, so unless she stole one from the garage, she had no transportation back into town, or wherever she’d come from.

  She was all for stealing a car from Young, but Mick stopped her, telling her we didn’t have time to deal with bailing her out of jail when she got caught.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” I demanded when we reached the bike. The electricity to open the gate was still off, but Mick solved that problem by wrenching the thing open with his big hands. “You’re supposed to be at Many Farms with Grandmother, driving her crazy instead of me.”

  Gabrielle looked at me with wide, innocent eyes. “Who do you think sent me? Ruby heard about Young buying this old pot, and she sent me here to see if it was real.”

  I stopped. “Grandmother sent you to find an artifact that might possess magic great enough to interest a strong mage? She sent you?”

  “Don’t keep saying it like that, Janet. Yes, she trusted me. Well, all right, she’s pretty sure that what Young bought was a fake. And she asked me to get a picture of it, so she could look at the markings.” She grinned. “But I went one better.”

  Gabrielle carefully swung her jacket around and opened it. Inside lay the fake pot Young had bought from Laura.

  “It survived the storm somehow,” Gabrielle said. “So I grabbed it while Young and his boys were feeling sorry for themselves.”

  “And when Young comes after you for taking it?” I demanded.

  “It’s fake. What does he want with it? Now he can tell his big, bad mage Pericles that it was stolen by two Indian chicks and a biker dude.”

  “Then Pericles comes after us,” I said.

  Gabrielle hefted the pot. “So? We can take care of him. Aren’t you interested in what this pot does?”

  I was. So was Mick, I could tell. And so was my grandmother.

  I snatched the pot from her. “I need to talk to Ansel. And find Laura. She must have the original.”

  “I say we find this mage,” Gabrielle said. “Make him tell us everything.”

  My sweet, innocent little sister. She was pretty, with her round, soft face, her dusky skin and shining black hair, her body’s curves showed off by her cropped top and jeans, the kind of outfit I liked to wear.

  My eyes narrowed. She wasn’t just dressing like me—those were my clothes. She’d taken them out of the dresser in my bedroom at Many Farms. Gabrielle had more on top than I did, and she was stretching out the shirt in a bad way.

  “Have you ever gone up against a mage, Gabrielle?” I asked.

  “Sure. I won.”

  “A truly powerful, unstoppable mage? It’s not that easy.”

  “Mages have earth magic. I have goddess magic. Goddess magic always wins.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “Mick, can you take her back to Many Farms? I’ll rent a car or something, or ask Maya to drive out here and get me. I want to take a look at Laura’s antique store before I leave.”

  Before Mick could answer, Gabrielle said, “Ruby and I are staying in Santa Fe. Just give me a ride to our hotel, Mick.”

  She grabbed my helmet and swung herself onto Mick’s big bike without waiting for his invitation.

  “Grandmother’s here?” Grandmother, who didn’t like to leave Many Farms or the Navajo Nation for any reason had come to a city as large as Santa Fe? With Gabrielle no less. Grandmother’s exception to her rule of never traveling far from home was my hotel, and she only went there so she could find out what I was up to.

  “She wasn’t about to let me that far off the leash,” Gabrielle said
. “Hurry up, Mick. I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll take her,” Mick said to me, getting on the bike. “You going to be all right?”

  He meant because of the storm. The aftermath was still crawling through me, and I needed to let off steam, but there wasn’t much I could do here and now. I nodded.

  Mick looked at me in concern, but he knew that we had to contain Gabrielle before we worried about me. “You have your cell phone?” he asked me. “I’ll call you when I’m done, and we’ll meet to check out the store.”

  “Nope,” Gabrielle said. Her voice rose as Mick kicked the bike to roaring life. “Ruby says I’m supposed to bring you to see her, Mick. She wants to talk to you. It’s important, she said.”

  * * *

  They left me with the fake pot. I took off my jacket as Mick roared off, Gabrielle giving me a cheerful wave, and wrapped the pot in the jacket, hiding it. Of course Gabrielle had left it with me, stolen from the rich Mr. Young, with police coming up the hill in the wake of the fire trucks. She’d think that was funny.

  I did my best to look like an innocent bystander as I walked away down the block. Gabrielle wearing my clothes had one advantage—I heard a neighbor’s gardener telling a policeman he’d seen a biker and his black-haired woman ride up to the house, and he’d just seen them ride away. I’d been wearing a helmet, and so had Gabrielle. I had my jacket off now; she’d put hers back on.

  It was still raining, so I bent my head and just kept walking.

  For once I’d remembered to bring my cell phone, and it actually worked, so I called a taxi when I reached the main intersection at the bottom of the hill. A sandwich shop, new and clean, stood next to a gas station, everything shiny new for this wealthy neighborhood.

  I was hungry and still shaky, and I ordered a sandwich and ate it while the rain pattered down. I wondered exactly what Grandmother wanted to talk about with Mick, and I knew neither would tell me unless they wanted me to know. Who knew how long I’d have to wait for them to be finished, and where Mick would have me meet up with him after that.

  In irritation, I crunched the house-made chips that came with the sandwich. They were good. I should tell Elena to consider making some—not that she ever listened to my culinary suggestions.

  The taxi arrived as I finished eating. I threw away my sandwich wrappings, took my soft drink with me, and told the taxi to take me to a corner in the heart of Santa Fe near the train station.

  I’d looked up the location of Laura’s antique store after Ansel had told us about it. It lay on an innocuous side street lined with older shops; some of the shops had been little bungalows, now converted into stores or offices.

  Laura’s shop was a regular store front with glass windows and a glass door. Laura’s Treasures, she’d called it, proudly lettered, with a logo of the right-angled design that was on the flag of New Mexico.

  The shades were pulled down tightly over the windows and door, with a Closed sign hanging askew on one of the windows. I continued walking down the block without pausing, went around the corner, and walked up the alley behind Laura’s street.

  The shop owners had nicely labeled their back doors, so that anyone making deliveries in the alley could find the store they needed. It was dark and raining, and I had to use a little glow light from my residual storm magic to read the signs on each door before I found Laura’s.

  The same little bit of storm magic allowed me to open the lock without trouble. I let myself into the store and quietly closed the door behind me.

  I didn’t dare let too much light flare in here. Anyone seeing it would assume burglar and call the police. The store did have small emergency lights above the front and back doors, and those tiny glows would have to be enough.

  I waited until my eyes adjusted to the darkness then walked through the store, taking my time. The shop was pretty typical—aisles of locked glass cases for the expensive things, the cheap junk lying about on shelves. Not that Laura had much in the way of cheap junk. She stocked a few obvious souvenirs—T-shirts and sweatshirts, jars of red and green chile salsa, and chunks of polished rock with Santa Fe or Bandelier or New Mexico printed on them.

  The rest of the store was filled with Indian pottery and jewelry, most made by artists and artisans in the pueblos that surrounded Santa Fe, interspersed with a few Zuni and Navajo pieces. Some were new, but most were antiques, made decades ago by talented craftsmen and craftswomen.

  Laura didn’t have a cash register, but she had a credit card reader that was tucked away out of sight. No ledgers. I found a printer and a space for a desktop computer or laptop to rest next to it, but no computer or laptop.

  Laura might have taken the computer home every night. The computer or laptop would have all her transactions stored on it, and I itched to see them.

  If Laura were proclaimed dead, who would get all her belongings? This store? Her sister, Paige? I thought about Paige at the séance, very convinced that Laura was dead. She’d had a photograph of Laura and a bracelet, and Laura’s hat. Where had she gotten those? Laura’s house?

  But Laura was alive, if Drake told the truth. Why then, hadn’t Laura tried to contact Paige? I’d been assuming Paige herself had faked the séance, but could it have been someone else, wanting Paige to go on thinking Laura was dead? And why?

  Next to the back door of the shop was another door that opened to a stairwell, which had wooden stairs leading up and concrete stairs leading down.

  Laura might have locked her laptop into an upstairs office. I had an office in the third floor of my hotel, where I kept information I didn’t necessarily want guests or the maids to stumble upon. Nothing sinister, just private.

  I was also intrigued at what might be downstairs. A potter’s bench? An array of paint ground from clay and natural dies? Various chemicals for aging things? Was Laura a professional forger, or had this pot been a one-time deal, or had Laura farmed out the forging?

  I had taken two steps down the concrete staircase when I knew someone was in the basement. The aura of the other person was subtle—or well hidden. In either case, I hadn’t sensed him or her when I’d entered the shop. Usually I wasn’t so oblivious, but I’d had no idea until the faintest tendril of the aura tickled to me on the stairs.

  As I halted in the shadows, a thin light flashed once, pale white like an LED light, but it didn’t bob like a flashlight in someone’s hands. I heard a tiny clink, then a footstep.

  I sniffed, but I didn’t smell Nightwalker or dragon, or even skinwalker or Changer. Whoever was down there was human.

  I moved silently down three more steps. From there I could see that the staircase opened into a large room that ran the length of the store upstairs. A light hung steadily from the ceiling, a lantern maybe, or another emergency light.

  I sent a bit of residual storm magic into the room, delicately probing.

  And met a wash of magic so strong it lifted me off my feet, carried me over the stair railing in a rush of blackness, and slammed me without remorse to the floor.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I lost hold of the jacket-wrapped pot, which rolled free of the cloth. Hands caught my shirt and dragged me up, up, and up in an impossibly strong grip.

  I looked down at a man who wasn’t big, but his muscles were heavy. He was balding, like Fremont, but unlike Fremont, he had eyes that were hard, glittering, and had long ago lost every bit of warmth they might ever have possessed. I dredged up the remnants of lightning that still itched beneath my skin and threw it at him.

  The man’s eyes went black, voids of evil. Those eyes sucked in the lightning, fast, faster. Electricity sparkled across his retinas, turning them white, then the man blinked, and the lightning was gone. I could only hang in his grip and gape at him in terror.

  “Stormwalker,” he said, as though both puzzled and amused. “Who sent a Stormwalker after me?”

  “No one sends me anywhere,” I said, trying to sound tough. “Who are you?”

  “It’s not here,” he said.
“I’ve already looked.”

  “The pot you mean?” I tried to act as dignified as possible while hanging in midair from hands I couldn’t wrench away. “You must be Pericles.”

  Pericles transferred one of his hands to my throat. “And who might you be?”

  “A Stormwalker, like you said.” Not that I could talk very well with him squeezing my larynx. “But a little more than that.”

  Coyote was dead, and Mick couldn’t blame me for using Beneath magic to save my own life. I let a ball grow in my hands, prayed I had enough connection with the storm to not blow up the building and the ones around it, and shot the magic into his face.

  Pericles dropped me. I landed on my knees, gasping for breath, my kneecaps smacking the stone floor with an audible crack.

  Pericles danced backward, flailing against the Beneath magic that covered him like napalm. I felt sick. I’d meant to disable him to keep him from killing me, but Beneath magic has a mind of its own. Burning someone alive . . . slowly . . . wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to think myself capable of.

  Then, as I watched, the Beneath magic solidified around his body like molded glass, cracked into a thousand shards, and fell from his body. The shards tinkled like broken icicles on the floor, and then vanished.

  Pericles stood up and faced me, while I still struggled, on my knees, to breathe.

  “Impressive,” he said to me. “Nice bit of magic working.” He really did sound impressed.

  I could barely speak. “Why do you want the pot so much?”

  “You mean this pot?” The fake pot zoomed out of the dusty corner to which it had rolled and danced in midair in front of me. “The fake Richard Young was going to foist off on me? Before you burned down half his house? I laughed about that.”

  “Word travels fast.” I wiped away something that tickled my lower lip and found blood on my hand.

  “I have spies everywhere. Remember that, little Stormwalker. You’re not bad looking. Want to work for me?”

  “No.”

  “I’d pay you a shitload of money.” Pericles looked even more like Fremont now, face bland, arms folded, not going anywhere in a hurry. “You’d be able to do anything you wanted, have anything you wanted, have anyone you wanted. As long as you show up with your storm magic and . . . whatever that was . . . whenever I need it. Put out the occasional blow job, and we’re good.”