Dreamwalker (Stormwalker #5) (6 page)

I lifted my hands. “Forget it. I just had that weird feeling you get, you know? When you think you’ve done something twice? I bet I saw an ad for this place on the road.”

“Mmm.” Mick gave me a nod, then sent a grateful look to the waitress who poured coffee into his cup.

Mick began asking her if the omelets really were all different from one another and ended up ordering twelve. Just as I remembered ...

***

We rode out that day, heading westward through South Dakota toward its border with Wyoming. As we flowed down the road I remembered more and more about this time, not only the beautiful sights of the West, but the feelings I’d experienced at that point in my life.

I followed Mick, he on his large Harley modified to accommodate his bulk, me on the Sportster that, while it vibrated me to pieces, I’d loved. It had been wrecked forever when it had fallen into a sinkhole near Flat Mesa, and I’d grown nostalgic for it. I loved riding it again, remembering every quirk of its personality.

I’d also missed watching Mick hunker low into the wind, his black hair flying every which way. In states with helmet laws, he wore a matte black half helmet, which only made him look more bad-ass than ever. He’d taught me how to shift positions on my bike so I wouldn’t grow too fatigued, including balancing on my seat with my feet behind me. Mick also liked to stop a lot, because every single thing we passed was fascinating to him.

Today, it was the Badlands of South Dakota, the jagged peaks of hills that stretched across a barren and stark valley, reminding me of the valleys around Many Farms. The land wasn’t quite the same, but the vista made me homesick.

I thought about the Crossroads Hotel I’d come to love, along with all the crazy people in my life. I wanted to wake up so I could be with them, but then again …
 

In this dream, I had Mick all to myself. It was the way it used to be—he and I riding side by side, heading down the road just to see where it led.

Mick soon left the freeway, just as I remembered, and took me down back roads deep into the heart of the country. In South Dakota that meant vast farms surrounded by land quietly rising into the Black Hills.

We stopped at historic sites along the way, Mick telling me more about indigenous culture than I ever knew. Even Grandmother hadn’t taught me much beyond the traditions of the Diné.

Mick knew a lot about geology too. Today he went on about how the Black Hills formed from rifts and uplifts or passing hot spots or whatever. At the time I’d thought he simply read a lot of books. Now I knew that, in his time, he’d probably witnessed an amazing amount of volcanic activity.

By mid-afternoon, Mick had dropped the college professor mode and suggested we stop in a town and rest a while. My young heart beat faster with anticipation—he really meant we should hole up and spend time in bed.

Mick tucked us into a room in another tiny motel, securing our bikes right outside the door. This motel was popular with bikers, and the ones wandering around the place were big, scary-looking guys. When they saw Mick, however, they broke into grins and greeted him with enthusiasm.
 

I swore Mick knew everyone on the planet. I bet myself that if we hiked to the highest, remotest place in the Gobi desert, a Mongolian would come striding along and say, “
Mick!
Hey, how you doing?”

That night a big thunderstorm blew up. The clouds were volatile, a tornado forming in the storm’s heart.

I wanted to pull that tornado wind to me and ride it. I wanted to blow apart every building, fly away high to freedom. I grabbed the lightning and sent it around the room, laughing.

“Shh.” Mick held my face in his hands as he took me down to the bed. His kisses were firing instead of calming, he aroused and wanting me.

Mick pressed my palms to his chest and took the lightning I gathered straight into him. I zapped him as I had the first night we’d met. Then he’d only laughed as arcs crawled all over him, crackling in his fingers.

His fingers danced with electricity now, and his smile was wild. Mick growled as the lightning ate into him, and he began to love me. A gust of wind burst through the room before I could stop it, rattling the walls and smashing pictures to the floor.

Mick had never made love to me like this before. Shrieking wind and crashing thunder filled the night as he held me down, his eyes changing from blue to soot black, fire sparkling deep inside them.

His body was hard under my hands, his skin slick with sweat. He spoke to me in languages I didn’t know, as though he’d forgotten English, but the phrases sounded highly complimentary.

I could only cry Mick’s name, because I pretty much forgot how to speak anything at all. I arched into him and enjoyed the crazy, intense lovemaking, the intimacy of being together, seizing every bit of enjoyment out of each other we possibly could. Somehow both of us had known it would soon be over.

I crashed into sleep as the storm died away and woke a long time later in his arms.

The part of me that knew this was a dream suddenly shut up. There was absolutely no reason to take myself back to the present. Mick lay beside me, sleeping deeply, a faint snore coming out of his mouth. I smiled to myself. I should record that—Mick swore up and down he didn’t snore.

It was a beautiful moment, moonlight strengthening as the tattered remnants of the storm clouds dispersed. Mick looked so normal beside me—as normal as a large man with a fantastically hot body lying naked on bedsheets could look. The dragon tatts around his arms were stark in the moonlight, seeming almost separate from him. But even they were quiet, Mick in profound slumber.

This was when I’d been the happiest in my life. I had no idea what was to come, what Mick’s true mission was, no idea he was a dragon. In this reality it was just Mick and me, no magic mirror butting in, no phone calls to tell me of another disaster at the hotel. No dragons trying to kill me, no sisters threatening to tear the world apart, no goddesses trying to drag me down to the underworld and siphon off my power. No Nash Jones butting into my business; my grandmother, the same.

My world was Mick and his world was me. I was happy, blissfully, ignorantly so.

A person could blind herself to the rest of the world when she wanted to hold on to illusion. I grabbed this illusion with both hands and hugged it to me. My true life, the Crossroads Hotel, Emmett, demons, and the rest of it, blurred and faded away.

***

We left the little motel in the morning and journeyed on through the Black Hills and into Wyoming. Ranches spread against sharp mountains in the distance, grasslands rolling by in heart-stopping splendor.

I pulled alongside Mick on the mostly empty highway and glanced over at him. He turned his head, black hair snapping out from under the helmet, his blue eyes covered with dark sunglasses. He shot me a wide grin, and my heart filled with an ache like a hot blue star.

The next morning, when I woke in another motel room, this one in Wyoming, Mick was already up and out of the shower. He’d pulled on jeans but not a shirt, the flame tattoo across his lower back peeking above his waistband.

I sat up groggily, the sheet tucked around my chest. I never tired of looking at him.

“Mick,” I said softly. “I need to tell you something.”

Mick glanced at me through the mirror above the dresser, where he was trying to smooth down his hair—never worked. He caught my expression and turned around. “What’s that, baby?”

He wasn’t expecting anything important. Just me going on about something or other.

I studied him a moment, getting lost in eyes blue enough to drown in. The dragon had receded.

I sat there wondering what past Janet thought was so urgent to tell him, then I realized.

Gods and goddesses, it was
that
day. The day that changed everything.
 

Chapter Six

Mick waited. He was always so patient with me, and yet so watchful.

It had been the watchfulness that had started to drive me crazy, on top of days when he’d simply disappeared and refused to tell me where he’d gone. At the time, I’d put down his watchfulness to him being older than me and restraining himself around a less experienced woman. I hadn’t realized at the time how
much
older. I’m talking a couple hundred years.

The Janet at this moment knew nothing of that. My chest was tight, my throat dry. I wet my lips, took a courageous breath, and blurted out:
 

“Mick, I love you.”

Mick stilled, his smile dying. His eyes flickered, and for an instant, the black depths of the dragon looked out at me.

The me in the past felt her heart plummet, embarrassment mixing with my outpouring of emotion. I got myself off the bed. “Shit, I just freaked you out, didn’t I? Forget it. Forget it. Forget it.”

Wrapped in the sheet, I headed for the bathroom door, my feet trying to take me out of this awkward situation. I’d been raised to keep my emotions close to my chest, and gushing that I loved a guy wasn’t in character. I don’t know to this day what made me tell him.

Mick got himself around in front of me. “Janet. Stop.” His voice had gone soft, a little bit growly.

“I’ll shower, and we’ll pretend I never said a thing,” I babbled, my eyes fixed on the hollow at his collarbone. “Promise me you’ll still be here when I get out.”

I tried to duck around him, but Mick caught me. “No,” he said in the gentlest voice I’d ever heard him use. “I don’t want to forget it.”

He put his hands on my face and looked down into my eyes as he liked to do. The me of the past didn’t understand what he was searching for. The me of the present did. He was looking for signs of the evil goddess who’d spawned me. Trying to discover if I were just as evil, if everything I said or did was a cover as I waited to explode onto the world and destroy all in my path.

Mick had learned that I wasn’t that evil being. We’d gone through hell before he’d understood that—we were still going through it in some respects.
 

At the moment the two of us Janets, juxtaposed and both confused, waited while Mick tried to figure out what we were.

One thing Janet past and future shared was love for Mick. That hadn’t changed. In the me of the future, that love had broadened and deepened, until we had understanding between us that I’d never dreamed possible. The Janet of the past had simply been blown away by him, as giddily in love as a young, unworldly woman could be.

This Mick didn’t know me. He even feared me, big-bad dragon that he was.

His eyes flickered again. I saw fire there, anger, and a tiny flare of hope.

Mick closed his eyes, cutting himself off from me. He bowed his head, his unruly black hair brushing my lips.

When he looked up again, something had changed inside him. The me of the past didn’t know what. The me of the future did.

This had been the most important day for
me
, changing everything.
 

What I hadn’t known then was—that day changed everything for
him
. That day, Mick made his choice.

He cupped his hands around my neck, caressing, and his blue eyes moistened. “What am I going to do with you, baby?”

Standing here with him in a bedroom, I could think of a lot of things he could do with me. Mick’s smile came back, full of wickedness. He wound his arms around me and dragged me up for a long kiss.

I found myself in a few minutes, not on the bed, but sitting on the dresser, the mirror cold at my back while Mick loved me with an intensity that rivaled even the storms of the night.

***

That was the day I started to forget. I rode off with Mick an hour later, pleasantly sore, and was both Janets. As the day and the ride went on, the Janet in my future began to fade, my memories of what was to come blurring and receding into dust.

I didn’t fight it too much. These days with Mick had been the happiest of my life. Why not let them take over? Unhappiness and bad times were coming. I would enjoy the hell out of what I had right now, and who cared if I never woke up?

Before present-day Janet slipped into the mists, though, she realized now why the first day I said
I love you
was significant for both Mick and me. I’d opened myself up, made myself vulnerable to another, for the first time in my life.

That had been Janet growing up. For Mick, the day had been still more important.

I knew now that Mick finding me in a fight on a back road in Nevada, and me trying to kick his ass, hadn’t been a happy coincidence. We hadn’t simply met by chance and hit it off.
 

Mick had been watching me. Following me. He’d been assigned to do so by the Dragon Council, because they’d been afraid of what I, a slip of a Diné girl, would do to the world. They were right to be worried—I hadn’t exactly been in control.

The day I’d declared my love, though I hadn’t known it, had been the day Mick decided to defy the dragons.

That morning he’d looked into my eyes and seen the real Janet, a young woman on the brink of life, horrifically powerful but innocent. I had the power to destroy the world and the latent anger to do it, but I saw no reason to. I wasn’t the crazy bitch my mother was. I was just …
me
.

That was the moment Mick decided to tell the Dragon Council to go screw themselves. That day, he stopped protecting the dragons from me, and began protecting
me
from the dragons.
 

He set in motion a long chain of events that culminated in Mick nearly dying for his choice.

For now, I was oblivious, happy to be out on the road, riding next to him, the miles of backcountry unrolling under us. I was with the man I loved and was free to do whatever I liked. That was all I needed.

Future Janet forgot, and lost herself in the pleasure of the past.

I dreamed, and never wanted to wake.

***

“Janet.” A voice not Mick’s whispered through my head.

Mick lay beside me on the hotel bed. We were in Montana, having ridden north all day and well into the night. We’d stopped for a while by the side of the road and looked up at the stars—a big patch of them between the tall trees.