Firewalker (27 page)

Read Firewalker Online

Authors: Allyson James

Tags: #Paranormal, #General, #Romance, #Paranormal Romance Stories, #Shapeshifting, #Fiction

BOOK: Firewalker
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The ends of the sticks started to glow. I thought about sitting on my rooftop with Jamison—had it been only this afternoon?—and how I’d awakened the Beneath magic by watching sparks on the lit sage.
No, I’d awakened it by thinking about how powerful I was, how easily I could summon beings to do my bidding: skinwalkers, Nightwalkers. Dragons.
Dragons were huge creatures, born of fire and rock. No one had created the dragons, Mick told me—they’d come from the volcanoes themselves. Dragons answered to the earth alone, not to magic of the gods of this world or to magic from Beneath.
Jamison called dragons
Firewalkers
, beings that could summon and control fire, make it do their bidding as I used storms to do mine. There was no storm tonight, but a strength inside told me that I no longer needed one.
With Jamison this afternoon, I’d used the mirror to enhance the Beneath magic, that time to push my best friend off the roof. I’d acted in anger. Could I heal this dragon in desperation to save my own life, or would my Beneath magic take over and try to kill?
If I killed the councilman, Drake would signal his men to unload their guns into me. Could I stop them before I fell dead at their feet? The magic inside me chuckled, thinking it a nice challenge.
Shit.
I focused on the incense, trying to calm myself by observing the shape and intensity of the orange glow at the end of each stick. The dragon fire around the councilman raged on, preserving him and keeping him alive. I’d have to remove the fire, which was powerful earth magic, before I could use the Beneath magic on him. I could do it myself, but I decided it was a good idea to let the dragons think I couldn’t negate their power.
“Shut it off,” I said to Drake, gesturing to the fire.
“He’ll die,” Drake snapped.
“You have to take that chance.”
I stepped back and waited. Drake’s face shone with perspiration and anger, and his eyes, to my surprise, were wet with tears.
Giving me a final warning stare, Drake lifted his hand over the fire. The flames streamed upward into his palm, much as the fiery barrier had into Nash when we’d rescued Mick. Drake’s tattoos glowed where they peeked from beneath his clothes, and his eyes took on a red tinge.
The fire came away to reveal the bloody mess that was the councilman’s body. I flinched when I saw it, and I heard one of the gunmen swear under his breath. I had no idea how the councilman could still be alive, but I sensed his red and black aura, still smelling of heat and ash but laced with the stench of death.
“Ish,” the magic mirror said in the distance. “He doesn’t look good.”
I made myself touch the councilman’s aura. It was cold, death so close. I let the aura wrap around my hand, shivering as the death-chill touched my skin. With my other hand, I tried to summon a white ball of Beneath magic, similar to the one I’d thrown at Jamison.
It wouldn’t come, of course. I swallowed hard, tried again. Nothing.
I glanced wildly at the mirror, but it didn’t help me. The mirror reflected me, a slender Navajo woman in dirty jeans, her hair disheveled, with one hand held out to her side, the other in front of her.
Drake started to growl. I’d heard growling like that before, from Mick whenever he got ready to fight something.
Come on.
Make the dragons bow to you,
my inner self whispered.
Hold the elder’s life in your hand, and make the dragons worship you for saving him. Demand it of them, or they’ll never respect you.
I don’t want their damned respect,
I snarled in return.
I want them to let me go home and to leave Mick alone.
And they will, when you command them.
“I’m sick of people telling me what to do!” I shouted out loud.
Drake blinked, wondering who the hell I was talking to. There was a restless noise behind me and the small metallic sound of guns cocking. Guns made me so damn nervous.
“Tell them to back off,” I said to Drake. “Tell them to put the weapons down—in another room preferably—or he dies.”
Drake hated me. I saw the hatred deep inside him, in his fire, and in his aura. He wanted me to drop dead at his feet.
“Do it,” he said to his lackeys. “Leave the room. Do not return until I summon you.”
In the mirror, I saw the two gunmen’s reluctance to obey. Drake kept his glare on them, until one of them said a resigned, “Yes, sir,” and led the other one out.
I relaxed a fraction. “I don’t like guns.”
“Neither do I.” Drake called flame to dance in his hand. “Save him or you fry.”
I willed the magic again.
He can’t resist you,
it said.
You can snuff his puny fire with the flick of your finger.
I could. And I did.
Drake took several hasty steps back as the flames in his hand died. He opened his mouth to shout for the guards again, but I said, “Wait.”
A white ball rose above my hand. I tossed it, almost casually, toward the mirror.
The ball shot down the length of the room as though I were a pro baseball player. It hit the mirror and returned like a beacon, arrowing toward the councilman’s torn-apart body.
The light surrounded the body, encasing it in whiteness the same way it had been encased in fire. I still held the councilman’s aura, and now I directed the white light to it. Holding both the dying aura and the light, I found the compassion inside myself that my crazy mother hadn’t managed to crush.
“Live,” I whispered.
The light brightened. The councilman’s aura grew hot, hotter, so searing hot I wanted to fling it from me. I gritted my teeth and held on in spite of the pain, knowing that if I let go now, the dragon would die. Finally and completely.
Drake’s eyes widened behind the white glow as the councilman’s muscles began to knit. As we watched, the bloody pulp of his body started to close, healthy skin growing to replace that which had been torn apart. I could now see the real shape of the councilman’s human body instead of a pile of bones and muscle. His face solidified, became recognizable as that of the stern man who’d approached Maya’s house with the intent of kidnapping me.
You can still destroy him. You’re plenty strong enough.
But I was also strong enough to save him.
I kept the magic going. Drake had clenched his fists, his tension and worry palpable. I felt invincible, power surging through me until I knew I could sprint around the world and never get tired. If I jumped from the cliffs behind the house, I would soar into the air like the dragons.
The sensible Stormwalker in me told me that the magic said this because it wanted me to try jumping off the cliff. The Beneath magic would think it funny if I didn’t succeed.
That makes no sense,
I thought in annoyance
. If I’m dead, it is too.
Beneath magic is the magic of gods. It doesn’t understand mortality.
And that, another little thought said to me, might be what saved me.
“Gods,” Drake whispered. “He’s alive.”
The councilman lay on his bier, whole and unbloody, surrounded by my light. I released his aura, which wrapped around his body like loving hands. I closed both my fists, and the beacon shot back into the mirror, like a film in reverse, kicking the original ball of light around back to me.
As soon as the light hit me, the magic winked out and released me. I fell to the ground like a wrung-out rag, my strength gone. Either I banged my head on the floor, or Drake kicked the hell of out me, because my head filled with stunning pain, and then there was nothing.
Twenty
I woke to a warm, bare body at my back. I thought I was home, snuggled down under the covers with Mick spooned up behind me, his large hand cupping my hip. Lips grazed the back of my neck, so warm, so loving.
I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar room with priceless artwork on the walls and faint light coming through balcony windows. A mirror in a heavy frame reflected me under thick quilts with a man lying behind me.
“Todd?” I said in alarm. I jumped away to find Mick next to me, watching me with bad-boy blue eyes.
“Todd? Who the hell is Todd?”
“A house boy with a wide range of responsibilities.” I pressed a shaking hand to my hair. “Mick, what are you doing here?”
“The mirror told me where you were.”
“I mean, what are you doing here giving yourself up to the dragons?”
“Who says I’m giving myself up? The outside doors aren’t locked, and I can fly.”
I sat up straight. “Then why didn’t you grab me and haul me out of here? We could be having this conversation back at my hotel.”
Mick shrugged. “I want to hear what Bancroft has to say.”
“Bancroft?”
“Bancroft is the dragon council member whose life you happened to save. I want to know why he’s so interested in talking to you.”
“Couldn’t you call him instead? I want out of this place.”
Mick’s hand on my arm was warm, caressing. “Janet, love, if you play by their rules, the dragons will be civilized. They won’t imprison me here. I’m honor-bound to appear at my trial, and they’re honor-bound to let me get there unimpeded. Honor means a hell of a lot to dragons.”
I didn’t feel better. “They might be honor-bound to you, but not to me. The dragon who visited Drake last night talked about obliterating me. What’s to say this Bancroft hasn’t decided the same thing? What if he orders you to obliterate me for him?”
“Then I’ll disobey, and they’ll have to go through me to get to you.”
I flopped back down on the mattress, still drained and sick in spite of my heavy sleep. I also had a tender spot on my head, which I was pretty sure had been put there by Drake’s boot.
“What guarantee do I have that you don’t agree with them?” I asked tiredly. “I saw your face when I crawled out of the club, Mick. It’s unnerving to know that the man you love thinks the world might be better off with you dead.”
Mick touched my face, and I was too exhausted to roll away from him. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking since I last saw you, Janet. Walking and thinking. You have some crazy magic inside you, but you did when I met you too. You learned to deal with that, and you’ll learn to deal with this.” The touch turned to a caress, his fingers on my lips. “And I want to be here to watch you grow.”
His words warmed me, but I couldn’t relax. “You suddenly have a lot of faith in me.”
“Not suddenly. The magics are part of you, no matter how frightening they are. They are what make you uniquely you.”
“Lucky me.”
Mick rose on his elbow to gaze down at me. “You’re a beautiful woman, Janet Begay. You have amazing strength but amazing gentleness too. I saw that when I first met you—you tempered your strength to keep from hurting others. This Beneath magic isn’t better than you. It’s strong, but you’re stronger.”
I thought of the way the little voice talked to me whenever the Beneath magic woke up, the terrible knowledge that the voice belonged to me, not something outside of me.
“The magic’s voice is mine, but it’s her words,” I said worriedly. “Mick, I’m so afraid of turning into her.”
“Into your mother?”
My mother, in her realm Beneath, was a woman of astonishing beauty and cold cruelty. She was powerful—there. Above, she could barely function and had to possess others to do it. She was sealed in now, but she wasn’t dead. I anticipated she’d find a way out again someday.
“You’re nothing like her,” Mick said. “I met her, remember?”
“You weren’t there the entire time. I was
just
like her. We can’t ever really get away from our genetics, can we?”
Mick twined his fingers through mine. “When we’re finished here, I’m taking you to Many Farms.”
I wanted to laugh. “What for? My grandmother won’t have anything good to say to me, especially not after I’ve been using my mother’s magic.”
“I want to remind you what else you inherited through your genetics. Your father is a kind and gentle man, and your grandmother has some powerfully strong earth magic. They’re a part of you, and you’re a part of them. You’re also a part of the land, the Dinetah. Both natures are you, both are equally important.”
I unwound enough to smile. “When did you become such a philosopher?”
“Walking down that road all the way to Prescott. It’s a long way on foot, through incredible country. All that beauty reminded me of you, and why I needed you to stay alive. The world would
not
be a better place without you in it, Janet, and it will just have to learn to live with you.”
Again, the warmth, accompanied by heat in his damn gorgeous blue eyes. Mick always knew what to say. “Even if I’m a dangerous killer?” I asked.

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