Shadow Walker (21 page)

Snowflake sits on the highway from Holbrook to the mountains, on a fairly flat area of the plateau, the highway cutting through the heart of the old town. The town was so named, not because it gets much snow, but because its founders’ last names were Snow and Flake. We passed tall statues that honored the men, and Maya turned off into a residential street.

“I don’t remember Nash giving us an address,” she said.

I shrugged. Nash hadn’t given me the address because I knew he didn’t want me trying to find Gabrielle myself. He had very firm ideas about what was police business and what was civilian business. “We’ll ask around,” I said.

I’d gotten very good at asking, in a casual way, for information. Before I’d moved to Magellan, I’d helped out people who were desperate to solve puzzles that the police couldn’t or wouldn’t—missing persons, strange hauntings, inexplicable events. Some problems turned out to be supernatural, some decidedly human. In any case, I often had to begin in a town I didn’t know, with people I didn’t know, and I’d learned to ingratiate myself. I wondered whether Gabrielle had learned the same skill.

It didn’t hurt that Maya had a few friends here, and within half an hour, Maya and I had learned that Gabrielle was renting from people called Thompson. Maya, who knew the streets of the town better than I did, drove me back to a small house in a late-twentieth-century development.

The Thompsons looked normal enough, a late-middle-aged couple whose children had grown and gone. Photos of said son and daughter and grandchildren dotted every available surface, along with photos of the Thompsons vacationing and several group photos in front of a church.

They didn’t know much about Gabrielle, however.

“She keeps to herself,” Mrs. Thompson told me. “We don’t see her often. Her room has a separate entrance, and she has her own key.”

“Has she been here lately—in the last few days?”

Both Thompsons looked at me blankly. “Haven’t talked to her,” Mr. Thompson said. “You say you’re friends of hers?”

“I never met her,” Maya volunteered. “I’m just the driver.”

“I’m a friend.” I debated whether to float the “half sister” relationship, but decided not to. “I’m getting worried about her.”

“Why?” the woman asked sharply. “Is she in trouble? She seems nice. What’s she into?”

“Nothing.” Well, besides Beneath magic, blowing up vehicles, and threatening to kill a witch I needed to keep alive for a while longer.

“She said she was Apache,” Mrs. Thompson said. “Are you Apache?”

“Navajo,” I answered, holding on to my patience.

“I thought you two tribes hated each other.”

What kind of stuff did she read? “I really need to find Gabrielle,” I said. “Can you let me into her room? She might have left some sign of where she was going.”

“Sign?”

I nodded. I’d noticed the well-thumbed paperbacks beside an armchair, on ghosts and haunted places. “I’m a bit psychic.”

The woman looked suddenly interested, and Mr. Thompson, who’d gone back to watching television, said, “Don’t see why not. She doesn’t have anything to steal.”

I wondered how he knew that. Maya and I followed Mrs. Thompson out and down a flagstone path to a door behind the garage. She knocked on the door then opened it to reveal a small room, about ten feet square, that held a bed, a cabinet, a small chair, and not much else. Another door led to a tiny bathroom.

I felt a stab of pity for Gabrielle as I walked inside. The room was clean, the bed stocked with pillows and blankets, but the space was stark, without personality. No television, no books, no pictures. The bathroom held essentials only: toothbrush and toothpaste, soap, shampoo, hairbrush. No makeup, jewelry, perfume. It was as though Gabrielle went through the motions of being human but nothing beyond that.

Mrs. Thompson watched us curiously, then I told her I could sense the vibrations better if we were alone. She left, still looking interested, and Maya rolled her eyes.

I noted that Gabrielle had put no warding over the doors, or anything that felt magical and would alert Gabrielle that someone had entered. I had to wonder why—either Mr. Thompson was right that she had nothing to steal, or else Gabrielle felt safe from all comers. Or she simply didn’t care.

Maya sat on the bed, while I went into the bathroom again to open the medicine cabinet. Nothing in that either, not even aspirin. I wondered whether Gabrielle got magic hangovers as I did or if she managed to avoid them. She certainly hadn’t stocked up on painkillers.

“Janet.”

Maya’s voice held a strange note. I left the bathroom to find her standing in front of the cabinet that she’d opened. I stopped.

Gabrielle kept no clothes in her closet, not even empty hangers. Instead, the walls and doors were coated with newspaper clippings, blown-up photos, printouts from Internet sites, and glossy sheets from magazines. The subject of these photos wasn’t me, but the stern face and cool gray eyes of Hopi County’s handsome sheriff, Nash Jones.

Twenty-one

It was a bizarre shrine. Gabrielle had taken some of the photos herself: of Nash’s house, of him walking out to go to work, of him washing his truck in his driveway, clad in shorts and shoes and nothing else. One had been snapped through Nash’s half-open blinds while he pumped iron on his exercise machine. The others came from articles on Jones as the youngest sheriff ever elected to Hopi County, on Jones the war vet, on Jones who’d made drug busts, uncovered a human traffic smuggling ring from Mexico, stopped small-arms dealers, and generally kept the populations of Flat Mesa and Magellan safe. Handsome Nash in his uniform, shooting at the range, Nash driving his SUV over desert roads, Nash talking into his radio.

“She’s stalking him,” Maya said, her face stark with shock. “She’s stalking
my
boyfriend.”

I sat down on the bed, my legs suddenly weak. “Yeah, she is. We need to tell him.”

“How can you be so calm? Why is she doing this? What does she want?”

I remembered the woman in the hospital in Flagstaff who’d claimed to be Nash’s mother. She’d gone for Nash before Mick had killed her, but I don’t think she’d been human. I still wasn’t certain what she’d been, but she’d fed on my Beneath magic and became stronger. I’d assumed the woman had been trying to kill Nash, but now I wondered whether Gabrielle had sent her to kidnap him.

“I’m pretty sure Gabrielle wants to have his baby,” I said.

“His
baby
?” Maya’s eyes were wide in outrage and fear. “What the fuck?”

“Nash negates the most powerful magic out there,” I said. “A child from a woman with pure Beneath magic, coupled with the DNA of someone who can absorb all magic, would be damn powerful. My mother—my real mother—wanted that too. She wanted me to couple with Nash and bring her the resulting child.”

Maya’s already wild eyes went rounder.
“What?”

“I stopped her. Mick and I stopped her.”

“When the
hell
did this happen?”

“Last May. Mick and I made sure she failed, but if my mother has sent Gabrielle in my place . . .” I got to my feet. “We need to find her.”

Maya slammed herself between me and the door. “Nash never told me this.
You
never told me this. How could you not tell me?”

“I’m sorry.” I was truly sorry, because Maya didn’t deserve any of this, but I needed to worry more about Gabrielle right now. “Of course Nash wasn’t going to confess that he was almost raped by a crazed goddess, if he even understood half of what was going on.”

“What about you?” Her dark eyes flashed pain, betrayal, fury. “What, did you
forget
that your mother wanted you to get pregnant by my boyfriend?”

“I didn’t want you to know about it once he was safe. You and Nash have enough problems.”

“Problems that are none of your business.” She stabbed a slender finger at me. “Don’t you think I deserved to know? What else has gone on with Nash that you haven’t told me? Is he secretly married to someone else? Has he had a sex change? Come on, Janet, you seem to know everything there is to know about Nash Jones, while I—the woman he’s
dating
, for crap’s sake—know next to nothing.”

“I know that he’s in love with you and always has been,” I said.

“Oh, right, Janet. You claimed not an hour ago that I had all the control in my relationship with Nash. Explain to me how I’m supposed to believe that, when crazy magical women are after his sperm? Because of his ability to
not
do magic? It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

I pressed my palms together, forefingers to my lips. “I’m sorry, Maya. I really am sorry. You can hate me later, but right now, I need to find Gabrielle, and I need to warn Nash. He’s thinking that she’s nothing but a petty vandal, but if he arrests her, and she’s in his custody . . .”

Maya screamed in fury. She shoved her way past me and attacked the papers taped to the cabinet walls. She ripped and clawed, shredding the images of Nash into so much confetti. I should have stopped her, but I didn’t have the heart. Let her get back at Gabrielle as best she could. When I next faced Gabrielle, I didn’t want Maya anywhere near her.

“Will this help?” I handed Cassandra a folded piece of paper with strands of Gabrielle’s hair I’d taken from the hairbrush in her bathroom.

Cassandra studied the black threads of hair and nodded. “It will. For both location and binding.”

Hence why leaving behind traces—hair, nail parings, anything—was a bad idea. Witches can use them to find a person’s essence, or to bind or manipulate the person. I was surprised at Gabrielle’s lack of caution—no wards on the doors, her hairbrush in plain sight. But maybe she simply didn’t know. Beneath magic, which was pure energy, was very different from witch magic, which used the connectedness of all things to work effective spells. I’d known nothing of witch magic before I met Mick, and Gabrielle hadn’t had the training I had.

Cassandra started her spells in my private third-floor office, and Maya planted herself in the lobby, so she’d be on hand the moment Cassandra located Gabrielle. Maya had never had much faith in Wiccan magic before, but now she resolutely waited for the results.

I called Nash and told him that by no means was he to approach Gabrielle, and if any of his connections found her, they were to call me first. I told him what I’d found in her room, and I told him why I thought she was stalking him. I’m not sure he believed me, but he sounded a bit unnerved.

“I know how to do my job, Janet,” he snapped over the phone.

“Jones, she’s not a perp with a pocketful of meth.
You
might be able to withstand her magic, but your deputies can’t, and the police in Snowflake can’t. You should call off the warrant before someone tries to arrest her and gets killed.”

Letting a criminal get away was not in the Nash Jones codebook, but he growled, “For once, I think you’re right. But if I see her, I’ll do my best to make her answer for what she’s done.”

“If you see her, you
call me.
”

“Fine.”

Jones hung up on me. I wasn’t sure if he meant he’d call me first, or if he’d try take Gabrielle down and call me afterward.

Drake and Colby were still upstairs, Drake honoring his twenty-four-hour window with dragon stubbornness. Dragons never went back on their word, but if I didn’t find Mick and free him in the next eight hours, the same dragon honor would send Drake back to the council to round up a posse to hunt down the witch and kill her, no matter what that did to Mick.

I had to find Mick before they did. My mind was a jumbled mess, worries clogging my thoughts. Gabrielle and Drake both wanted the witch dead, and neither was bothered much by the fact that her death would kill Mick. I knew I needed to be calm and think, but when I closed my eyes, trying to find the meditation exercises Jamison had taught me once upon a time, they eluded me. I could only feel the weight of the silver onyx-and-turquoise ring Mick had slid on my finger as his pledge to me and wonder if I’d ever see Mick’s bad-boy smile again.

I studied the ring. Turquoise for protection, healing. Onyx for more protection, and silver for love. The stones flowed around the ring in a pattern for strength, courage, and again, protection.

I kissed the ring softly, then let my gaze focus on it, reaching again for my meditative state. It cut my heart to study Mick’s beautiful gift to me, but at the same time it made me realize that he was still part of me.

As I concentrated on the ring, the power of the stones became visible, like heat waves in a desert summer. Linked, intertwining: protection, healing, love, all laced with the tiniest bite of Mick’s fire magic.

I brought the ring to my cheek, closing my eyes again. Mick’s magic, the merest touch, kissed my skin, and I opened my eyes and looked at the ring.

Mick had given me this right after both Maya and Pamela had reported seeing him with Vonda, just before he’d had to go to her. Some part of him had known, even if his conscious mind hadn’t remembered his encounters with her, that he was being taken. He’d given me a ring filled with protective magic, and laced it with a tiny bit of dragon magic.

I took off the ring and examined it closely, pouring my concentration into the stones. Had Mick left clues for me in it? Maybe a piece of his name or an idea where to find it?

If he had, I wasn’t able to unlock the secret, no matter how much I probed and concentrated, no matter how deeply I tried to meditate. I found no music that might be a dragon name, no part of Mick to tell me where he was, or even if he were still alive.

Damn it. I balled my fist, brought it down on my desk, and left the office.

I went back to the bedroom and started going through the drawers that held Mick’s belongings, looking for clues, anything. Like Gabrielle, Mick traveled light, having nothing more than spare jeans and shirts, socks and underwear, hairbrush, toothbrush. Nothing that he’d poured his true name into to sing to me as soon as I touched it.

I made the mistake of lifting one of his T-shirts to my nose. It smelled first of the laundry but then of Mick, his scent, his fire. I sank to my bed, hugging that shirt and burying my face in it.

I would get him back. I would lie in this bed with him again and wrap my arms around him while he smiled down into my face and made my body sing. I didn’t care what I had to do or what kind of magic I had to use. I would bring him home.

“Janet.”

Pamela stood in my doorway, and I didn’t even question that she was back in the hotel. Where Cassandra went these days, so did Pamela. “Cass said to tell you she made a breakthrough.”

I folded Mick’s shirt carefully and put it back into the drawer before following Pamela out into the lobby. Maya tossed aside the magazine she’d been pretending to read and went upstairs with us.

Cassandra sat cross-legged in the middle of my third-floor office, a map of Arizona and New Mexico spread before her and strewn with black sand. Cassandra looked out of place on the floor in her business suit and no shoes, slim legs folded, smudges of black on her silk blouse. Her eyes were tired.

“You’re not going to like this,” she said as I entered.

“Why not?”

“I found her, and she’s still there.” Cassandra pointed at a red dot on the map.

I leaned closer and saw that the dot lay next to the words “Flat Mesa.” The dot pulsed. Cassandra moved her hand, and that bit of the map enlarged outward, as though she used the zoom function on a computer. The streets of Flat Mesa separated and became distinct, even showing houses and trees and cars. Cassandra stopped the map on a long, low ranch house set back from the road with a black F-250 parked in front of it.

Maya made a noise of anguish and ran out of the room. I lunged after her, but my cell phone rang. For once I had it with me, and the caller ID readout said “Jones.”

I slammed it to my ear, but I heard a woman’s voice, not Nash’s.

“Hey, big sis. You need to get over here right now and bring your wicked Wicca. Better hurry, or Jones and I will go one on one.” A click, and she was gone.