Jones snapped out of his self-pity. “I need to get you to an emergency room. Do you think you can make it down, or do I need to carry you?”
“Oh, no, you don’t. I’m not leaving until I find Mick.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You’re concussed. You need stitches and a doctor.”
“Then patch me up with your state-of-the-art first aid kit. We find Mick, and then I promise you can drive me to the nearest ER.” I couldn’t leave Mick after coming this far. Even if I weren’t so worried about him, the spell had me in its grip and wouldn’t let me go. I felt like I was being squeezed by a giant octopus.
“I can’t risk that,” Nash said.
“Too bad. I can do healing spells on myself. I’ve done them before.” So many, many times before. What did that say about my life? “They won’t cure me completely, but I’ll be able to go on. I have to find Mick.”
Nash heard the panic in my voice; maybe he even understood it. With a growl, he returned to his first aid kit, which already lay open on the ground. He took out the antibacterial I’d used on him and cleaned my wound with gauze. It hurt like hell.
I quickly whispered the words of a healing spell, some of the minor magic I could do when there wasn’t a nearby storm, but nothing happened. For a moment, fear squeezed my heart, and then I realized that Nash’s body touched mine as he wiped blood from my head.
“Could you move away a little?” I asked. “I think you’re killing my healing spells.”
He stopped. “What?”
“You’re a walking magic void, remember? My powers aren’t strong enough to overcome the negative field that is you.”
Nash stared at me, bloody gauze hovering. “How far?”
“I have no idea. Start walking, and I’ll tell you when to stop.”
No one could pin someone with a suspicious glare like Nash Jones could. Criminals who came through Magellan and Flat Mesa, thinking to hide out in small towns, ended up begging to be turned over to the feds or state police once Nash got hold of them. The times I’d been in Nash’s custody, his deputies claimed Nash had gone easy on me. The thought made me shiver.
“Seriously,” I said.
Nash gave me one final icy look, then unfolded to his feet and started up the ridge.
I whispered more spells to myself as he went, and finally, I felt my scalp prickle and the pain ease a little. “Far enough,” I called to Nash.
He waited while I got to my feet, brushed off the gravel that had cut my skin, and packed up the first aid kit. My hands shook, and my nausea let me know the healing spells helped only so much.
Nash pushed one of the canteens into my hand when I reached him. “Don’t dehydrate. I don’t want to have to carry you down this mountain.”
“You have a heart of gold, Jones,” I said but sucked greedily at the plastic-tasting water.
We went on. I had to stop often. My healing spell could keep my blood inside my body, but I wasn’t a strong enough mage to cure myself completely. The night remained blissfully clear and quiet, the wind coming off the mountains, chilly.
“Nash,” I called softly.
Nash stopped, hand on weapon. “What?”
“He wants us to go that way.” I pointed to a ridge off to our left, one that this path wouldn’t take us to.
Nash’s eyes glittered in the beam of his flashlight. “How can you be sure?”
“I just know.” I touched my temple, winced, and rubbed it. The closer I got, the more the compulsion spell hauled me to it, like a fish in a net.
“We have to backtrack about a mile to get there.”
I started back down what I laughingly called our “trail.” “Better than going the wrong direction the rest of the night.”
Nash grunted something, but he came after me. Rocks slipped and slid under my feet, as I picked my way down the steep trail. Nash came behind, his steps slow, deliberate, the light of his flashlight bobbing behind mine. The mountains were closing around us, the occasional tree straight and stark in the moonlight.
We found the side trail that led across a saddle, folds of jagged rock tumbling away to either side of us. If I could have seen better, I’d have been nervous about the sheer drops to the right and left. As it was, we concentrated on the narrow ribbon of land beneath our feet and moved slowly.
Our makeshift trail widened when we reached the other side of the saddle, and we climbed again. I was glad of Nash’s GPS device, because I’d lost track of where the hell we were.
More climbing for another mile or two. The spell grew stronger as I ascended, which increased both my hope and impatience.
Nash stopped so abruptly I almost ran into him. He stood still, saying nothing while he played flashlight over the trail.
Ahead of us, the ridge ended, dropping into a craggy morass that connected to the higher wall of mountain beyond. The gap wasn’t wide—Nash’s flashlight beam reached the other side—but it was wide enough. One of the bighorn sheep that populated this place might traverse it, but never two humans without rappelling gear. Flying would be another asset, but neither of us could turn into something with wings.
I was breathing hard. We’d climbed from the below-sea-level desert floor to three thousand feet according to Nash’s device, and the next ridgeline was another couple thousand feet higher than that.
“What now?” Nash asked me.
I didn’t know. The spell was stronger than ever, but no way in hell could I climb down those rocks with my head spinning like a merry-go-round.
Nash started exploring the top of the ridge, while I sank to a boulder and tried to feel the source of the spell. I fished a chamois bag from my backpack, carefully pulled out a shard of magic mirror, and set it on my knee.
The void inside the mirror was black, no color, no light. One big nothing.
A chill went through me. Mick also carried a piece of the broken magic mirror with him in case he needed to communicate with me. Magic mirrors beat cell phones every time. But lately, whenever I’d tried to focus on his shard, I got this.
“Anything?” I asked it.
The blackness cleared, and the mirror reflected my anxious brown eyes in the glow of my flashlight.
“Sorry, sweetcakes,” the mirror answered me in a drag-queen drawl. “Our Micky’s just not answering.”
“You can’t tell where he is?”
“It’s dark.” The mirror’s tone was worried, and that worried me.
“Thanks for trying,” I said.
“Sure thing, sugar. Hey, tell the sheriff to come over here.”
“Why? Can he help?”
“I don’t know. I just want to look at his pretty ass.”
I growled and stuffed the mirror back into the bag.
“Who are you talking to?” Nash stood over me, his flashlight like an interrogator’s lamp.
“No one,” I said. “Did you find anything?”
“There might be a cave over there. Or an old mine shaft.”
Shafts dotted the land around here, left over from the days when these mountains were picked over for gold, silver, talc, and borax. No one mined up here anymore, the shafts played out and abandoned decades ago.
Nash hauled me to my feet and led me to a small hole that yawned from the base of a boulder. When Nash crouched down and shone his light inside, I saw that the hole dropped a long way below the surface. A foul-scented breeze rose from it, to be blown away by the increasing wind.
The spell wrenched me with a mighty throb. “Yes,” I gasped. “Down there.”
“Are you sure? Old shafts are unstable and full of poisonous gases.”
I got to my hands and knees beside him and peered down the shaft. Once upon a time, wood planks had shored up the hole, but they’d rotted away, leaving a few gray slivers. The pull of the spell was damn strong.
“I’m sure. I need to go down there.”
Nash moved back. “Janet, you came up here on the word of a woman you’ve never met, who charged into your hotel and started acting crazy. She could have lured you out here on purpose—to kill you, maybe. Have you thought of that?”
“Of course I’ve thought of that. It’s one reason I didn’t want to come alone. But I can’t take the chance that Mick isn’t in trouble. I have to know. I can’t leave him out here without help.”
Nash played the flashlight on the hole again, then on me. “You’re ready to get yourself killed for him, and you don’t even know if he’s really down there?”
“Mick’s nearly gotten himself killed for me lots of times,” I said. My voice bordered on hysteria. “He’s been living his whole life on the line for me.”
Nash shone his light into the shaft, but he was looking at me, not the hole. “If he’s risked his life for you, he’d not want you to die now. It’s foolish to put yourself in danger because of guilt.”
I tried a smile. “Says the man with PTSD.”
“I know all about guilt. I crawled out of a pile of rubble that should have crushed me, the nine men I was supposed to lead and protect dead behind me. I lost every man, and to this day, I don’t know why I lived. But I’ve learned the painful lesson that throwing away my life won’t bring them back. Jumping into that hole and choking to death on sulfur fumes isn’t going to save Mick.”
“You have some better ideas?” I asked him.
“We go to the ranger station and tell them we’ve lost someone up here. They’ll have the equipment to get in there and find him.”
“If it were that simple, don’t you think Mick would be out by now? He’s a
dragon
and pretty damned resilient. So, if he hasn’t been able to blow himself out of this place, he’s seriously trapped, magically as well as physically. No ranger station will be equipped to handle that.”
“And you are?”
“No, I’m not. That’s why I brought you.”
“Because I’m this magic void,” he said, sounding skeptical.
“That, and you’re good in an emergency. Please, Nash. Anyway, if you want to talk about guilt, you’ve just hit me on the head with your gun. I think I’m entitled to some help for that.”
Nash growled at me, but I was past caring.
He dumped his backpack on the ground and started rummaging through it. He took out a spool of twine and a candle and tied the candle securely. Leaning over the hole, he lit the candle and started unwinding the twine down into the shaft. I watched the candle burning merrily as it went down, the flame high, steady, and bright yellow.
“What happens if there’s methane down there?” I asked worriedly. “Won’t that explode?”
“Then we’ll know it’s not safe.”
I backed quickly from the hole. “You’re a fun date, Nash.”
Nothing dire happened. The candle continued to burn, the flame looking normal and happy.
Nash brought the candle back up and blew it out. “So we know we can breathe, at least that far in. That still doesn’t mean it’s safe.”
“I’m light and nimble, and Pamela got in and out all right.”
“So she says.”
While he spoke, Nash was taking out a rope and harness, so I knew he was going to help; he would just be crabby about it. Fine with me, as long as he helped.
He turned to me, held up the harness, and gave me a cold smile. “Since I’m bigger than you, you get to go down first.”
Five
I was never at my best in enclosed spaces. As Nash lowered me, wrapped in the rope and harness, I secretly agreed that Nash was right. This was crazy.
I had no way of knowing whether Mick was really down here or whether this was an elaborate trap, Pamela a part of it. But the spell tugged me on, and my heart told me that Mick waited for me at the end of the line.
After what seemed a long time, my feet touched firm ground. I played my flashlight around and found that a horizontal shaft ran to my right, sloping a little downward, shored up in places with rotting timber or rough-hewn stones. Lovely. This place could collapse at any moment, and only the crushed remains of an ex-Stormwalker would be found, if anyone bothered to dig me out at all.
I called back up to Nash that I wanted to explore the tunnel. He kept a firm hand on the rope, and I realized that if he didn’t want me looking around, he’d simply haul me back up whether I liked it or not. I unhooked the harness and slid out of it.
“Janet!” he shouted down at me. “Don’t be stupid.”
I ignored him and started walking, the compulsion spell now too strong for me to fight.
After a long time of stepping over old timbers, rotted sacking, and fallen stones, as well as stirring up the stink of bat droppings, I felt heat. The shaft bent left, running deeper into the mountain until it ended in a wall of solid stone.
Before I could despair, my flashlight’s beam found a long, vertical crack, about three inches wide, that ran from the stone’s base to the rotted timbers above my head. Through that crack, something glowed.
I put my eye to the crack. It went all the way through stone about a foot thick, and beyond that, I saw a vast cavern rising high into the mountain, a spelunker’s delight. The heat I felt came from a wall of flame that divided the cavern neatly in half. Behind that flame, cut off from me, lay a dragon.