“No, I’d be dead,” Mick said, not sounding worried. “But they wouldn’t have kept me in there that long. We need to catch up to Nash.”
End of conversation. Nash was marching at a swift pace, the soldier in him eating up distance. Mick propelled me along, keeping me too breathless to ask more questions, but no matter. I’d grill him later.
We caught up to Nash on the narrow saddle that led to the next chain of hills. Without thinking, I looked over the edge of the ridge, and I bit back a hysterical cry. The dawn light showed me what the darkness had hidden—to either side of the path, cliffs fell away in ripples of gray and black, down, down, down through clumps of sagebrush and creosote to the darkness at the bottom.
I saw something else down there. Eyes. Hundreds of them. Faint white light swirled at the bottom of the hill like mist. A vortex.
From the vortex, demons were crawling. The shard of mirror in my pack started shrieking, drowning out my own cry of horror.
Mick looked over the side, saw what I saw. “Aw, damn it. Up!” he shouted at Nash. “Back up!”
He started hustling me along the path back toward the mine shaft. Nash didn’t waste time asking questions and sprinted with us up the trail.
The demons boiled after us. I’d fought creatures like this before, down in the dark desert of Nevada, fought for my life. That was the night I’d met Mick, but that night I’d had a good storm to help me out. This morning, the sky above remained stubbornly clear, not even a breath of wind to stir the dust.
Mick shoved me behind him and faced the onslaught. He was exhausted, I saw it in the slump of his shoulders, and he’d just said he was drained of magic. Nash passed me the gun he’d taken from the Nightwalker plus two magazines, but I knew it wouldn’t do much good against a horde of crazed demons.
Nash sighted down his nine-millimeter at the beings with leathery bodies, clawed hands, and bloodred eyes. “What are they?”
“Demons,” Mick answered curtly.
“Not the steal-your-soul, take-you-to-hell kind of demons,” I put in. “Just the garden-variety, kill-and-eat-you demons.”
Nash gave me a resigned look, sighted down his pistol again, and fired. The boom of the pistol echoed into the morning, and a roar from a hundred demon throats answered it.
Nash’s bullet hit the first demon square in the chest, and it tumbled back into its fellows in a shower of blood. The demons came on. Nash fired again.
Flames danced in Mick’s hands, but I could tell his magic was at low ebb, very little restored yet. I aimed the gun Nash had given me, sighting down the barrel. I hated guns. I knew how to use one, because Mick had taught me, but when I finally made myself pull the trigger, the kick sent me reeling. I fell flat on my back, already off balance from my head injury. The acrid smell of the gun, plus the roar of it, made me want to puke, and I couldn’t even tell if I’d hit the demon.
Mick was fighting with fists, Nash shooting, and still the things came on. At this rate, the demons would leave our shredded bits over the mountain, and the rangers would assume we’d been mauled by bears or a puma. I wondered if any bits would be identifiable.
Demons boiled at Nash like a horde of cockroaches, and he was swearing and shooting, falling to his knees. Mick sagged, his body gleaming with sweat, his fire fading. The demons swarmed over him, jumping on his back, dragging him down to feast on the flesh of the man I loved.
I tossed my gun into the pack and stood up, something wild surging inside me. I suddenly felt strong, adept, fearless; the surety that I could kill the demons and save the day rising in an amalgam of white-hot heat and blinding light. I raised my hands, and light poured out of my palms, just as in the visions I’d had tonight.
A terrible glow lit up the mountain and flowed like a deluge toward the demons. The white light engulfed the demons, Mick, Nash, the ridge. Rocks exploded into rubble and rained into the crevice, and the demons screamed as they began to fall with it. Trees on the ridge above us burst into flame, grasses crackling in the gray morning light.
As soon as the demons fell from Mick, he sprang to his feet, grabbed Nash, and dragged him away from the mewling, desperate demons and the white light. I lifted my hands higher, my laughter booming. Words came out of my mouth, and I didn’t understand one of them. I wasn’t speaking Diné or any other Indian language I knew, or English, or Latin, or Spanish.
The demons ran from me, plunging over the precipice, screaming as they dropped. My wall of light followed them down. It killed all of the demons, and then the light incinerated them. The magic in me killed every single demon, all the way down into the vortex, and once they were nothing but ash, my magic snapped the vortex closed.
I turned to face Nash and Mick, who watched from a little way away, both of them covered with bloody bite marks. Mick’s eyes had gone black all the way across, and the way he looked at me should have terrified the hell out of me.
I laughed. “Hi, boys,” I said, raising my hands again. “Want to play?”
The rocks in front of them exploded. The two men scrambled out of the way of the ensuing rain of gravel, and Nash trained his pistol on me. “Why the hell are her eyes green?” I heard him shout.
“Janet.” Mick’s voice was harsh with warning. “Stop.”
I had no clue how to stop. I’d killed the demons, all of them, completing the task I should have completed that night six years ago. Now I wanted to crush the entire mountain, find the dragons who’d imprisoned Mick in it and imprison them too.
Mick started for me. Brave man. I knew I could stop him, enslave him, make him obey me. Mick had the ability to absorb my storm powers and not be hurt by them, but I knew good and well that he couldn’t survive the magic in me now.
“I command you,” I said, power boiling up inside me. “You are
mine
.”
The white light wrapped around Mick, and he snarled. And then, without warning, the magic blinked out.
The light died, and with it went the last of my strength. I fell and started sliding toward the edge of the gorge, my fatal plunge stopped by a single boulder that hooked me around the waist. Beneath me, the rocks tumbled over the side, bouncing and rattling for hundreds of feet to the mists of the vortex, which faded into the rising sun.
Six
I woke up hanging facedown on Mick’s back. It was damn hot, and I felt as though someone had poured cleanser into my body and scrubbed my insides with a wire brush.
As soon as I groaned, Mick stopped and laid me gently on the ground. Both Mick and Nash were breathing hard and sweating, smeared with dried blood where the demons had clawed and bitten them. Mick’s wildly curly black hair hung across his face, and his blue eyes glittered behind it.
“Are you all right?” I croaked.
“We should be asking you that,” Nash said in clipped tones.
Mick was watching me in a way I didn’t like. His face bore the wary look of a man whose trained animal had suddenly remembered its wildness and turned on him.
“Mick, don’t,” I said.
“Your eyes changed color,” he said. “To very light green. Like ice.”
Fear kicked me in the gut and kept on kicking. “My mother isn’t inside me, I swear to you. I know how that feels. We sealed her vortex, Mick, you and me. Even the cracks are sealed. She’s trapped.”
Nash crouched next to us, his gun out. “What the hell are you two talking about?”
Mick broke in before I could draw breath to answer. Just as well. Explaining this was beyond me.
“The entity you saw coming out of the vortex last spring,” Mick said. “She is a goddess, trapped in the world Beneath. She created Janet, even though Janet was born of human parents. She is, in essence, Janet’s mother. She has the ability to possess women. Or had.”
Nash stared at me. “That thing was your
mother
?”
“We’re not responsible for our parents,” I tried to joke.
“You’ve always had her Beneath magic in you,” Mick said. “When did you learn to channel it so well?”
His voice was quiet, dark, waiting. “I didn’t,” I said. “I have no idea how I used that magic, I promise you. I just did it.”
Nash unfolded next to me. “Good thing you did. We wouldn’t have survived that attack.”
I still didn’t like the way Mick watched me. He wasn’t going to let it go, and I had the feeling that me busting him out of that cave and then saving his life wouldn’t mitigate things. My connection to my goddess mother and the powers of Beneath were the very reasons all dragons, including, at one time, Mick, wanted me dead.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he said. “It’s going to get hot here, quick.”
It was already hot, the sun streaming over the eastern mountains, bringing another day of heat to the valley floor. Mick carried me again, and it got hotter as we descended, the white alkali flats reflecting the sunlight in bright waves. I remembered reading a statistic that the ground temperature in Death Valley could reach two hundred degrees during the day. You could make fry bread on that. Salty, sandy fry bread. I giggled.
Mick stopped and fed me water. “She’s delirious,” he said.
“Not much farther,” Nash promised.
Lower and lower we went, as the morning grew hotter. I hung upside down over Mick’s shoulder and quietly started dying. Sun played on the pale sand dunes and dry flats, forcing my eyes shut against the brightness.
Mick finally stopped and lowered me to my feet. We stood on black pavement, a road, and my heart leapt. I never thought I’d ever be so happy to see asphalt in my life.
When the rushing sound in my ears cleared a little, I heard Nash swearing.
“What’s wrong?” I tried to ask.
Nash was shouting foul and filthy words. Parallel tire tracks showed where a truck had been driven off the road, but of Nash’s shiny new black pickup, there was no sign.
“Son of a
bitch
!” Nash kicked the dirt, sending up sprays of fine gravel. I knew he wasn’t angry about being stranded in the middle of Death Valley with no transportation and little water—he was pissed that someone had dared to touch his beloved truck.
Mick gave me water again, and I slumped against his side to drink. “Where are we?” I heard him ask.
“About thirty miles from Stovepipe Wells,” Nash said.
“We walk it, then. We can’t afford to wait.”
I didn’t want to hear that, and I was about to argue with him, to beg him to let me lie down right here and go to sleep, when I heard the blissful sound of a car engine. It wasn’t Nash’s big truck but an older, dust-covered pickup with its windows down, bumping toward us along the road. Three people crowded into the cab and several more rode in the bed.
The truck stopped beside us, its engine chugging like a steamboat’s. A Native American man leaned out the window and looked us over. “Hey, you folks lost?”
Mick didn’t hesitate. “She needs a doctor.”
A young woman peered over the driver’s shoulder. “We’re going into Beatty,” she said. “Come on with us, if you want.”
A chubby youth obligingly vacated his seat in the cab and hopped into the truck bed. The young woman remained, helping Mick slide me in next to her. Mick buckled a seat belt around me before he kissed my forehead, shut the door, and climbed into the back with Nash.
The truck had no air-conditioning, but the open windows admitted a dry breeze that still held morning cool from the mountains. My rescuers discussed something as we pulled away, using a Native American language I didn’t know. If they were from Death Valley itself, they’d be Shoshone, from the tribe that lived in the southern part of the valley.
The girl turned to me. “I’m Beth,” she said. “That’s my dad and my good-for-nothing brothers in the back.”
“Janet,” I croaked. “Really, really pleased to meet you.” Beth was college age, I guessed, maybe about twenty or twenty-one. She shot me a grin. “That white guy with the gray eyes is cute. Who is he?”
“His name is Nash Jones. The sheriff of Hopi County. In Arizona,” I added when she looked blank.
“Yeah?” Beth’s dad said. “What’s he doing out here?”
“Hiking.” Well, it was partly true.
Beth looked through the back window at Nash again. “Well, he is sure cute. He have a girlfriend?”
Did Maya Medina qualify as his girlfriend? “It’s hard to say. Have you seen a brand-new black Ford 250 out here? I think Nash loves it more than any girlfriend.”
“Nope,” Beth’s dad said. “You’re from Arizona, huh? What tribe?”
“Diné,” I said, copying his laconic style.
He didn’t make any reply to that, and neither did Beth, and my eyelids drooped. As I drifted toward sleep, my vision started to play tricks on me. Through my eyelashes I saw Beth, but I also saw a shimmering light superimposed on her and an animal shape—with feathery wings? Wings? Were they Changers?
Beth’s dad glowed a little too. He was at once a black-haired Native American in dusty jeans, and a shining creature I couldn’t identify. Were they aliens, maybe? I giggled.