Stormwalker (28 page)

“I have so longed to touch you,” she said. “How horrible it was that I could only connect to you through another’s flesh.”

I clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. “It’s only through another’s flesh that I was born at all.”

“That is true. Think how heartbreaking it was for me to leave you behind, to not be able to hold you, comfort you, even touch you. My child, and I had to abandon you to others.”

“You didn’t abandon me.” I was angry, very angry, but so cold I couldn’t move. “You killed the woman who gave birth to me.”

“The female vessel was weak. She was stronger than the others, able to carry you to term, but still too weak in the end.”

“That ‘vessel’ was my mother,” I snapped.

“No, child. She bore you, but I gave rise to you. She was a surrogate, nothing more.”

“There were other surrogates. Amy. Sherry Beaumont. The woman who seduced Harold Yazzie. I’m sure the list goes on.”

“But in all the centuries, there was only you.” My mother brushed a light finger across my lips. “You with your powerful storm magic. You are very, very special, daughter.”

If I didn’t like her touching me, Mick certainly didn’t. He was at my side, growling a warning, ready to do battle.

I think I realized in that moment how much I loved him. He was helpless here, and he knew it, and still he wanted to protect me.

“How sweet,” my mother said to me. “Will you give him to me as a present?”

“Leave Mick alone.”

“No, darling. I won’t. This
thing
is nowhere near good enough for you.” She gave Mick a look that was nearly identical to the one my grandmother had given him upon meeting him. I’d have found that comical if I hadn’t been so terrified.

“You belong to me now, Janet,” my mother said. “You will love
me
, not this monster.”

“Mick has been far more loving to me than you ever were.”

My mother looked hurt. “I didn’t have a chance, darling. I can’t exist above except through other shells—you know that. The dirty little town where your father raised you was too far away and too protected for me to come to you. Thankfully you escaped it in the end.”

“I didn’t escape.” But hadn’t I regarded leaving home as an escape? Fleeing the cage my aunts, cousins, and grandmother had placed around me?

“Your grandmother was a fool and kept you for herself,” my mother said. “But now you are with me.”

I took a step back. “If you wanted to be with me so much, why didn’t you just take over my body the first time you met me? You jumped into me readily enough tonight.”

“Because I didn’t want to weaken you, love, and my power would have strained you. I wanted you to stay strong for me. Tonight, all I needed from you was for you to take me to the vortex and open it. I knew you’d dive down here after your dragon if I made him fall in. And you did.”

“Fine. You’ve got me. Let Mick go.”

“No, darling.” My mother leaned toward me but didn’t touch me again. “Kill him for me.”

I ground my teeth, fighting fear. Not of her, but of the fact that I
could
kill Mick with a word, and she knew that. I felt Mick tense next to me, knowing it too. “I would never hurt him.”

My mother gave me a pitying look. “Dear heart, I wasn’t talking to you.” She looked behind Mick and smiled a chilling smile.

Leading them was a
thing
. I didn’t know what it was supposed to be. It had the body of a man, one taller and bigger than Mick, but its head was a cross between that of a bull and a wolf. Long muzzle, pointed teeth, horns, round, blazing eyes.

“What the hell is
that
?” I managed.

“This is my consort,” my mother said. “You will like him.” She smiled at the monstrosity. “Kill him for me, love.”

The minotaur-like thing charged, the skinwalkers right behind him. Mick balled his fists and faced the onslaught. I saw in Mick’s face that he knew he was going to die, that he was fully prepared to die, but that he was happy he could go out fighting.

“Come on, let’s tangle,” he shouted at the monster. He laughed, his blue eyes flashing with the wickedness I loved. “This could be fun.”

“No!” I screamed. “No, Mick.
Go!
”

I grabbed Mick around the waist and shoved him as I shouted. Mick’s feet left the ground, and he gave me a startled, then a horrified, look. He reached for me, his mouth forming my name, and then he vanished. My hands closed on nothing, and Mick was gone.

I whirled, my grappling hands reaching for my mother. “Where is he? What did you do?”

Behind me the monster and the skinwalkers stopped their charge, their halt kicking mud that spattered the backs of my legs. My mother smiled and shook her head.

“I did nothing. You sent him away, dear. He is wherever you told him to go.”

Icy panic hit me. Where the hell had I shoved him? Back to the desert of above? To the realms of the dragons? Or to some world worse than this one? I tried to picture the exact thought I’d had when I’d yelled the word, “Go!” but I had no idea.

“You’re making me do this.”

“No, child. You did it yourself. You have great power here. You will fit in nicely.”

“No.” I wanted to cry, but my eyes and throat were too dry. “I belong with my father, in the lands of the Diné.”

“You have made yourself believe that. But what do you have there? A family who is deeply suspicious of you, an outside world that herded your people onto reservations as though they were cattle. You weren’t human to them, just animals to be penned up and starved, shot if you put a foot wrong. They did it so they could take everything you had for themselves, no other reason. Why should you go back to a world like that? When you can stay here, and be strong, and thrive?”

“Here?” I looked at the enclosing woods, the heavy sky I could barely see, the skinwalkers with beautiful faces. I thought of the land around Many Farms, the stark beauty of its measureless vistas, the scorching blue sky that faded to crimson and gold at dusk. My recent ancestors had been penned up as my mother claimed, but Navajo had lived on that land for centuries, and it was in my bones.

I wanted to be back there so much I could taste it. I wanted to see my father walking in from the fields, his fists stuffed into his jacket pockets, his head bowed as he moved along, careful not to step on stray insects or lizards in his path. I wanted to see my grandmother chopping vegetables for the stew, frowning at me for some wrong or other she was certain I’d done. I missed them with an ache as big as a cavern.

“What is here that I could possibly want?” I asked my mother.

“This woods is not the only place. Take my hands.”

I stared at her outstretched fingers in suspicion. “Why?”

“I will show you my true home. But it’s a long journey.”

I continued to look at her hands, beautifully shaped, so pale they might have been made of moonlight. Impatiently, she grabbed my much browner and mud-coated fingers, her touch ice-cold.

The woods spun around me, faster and faster until I snapped my eyes closed. Before I could decide to be sick, the world stopped, and I opened my eyes again.

The woods were gone. We stood in a garden perched on top of a rocky hill, with a green meadow studded with flowers flowing away from our feet. A fountain bubbled beside us, water falling over natural rock to splash in a wind-carved sandstone bowl. Bright fuchsia hung along the rocks beside honeysuckle and light blue flowers I didn’t recognize. The air was deliciously cool and scented with sweetness.

“Is this real?” I asked. “Or illusion?”

“My, you are distrustful, Janet. Had I raised you, you would delight in this place and your powers. But you’ve been tainted by that awful woman you call your grandmother.”

“She isn’t awful.” I’d grown up resenting Grandmother, but in retrospect I could see many reasons for the things my grandmother had done. She’d feared what I might become, feared
for
me and tried to protect me.

“She brainwashed you,” my mother said. “Taught you to hate me.”

“She didn’t, actually.” I sat on the lip of the fountain, mostly to see if it was real. I felt cold stone through my jeans and a spray of water on my skin. “She tried to teach me to fear and hate you, which of course made me romanticize you. My grandmother never met you, but she saw you in me and feared what might happen if I gave in to you.” I nodded. “Rightly so.”

“Ah, but when you join me, my love, you’ll understand.”

“And what did you mean when you said that
thing
was your consort?” I asked. “You don’t have sex with it, do you?” I thought of the minotaur’s snout with its jutting teeth and shuddered.

My mother’s answering smile gave me the creeps. “He is most pleasing. He has many brothers, if you would like one for yourself.”

“Ick. No. And I mean that with all the offense it implies.”

“Yet you sleep with a dragon.”

“Not while he’s a dragon.”

“You can have Mick back, you know. I will teach you how to call him to you, how to bind him and make him do whatever you wish. He will exist for you, for your pleasure, and do everything you command. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t like that.”

Having Mick as my love slave? Of course I wouldn’t mind that. But my mother didn’t understand that I wouldn’t want Mick coming to me because I forced him to, loathing me every time he touched me. But by the look on her face, the words “free will” weren’t in my mother’s vocabulary.

“And the others,” she went on. “The human who absorbs magic—Nash—he will be a powerful ally, and he’s lovely to sleep with. Such strength. Even Coyote could be useful. He chose to bind himself to the earth and abandon his Beneath magic, so he’ll be helpless when we pull him down here. He will do anything we want.” She wet her lips. “We could share him.”

I wasn’t so sure Coyote would be helpless—knowing Coyote, he’d hedge his bets to retain power wherever he went. But I didn’t argue. I saw no point.

My mother touched my head, and my mind flooded with images I couldn’t stop. Erotic images like those in my dreams: Mick and Nash touching and licking me; Coyote behind me with his hands cupping my naked breasts. All three men making love to me, taking my pleasure to heights it had never seen.

I jerked away. “Stop that.”

“You see what it is you want, deep in your heart. You can make it reality.”

I knew then that she’d never understand me. She confused sex with love and caring, physical pleasure with deep emotion. “I don’t want to make that reality.”

“You do, you know. You just don’t want to admit it.” My mother reached for me again, but this time she put her hands on my elbows and pulled me to my feet.

“I know this is difficult for you, dear,” she said, sounding like a mother genuinely concerned for her child. “But you will understand in time. Here, in my realm, you are as powerful as you were meant to be. Together you and I can be more powerful still. You’ll have the power of the gods, Janet. Nothing will be able to stop you.”

I looked into her green eyes and saw pure ambition but also desperation and the need to be accepted.

The temptation to take what she offered—to embrace the magic I could have here, to not be shunned for what I was—was great.

Altruistic thoughts tumbled through my head as well, tempting me as much. If I agreed to join her, I might be powerful enough to stop her from breaking through the vortexes and wreaking havoc above. It would be worth the sacrifice of my earthbound life if I could keep her down here, to make sure she never hurt anyone again.

What did I have to lose above, anyway? Few friends, a family who didn’t respect me, a dragon-man who’d admitted that his purpose in coming to me had been to kill me. I’d spent my life trying to please everyone, to prove to them that I was worth something. Even with my beloved photography, I only sold what other people were willing to buy, what made
them
happy, not me.

In this place, I would be accepted without question, the daughter of a goddess, able to command hordes of skinwalkers—hell, I could command the vines and the trees. Everything. I could do anything I wanted, have anything I liked.

All I had to do was stay here with her.

“If I go back above,” I said slowly, “the magic I have here won’t follow, will it?”

“Not in the same way as it is here. But you are a unique being, Janet, able to exist as you truly are both on earth and Beneath.” She smiled. “But when we leave together, when we break free of my prison and my magic joins with yours, there will be no one to stop us. Nothing we can’t do.”

I stuck my thumbs in my belt loops, a teenage habit my grandmother had abhorred. “Yes, I could enjoy that heady power. How wonderful to be able to punish everyone who ever hurt me.”

My mother’s green eyes glowed. “Yes. Now you understand.”

“But I think you don’t understand me.”

She looked puzzled. But I suddenly understood what Coyote had been trying to explain to me with his cryptic hints. I had not been able to choose the path that led me here—I hadn’t asked to be born of a goddess and inherit Stormwalker powers through my father. I hadn’t asked to be the strange by-product of a powerful bitch queen and a quiet human, hadn’t asked for the amalgam of magic that tore me up inside.

Now my path forked, and Coyote’s words from my dream came back to me:
Only you can choose which direction to take.

I could remain with my mother and embrace my own goddess-like power, or I could return and be a slightly crazed Navajo Stormwalker, struggling to finish a hotel, pay my bills, make new friends. An all-powerful goddess from Beneath like my mother, or a creature of the earth like my grandmother, like my father, like Mick. My life, my path, my choice.

My mother watched me with narrowed eyes, as though she knew the thoughts that spun inside my brain. She leaned to me, her beauty dimming for a fleeting moment into something gray and hideous.

“My darling, if you reject me, if you leave me, I’ll make certain your precious dragon is tortured for eternity and that your so-called father and grandmother die horrible deaths.”

We were the same height and faced each other eye to eye. Her beauty returned almost instantly, but I’d glimpsed the monster inside her.

“You don’t know where I sent Mick,” I said. “Maybe I do.”

“You don’t, my dear. You said so yourself.”

I smiled, brazening it out. “You don’t know much about kids, do you? Growing up is a constant struggle between adoring your parents and wanting to push them away. You want their approval and you want to be your own person at the same time. During this complicated process, a few lies get told.”

Her brow puckered. “You are grown-up, Janet, in the manner of earth children. When I found you, you were an adult.”

I contrived to look wise. “Sometimes, though, the growing up process stretches into the adult years, especially when you’re as confused as I was. But then you get over it.” I stepped closer to her and spoke in a hard voice. “Mother dearest, I gave up wanting to please you years ago.”

She gave me a hurt look. “But I never gave up wanting to please you.”

“You should,” I said. “Because you never will.”

“Why are you being so cruel to me?”

“To show you what it feels like. My magic is very strong here—you’ve let me discover that. Here I flick my fingers, say a word, and get what I want.”

“Is there something wrong with that? Embrace it, my dear. Understand that you can have
anything
you’ve ever dreamed of.”

“Except real love,” I said. “Peace of mind. Knowing what’s true.”

“Don’t be stupid. You can have all the love you want. No one will be able to help adoring you.”

She meant sex again and pleasing born of fear. I thought of my father, with his warm eyes, loving me hard at sacrifice to himself. I thought of my grandmother and her constant scolding but her understanding of why I needed to be fiercely protected. I thought of Mick, who’d defied his own kind to keep me alive. Life would have been so much easier for him if he’d simply killed me when he first met me. But he’d loved me and protected me instead.

“What you offer is not enough,” I said softly.

Again her beauty flickered. “You are mad, Janet. It’s perfectly adequate.”

“Coyote told me I’d have to choose, so now I’m choosing. I will never forgive you for trying to kill my father and my grandmother. And Mick. I’ll never forgive you for killing Sherry Beaumont and causing such grief. I won’t forgive you for driving Amy McGuire half out of her mind and messing up the lives of her parents, Nash, and even a woman who hated her. I’ll never forgive you for the sorrow you caused a Navajo man I’d never even met. I choose the earth above, and the earth magic that makes me insane and all the people who are pretty sure I’m crazy because of it. I choose that path, because I never,
ever
want to be like you.”