Shadow Walker (16 page)

“
Now
you find it,” I said sourly. “When it’s too dark to see anything.” The sun set rapidly in these latitudes, and behind the dense forest, we stood in blackness.

“You don’t need light to find the name,” Drake said. He hadn’t spoken much all day, but his dark voice was as strong as ever, not dry and scratchy like mine. “But if you must have light . . .”

He threw a fireball high. It exploded into a light spell, the same kind Mick liked to use, illuminating the clearing like a million fireflies.

I gasped, and I heard Colby’s sharp intake of breath.

Drake’s light showed us a charred ruin. The entire clearing had been burned out, every tree, vine, and tangled bit of undergrowth destroyed to its roots. The rocks left behind were blackened like lumps of charcoal, and I saw the glitter of gold, melted, coating the rocks, mud, and debris.

It was an amazing piece of destruction. Only molten lava could have caused this damage, except that no hardened black lava remained. The only other thing that could have obliterated this place was dragon fire.

“He destroyed his own lair.” Colby sounded both awestruck and sickened. “No dragon would do that. The heart of the lair is a sacred place.”

Drake lowered his hand, and the light spell died. As the fire faded, stars came out overhead, bathing the stubbled landscape in a kinder light.

“He is lost to us,” Drake said, his voice holding a note of sadness I’d never heard from him. “Micalerianicum is lost.”

“Or not.” Colby was looking at the sky, studying the stream of stars the clearing bared.

Colby grabbed me and jerked me aside at the same time a huge black dragon swooped in, mouth open, fire roaring, coming right for us.

Sixteen

Mick fired what was left of the clearing, belching flame that ate everything in its path. Without Colby taking to wing and grabbing me up with him, I would have been one of the things roasted.

My stomach dropped as Colby did one of his whizzing turns, but I realized after a few panicked seconds that Mick wasn’t aiming at us. He’d come to finish burning out the clearing, destroying the last of what he was. Drake rose, his dragon as large as Mick’s, ready to stop him, but he dove out of the way when Mick shot a stream of fire at him.

Mick was big, dangerous, and he didn’t care. This was the side of Mick other people saw—the dragon lord, the monster, the force of destruction. I understood why people feared him, why they turned green and sidled away when his eyes went black and determined. Any gentleness I’d ever seen in him had gone. The witch had taken it away.

Trees went up in flame, towering pillars of fire ringing the clearing. Mick burned everything down to the rocks and soil, until the black volcanic gravel gleamed through the mud. Twice Drake tried to stop him, and twice Mick drove him away. Colby, smaller than Mick, had the sense to hover above and outside the clearing, out of range of Mick’s flame.

Mick rose from the fiery lair, climbing up and up, his huge body outlined by the stars. He swung among them like another constellation, but just when I thought he’d wing away from us, back to his witch, he turned and rushed at Colby.

Colby did his zinging hop backward, leaving bile in my mouth. Mick swooped by, giving us a foot to spare, his wings folded behind him as he arrowed past. He cocked his head as he went by, and I looked straight into Mick’s black and silver eye, which was cold—ice-cold—no fire within.

“Mick,” I whispered.

But he was gone, shooting past. He opened his vast wings to pump him up into the night and disappeared.

Colby banked left, carrying me back to the clearing where we’d started. He set me on the ground, morphed back to human, and grabbed at me with human hands as I collapsed, numb and spent, to the grass.

Drake insisted we stay the night before heading back home. I didn’t want to. I’d been gone twenty-four hours already, and I longed with all my heart for dry desert cold and my grandmother’s scolding. Drake gave me a grave look, shook his head, and said, “The human woman needs to rest or she risks death.”

Colby, damn him, agreed with him.

Drake proved himself useful by fashioning a shelter for me against the rain that had started to patter down. Darkness brought sudden cold, and the clouds that had formed against the high mountain now spread their bounty to the lowlands. Drake must have done this before, because the tropical roof he tied between the trees was pretty damned watertight. He ordered Colby to guard me and said he’d forage for food.

Drake took a long time to return, and when he did, he brought me not whatever fruit was in season or some unfortunate tropical bird he’d snared, but a Hawaiian plate lunch in a plastic container. We weren’t that far, he explained, from Hawaii’s Big Island.

I hadn’t thought I could eat a bite, but suddenly the meat and rice and fruit seemed a very good idea. “Don’t tell me you went into a restaurant naked,” I said around mouthfuls.

“I keep stashes of clothing in various places in the world, in case I need to move among humans.”

“Your lair’s around here too, is it?”

Drake didn’t answer. I gathered from the chill in his silence that my question was the height of rudeness. The gleeful look on Colby’s face confirmed it.

Once I’d eaten, my stomach settled a little, and exhaustion hit me. I huddled under the shelter, longing for my coat, and discovered that Drake had thoughtfully brought me a blanket.

I slept fitfully, my dreams filled with Mick and fire, sorrow and worry. After a long time of tossing and turning, I woke abruptly in the pitch-dark, unaware what time it was. Drake was nowhere in sight, but Colby lay next to me, human and naked, snoring loudly. In his sleep, he’d stolen most of the blanket.

I let him have it. I got to my feet as quietly as I could and walked away from the shelter.

I made my way out of the clearing and down to the beach, where I could breathe the fresh air that came over the sea. The rain had abated, the clouds thinning to tatters before a running wind. The moon had set, but the stars shone above me in dense proliferation, reminding me of the petroglyphs the ancient artists had drawn in the sinkhole. Without manmade lights spoiling the sky, the pueblo peoples must have seen and drawn the same swirls of stars I looked at now.

I saw him by that starlight, an upright man walking with strong steps toward me down the sand.

I stopped. I knew in my heart Mick hadn’t come out here because he’d been miraculously released or because his love for me had overridden the spell. He’d come for a reason, the witch’s reason.

I waited for him to approach. Mick hadn’t dressed; his naked skin glistened in the starlight where spray dampened him. The dragon tattoos on his arms looked blurred, out of focus, as though the dragons shivered, as I’d seen them do the night Mick had been taken from me. Mick’s eyes were white and cold, but fire flickered in them as he stopped and looked down at me.

I cleared my throat. “Nice lair you have here. Long way to go for takeout, though.”

“You need to leave.” His voice was so different, no longer the easygoing tones of my beloved Mick. “You won’t find what you seek here.”

I folded my arms, both to keep myself warm and to hide the fact that I was shaking. My finger found the turquoise-and-onyx ring that still clasped my finger, and I stroked the cool silver. “What I’m seeking is you. I won’t let that bitch have you, Mick. If she wants a fight, I’ll give her one.”

“You are not what she wants. She doesn’t care whether you live or die.”

“No? What does she want, then? And why all the crap with Ted and my hotel?”

I knew Mick wouldn’t tell me, even before he gave me a stony look. “Leave Magellan. Go back to your native land and stay there. For your own good.”

“Is it my hotel she wants? Why? The damn thing stood empty for years. Why is she just now trying to move in?”

Again, the unhelpful stare. “I can tell you this, Janet. Take your grandmother and go home, or you will die.”

My shaking calmed as I thought things through. “If Vonda Wingate is so big and bad, why does she need a dragon to deliver messages for her? She had to use you to get through the wards to put the damaging spell into my hotel—which means she’s not as all-powerful as she’d like to be.”

“She is stronger than you understand. This is her warning.”

“Gods, Mick, listen to you.” I stepped to him, looked into his hard face, my heart aching because I wanted to touch him and didn’t dare. “She’s made you destroy the heart of your own lair. Drake told me it was sacred to you. Doesn’t that mean anything? Plus you tried to kill me, right after you gave me this.” I held up my hand, letting the stars reflect on the ring.

Mick’s gaze went to the ring, and for an instant—the barest instant—I saw his eyes become blue.

The flicker fed my hope and made me reckless. He was in there, somewhere, my Mick. I grabbed his arms, but Mick jerked away with a snarl. “Don’t touch me!”

“Mick, come back to me. Don’t let her have you. Please!” I was crying and begging, and I didn’t care. I loved this man, and I knew, somewhere deep inside him, that he still loved me.

Mick pushed me from him so hard that I stumbled, and by the time I regained my balance, he’d lifted both hands and surrounded them with fire.

“I’m ordered to kill you if I have to,” he said. He gave me a sickening parody of his usual grin. “It’s nothing personal, baby.”

I rested my weight on the balls of my feet, ready. “Tell me one thing. Are you sleeping with her?”

He gave me a look of disgust. “I don’t have sex with humans.”

“Except with me, you mean.”

“And for that, you die.”

The little aside gave me the time I needed. Mick’s fire burst from his hands, but I threw up a shield of Beneath magic, drawing on the barest remains of the passing rainstorm to ground me. My shield deflected Mick’s fire into a little circle around me, and sand melted into glass.

My defense pissed him off, and again I saw the monster that was Mick, the dragon who wanted to crush the puny human. The sneer he’d made about sex with humans had been real. I was seeing the Mick from long ago, from before the dragon council had sent him after me, before he’d watched me and decided that maybe humans, especially Navajo biker-chick Stormwalkers, weren’t so bad.

He threw fire at me again. But Mick had trained me to fight, to reach for and control my powers. I was no longer the child who burned down buildings by accident until she fled, crying into the storm. I was no longer the young woman running away from what she was, who feared killing a bunch of human bikers in a bar when they tried to mess with her. I wasn’t even the Stormwalker determined to, yet afraid of, confronting her goddess-from-hell mother.

I was the Janet in control of her newly awakened goddess powers.

Well, nearly in control of them.

I surrounded myself with Beneath magic, making a bubble of it as Gabrielle had when I’d fought her in the snow. Mick’s fire streamed at me, the sand burning and boiling in its wake. I sweated as it struck my barrier, my skin blistering even behind the bubble.

“I taught you,” Mick said, as though he knew what I was thinking. “I taught you everything. I know all your tricks, Stormwalker.”

“Maybe you taught me some. But we spent time apart, Firewalker, five years apart. I learned plenty of other things then. Without you.”

“I watched what you learned. I’ve always been watching you.”

He had me there. Mick had watched and protected me when I thought I was alone and vulnerable, which I hadn’t learned until much later.

“Stalking me,” I countered.

Mick shrugged. “Whatever.”

I wasn’t going to win a battle of words. I rarely won arguments with Mick when he was sane. I doubted enslaved Mick would pull his punches.

So I didn’t pull mine. I grabbed the fading wind, built it into my own little microburst, mixed it with Beneath magic, and threw that at him. Mick’s flame widened, sucking the wind into himself at the same time keeping the Beneath magic out. My power pulled back into my hands with a jerk.

Mick didn’t give me time to recover. Another wave of flame came at me, and another, and another, engulfing my little bubble in heat. My hair crackled, my skin blistered. Mick was going to roast me alive.

He circled closer, a smile on his face, ready to kill me and enjoy it.

I gathered wind and blew it at him, following it with a whip of white magic that cracked through the fire and across his skin. His eyes widened in rage, and he came for me.

My bubble burst under the next fireball, the magic evaporating like water. I ran. I pounded down the beach and straight into the waves as streams of fire followed me.

The water slapped me, salty and cold. Mick came after me. He was pissed as hell, and his fire boiled the sea. Bubbles formed around me, the water roiling as Mick decided to steam me like a lobster. He strode into the water, like a very good-looking sea monster, and I could do nothing against him. The rainstorm was now completely gone, and it hadn’t been much more than gentle in the first place. I had only my Beneath magic left.

I could kill Mick with that raw power, but Mick knew I wasn’t prepared to kill him. The witch must be counting on that too. I didn’t want Mick dead. I wanted him free.

“What is your name?” I shouted at him. “Come on, Mick.
Tell
me!”

Mick ignored my plea. He kept coming, me treading water now, my clothes soaked.

“You have to be in there somewhere, Mick. Please, tell the witch to kiss off and come back to me.”

Mick had finished with banter. He was the most frightening when he was quiet, focused, deadly. That deadly focus was now trained on me.

His next burst of fire flowed around me, so hot it burned even the water. I realized dimly that he knew my Beneath magic could shield me as it had on the beach, but that I’d corner myself in a trap of my own making. He’d surround me with fire and heat until the shield failed, and Mick was a long way from tired.

Mick didn’t bother with another burst of flame once he neared me. He reached, physically, through the fire, immune to his own dragon magic, and grabbed me around the throat.

I couldn’t scream, couldn’t do much of anything but kick and flail and try to beat him. Mick was a big man, with three times my strength. I’d always loved how he kept that strength gentled for me, even during our wildest sexual escapades, but he wasn’t gentling it now.

He lifted me out of the water, one hand around my neck. He didn’t squeeze, didn’t shake, simply lifted me until I was face-to-face with him, until I knew the hard power of his hands that would take my life.

Except he didn’t take it. He held me fast, my clawing not making a damn bit of difference. With the other hand, he ripped open the pocket of my jeans. When Mick’s fingers closed around the shard of magic mirror I kept there, I understood.

I kicked him squarely in the balls.

Any man kicked by a hard motorcycle boot between the legs should fold over in exquisite pain, but Mick just looked at me. He pulled up the shard of mirror, his hand bleeding as the glass cut him. I stopped clawing at his death grip and started going for the mirror. I couldn’t let him have it.

Mick heaved me away from him, one-handed. I flew backward and landed hard on the water, the flames still licking it. I went under but fought my way upward, coughing and spluttering. The mirror was screaming, its high-pitched keen echoing through the deep valleys of the island.

The mirror would be compelled to obey him, because Mick and I had woken the mirror from dormancy with a spell we’d worked together. It had to obey me too, but right now, Mick held the shard, and it was Mick bouncing fire magic off it, doubled in strength, directed at me.

I dove. Down into coral that waited to scrape the hell out of my face and hands and rip my jeans. Startled fish burst apart as I invaded their space. I kicked and swam, well under the water, and surfaced right next to Mick.