Hexed

ONE

IT STARTED, INNOCENTLY ENOUGH, WITH A leaky faucet.

I called my hotel’s plumber, Fremont Hansen, who agreed to come right away, and asked the guests in room 6 to go out for a while. Fremont had a balding head and gentle hazel eyes and believed he had magical powers. His true power lay in fixing the plumbing, but today, after nearly two hours, he crawled out from under the sink, still baffled.

“Don’t know about this one, Janet,” he said, pushing back his cap to rub his high forehead. “I’ve taken everything apart and replaced the faucets and resoldered the pipes. I’ve used plenty of plumber’s enchantment, but nothing is working.”

“Plumber’s enchantment?”

Fremont wriggled his fingers. “You know what I mean.”

“Oh brother,” came a drag-queen drawl from the mirror above him.

Fremont did have a touch of magic in his aura, but I’d never had the heart to tell him how minor it was. The magic mirror, on the other hand, had no such compassion. The true magic mirror hung downstairs in the saloon, but it had learned to project itself through every mundane mirror in the hotel, kind of like a magical CCTV. Fremont couldn’t hear it, because only those with very powerful magic could—lucky us.

“Honey,” the mirror said, “he’s got as much magic in his fingers as a shriveled-up transvestite has in his—”

“Stop!” I said.

My one maid, Juana, who was bringing in clean towels, thought I was talking to her and halted in the doorway.

Fremont leaned to peer at the bathroom mirror. “I swear something is buzzing behind there.”

I’d told the guests they could return by six, and it was five forty-five now. “Anything?” I cut in.

Fremont heaved a sigh. “Let me try something.” He got back down on his hands and knees while Juana went out for more towels. By the time she returned, Fremont scrambled up again, looking triumphant. “I think that’s it.” He grabbed the faucet’s handles and cranked them wide open. “Here we go!”

The faucet exploded in blood.

Hot, red gore fountained over the bathroom, soaking us, the floor, walls, ceiling, shower, and Juana’s clean towels in scarlet horror. It was blood all right, with its metallic tang, and warm, as though it had just erupted from a human body.

“Shut it off!” I yelled.

Fremont dove under the sink again. “Damn it, damn it, damn it . . .”

The aura that radiated from the blood was horrific—black, sticky, evil. Juana kept shrieking as the rain continued and so did the mirror.

“Shut up!” I shouted at both of them.

Juana’s eyes blazed through the blood running down her face. “I go home! I don’t work for you no more, you crazy Indian!”

She flung the blood-soaked towels at me, turned, and hightailed it out the door. Fremont’s wrench clanked against pipe, and the shower of blood abruptly ceased.

Fremont pulled off his cap to reveal that only the top of his balding head had escaped the red rain. “I don’t know what the hell happened, Janet. Or what’s making the water that color. Corrosion?”

“It’s not corrosion. It’s blood. The real thing.”

“Plumbing don’t bleed, not even in Magellan—”

Fremont broke off when he saw me staring not at him but at the mirror. He turned around, and his face drained of color.

The mirror now bore words, washed across it in red blood.

You are doomed.

THE GUESTS OF room 6 chose that moment to walk back in. They were well-groomed, well dressed, and pale white from northern climes, the kind of people whose money I needed to keep my little hotel in the hot Southwest open. They took one look at the mirror, at me and Fremont spattered with blood—not to mention the walls, mirror, and part of the bedroom carpet—and walked back out again.

I grabbed the cleanest of the towels and rubbed at my face as I chased them down the stairs.

Cassandra, my neat and efficient hotel manager, didn’t betray any surprise when the couple approached reception and demanded to check out, me covered in blood and panting apologies behind them. My offer to move them to another room was declined.

Without asking questions, Cassandra calmly told them we’d charge them only half the fee for the night they’d spent and give them vouchers for the restaurants in town. I let her. She suggested the restored railroad hotel in Winslow as an alternative and offered to have their bags delivered there if they liked. They accepted.

Cassandra disarmed the guests with her cool charm, but they still left.

Once they were gone, I beckoned to Cassandra with a stiff finger. She followed me upstairs, her fair hair perfect in its French braid, her silk suit crisp. A far cry from me with my black hair, jeans, cropped top, and motorcycle boots now coated with blood. I probably looked like a murder victim, except that I was still up and running around.

Fremont stood in the bathroom where I’d left him. His arms were folded, his eyes closed, and he rocked back and forth.

“Fremont,” I said in alarm.

He opened his eyes but kept rocking, his face drawn in terror.

“Stop it,” I said. “It’s just a little blood projection. Some witch is messing with us, that’s all. Or maybe Sheriff Jones hired a sorcerer to drive me out of town. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Fremont drew a shaking breath. “You shouldn’t joke about dire portents, Janet.”

I grabbed the glass cleaner and paper towels Juana had left in her cart. “This is how I deal with dire portents.”

Fortunately for me, the cleaner cut right through the blood. I wiped away the words, the paper towels squeaking against the glass.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” I whispered to it. “Who the hell did this?”

“Beats me, honey bun. That was scary.”

So helpful. I finished with the mirror and started on the rest of the bathroom. The other two wandered out to the bedroom, tracking blood on the carpet. Fremont sat on the bed, dazed, his bloodstained coveralls planted on the quilt one of my aunts had made. Cassandra gazed out the window at the distant mountains in silence.

“Cassandra?” I asked, continuing to spray and wipe. I at least was one hell of a bathroom cleaner. My grandmother, who’d raised me, had been a stickler for cleanliness, and she’d trained me how to scrub at an early age.

Cassandra turned to me, and I stopped in mid-swipe. Her face was pale with fear, my always cool, always contained manager-receptionist looking like she wanted to be sick.

“You all right?” I asked her.

Cassandra shook her head. “I’m sorry, Janet.” She gave me another look of anguish and ran out of the room.

I HANDED FREMONT the rags and told him to keep wiping. I caught up to Cassandra on the stairs, but she wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t talk.

I’d never seen her like this, my unflappable manager who’d managed luxury hotels in California and who ran this place better than I ever could. I ordered her to accompany me into the saloon, which wasn’t open yet, and tell me what she knew.

We entered the saloon to see a broad-shouldered biker with black hair leaning over the bar to help himself to a beer. He took one look at me covered in blood, slammed down the mug, and rushed me. I found myself lifted in arms like hard steel, and I gazed into the blue eyes that had looked back at me the night I’d first lain with a man.

“What the hell happened?” he demanded.

Mick’s fire magic tingled through me, searching for injuries and ready to heal them. Because I was unhurt, my body started to respond the way it wanted to, with desire.

“I’m fine,” I said swiftly. “The blood isn’t mine.”

Would Mick set me on my feet and let me go? No, he slid his big hands along my back and pulled me closer. “I felt it in the wards. Something got in.”

He wanted to shift, to fight. Mick was a dragon, a giant black beast with black and silver eyes and a wingspan that rivaled a 747’s. As a human, his dragon essence was contained in the dragon tattoos that wound down his bare arms and in the fire tattoo that stretched across the small of his back.

“I was about to ask Cassandra all about it,” I said.

Cassandra had seated herself dejectedly at one of the empty tables. I’d restored the saloon to its original Wild West glory, complete with tin ceiling, varnished bar, and wide mirror on the wall. The magic mirror had shattered in its frame one night, the product of one of my harrowing adventures, but the fact that it was broken hadn’t dimmed either its magic or, unfortunately, its personality.

“I’m sensing a wicked imbalance in the force, sweet cheeks,” it said. “Micky, maybe you should get naked in case you have to shift.”

I envied the way Mick could utterly ignore the thing. To Mick, the mirror was simply a powerful talisman, good to have on hand, and the fact that it kept up nonstop sexual suggestions rarely bothered him. Mick and I had awakened it from dormancy one night while working some Tantric magic, which meant that the mirror now belonged to us. It never let us forget how we’d awakened it, and its ongoing innuendo drove me insane. But I’d never throw it away. Magic mirrors were rare and powerful, and the mage who owned one could work amazing magic.

I took a seat next to Cassandra. I badly needed a shower, and a beer wouldn’t hurt, but more than that I wanted to know why Cassandra had been so spooked by the blood. I’d never seen anything frighten my ultra-efficient hotel manager.

Cassandra studied her bunched fists that rested on the table. “I’m sorry, Janet. I never should have come here in the first place.”

“Yes, you should have. I can’t run this hotel without you. Why do you think the message was for you, anyway? It appeared when Fremont and I were up there alone.”

Cassandra looked straight into my eyes. “Because I used to work for John Christianson.”

She obviously expected me to clutch my chest and fall over in shock. I blinked. “Who is John Christianson?”

Mick answered for her. “He’s a filthy rich hotelier and real estate magnate. Owns half of Southern California—commercial real estate, hotels, anything high-dollar in Los Angeles and down the coast to San Diego. Prominent in social circles, contributes to more charities than anyone in the state.”

I spread my hands. Big business, especially big business in other states, was far away and unimportant to my day-to-day existence.

“He’s a first-class bastard,” Cassandra said with venom. “I worked at one of Christianson’s hotels, the ‘C’ in Los Angeles.”

All right, so even I’d heard of the “C,” which featured in Fremont’s favorite television shows about the rich and famous. The “C” was a boutique hotel in Beverly Hills that attracted celebrities, high-profile politicians, and the ultra-rich. They could check in for the weekend and have every need met and every decadent wish granted, without ever having to leave the building.

“What has the ‘C’ got to do with messages on my bathroom mirror?”

“Because the secret of Christianson’s success is deep, dark magic,” Cassandra said. “He can’t work magic himself, but he’s hired some of the best in the business—mages into the blackest arts. At first, when Christianson asked me to manage the ‘C,’ the top of his chain, I was thrilled. It would be a huge step forward in my career.”

“But . . .” With a setup like that, there was always a “but.”

Cassandra shivered. “Please don’t ask me what really goes on at the ‘C’—what you get with the most secret and expensive of packages. Let’s just say there are people out there who will do anything—anything—and pay any price, for pleasure. And please don’t ask me what Christianson expected me to do, with my magic, with . . . myself. One day, I’d had enough, and I left. Escaped is more like it. I didn’t tell anyone, didn’t plan anything. I just walked away.”

“And came to Magellan,” I finished, finally understanding why she’d turned up on my doorstep, looking for a job. “Interesting choice. Why here and not half the world away?”

“The first place they’d look is half the world away,” Cassandra said. “I thought I’d give a small town in the middle of nowhere a try. I changed my name and got you to hire me.”

“So you’re not really Cassandra Bryson?” I’d taken her information for tax purposes, and it had all checked out, but I conceded that a competent witch could have taken care of such trivialities.

I’d read Cassandra’s aura when she’d first arrived and saw what I saw now: a powerful witch who liked things clean and tidy, but without a taint of true evil. I’d liked her, she’d had experience running hotels, and I’d been out of my depth with this place and knew it.

“If you don’t mind, I won’t tell you what my real name is,” Cassandra said. “They can hear names, and use them.”

Mick gave her an understanding nod. He’d explained to me once that his name—the full version of it unpronounceable to me—wasn’t his true name, which would sound more like musical notes. Only a dragon and its dam knew its true name, because knowledge of a dragon’s name—and Cassandra had told me this part—could enslave it.

I also had a true name, a spirit name, one my father had given me the day he’d brought me home, which was between me, him, and the gods. Names were powerful things.

“I came to Magellan because of the vortexes around it,” Cassandra said. “What better place to hide my magic than in a place permeated with it? When I drove by your hotel and saw the wards all over it, I knew I’d struck lucky. Even if you hadn’t been looking for a manager, I’d have washed dishes for you, anything for a chance to live here. Plus your aura held so much innocence, Janet, I knew I could trust you.”

“My aura?” I stared. “Held innocence?” This was the first time in my life I’d heard someone refer to Janet Begay as innocent. Janet, the Stormwalker with the goddess-from-hell mother and magic she was just beginning to understand, was a long way from innocent. Most people called me “troublemaker,” “pain in the ass,” or “oh-my-god-it’s-her-let’s-run.”

Cassandra smiled at me. “Trust me, Janet, after knowing the people I knew, your honesty was refreshing.” Her face fell. “But I’ve put you—and Mick and everyone here—in the worst danger.”

“You think the blood message in the bathroom means Christianson has found you?” I asked.

She nodded. “ And I can’t risk that he won’t kill everyone in this building to get to me. I have to go.”

Cassandra started to rise, but I pulled her back down. “Don’t be stupid. If they’ve found you, the safest place for you is here. We have Mick, and I’ll call Coyote—if I can find him—and we’ll get Pamela up here. There’s some damn strong magic within these walls. We’ll defend you. It’s what friends do.”

Cassandra looked pathetically grateful. Mick and Coyote were the strongest magical beings I knew, but my magic is plenty damn powerful as well. Mine is a mixture of earth magic—Stormwalker power that I inherited from my Navajo grandmother—and the crazy, white-hot goddess magic from Beneath.

Beneath is the shell world below this one, where the evilest of the gods got stuck when Coyote and others sealed the cracks between that world and this one. The vortexes around Magellan held gateways to that world, and one of the evil goddesses stuck down there was my mother. I’d inherited the nasty, unpredictable, insanely powerful Beneath magic from her.

I’d recently learned to twine my Diné-inherited storm magic and my Beneath magic to temper both, but earth magic and Beneath magic mix like oil and water. It’s like having a blender inside you all the time. An angry blender.

Cassandra flinched. “No, I don’t want Pamela here. I don’t want her hurt. If they don’t know about her, they can’t use her to get to me.”

Pamela was a Changer, a shape-shifter who could take the form of a wolf. She and Cassandra shared a small apartment in town, and Cassandra had met her here, in my hotel, the day Pamela had tried to choke the life out of me.

“Pamela will be pissed as hell if you keep her out of it,” I said.

“Yes, but that means she’ll be alive.”

“Good point.” I got up. “But I’m calling Coyote. It never hurts to have a god on your side.”

“I’ll reinforce the wards,” Mick offered. “Janet is right; this is the best place you can stay. Plus I can have a phalanx of dragons here anytime I need them. I don’t care how powerful a mage Christianson sends—he can’t work magic if he’s being fried to a crisp.”

Cassandra got to her feet at the same time we did, the emotion in her eyes touching. “Thank you, Janet. Mick. You are good people. I should have told you right away.”

I shrugged. “We all have our secrets.”

Mick, who had more secrets than most, returned my look blandly and said he’d head to the roof to work the wards.

Cassandra and I returned to the lobby, she to reception and I to my office to hunt down my cell phone. I never could remember to carry the damn thing, so anytime the cell rang, I had to race to find it before it went to voice mail. I’ve never made it yet.

I didn’t make it this time, either. Finally locating the thing stuck in the big potted plant that Juana had obviously watered before our adventure upstairs, I was brushing dirt from it when Coyote himself waltzed through the hotel’s front entrance, followed by Maya Medina, my on-call electrician and pretty much my best friend.

Coyote was a tall, broad-shouldered Native American with a long black braid and intense dark eyes. He didn’t come from any specific tribe that I knew of, because he was Coyote—trickster god, being of raw power, and a royal pain in the ass. He wore his usual jeans and jeans jacket, cowboy boots, a button-down shirt, and a big belt buckle studded with turquoise. Maya, on the other hand, wasn’t in her electrician gear; she was dressed to kill in a tight black dress, red lipstick, and stiletto heels.

Coyote halted in the center of the lobby. He threw his head back to study the gallery that ringed the second story, then he laughed, a big, booming laugh.

“I smell a curse,” he said. “A big, bad curse. What are you still doing in here, Janet?”

As soon as the words left his mouth, the front door slammed shut behind him. A hurricane-like blast blew through the lobby, ripping papers into the air, shoving pictures off the walls, and shattering glass. Every open window banged shut.

The wind died abruptly, followed by a heavy clanking as the big lock on the front door fastened itself. Then all the lights went out.

As the four of us stood in twilight gloom, the magic mirror’s voice rolled from the saloon.

“Uh-oh, kids. I think it’s showtime.”

TWO

MAYA RAN TO THE FRONT DOOR, TRIED TO unlock it, failed, and started pounding on the wood. “Hey, let me out of here!”

Cassandra checked the saloon. “Everything’s locked down tight in there.”

Coyote, damn him, kept laughing. He flicked magic at the windows in the front room, his amusement dying when they stayed firmly shut.

“Come on, Janet,” Maya snapped. “Open the door. There’s somewhere I need to be.”

I shrugged, trying to remain calm. “If you can figure out how to get out, you let me know.”

Maya gave me a disgusted look and marched past me and into the kitchen, where we heard her start beating on the back door.

“So, little witch,” Coyote said to Cassandra, his eyes gleaming in a way I didn’t like. “What have you been up to?”

“Leave her alone,” I said. “What exactly did you mean by a curse, Coyote? I thought this was just a warning spell.”

“Nope,” Coyote said, almost joyfully. “A curse, a hex, very bad juju. You can’t smell it? It stinks like shit, all over this hotel. I’d say you’re in for one hell of a night.”

“So break it,” I said.

Coyote grinned. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to see what happens?”

“No,” Cassandra and I said at the same time.

Coyote just chuckled. I was glad he thought this was so damn funny.

He looked Cassandra up and down, and his laughter died. “I don’t see the connection, though. This might be tough.”

“What connection?” I asked.

“The one between Cassandra and the hex. Could be a general hex, on anyone and everyone near her. Or a blanket hex, on the place she happens to be.”

“Whatever it is, just fix it.” I headed for the kitchen. “We need lights.”

Coyote called after me, “The best spells might need a little sex magic. You game?”

I gave him a signal he’d understand and went on into the kitchen.

Maya at least had stopped banging on the back door. She leaned against it to face me, her slender arms folded, her dark eyes full of rage.

“What the hell, Janet? Every time I come near you, I get battered, taken hostage, held at gunpoint, buried in rubble, or all of the above. And I always, always ruin my clothes. What is it with you?”

“Would you believe me if I said that this time it’s not my fault?”

“No.” Maya uncrossed her arms, gave the door one final thump, and stalked back into the middle of the big kitchen.

It was eerily quiet in here without the appliances humming. My temperamental cook, Elena, hadn’t shown up today. Elena Williams was an Apache from Whiteriver, a culinary genius but given to fits of sullenness. Some days she never came to work at all.

“Whether you believe me or not, can you fix the electricity?” I asked Maya.

“In this dress?”

“You can wear something of mine.”

“You’re two sizes smaller than me, and you only have bikerchick clothes.” Her voice went sad. “I was going to meet Nash.”

“Oh.” Maya’s so-called relationship with Nash Jones, the sheriff of Hopi County, was drama with a capital D. I’d seen them a couple of times together lately, eating sedate meals in the local diner, looking like two people afraid to talk to each other.

“Call him,” I said. “Tell him you’re stuck because of me. He’ll believe that.” My run-ins with Sheriff Jones were volatile and memorable. He blamed me for anything weird that went on in his county, and the trouble was, he was usually right.

“I tried.” Maya’s face went even more glum. “My cell phone won’t work.” She fixed me with an accusing stare. “What did you do this time?”

I started rummaging in a drawer. “Why is everyone assuming that I did something?”

“Because you usually do.”

She had a point. I pulled out a screwdriver. “Here.”

Maya sighed, but she yanked the screwdriver out of my hand and headed for the back of the kitchen, where the junction boxes were. I knew that if anyone could bring the lights back, it was Maya. She was the only one currently in the hotel who wasn’t magical, but when it came to electricity, she had talent to burn.

I returned to the lobby to find Cassandra trying to get a signal from her cell phone. I couldn’t get one on mine, either, and my landline was out as well. A good curse would take care of pesky things like phones.

But I had a couple of secret weapons at my disposal. I poked my head into the saloon and looked at one of them. “Mick still on the roof?” I asked the mirror.

“Yes.” It sounded as glum as Maya. “There’s some bad things stirring, sugar.”

“That’s why I want Mick.”

“I mean, really bad, sweetie. I’m having a bet with myself how fast you’ll replace me if I die.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic. You’re a magic mirror. You can’t die.”

It sighed. “I can be melted into slag, ground to powder. And then I’d never see your beautiful ass again.”

I ignored it. Besides, even a melted magic mirror could be re-formed with no loss to its power. “Are you still tied in with the mirrors at the compound in Santa Fe?”

“The place with Bancroft and Drake and their hottie houseboy? I might be.”

I had the feeling my mirror had been training his magic eye on the twenty-two-year-old human who did errands for Bancroft, a member of the dragon council. The houseboy’s name was Todd, and his job was to make sure that the needs of the dragons’ guests were met. Each and every need.

“Drake owes me one, he and Bancroft both,” I said. “Stand by to contact them if we need help. If we need it, that is. I don’t want Drake out here giving Mick hell if it’s not necessary.” Drake worked for the dragon council, and he was more arrogant than the three council members put together. But I couldn’t ignore his potential as an ally.

“I’ll stand ready, sweet cakes.” The mirror paused. “Could you show me your beautiful bod, one more time? Just in case . . .”

I made a disgusted noise and left the room. I was surrounded by perverts, but they were powerful perverts, and I couldn’t afford to do without them.

I ascended to the second floor, took the back stairs to the third, and opened the door out onto the roof. Mick was there, gazing out over the desert beyond the Crossroads—what the locals called the T-intersection of two highways. My hotel and the Crossroads Bar sat on desert east of the T, but the Crossroads was also a mystical crossroads, I’d learned, where magic and reality could blur. A railroad had been built here once but had gone bust nearly a century ago, the empty railroad bed and a derelict hotel the only reminders of its aspirations to glory.

I paused on the roof a moment to appreciate the fineness of my boyfriend. Mick’s body was broad, hard, and strong, the muscle shirt and jeans he wore, despite the chill, showing it off in a good way. Wind tugged at his wild black hair, which he usually tamed into a short ponytail. Tonight he’d left it loose, and it was all over the place. I wasn’t sure why Mick had hair at all, or why it was always that length, but he never changed it. I didn’t mind, because his hair was wonderful to run my fingers through.

Mick had been my first lover—my only lover—though we’d spent five years apart before we’d both ended up in Magellan. He was the only being who could tame my Stormwalker magic when it threatened to overwhelm me. Thoughts of how he did it started wicked fantasies bubbling inside me.

The dirt parking lot I shared with the Crossroads Bar was filling with motorcycles as the sun set in splendid glory to the west, silhouetting the distant San Francisco Peaks.

Mick turned as my boot scraped on the roof, but he’d known I was there. Mick always knew where I was.

He gave me the smile that turned my heart inside out. “Hey, baby.”

I silently damned whatever mage had tracked down Cassandra. Stupid curses. Mick and I should be making love up here under the blaring sunset, the red light touching our skin, not discussing malevolent magic.

“Coyote says it’s a hex, not a spell,” I said as I approached him. “All doors and windows are locked downstairs.” I looked around. “So why doesn’t it apply to the roof?”

“Who says it doesn’t?” Mick picked up a pebble and tossed it upward as hard as he could. About fifteen feet above our heads, the pebbled exploded into dust.

“Shit,” I whispered.

“Funny, that’s what I said.” Mick dusted his hand on his pants. “If I change to dragon up here, and my body expands . . . zap.”

Terrific. There went my hope that Mick could spread his dragon wings and fly away, maybe go for help or find whatever mage was chanting the curse and fry him.

“How did this get by you?” I asked. “This is the bestwarded building I’ve ever been in. You must have felt someone trying to cast a spell. How did it get by me?”

“Like Coyote says, it’s a curse, not a spell,” Mick said. “Different thing.”

“Oh, right.” Wiccan magic isn’t really my thing. Mick had taught me to work minor spells such as those for healing or protection, but my true power is more raw and basic. Instinctive. Mick was the one with the encyclopedic knowledge of magics.

“Hexes can fasten themselves like leeches or barnacles to a person or a place and then spread,” Mick explained. “They can be cast on one target, like a building, a car, or even a whole town if the caster is strong enough. An expert witch can slide the curse onto protective wards and use the wards themselves to sink the curse into the building, kind of like an infection.”

Great. A magical bacteria.

I hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my jeans. “So how do we get rid of it? Can we infuse the wards with defensive magic, kind of like sending in antibiotics?”

“Possibly. Or we could take down the wards altogether, but that might be exactly what the mage wants. Hexes are tricky. Let me think about it. In the meantime, we need to minimize casualties.”

Minimize casualties. Just what I wanted to hear.

I raised my gaze to the mountains in the west that were quickly fading into the dusk and said a prayer. The gods of my people lived in those mountains, and so did the kachinas, the Hopi spirits who were watching me, not always in a friendly way.

“This was not how I envisioned spending my evening,” I said.

“No?” Mick’s smile heated my blood. “And how did you envision spending it?”

I traced the reddish dust on the rooftop with my boot. “Since I haven’t seen you in a couple of days, how did you think?”

“I can guess.” His smile widened. “I have a couple of new things I want to try.”

“New things?” I gave him a mock-innocent look. “You mean there’s more?”

“So much more.” Mick came to me and drew the knuckle of his forefinger down my cheek. “I want to teach you everything, Janet.”

Believe me, I wanted to learn. I turned my head and pressed a kiss to his palm. “Maybe a little Tantric magic would loosen up the curse?”

Mick’s growl wasn’t human. “I wish, but we can’t trust the hex. It might make some seriously bad shit happen.”

Like things falling off, maybe? Figures. I had the feeling the hex wasn’t going to let us have any fun.

Mick brushed his thumb over the corner of my mouth. “It would be a hell of a way to go, but I’m not ready to lose you yet.”

I wasn’t ready to lose Mick, either, especially when I still wasn’t really sure I had him. I raised on my tiptoes and kissed his lips.

“Let’s go minimize casualties,” I said before I could turn the kiss into something more satisfying. “But when this is done . . .”

Mick slanted me his bad-boy smile. “When this is done, I won’t hold back.”

I returned the grin. “Good. I’m looking forward to it.”

WE WALKED INSIDE together, hand in hand. “Who’s in?” Mick asked as we started down the stairs.

I considered. “Maya, Coyote, Cassandra, me, and you. Fremont. Juana walked off the job, and Elena never showed up. I only had three rooms filled, and one couple left after the curse played the little trick with the blood. I don’t know whether the other guests have come back for the night . . .” I stopped in my tracks. “Crap.”

Mick and I looked at each other, realizing at the same time. “Ansel,” we said together, and we took the stairs at a run.

THREE

JUST THE QUESTION TO MAKE MY DAY bright—what effects will a very powerful mage’s curse have on a Nightwalker who’s trying to stay on the wagon?

The door of room 2, where Ansel had taken up lodgings a few weeks ago, was firmly closed, and no sound came from behind it. Usually I wouldn’t have let a Nightwalker into my hotel, but Ansel had seemed so alone and morose the night he’d arrived that I couldn’t turn him down.

He’d so far kept to himself and been far less trouble than some of my human guests. I’d learned to have cow’s blood on order for him, but I wasn’t certain of our supply. I’d left a note for Elena the cook to check, but of course she’d decided to not come in today.

I grabbed a flashlight from my office and headed to the kitchen while Mick stayed in the lobby to both check the wards and keep an eye on room 2.

When I reached the kitchen, I could just make out Maya in the back, her long legs a pale smudge in the darkness. The occasional curse in Spanish floated to me.

I yanked open the walk-in refrigerator and quickly splayed my flashlight over the shelves. The refrigerator was depressingly bare, but I relaxed a little when I spotted a plastic gallon bottle full to the top with blood. Good. One of those usually kept Ansel going for a couple of days, so he would be all right. The rest of us might get a little hungry if the doors stayed locked for too long, but at least we wouldn’t be Nightwalker food.

Out in the lobby, Mick was hugging the wall by the front door, cheek pressed to it, palm moving over the plaster as though he caressed a lover’s skin. I envied the wall. I knew what he was doing, though, feeling the essence of the building, connecting with his own magic in it.

Coyote sprawled in a chair with his feet up, watching Mick with interest. Cassandra sat on one of the leather sofas, arms pressed over her stomach, staring at the floor. I plopped down next to her.

“Cassandra, you are the most amazing witch I’ve ever met,” I said. “Your power could light a city.”

Cassandra didn’t look up at me. “Is there a point to this little pep talk?”

Her acid tone surprised me, but I let it go. We were all a little nervous. “I mean that if anyone can defeat a curse it’s you. I’m here to help you, and so is Mick, and we have Coyote. The four of us are damned powerful. We can break this, especially if we work on it together.”

“And me.” Fremont came down the stairs, minus his toolbox, his overalls, face, and cap still spattered with blood.

“And Fremont.” I knew Fremont’s magic was minimal, but even a minor mage can contribute to a group spell. “Thanks, Fremont. We’d welcome your help.”

He gave me a pleased look, but Cassandra raised her head, her eyes red-rimmed and moist. “Janet, will you quit with the team-leader attitude? This is serious.”

“I know, which is why I’m trying to come up with answers.”

Cassandra wiped her eyes as Fremont went back upstairs, probably to check the plumbing. “Do you know what an ununculous is?”

“An unun . . . a what?” I asked.

“It’s a sorcerer who is a master of the blackest arts,” Cassandra said. “And when I say master, I mean the best sorcerer in the world, practitioner of the darkest magics. There are mages out there who summon demons to enhance their power, but an ununculous has more power than any demon ever could. Demons fear him. If he summons a demon, it’s to steal all its power and then try out a new way to kill the demon. The Nazis used an ununculous during the war—there was a branch that tried dark sorcery.”

“Oh, nice. But you keep saying ‘he.’ Are there no female ununculouses?” I paused as my tongue twisted. “Or is the plural of ununculous ununculi?”

“There is no plural, because there’s never more than one at a time.” Cassandra’s voice weakened as she spoke. “When he reaches the highest stage of his power, he fights the current ununculous, and only one survives. An ununculous never trains any other mage, because he knows he’d be teaching his own killer. They do their best to murder any mage who shows inclination to study the black arts too deeply. An aspiring ununculous trains in utmost secret, or he or she doesn’t survive.”

I blew out my breath and scrubbed my hand through my still-blood-caked hair. “And that’s what’s after you?”

Cassandra nodded. “I won’t name him, in case that calls him. But John Christianson employed the ununculous from time to time, paying him millions, to do things for him and for the ‘C.’ The ununculous took the money and did the deeds because he likes money; he’s the ultimate hedonist. I met him a couple of times.” She shuddered. “He knows me; he must have tracked me here.”

I smiled grimly. “But can this ununculous stand against a god, a dragon, a Stormwalker, and one hell of a witch?”

Cassandra gave me a deprecating glance. “Oh, yes. It’s likely he’ll welcome the challenge. He’ll enjoy experimenting until he figures out the most satisfying way of killing us, one at a time.”

I gestured to Coyote, who was still watching Mick fondle the walls.

“Coyote’s a god. Your ununculous, whatever he might aspire to be, is still mortal. Coyote can unmake him anytime he wants to.”

Coyote shrugged. “Maybe.”

I was tired of playing team leader. I got off the couch and headed for the hall that led to my private bedroom and bath. “You three figure something out. I need a shower, even if the water heater is out.”

“No can do, Janet,” Fremont called to me, coming down the stairs again. “Water’s out completely.”

I swung around. “What do you mean? Are the faucets still spraying blood?”

“No, I mean nothing’s coming out. I opened up all the faucets, but they’re bone-dry. That’s all right, though. I can work on the pipes better if the water’s gone.”

“That does it.” I didn’t discount Cassandra’s worry, but damn it, I wanted a shower. “Coyote, blast the curse and get rid of it. We’ll deal with Cassandra’s ununculous when he shows up to finish the job.”

Coyote yawned. “As Fremont says, no can do.”

I marched to the all-powerful god and stuck my finger at his face. “Don’t you dare give me any crap about not interfering in the lives of mortals, because you do it all the time. I’m filthy, it’s getting cold, and there’s a Nightwalker about to rise upstairs while the blood I bought for him slowly spoils in the nonworking refrigerator. Just get rid of the curse. If you are holding out to see how we deal with it, I’ll . . . I’ll tell my grandmother.”

Coyote’s eyes flickered. “Oh, hey, that’s not fair.”

My grandmother, from whom I’d inherited my Stormwalker magic, often hung around my hotel parking lot in the form of a crow, watching over me (or watching to see what I did wrong). She didn’t like Coyote. Once upon a time, she’d run him off our place in Many Farms, he in his coyote form, she with a broom. Grandmother had no fear of trickster gods.

Coyote looked troubled. “I really mean I can’t do it, Janet, sweetie. I seem to have lost my mojo.” He opened his hand and made a throwing motion at the windows, but again, nothing happened. The panes didn’t even rattle.

My heart squeezed. “You’re a god. Your magic can’t disappear.”

“Apparently, it can.”

“You’re tricking me, right? Pretending to be powerless so you’ll see what I’ll do? Some god thing about observing the human condition?”

Coyote leaned to me until we were face-to-face. His nose had been broken at some time in his human form and hadn’t healed in the best way. Why he hadn’t fixed that, I had no idea. “No, Janet. I truly can’t work any magic.”

I went cold. If this ununculous was so powerful that his curse could render a god helpless, what could we do against him?

Fear and rage awoke in me, and that, in turn, stirred the all-powerful, goddess-from-hell magic I fought every day to control. I’d been teaching myself, with the help of my friends, to twine it with my Stormwalker magic, to form a warm and strong power without the side effect of chaotic destruction, but it was tough going.

There was no storm in the sky right now, and if I chose, I could let the Beneath magic untwine itself and become as hot and crazy and devastating as ever. Coyote didn’t want me doing that—a mortal with god magic was a dangerous thing, he’d told me—but I considered this an emergency.

“To hell with it,” I said. “Get out of the way, Mick. I’m breaking the curse.”

Mick stood up, his hand still pressed to the wall. His eyes had gone coal black all the way through, no more trace of blue. “The hex runs pretty deep. If you rip it away from the wards, you might destroy the walls.”

“I don’t care if I bring down the whole damned hotel. I can rebuild it—I’ve done it before. After I take a shower.”

Coyote rose, his height and bulk a formidable barrier. “Janet, you know I can’t let you use the Beneath magic.”

“Make an exception. You can’t do shit right now. You just said that.”

“But if you use that magic to break the curse, my first order of business will be to kill you.”

At the moment, I didn’t care. I was angry, grungy, and not a little worried about what Cassandra had told me. And for some reason, I was convinced I couldn’t fight this ununculous until I’d scrubbed myself clean. I was obsessing, yes, but I didn’t care.

I looked up at Coyote, unafraid. I knew by the expression on his face that my eyes had gone ice green, the color of my mother’s eyes. “Get out of my way,” I said calmly. “Or I’ll do this through you.”

Coyote lunged for me. I stared in shock, not really believing he meant to kill me, but at the last minute, when his hands were wrapping my throat, I realized—yes, he did.

And then Mick was there. Mick ripped Coyote away from me and took the big man down. Coyote’s god power outweighed Mick’s dragon magic any day, but with them both in human form, neither using magic, they were well matched in strength.

While the two of them fought it out on my earth-colored tile floor, I raised my hands, willing the worst of the Beneath magic to come out and play. White-hot light roared from my fingers and hit the door full force. The hotel shuddered, glass tinkling in the windows.

I threw back my head and laughed. I hadn’t felt power like this in months. I’d forgotten how much I loved it.

“Feel that, sorcerer,” I said, my entire body crackling with magic. “Fucking feel it.”

There was a sizzling noise, and sparkling electricity danced across every wall. A high-pitched scream shrilled from the kitchen.

Maya.

I snapped off the Beneath magic—or tried to. A glowing nimbus clung to my hands as I turned and sprinted for the kitchen, Fremont and Cassandra right behind me.

FOUR

WE FOUND MAYA SITTING ON THE FLOOR against the wall, cradling one arm, her black dress hiked up to her hips. When she saw me charge in with my hands glowing white and my eyes bright green, she screamed again.

“Are you all right?” I yelled at her. “What happened?”

Maya’s face was streaked with mascara and tears. “What do you think happened? I shocked myself. What the hell are you doing?”

Fremont crouched next to her. “Didn’t you switch off the power?”

“Of course I switched it off. I threw the main. I’m not stupid. A big arc jumped out of the generator and wrapped around my arm. Damn, and I’d almost gotten it working.”

Had I done this? With my wave of Beneath power, had I sent electricity through the building to electrocute Maya? Or was it the curse simply not wanting Maya—or me—to get the lights back on?

“Don’t worry about the electricity, Maya,” I said, trying to bring myself under control. “We have plenty of candles, and we’re going to break this spell. Let Cassandra look at your arm.”

“She’s a medic?” Maya asked.

“No, but she’s good with a healing spell.”

“A magic medic.” Fremont grinned.

Cassandra tented her hands over her mouth, tears trickling from her eyes. “I’d better not. If the ununculous behind the hex is after me, using magic will draw him here faster.”

“Cassandra,” I said, my jaw tight. “You need to hold it together and help us.”

“I can’t.” Cassandra started to sob, crumpling to her knees. “I can’t. Don’t make me.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Fremont asked, wide-eyed.

I wished I knew. I’d never seen Cassandra lose her cool, no matter how desperate the situation. “Either the hex is making her a little nuts, or the ununculous really is that terrifying.” I sighed. “So, that’s one powerful Wicca and one god down for the count.”

“You still have me,” Fremont said quickly.

“Yes,” I said, giving him a grateful look. “And me. And Mick.”

And the mirror, I added silently. Time to have it send messages. Dragons knew everything about everyone, even though they mostly sat back and observed. I had no doubt that Bancroft of the dragon council would have heard of the ununculous and know who he was. Time to call in my favor.

I dug in drawers for emergency candles, happy we had so many. In the desert, storms summer and winter could easily knock out electricity, and even though we had our own generator, it didn’t always work—like now. Fremont started helping me set the candles into holders and lit them with a butane lighter.

“Fremont, can you and Cassandra fix some food for all of us? Something simple, even chips and dip would work. Maya, come out front with me, and Mick will take a look at your arm. He has healing magic, too. We’ll have our little meal and figure out how to beat this.”

“She’s being team leader again,” Fremont said.

“It’s better than sitting on our asses waiting to be picked off. Now do it.”

Cassandra looked up from her huddle on the floor. “Sorry, Janet.”

Fremont helped Cassandra to her feet and gave me a salute. “Aye-aye, ma’am. We’re on it.”

I put my arm around Maya’s waist and guided her to the lobby. Mick was back at the walls, the fight over. Coyote sat on the stairs to the second floor, near the statue of the coyote my friend Jamison Kee had made for me. Blood stained Coyote’s face where it had run from his nose and a cut on his lip, but Mick looked whole and unscathed.

I gave Maya to Mick’s capable healing—for a man his size, he could be incredibly gentle—and strode into the saloon.

Through the saloon windows I could see the Crossroads Bar, now teeming with life. Floodlights glared to illuminate the motorcycles parked in front, and I saw movement inside the open door. Oh, to be there sipping beer provided by the taciturn Barry Dicks, fending off unwanted passes from drunk bikers. Paradise compared to being stuck in a curse-ridden hotel.

As I turned away from the windows and moved to the mirror, Maya wandered in. She still cradled her arm, but less tenderly now. Mick’s magic would have easily fixed whatever burn or damage she’d sustained.

Maya walked to the window in her high heels and looked out at the bar with the same wistfulness I’d had. “Mick and Coyote are growling at each other again. I never thought I’d say this, but you are acting the least weird of anybody, Janet.”

She flattered me. I went behind the bar, unfolded the stepstool I kept back there, and stepped up to look into the mirror.

“I think it’s time to get Drake,” I murmured to it. “And while you’re at it, tell him to call the Hopi County Sheriff’s Department.” I couldn’t have the mirror contact Nash directly, because Nash was unable to hear it, but Drake knew who Nash was and would find him.

Silence met me.

“Hello?” I tapped on the mirror. “Is this thing on?”

“Janet?” Maya said from the window.

I stood on tiptoe and shook the mirror in its frame. “Wake up, damn you.”

A piece of glass fell out and shattered on the floor. The mirror made no sound, and my breath stopped. It hated pieces of itself breaking, would scream in melodramatic terror when it happened. Simple breakage couldn’t hurt it, but the mirror always acted as though it was on death’s door when a piece broke.

“Hey.” I shook it again. “Talk to me, or I pulverize you.”

Nothing. No Oh, sugar-pie, don’t hurt me, I’ll be good. Or Only if you promise to wear a leather bustier and thigh-high boots.

“Janet, who are you talking to?” Maya asked. “I take it back about you not being weird.”

“Damn it all to hell.” I jumped down from the stool and fetched the broken pieces of mirror, cutting myself on one. I put the pieces into an ashtray, selecting one of the smoother ones to shove into my pocket.

I’d been arrogant, thinking that while the ununculous might be a big, bad sorcerer, we stood a chance to defeat him because we had a magic mirror. Even a minor witch can face the strongest mage if she has a magic mirror behind her.

If the hex had rendered the mirror dormant, we could be seriously screwed.

“Hey,” Maya said, rushing to the window. “There’s Carlos.”

Carlos was my bartender. At the moment, he was staring in confusion at the outside door while he rattled the handle, trying to get in to work his shift.

“Janet?” he called. “Anyone home?”

“Carlos!” Maya banged on the window, but Carlos didn’t hear her. Maya started beating on the window so hard I feared she’d break the glass. “Hey, we’re here! Carlos!”

Carlos obviously didn’t see her either. He kept trying the door, and then he attempted to pry open the window right next to Maya. He backed away from the building, frowning. Maya shouted at him, calling him names in both English and Spanish, but Carlos wandered away toward the front of the hotel.

“Idiota,” Maya screamed at him as he walked away.

“Give him a break, Maya. He can’t hear you.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a curse. A hex. Magic badness. Cassandra’s enemies want her trapped in this hotel, and they don’t want her to get help.”

Thinking about that, I wondered why the ultra-bad sorcerer hadn’t waited until Cassandra was alone to confront and kill her. I could understand a sadistic man making Cassandra watch her friends die first, but why would he allow her the potential help of a dragon and the god Coyote? Why risk that?

Something was wrong here, and I needed to know what. But even if Cassandra had neglected to tell us everything, it didn’t really matter. We were cut off and in trouble, and now we were without the magic mirror’s communication ability. We needed help.

“We need Nash,” I said. If dragons were out, Nash Jones was the next best thing.

“Don’t you think I’ve been trying to call him?” Maya demanded. “I told you, all the cell phones are out and so is your landline.”

She went silent as we both watched Carlos circle back to the saloon, frown in puzzlement at the door again, then drift to his car and get in it. He started up, his taillights flashing as he pulled away from the parking lot. Maya muttered under her breath, calling Carlos more names.

“Let him go,” I said. “And let’s concentrate on contacting Nash.”

“How?” Maya asked sourly. “Smoke signals?”

“Maybe. I’ll think of something.”

I left the saloon a lot less confident than when I’d gone in. I made for Coyote, who still lounged by the coyote statue as though drawing comfort from the stone. He’d at least wiped the blood off his face.

Mick was touching the walls again. He was becoming obsessed. Maya thumped down on a couch, folded her arms, and pretended to ignore us.

“Tell me you really do have your god powers,” I said, sitting on the steps next to Coyote.

“Sorry, Stormwalker. Tell me you’re not going to try the Beneath magic again, when we can’t predict what the hex will do to it.”

“I will use it to defend my friends if I have to. I’ll not stand by and let the sorcerer, whoever he is, kill us or get to Cassandra.” When the ununculous attacked, I planned to kill him. Quickly. End of problem.

“When he comes,” Coyote said, as though he’d read my mind, “Mick fights him, not you. Mick’s the only one who can.”

“Like hell I’m letting Mick face an over-the-top powerful sorcerer on his own. If I can take this guy down, I’m doing it.”

Coyote gave me a stern look. “You need to stop and think about what kind of forces you’d be unleashing if you use your Beneath magic, Janet. Undampened, on something like that sorcerer, with everything complicated by his hex. There’s no way of knowing what kind of magic he’ll be drawing on. The two of you could rip open the vortexes and release who the hell knows what, including your bitch-queen goddess mother. I will not let you do that.”

My blood chilled. The desert to the east of my hotel was riddled with vortexes, confluences of mystical energy. New Agers liked them, thinking that they enhanced their chi or whatever, but I knew what vortexes really were—gateways to the world Beneath. If my mother got out, she wouldn’t be looking to have a happy family reunion. She’d destroy every single person she could get her hands on, beginning with those most special to me. What she’d do with me, I had no idea, but it wouldn’t be anything good.

I was about to concede that Coyote had a point when Mick rushed across the room, yanked Coyote up by the shirt, and slammed him against the statue.

“Mick!” I protested.

I was more worried about the sculpture than Coyote, but Mick’s eyes were black with fury. “I told you what I’d do if you threatened my mate again,” Mick snarled.

“He wasn’t threatening,” I tried. “He was explaining.”

Coyote might be out of magic, but Mick wasn’t. His eyes were still black dark, and fire flared from his fingers. Flame magic licked up the arms of Coyote’s jeans jacket, threatening to burn him alive.

Coyote solved the problem by turning into a coyote. Mick suddenly had his hands full of a hundred or so pounds of enraged beast while Coyote’s clothes fell from him in smoking shreds. Mick’s eyes filled with fire, and his tattoos began to glow red.

“Don’t turn into a dragon!” I shouted at him. “Don’t you dare turn into a dragon!”

Coyote kept snarling, fighting, clawing, and Mick fought him. Maya drew her legs up under her on the sofa and watched. The commotion brought Fremont and Cassandra from the kitchen, but they only stopped and watched in alarm.

Coyote bit Mick on the shoulder, and blood blossomed on Mick’s shirt. Mick’s hands filled with fire, and Coyote’s fur began to smolder.

No way should I shove myself between the ripping, clawing, and fire-striking males, and Coyote had just scared the shit out of me about using my Beneath magic. But I didn’t see that I had any choice. I couldn’t let Coyote kill Mick, the man I loved, and if Mick killed Coyote, I didn’t want to imagine the consequences.

I drew on my Beneath magic, finding it scarily close to the surface. Just a little bit, I thought, nothing like what I’d done when I’d tried to break the wards. The tiniest amount was all I needed. I would separate the two wrestling alpha males and then shut it off.

What rushed up from inside me was a huge blast of otherworldly power that made me gasp with its intensity. I desperately held on to the magic, sweat pouring from me, knowing that if I let the magic go, it would blow off the roof.

“I can’t,” I babbled, the sweat freezing on my face. My breath fogged out. “I can’t.”

I didn’t have to. A pair of thin, but incredibly strong, arms locked around Mick’s waist, tore him from Coyote, and tossed Mick aside. Coyote, still in his fighting frenzy, went for Mick’s assailant, but I leapt between them and yelled at Coyote, “Stop!”

Coyote skidded to a halt, his eyes yellow with rage. The tall, slender man stepped beside me and fixed Coyote with a steady gaze.

“Hey, Ansel,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Mind telling me what is going on?”

Ansel’s voice was calm and matter-of-fact, and that made me edgy. Ansel, an Englishman who’d been turned Nightwalker at age twenty-three when he’d been a prisoner during World War II, was quiet, soft-spoken, and a little nervous. He collected stamps, watched lots of television, and generally kept to himself.

What he was unlikely to do was throw Mick across a room—he was afraid of Mick—and then calmly ask me what was the matter.

“Hex,” I told him. “You all right?”

The night-dark eyes Ansel turned on me smoldered with a deep hunger. Once you’ve been given the once-over by a ravenous Nightwalker, you don’t forget it. Or you die.

“I am a little peckish, my dear,” he said.

And Ansel never called me “my dear.”

“There’s blood for you in the refrigerator. But the electricity’s out, so please keep the door closed.”

Ansel reached out and traced my cheek with an ice-cold fingertip. “Anything you say, darling.”

Mick started for him. I got myself between Ansel and Mick’s headlong rush, a frightening place to be. “Mick, no!”

“Let him come,” Ansel almost purred. “I’m hungry, and dragon blood would be delicious.”

“Mick,” I said in warning.

Mick stopped, but his eyes flashed fire. “Touch Janet again, Nightwalker, and I tear your head off.”

Ansel gave him a derisive look and turned away, only to have his attention arrested by Maya. Maya self-consciously tugged the hem of her skirt down her thighs.

“Ansel,” she said, not sounding pleased to see him.

“Maya.” Ansel gave her a smile full of teeth. “Want to raid the fridge with me?”

“No.” Maya looked away, a woman’s universal signal for “Get lost.”

“You go alone,” I said to Ansel. “Drink at least half that gallon jug of blood, and then come back in here and help us figure out how to break this hex.”

Ansel turned the smile on me. “Anything you say, mistress.”

Gods, he sounded like the mirror. Ansel finally went off to the kitchen. Fremont and Cassandra got out of his way as he went by, and no one followed him.

Coyote, still a coyote, growled at Mick. I planted myself in front of Coyote and raised my hand, palm out.

“Sit!” I commanded. “Stay!”

Coyote gave me a look that said “Fuck you” and then sauntered over to the sofa, climbed up next to Maya, and lay down.

I drew a long breath. “All right. It looks like the hex is working to bring out the worst in us—or at least release that part of us we try hardest to control. Ansel, bloodlust; me, my Beneath magic; Mick, his dragon instincts; Cassandra, it’s messing with her emotional control. Coyote—I don’t know what’s going on with Coyote.”

Coyote growled again. I was aware of Mick at my back, right against my back, pressed all the way along me. His arm stole around my waist, strong and possessive.

“It hasn’t affected me, Janet,” Fremont said. “I’m being strong for you. And I’m coming up with all kinds of ideas to enhance your plumbing.”

I had to love him. “I can honestly say, Fremont, that so far you are the only male here I haven’t wanted to strangle.”

Fremont winked at me. “I’ve got your back.”

“Janet.” Cassandra’s voice was weary. “I can’t keep letting this happen. I can try a summoning spell, bring the ununculous to me, and let him kill me. He won’t have orders to do anything to the rest of you.”

“Screw that,” I said. “You can’t know what this guy has in mind—he might decide that Mick, Coyote, Ansel, and I are a threat to him. Or he might kill us for the fun of it.”

Cassandra’s face crumpled as her tears came again. “I promise you that if I need to be sacrificed to save the rest of you, I’m willing. I’m the one who got you into this in the first place.”

“No one’s getting sacrificed.” Except maybe Coyote or Mick, if they continued to piss me off. “Besides, I have a few ideas up my sleeve—”

My words were cut off by a gut-wrenching moan from the kitchen, which wound quickly into a wail of anguish. I rushed past Cassandra and Fremont and into the kitchen, Mick hard on my heels.

Ansel was bent over the big stainless steel sink on the other side of the room, vomiting his guts out. The gallon jug of blood lay on its side on the floor, the remaining liquid spilling across the tiles. As we piled into the kitchen, Ansel looked at us over his shoulder, blood all over his mouth.

“It’s bad,” he snarled. “The blood is bad. Are you fucking trying to poison me?”

“No,” I said in surprise. “It was fresh yesterday, never out of the fridge.”

“It’s tainted, and it’s cow.”

“You always drink cow.”

Ansel dug his fingers into his mouth and scraped out more blood, which he flung into the sink. “Not tonight, I don’t. I need to feed, and I need to feed now. Either one of you volunteers, or I simply start biting.”

FIVE

MICK STEPPED IN FRONT OF ME, AND FOR once his overprotectiveness didn’t irritate me. “You touch anyone here, and I’ll kill you,” Mick said. His words were quiet, deep, and unshakable.

“Come on and have a go, then,” Ansel said. “I’d like some dragon blood.”

Fremont gaped. “Is he a vampire?”

Cassandra started to answer, then snatched paper towels from the counter and pressed them to her overflowing eyes. “Damn it, why can’t I stop crying?”

“Ansel is a Nightwalker,” I said crisply. “Much like a vampire, but a little different from ones in the movies. For one thing, he’s real.”

Ansel’s lip curled. “He’s real hungry.”

“I’m killing him,” Mick said. “Sorry, Janet, I know he’s your friend, but no one here should be a Nightwalker snack, and I’m certainly not letting him get his fangs into you.”

“It’s not his fault,” I countered. “I’m betting that the cow’s blood would have been perfectly fine if not for the curse.”

“It’s also not a demon’s fault it likes to devour human flesh,” Mick said. “That doesn’t mean I’d let one feast on you.”

“Ansel,” I said, trying to ignore Mick. “If I can give you fresh cow’s blood, will you drink it? It would take the edge off at least, right?”

Ansel gave me a grudging nod. “Possibly.” He wet his lips, then grimaced when his tongue touched a drying drop of the tainted blood. “I really need a human vein.”

“For me, Ansel.” I held his gaze with my own. Nightwalkers could mesmerize with their gazes, but none had ever been able to do that to me. “There’s another jug in the back of the refrigerator. Go get it, and drink it. If you don’t, and Mick tries to kill you, I won’t be able to stop him.”

Not without killing Mick in the process. If I had to choose between Mick and a Nightwalker ready to go on a rampage, sorry, Mick won.

Ansel sneered, fangs still long and nasty, but he headed for the fridge. I could tell he was trying to control himself, but he nearly ripped the handle off the refrigerator door when he opened it.

As soon as he stepped inside, I rushed the door. Mick caught on and got there first. He slammed the door just as Ansel realized what we were doing and turned around. Ansel hit the door from the inside, the boom rattling the kitchen windows. Mick fused the latch with a lance of dragon fire.

Ansel screeched, an unearthly, ear-shattering sound. He pounded on the door, and Mick stepped away from it, breathing hard.

“That should hold him,” Mick said. “For a while.”

“A while is all we need.” I wiped my brow. “The air in there is still cold enough to make him a little sluggish. By the time he breaks out, hopefully we’ll have this curse thing resolved.”

“Breaks out?” Fremont asked, his eyes wide. “What happens if he breaks out?”

Cassandra answered from behind her tear-dampened paper towels. “Then he’ll want more than a snack.”

Maya put one hand on her hip. “You do know that most of our food is in there.” Aside from the little pile of half-made sandwiches on the counter, dangerously close to spattered cow blood, she was right.

I gestured to the refrigerator, where Ansel was already denting the door from the inside. “Go on in, if you really want to. Pick something out for me, too. In the meantime, there’s something I need to do on the roof.”

“IS THIS SOME crazy Indian thing?” Maya asked me as she walked out onto the roof with me.

“No,” I answered. “Just some crazy desperation thing.”

Mick followed us, but Cassandra, Fremont, and Coyote remained below to make sure Ansel didn’t get out. Or at least Coyote and Fremont did. Cassandra had curled into a ball on a sofa, still weeping.

I was pleased to see, as we walked outside, that the emerging stars were being swallowed by thick clouds to the north and west. My skin prickled. A storm was coming, a big one, and my Stormwalker magic wanted to lick it all over.

Once the storm grew big enough, I’d suck it inside me, bind it to my Beneath magic, and let it rip.

Mick laced his fingers through mine, and I knew he sensed my storm magic awakening. The aftermath of storms usually involved him calming me down from the overwhelming magic, and that involved our grappling bodies and plenty of sweat.

Maya shivered as the approaching wind cut through her thin dress. “You think Nash will see your smoke signals from twenty miles away and come running? Nash never even looks out the window.”

“No.” I crouched down and set out the supplies I’d grabbed: a brazier, sage, charcoal, and towels from the linen supply closet. I piled charcoal and sage in the brazier and looked at Mick. The butane lighters had stopped working, and I hadn’t been able to find any matches.

Mick’s eyes were still black, without a hint of blue. He pointed at the brazier, a fireball streaked out of his forefinger, and the brazier exploded into flames. Maya and I jumped away.

“I only needed a spark,” I said as I grabbed a towel and beat the flames in the bowl back to manageable size.

Mick balled his hand. “Sorry, I was trying for a spark. That just came out.”

Terrific. If Mick lost control of his Firewalker fire, he could burn the hotel down around us. The hex might burn with it, but we, trapped inside, would still be dead.

Was that what the hex meant to do, I wondered, bring out the worst in us so that we were the means of our own destruction? The wind turned suddenly icy.

“So, what happens now?” Maya asked.

I got to my feet and fed the towel I’d been using into the fire. The cloth sputtered and caught, then started to smolder, sending up a wisp of stinking smoke.

“I’m hoping that someone will see smoke coming from the top of the Crossroads Hotel and report it. A 9-1-1 call will bring firefighters, the police, and Nash.”

“Carlos couldn’t see me or hear me through the window,” Maya said. “What makes you think the smoke will be visible?”

I had no idea. Mick had demonstrated that the bubble of the hex extended fifteen feet upward. Possibly the smoke would simply collect in the bubble and not disperse, but wouldn’t that look weird enough to attract attention? A glowing ball of smoke on top of the Crossroads Hotel?

“If Nash hears about it, he won’t be able to stay away,” I said. “He’ll have to know what trouble I’m getting myself into this time, so he can gloat if no other reason. Besides, he and you were supposed to meet tonight, right? He’ll get worried when you don’t show up.”

“He won’t.” Maya folded her bare arms. “Out last date didn’t exactly end well.”

I grew curious. “What happened?”

“Do you know what he talked about during our nice dinner out? Nonstop? You.”

“Me?”

I felt Mick at my shoulder, his breath hot on my skin. “Why?” he asked, his voice taking a dangerous edge.

“Because he and Janet had just had another run-in,” Maya said. “He was angry at her, and he told me all about it at the fancy restaurant he took me to—through the appetizers and the wine, and all through dinner. Couldn’t shut his stupid mouth about you, Janet.”

“Sorry.” It was hardly my fault that Sheriff Jones was clueless when it came to women, but I felt bad that his choice of conversation had hurt Maya. “What did you do?”

“Poured my wine in his lap and walked out.”

Mick snorted with laughter. “Good for you.”

“This was supposed to be our makeup date. If I don’t show, he’ll assume I’m still mad at him. Which I am.”

Mick put his arms around me from behind while I dropped another towel into the smoking mess. His dragon tattoos glowed eerily in the light from the brazier. “Tell Jones to back off Janet, or he’ll answer to me.”

I suppose some women would be thrilled by a gorgeous man leaping to her defense for every little thing, but his tight protectiveness was starting to worry me. Mick was possessive, yes, but he usually was more sensible about it.

“Nash is immune to your fire,” I pointed out.

“I can’t hurt him magically, no,” Mick said. “But I can break things, like his neck.”

“Let him, Janet,” Maya said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing Nash beaten up a little. But don’t hurt him too much. I want a turn at him, too.”

“Enough with the bloodthirstiness, both of you.” I coughed from the thickening smoke. “Right now, we need Nash whole, and we need him here. Mick, you spent lots of time feeling up the wards. Were you able to strengthen them? Can we fight the hex through them?”

Mick let me go, but he remained standing against me. “I don’t think so. It was a stealthy spell, latching onto the wards themselves. From there it spread through the building like a net, affecting everyone within its drag. If we could find its key, we could unlock it, but the hex itself makes anything we try to do against it or every attempt to decipher it go wrong. I’m lucky I could find out as much as I did.”

“So what do we do? How long will a spell like that last?”

He shrugged. “No way to say. It’s growing in intensity. I’m watching everyone become a little crazier as the night goes on.”

“Including you,” I said.

Mick looked surprised. “It’s not affecting me. I feel a bit of demon in the spell, but Cassandra said the ununculous could steal demon powers. And here’s one more interesting thing about it: The caster had to be very close, as in within the building.”

Mick dropped that bombshell and closed his mouth.

Maya’s eyes widened. “You mean, like he’s hiding in the basement? Dios mío, why don’t we go get him, then?”

“I don’t mean that the ununculous is here,” Mick said. “I’d know. So would Janet. I meant that someone brought the trigger for the spell in with them and set it off. One of us.”

SIX

“DON’T LOOK AT ME,” MAYA SAID QUICKLY. “I didn’t set off any curse. I think you two are nuts.”

“We know it wasn’t you,” Mick said, voice soothing. “Of all of us, you are the only one untouched by magic. You’d have to be at least a minor mage to bring it in.”

“A minor mage,” I said in dismay. “Like Fremont?”

Maya snorted. “Fremont? You don’t mean all that crap he says about being magical is true?”

There was nothing like a good, old-fashioned curse to bring out the paranoia. “He wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Fremont’s a nice person who would never hurt anyone.”

“He could be wholly innocent of the fact that he brought in the curse,” Mick said. “He might have carried it like a mosquito carries a disease. This all started when he came to fix your leaky faucet, right?”

“Right,” I said glumly. “Let’s go talk to Fremont.”

I glanced at the brazier. My fire was smoking merrily, sending a heavy gray-white plume into the darkening sky. As I’d suspected, it stopped about fifteen feet up and simply vanished. But that might be enough. “Maya, can you stay here and make sure that the fire doesn’t go out?” I asked.

“Fine with me.” Maya hunkered against the stone wall, out of the smoke. “I don’t want to go back down into Hotel Crazy.”

“Thank you.”

“But go easy on Fremont,” she said as we passed her. “He can be an idiot, but he’s not a bad person, you know?”

“I know,” I said, and I followed Mick inside.

“I SWEAR TO you, Janet, I never met the guy!” Fremont, white-faced, stared at the tribunal of me, Mick, and Coyote. We were in the kitchen again, where the others had decided to at least nibble on the sandwiches. Cassandra leaned against the wall, her arms folded, her face pale, and her eyes sunken into dark sockets.

Coyote remained a coyote, his yellow eyes a study in irritation. The fact that he’d chosen a form in which he could neither berate me nor give sexual suggestions worried me a bit.

As for Ansel—he was still banging on the door of the refrigerator from the inside. He’d slowed from frantic pounding, settling for a bang every thirty seconds or so.

“You wouldn’t have realized who he was,” Mick said, keeping his voice mild. “Someone you talked to at the diner, a tourist passing through, someone you saw at the gas station . . .”

Fremont shook his head vehemently. “I know everyone in Magellan and Flat Mesa, have for years. I know when someone’s new, and I remember every single person I talk to. I didn’t talk to a nasty sorcerer who wants to kill Cassandra. I’d have noticed his aura, wouldn’t I?”

Bang.

“Not necessarily.” I was amazingly good at reading auras, and I could see Fremont’s magic one now, like pale smoke in sunshine. But Fremont’s magic ability was small, and I doubted he could see them all that well. “If Cassandra’s sorcerer is as good as she says, he’d be able to hide his aura. Very powerful people can do that.” I knew this from personal, and frightening, experience.

“What does he look like, Cassandra?” Mick asked.

Cassandra gave a listless shrug. “Ordinary. So ordinary you wouldn’t look twice.”

“Can you be more specific?” I asked, trying to be patient. Her apathy was grating on me.

“About five foot seven. Dark brown hair. Receding hairline. He looks like any other suit-wearing forty-year-old man in an office.”

Bang.

“Well, I haven’t seen any men in suits in Magellan,” Fremont said. “They’d stand out. I haven’t talked to any man looks like that who I didn’t already know. All right?”

“Can the ununculous change his appearance?” I asked. “If he’s tracking you, he might use a glamour or even a simple disguise.”

Cassandra gave me a watery smile. “Him? He’s the most arrogant man I’ve ever met. What does it matter to him if one of us identifies him? He’ll crush us and not care.”

Bang.

“All right,” I said, drawing a breath. “Could he have seeded the curse in Fremont without Fremont seeing him or noticing? Maybe by brushing by him in a store, something like that?”

Mick answered, “Eye contact is better. If the sorcerer greets you, shakes your hand, he can make sure you received the spark. It’s more emotionally satisfying for him as well. But I suppose it could happen with a brush-by. Like a pickpocket in reverse.”

Fremont waved his hands. “What you’re not getting is that I haven’t seen anyone like who you describe. Not brushing by me in the diner, not even passing me in a car on the road. I would have noticed.”

“I believe you,” I said. He was right, he would have. Fremont loved to watch, and then talk about, his fellow man.

“Thank you.” Fremont let out a sigh and rubbed his hand over what was left of his hair.

“Mick?” I asked. “Have you seen anyone like Cassandra describes?”

“No.”

Bang.

“Okay, then. Neither have I.”

Fremont glared. “Wait, you believe him without grilling him like you did me?”

“Sorry, Fremont. I’m on edge. Mick’s a dragon—if someone seeded a curse on him, he’d notice right away.” I glanced at Mick. “Right?”

Mick affirmed. I’d like to think I would have noticed right away, too. A spark like that would sting both my magics, wouldn’t it? Then again, if this sorcerer was as powerful as advertised . . .

“It was probably me,” Cassandra said.

Fremont looked at her in surprise. “You saw him? Why didn’t you say so?”

“I mean the last time I met him. Christianson might have had the ununculous seed a hex on me, so that if I doublecrossed him, it would activate, like a time-release pill. It would wait until I felt safe and then go off. The ununculous would feel it, and come for me. Revenge served cold.”

A bolt of lightning slammed to the ground not a mile away, followed by a boom of thunder that rolled on, and on, and on. Before its rumbles died, another bolt cracked not far from the first one. My body pulsed with electricity, my Stormwalker magic reaching to suck it in before I could stop it.

Wind struck the hotel with such force that the building creaked. It howled through the eaves and every crack in the edifice, and I felt a breeze cross my face.

“Janet,” Fremont said, staring at me. “Your eyes.”

“What about them?” Sparks laced my fingers as I raised my hands. “Are they green?”

“No. Black. All black. Like nothing’s there.”

I could see out of them fine, no change there, but Mick was watching me in concern. I snatched out the piece of magic mirror I’d shoved into my pocket and stared into it. Sure enough, my eyeballs had gone all black, no pupils or irises. I looked into the black void that was me, until lightning struck again, and white electricity encircled my face.

“I see,” I whispered in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. “I see so much. Darkness. Pain. Terror. The end of all things.”

“Janet,” Fremont said, worried. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I wrenched my gaze from the mirror and looked up. I had their attention now, even Cassandra’s.

“I don’t know why I said that.” Or did I? I had seen it, deep in the mirror, flashes of terror, darkness, fire, white light rising from the ground. Everyone I loved in torturous pain. And then, nothing . . .

Lightning struck again, its white flare rendering the candle flames ineffectual pinpricks. Electricity crawled up my arms, and I bunched my hands to keep from blasting the table, floor, my friends, everything in sight.

I wasn’t certain how I was pulling in the storm magic when the hex wasn’t letting anything physically in or out, but maybe it was because magic isn’t physical. It’s the coupling of the mage and the elements that mage uses for power—Mick and his dragon nature, Cassandra and her spell accoutrements, me and a storm. A psychic connection no one understands. I don’t actually direct the storms themselves—I absorb their elemental might and use it to fuel my own magic.

Or the hex might be letting me use my storm magic so it could busily fuck it up.

I couldn’t control the power. I’d felt this before—at age eleven, when I’d first called a storm’s power, not on purpose. I remembered flailing my hands, trying to get rid of the lightning that clung to them. I’d succeeded only in blasting a tree and burning down a shed. I’d run off into the desert in terror, the storm following me.

This storm was big and close, and I was locked inside my hotel by a curse. No running away to keep my loved ones safe.

“Janet,” Cassandra said, watching me with a hint of her usual witchy focus. “What did you see?”

“I don’t remember now.” The visions were fading, dying as fast as they’d come. “Fire, darkness. The vortexes. Nothing.”

Bang.

Cassandra didn’t answer, but she held on to the back of a kitchen chair, her knuckles white.

More lightning struck, and electric arcs crawled all over my body. I moved my hand, and a tail of lightning caught the end of the counter and blew it into pieces.

“Whoa.” Fremont threw up his arms to shield himself from the rain of wood and tile. Coyote, still a coyote, grabbed Cassandra by the skirt and towed her back out of my way.

Only Mick stood his ground. Mick, whose eyes had gone as black as mine, watched me with a predatory stare.

“Mick,” I whispered.

He moved to me and took my hands. His body jolted as the lightning jerked into him, but he smiled a wide, bestial smile. “Want me to draw it off?”

“This is a full storm. The last time you were with me in a full storm, I nearly killed you.”

“That was different.” Mick leaned down and bit my cheek, and the heat of his mouth awoke every need I’d ever had. “That was battle. This is me, drawing off your power so you can function. Give me your lightning, Janet.”

Bang.

I turned to Mick and kissed him.

The kiss canceled out every worry I had, every terror of the night. This was me and Mick, and this was raw. His lips bruised mine as he drew me up into him and explored my mouth with deep, hot strokes. I clung to his shoulders, and my lightning flowed straight into him.

Mick cupped my breast, his palm rough through my shirt, and I wound my leg around his thigh. I wanted him; gods, I wanted him. The lightning was driving me crazy, the storm outside was escalating, and I craved Mick.

I wrapped my arms around his neck and melted against him, finding him hard for me. Sex with Mick could be fast, brutal, and exciting, and then he could turn around and be so incredibly tender it made me cry.

Tonight, I wanted him with everything I had. If the others hadn’t been in the kitchen with us, Mick would have had laid me across the stainless steel table and taken me then and there.

Bang.

“Um,” Fremont said. “I appreciate that you guys are in love, but . . . a time and a place?”

“He’s toning down her storm magic,” Cassandra said, sounding weary. “He’s afraid she’ll kill us with it. Dragons can imbibe storm magic. It won’t hurt him, I don’t think.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

I was aware of Coyote watching us closely, a far-too-interested look in his yellow eyes. As if in answer, Mick lifted me into his arms and strode with me out of the kitchen. I clung to him, my mouth still seeking his, blue crackles of electricity crawling over both of us.

Maya came charging down the stairs as Mick carried me toward the back hall. “I’m not staying up there to get struck by lightning,” she said. “Anyway, it’s raining now, so the fire’s out.” She stopped. “Janet, what the hell?”

“Go to the kitchen,” I said breathlessly. “Talk to you later.”

Maya rolled her eyes as Mick whisked me into the hall that led to my bedroom. Before we hit the threshold, I shouted back, “Keep Coyote away from us.”

Mick kicked closed the bedroom door, cutting off Maya’s deprecations directed at me in Spanish.

MICK DUMPED ME onto the bed and started pulling off his clothes. Even while my bedcovers started to smolder from the lightning in my hands, I didn’t mind sitting back and watching my boyfriend strip.

His body was delicious. I remembered the night I’d first seen it, in a hotel room in Las Vegas. I remember sitting on the bed, nervous as hell, while he pulled off his shirt to reveal a chest and six-pack abs a bodybuilder would kill for. As he’d turned around to toss the shirt somewhere, his jeans had dipped to reveal the jagged fire tattoo riding across his lower back. Plus the fact that he wasn’t wearing any underwear. By the time he’d turned back around, I’d had my shirt off, too. Mick had smiled at me, his eyes so damned blue. He’d put his knee on the bed, touched my face with his big hand, and said, “Gods, Janet, do you know how beautiful you are?”

His eyes were black tonight, but my heart still pounded as hard as it had then.

Mick threw his shirt on the dresser. “What are you smiling at?”

“Memories,” I said.

Lightning struck right outside, and Mick stripped me, not slowly, not gently, but with the skill of long practice. He jerked out of his own jeans and laid me down on the mattress, his mouth all over me. My lightning fired into him as he covered my skin with openmouthed kisses, his breath hot when he kissed the stud in my navel.

He looked up, my lightning sizzling around him and sparking in his eyes. “More,” he whispered. “Give it to me good.”

The power in me wanted to dive into him, like the best sex, but I worried I’d hurt him. Mick never touched me when the storm was at its peak; it would be too much.

Mick pulled me up until we were kneeling together, naked, sweat slicking our bodies. “Don’t hold back,” he growled. “I want it. All of it. As much as you can give me.”

“Mick, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t. I want it, Janet. I want you.”

When I still hesitated, Mick grabbed me, opened my lips with his, and sucked the power out of me.

I screamed against his mouth. Mick imbibed my lightning as though it were the best wine, his body hard, his whispered groans driving me crazy.

Gods, I love him.

The fire tattoo on his back was hot under my touch, his body sizzling with my lightning. We risked blasting a hole in the floor and tumbling into the basement, and it was the most erotic thing I’d ever experienced. Mick laid me back down on the bed, his eyes devouring me, and he entered me in one swift thrust.

He pinned me down, my Mick who liked to play the master with me, made even more exciting because I knew he’d never, ever hurt me. He’d taught me that first night to trust him with everything I had, and the reward was pleasure I’d never dreamed existed.

Tonight bore the wild edge of danger because of the hex. Mick had been reluctant to try sex-enhanced spells, but now we tossed away caution like a used tissue and gave in to the ecstasy. This was different from spell casting—this was Mick simply driving into me, and me giving him every bit of power I had.

I met his thrusts with my body, my nails raking down his back, my cries ringing to the ceiling. Outside the storm wound up, and inside we did the same.

Mick’s eyes shone with fire. “Love you,” he grated. “Love you so much.”

The snakes and whorls of electricity slowly dimmed, Mick’s dragon magic absorbing them all. But Mick was a long way from being finished. He pinned my wrists over my head and kept going, this lovemaking session growing ever more crazy.

I think we would have gone on until we died, if the magic mirror hadn’t chosen that moment to let out a high-pitched keen. The sound spiraled up until it knifed through my head, and even Mick cursed and jammed a hand over his ear.

“What the fuck?” he snarled.

I rolled out from under Mick, and Mick landed next to me, panting, while I leaned from the bed and scrabbled for the piece of mirror in my pocket. “Hey!” I yelled at it.

The keening wound all the way down and flattened out into a word. Summertiiime.

“Hey, you moronic piece of glass. Call Drake. Get him over here.”

The mirror kept on belting out the song from Porgy and Bess. I shook it and yelled at it, but my mirror ignored me.

“I don’t think it can hear you,” Mick said breathlessly.

“Damn it!” I flung the mirror into the wall. The voice dimmed somewhat but didn’t stop. I didn’t know which was worse, having the mirror dark or stuck singing show tunes.

“If he starts singing to the dragons, Drake will be out here fast enough,” Mick said. He ran a firm hand down my body. “Right now I need more.” He kissed my back. “So much more.”

It would be stupid to stay in here and have sex while Cassandra’s enemy waited for us to be at our weakest. But I willingly rolled over and drew him into my arms.

Mick had started kissing me again with hungry strokes when someone beat on the bedroom door.

“Janet,” Maya called through the wood, her agitation strong. “If you’re done screwing in there, Nash is out front. He’s with Pamela, and they’re trying to get in.”

SEVEN

I YANKED ON MY CLOTHES AND WAS ABOUT to hurry out after Maya, but Mick put his arm across the door, blocking my way. He was a big man and made a formidable barrier.

“Wait,” he said. “Let me check it out first.”

Impatiently I buttoned my jeans. “It’s Nash, Maya said. Exactly who we need.”

“Maybe it’s Nash. I want you to stay in here and lock the door behind me.”

This was getting annoying. “Staying in my room won’t save me from the hex,” I said.

“Even so, wait for me to clear it before you come out.”

I wasn’t about to obey. I knew I couldn’t fight Mick, but I was small enough and swift enough to duck under him before he could grab me. I heard him growling in anger as he came after me, but this was my hotel, and I was more than ready for Mick’s alpha-dragon instincts to recede.

Someone was pounding on the front door. “Janet!” Nash called. “Open up. It’s Jones.”

As though that weren’t obvious. The blue lights of the Hopi County Sheriff’s Department SUV flared behind him, and his sheriff’s badge winked on the uniform coat he wore against the cold. Pamela, a Native American Changer in black leather pants and jacket, stood next to him in tall fury.

“Let me break it down,” we heard her say with impatience.

Cassandra pressed her hands to the window. “No, Pamela, get out of here! I don’t want you here!”

Pamela didn’t hear, and neither did Nash, nor did they see the rest of us at the windows like lizards against glass. Nash kept pounding and then trying the door handle, which wasn’t budging.

“Come on, Nash,” I whispered. “Open it.”

Nash took a step back, drew out his nine-millimeter, and shot the lock. I cringed, thinking of the Native American artisan who’d crafted the door handle and lock for me up in Santa Fe. His exquisite work was now slag with a bullet in it.

Nash and Pamela slammed against the door in unison, and the wood bulged inward. Another blow and the door splintered from the hinges. I felt the wards around the entrance crumble and die, reacting to the magic void that was Nash Jones. The curse magic that had piggybacked on them faded to nothing.

The wards in the walls were still intact, and so was the hex, but Nash was able to burst in and swing his pistol around the lobby.

He took us in: Maya, Fremont, Cassandra, me, Mick. I had no idea where Coyote had got to.

When Nash realized there was no immediate threat, he pointed the pistol at the floor. “Janet, what is this?”

Pamela rushed past him and caught Cassandra in a crushing hug, lifting her off her feet. “Are you all right, baby?”

Nash pinned me with an ice gray stare. “Ms. Grant charged into my office, insisting there was something wrong at your hotel. So what are you up to?”

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Nash looked past me to the kitchen door. “You have someone back there?”

“Nash,” I said. “Touch the walls. Hurry. Please.”

Nash completely ignored me to listen, his gun held ready.

“That’s just Ansel,” Maya told him. “He started going crazy, so we locked him in the refrigerator.”

“Nash, the walls. Please!”

Nash started for the kitchen. Mick was on him before he’d gone three strides, but Nash, combat-trained, knew how to fight. He had himself out of Mick’s grip in a flash, the pistol now pointed at Mick’s head.

“I suggest you start explaining, Burns, before you spend the night in my lockup.”

“Fine by me,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s go.” Get out of cursed hotel now, finish breaking the hex later.

Coyote came bounding out of the kitchen. In his coyote form, he was the size of a large wolf, and he sprang full force onto Nash. The momentum, with an assist by Mick, carried Nash the five feet needed to land him against the lobby’s brightly painted wall.

The hotel shuddered. I screamed as I felt my wards, as infected as they were, stream from the brick and plaster into Nash’s body. I was deeply connected to the wards, and through them, to the hotel, and so was Mick.

Mick doubled over in pain, but this purging was necessary. All the wards had to go, no matter how much it hurt us. Then Mick and I would reset them, clean and free of the hex.

It was hurting Nash, too. Nash clenched his fists, the pistol still in one, eyes shut in silent agony.

“What are you doing?” Maya shouted. “Nash!”

“He’s negating the curse,” Cassandra said from within the protective circle of Pamela’s arm.

“Nash is?”

“He’s a magic null.” Cassandra sounded tired. “His touch renders anything magical harmless. Spells don’t work on him, and he can pull in even the strongest magic and dissipate it.”

I yelled again, my voice breaking as I collapsed to the floor. Mick tried to get to me, to help me, but his knees buckled as soon as he took a step.

Fremont crouched down and touched my shoulder, but Mick snarled at him. “Get away from her!”

Fremont raised his hands and backed away. “Easy there, big fella. Easy now.”

There was something wrong. Nash continued to suck in the wards, and I felt the last of them rush into him and vanish. But whatever was inside Nash didn’t stop at the wards. It reached out to me and then to Mick and began to drain us dry.

My Beneath magic flared up to stop him, but Nash sucked that in, too. The white-hot aura of it streamed into Nash’s body, and the agony of that had me falling flat to the tile. I saw Mick’s fire being pulled from him while Mick fought a losing battle to keep it.

“Ow!” Fremont said, slapping his hands to his head.

A tiny stream of yellow light—Fremont’s magic—yanked from him to Nash’s body. Cassandra was on the floor now, Pamela with her, as Nash drained their magical essences as well. A scream so high-pitched it was on the edge of human hearing streamed from the saloon, the magic mirror singing no longer.

Coyote shimmered and became the man Coyote, lying naked, facedown on the floor. Ansel stopped banging in the kitchen, and I wondered if he were dead, the magic that kept him alive stolen by Nash’s magic suction. Ansel might be nothing but decaying blood and bone on my refrigerator floor.

“Nash, stop,” I gasped.

He didn’t, and I had the feeling he had no idea how to. Mick lay next to me where he’d crawled in an effort to protect me. His tattoos faded to thin lines of ink, and then those shrank and disappeared. Cassandra struggled to breathe, and Pamela lay limply next to her. Coyote didn’t move.

Maya wasn’t affected, being the only non-magical one among us. She stared at us as we slowly died, the magic that had been part of us all our lives draining away.

Then she looked at Nash. I watched Maya draw a breath for courage, and then she stalked across the floor in her milehigh heels, grabbed Nash, and jerked away him from the wall.

Nash turned on her with eyes as white as twenty suns. Maya let him go in surprise, and Nash moved that awful gaze to the rest of us.

He’d absorbed everything. He shouldn’t have been able to do that—Nash only affected magic within a certain radius, or only if touched by it directly. He’d never simply stood in one place and sucked in all magic around him.

“Maya, get away from me,” Nash said, voice harsh. “Get out of here.”

I wanted to encourage her to go, to run, but I had no strength for speech. Fremont climbed to his feet, looking the least sick of the rest of us, but still not looking good.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Maya said. This from the woman who’d been the first to beat on the door when the curse locked us in. “Nash, what is happening to you?”

“I can’t.” Nash dragged in a harsh breath. “I can’t contain it.”

He’d just absorbed the power of a dragon, a major witch, a Changer, a Stormwalker with goddess magic, and a magic mirror, not to mention Coyote’s god magic and the supercharged wards of the hotel. And Nash seemed surprised he couldn’t contain it.

Nash’s eyes became incandescent. He threw back his head, opened his arms, and roared as the magic came pouring back out of him.

The Beneath and Stormwalker magic slammed into me simultaneously. The impact lifted me several feet and threw me across the room, and I landed hard against the reception counter. Cassandra started retching. Fremont sat down on the floor, his hands to his head. Mick shouted, his body on fire, and I saw his flesh crackle and expand, the dragon in him trying to get out.

All I could do was fold up into myself, my body a ball of pain. I heard animal snarls coming from Pamela and knew she was now a wolf. The magic mirror’s high-pitched keening returned.

I felt the wards burst out of Nash and flow back into the walls, all of them, doubled in strength. And with them the curse, twice as strong as before, clinging to our wards and permeating the building. The candles we’d lit died at the same time, leaving us in absolute darkness.

“Damn.” Cassandra’s voice came as a weak whisper, but it held a hint of awe. “It’s a double hex.”

“AND A DOUBLE hex is . . . ?” I asked irritably about a half hour later.

We couldn’t get the candles lit again. The eight of us huddled in the dark in the lobby while rain beat down outside. Our only light was what filtered through the front windows from the floodlights on the Crossroads Bar.

Ansel hadn’t made any noise in the kitchen since Nash sucked out the wards, but the magic mirror had returned to singing. It finished Porgy and Bess and began Cabaret.

“A double hex is exactly what it sounds like,” Cassandra said. In spite of what had happened, she sounded as apathetic as ever. “Most hexes eventually wear off or weaken enough to be broken by the victim, if it doesn’t kill them soon enough. Therefore, some sorcerers take the precaution of making it a double hex—if the curse gets broken, it casts itself again, this time twice as strong. It’s tricky, and only the best sorcerers can do it.”

“Or gods,” Coyote put in. He’d remained in his human form, lying flat on the floor. He’d refused Mick’s offer of clothes, so he was stark naked. At least it was dark.

“And one of the best sorcerers is after you,” Fremont said.

Cassandra looked at me. “I told you, let me summon him and get this over with. It’s me he’s been sent to kill.”

“No summoning,” I said firmly. “We aren’t in any shape to defend ourselves, and like I said, there’s nothing to say the ununculous won’t try to kill the rest of us for the hell of it.”

“What do we do, then?” Fremont asked. “Sit here and wait for him?”

“No, we keep trying to break the hex,” I said. “Every sorcerer has a weakness. We need to find his.”

“Sage words, Stormwalker.” Pamela’s voice was bestial and odd.

She’d gotten stuck in the form between wolf and human and looked like something from a horror movie. Pamela’s face was wolf. She had the limbs of a human covered in wolf fur, a tail, and two complete sets of breasts, human and wolf. She sat with her back against the couch and held Cassandra, who didn’t seem to mind that her girlfriend was now a nightmare beast.

I’d made Mick sit close to Nash, hoping Nash’s strange canceling effect would keep Mick’s need to become dragon at bay. I also needed Nash’s now-increased dampening field to keep my own magic quiet. The storm magic was at least calming as the lightning moved off, though I still had urges to grab the rain and sweep it in through the windows. The Beneath magic, though, kept wanting to come out and play. If I lost control of that, everyone here could die.

I actually did have a plan, one I didn’t bother mentioning, especially not to Mick. If Mick knew what I had in mind, he’d simply lock me in the basement and secure the door with dragon fire. But once I had everyone busy working out the ununculous’s weakness, I would sneak away, call the ununculous myself, and face him alone. The way my Beneath magic was raging, I could kill the bastard with one blow, and I would.

I felt Coyote looking at me. Hard at me, his eyes glittering in the darkness.

Damn it, he wasn’t telepathic. And yet Coyote always did seem to know what I was thinking. I remembered what he’d said about me ripping open vortexes if I tried to fight the curse or the sorcerer, but I saw no other way. Anyway, I didn’t plan to fight, I planned to kill quickly and get it over with.

I returned Coyote’s stare with a determined one of my own before asking Pamela, “How did you know something was wrong here? Did you see my fire?”

“No.” Pamela’s voice was thick. “Cassandra didn’t come home, and then I saw your bartender at the gas station. He told me the hotel was shut down and dark, and he didn’t know why. I came up here, but I couldn’t get the door open and couldn’t see through the windows, so I rode up and got the sheriff.”

We must have been busy with Ansel in the kitchen when Pamela arrived, because none of us had seen or heard her.

“What was the sheriff doing at his office?” Maya studied her polished nails. “Did he forget something, like, I don’t know, our date?”

Nash’s voice went cold. “I didn’t forget. I assumed you found something better to do, so I went back to work.”

“You thought I stood you up?” Maya’s screech rang to the rafters. “I spent two hours getting ready for you. Why would I stand you up?”

The mirror’s voice cut through her shout with something about life being a cabaret.

“And you look great,” Coyote said from his supine position.

“You, shut up,” Maya snapped. “If I hadn’t agreed to give you a ride up here, I would have been in Flat Mesa in plenty of time. But no, I had to be nice. Look what it got me. Stranded here all night with the freak show.”

“Coyote’s right, though,” Fremont said. “You do look great, Maya. That part was worth it.”

“Thank you, Fremont.” Maya gave him a big smile. “Forget you, Nash. I’m going out with Fremont.”

“Hold on . . .” Fremont started.

“Fremont already has a girlfriend,” I said. “In Holbrook.”

“Not anymore.” Fremont sounded sad. “She went back East. She asked me to go with her, but what the hell would I do back East? So, she’s gone.”

“I’m sorry.” I really was sorry. Fremont was a nice guy, and he deserved someone who appreciated that.

“Her loss,” Maya said. “Take me to the movies.”

“Maya . . .”

We were spared further argument about Maya’s love life by a huge bang in the kitchen. This time, not only did Ansel strike the door of the walk-in fridge, he tore it from its hinges. We were on our feet, sprinting for the kitchen, when the door landed on the floor with a second bang and a clatter.

Ansel was alive, awake, and free.

EIGHT

I’VE DONE SOME FRIGHTENING THINGS IN MY life, but I think stumbling into a pitch-black kitchen, knowing that somewhere in there lurked a blood-starved, very angry Nightwalker, rates as one of the scariest.

Nightwalkers don’t breathe, so we couldn’t listen for his breath, and Ansel had chosen to go into silent mode. The fire in Mick’s hands was our only light, but even by that Ansel was nowhere to be seen.

“He couldn’t have gotten out, could he?” Fremont’s nervous voice was right behind me.

He and Maya were staying as close to me as they could. I’m not sure why they thought I’d keep them safe, because my fingers kept drawing the pounding rain, and my Beneath magic was going to flare out of control any second. I had contained the magic relatively well in the living room, but fear of the Nightwalker was bringing it out of me.

A check of the back door proved it was still solidly shut, as though it had been fused. Ansel couldn’t have escaped that way. He was as trapped as the rest of us.

We found him when he whispered, right behind Maya, “Hola, señorita.”

Maya’s scream took me a few inches off the ground. Mick’s fire roared high at the same time Nash yanked Maya from Ansel and shoved his gun into Ansel’s face.

Ansel laughed and ignored the pistol. “I’m hungry, Janet. What do I have to do to get some service in this hotel?”

I knew then that the double hex had doubled Ansel’s strength and need for blood. Unless his appetite were slaked, and slaked soon, he’d simply rip into us. A Nightwalker in a blood frenzy was not a pretty sight—I’d seen the aftermath of one on a rampage before. I never wanted to see that again.

We could knock him out—if we could—or find another place to lock him up, but Ansel would break out of whatever prison we devised sooner or later, hungrier than ever. We still had six or seven hours to go before daylight would force him to find a dark place to sleep.

“We need to let him feed,” I said.

Pamela had Cassandra safely behind her, her werewolf lips curled. “And who would be the fool to volunteer for that?”

Ansel wrinkled his nose. “Not you, wolf-girl. Changer blood is disgusting. I want the Spanish lass.” He licked his teeth. “Mmm, the dark-eyed beauty of Maya Medina.”

Nash’s pistol was back, the barrel digging into Ansel’s cheek. “Touch her, and I blow your face off.”

“Or maybe Sheriff Jones,” Ansel purred. “What does the blood of a man who lives to harass my friends taste like?”

“No,” I said.

Nash exchanged a glance with me. “Janet.”

We’d both, once upon a time, seen the effect of Nash’s blood on a Nightwalker. “What’s happening is not Ansel’s fault,” I said firmly. “He stays alive.”

“What about the rest of us?” Pamela asked in her thick Changer voice.

Ansel looked us over. “I don’t trust the witch. The coyote? Hmm, the blood of a god?”

“Would be bad for you,” Coyote rumbled. “And Janet wants you to live. She’s such a sweetie.”

“I see.” Ansel turned away. “I don’t want the plumber. He probably tastes like a sewer. But Janet.” Ansel touched my neck, his fingers ice cold. “Pretty Navajo girl. Fine blood of a Stormwalker.”

Mick was beside me in a heartbeat, lifting Ansel by the throat. Mick’s eyes were black with rage, and his hand burst into flame as he pinned Ansel against the wall.

“Mick, no!” I shouted. As frightening as Ansel was, I knew that, at heart, he was a shy man who’d be horrified when he remembered that he’d tried to hurt anyone. I also knew that if we couldn’t subdue him, Ansel would have to die before he killed us all.

Mick let his fire fade. “You don’t touch Janet. If you need to feed, you feed on me.”

Ansel didn’t trust Mick, for good reason. “No, give me the señorita. I’ll make it good for her.”

Mick’s barely contained dragon frenzy made him as strong as Ansel. He grabbed the back of Ansel’s neck and yanked the man’s mouth down to his jugular. “Drink me, damn you.”

Ansel’s eyes went bright red as the bloodlust took him. His mouth opened—the narrow, catlike mouth of a Nightwalker—and he plunged his fangs into Mick’s neck.

Fremont gasped in horror, and I wanted to scream. Ansel might drain Mick dry before we could pull him off. Nightwalkers hung on like leeches even after their victims were dead.

I lunged for them, but Mick put out one arm to stop me, fire flaring from his palm. His muscles bulged as he held Ansel in place, the other man’s mouth working, sucking, pulling at Mick’s neck. Mick grunted, his face creased in pain, but still he held me off.

The rain continued to pour outside, building to a deluge. Water slid between my fingers, starting to patter on the floor. As much as I felt sorry for the real Ansel, I wanted to kill the Nightwalker for hurting Mick. When Mick gasped for breath, blood running in rivulets down his neck, Ansel still drinking, I almost did it.

“No.” Mick lifted his hand again, the fire keeping me back. “Let him. I’ll heal.”

“Mick, damn it.”

I was aware of the others, in a semicircle, tense, watching, waiting to see what would happen next. Mick started to sag, but so did Ansel, Ansel’s frantic, moist sucking noises slowing.

When Ansel fell from Mick like a full tick, a smile on his face, Mick folded to the floor next to him. I got to Mick’s side, but Mick raised his head and gave me a weak nod. “I’m all right.”

“That was stupid.”

“No.” Mick caressed my thigh, his fire gone. “I couldn’t let him touch you, baby. I’d die before I let him do that. I’d do it again even if it killed me.”

Part of me was pleased with the sentiment, part of me furious he’d even consider dying for me. I dragged myself away from Mick, past the others, and sat on a stool at the stainless steel work table. I put my head in my hands, finding my fingers wet with rainwater.

I had to stop this. I’d begun the evening believing this a simple hex that Mick and I could handle. Now Mick’s dragon nature was taking over, the one that took unbelievable risks without fear of death. Cassandra had lost all emotional control, and Coyote’s power was down.

It was up to me. The light from the parking lot touched my hands, which were sopping with water, my storm magic taking over. My body ran with water, my clothes began to soak, and a faint spark of lightning danced on my skin just before we heard the rumble of distant thunder.

I would stop the ununculous. I would carry out my plan to pull the sorcerer to us and kill him, but I no longer felt the need to be secretive about it. Coyote wouldn’t like it, but Coyote could kill me later.

My Beneath magic agreed. It rose to twine the storm magic, its incredible power squeezing through my body.

The visions returned. More distinct now—fire, the town burning, the desert itself on fire. White light of the vortexes, a darkness rising: behind it, the dragons, and Hopi and Navajo gods fighting for their lives. Terror, destruction, and in the center, one lone figure. I didn’t know who it was.

Maya gasped. “Look at Janet.”

I sensed them turn my way, all of them, even Ansel, and with a precise flash of vision, I saw what they saw. I sat at the table, my body rigid, fists clenched on the metal. Water flowed out of me, across the table, and to the floor. My black hair hung in sodden clumps around my face, which had turned almost sheet white, my eyes burning black within it.

“Go,” I told them in a booming voice. “Leave this place, while I cleanse it.”

Coyote got to me first, though I know Mick would have if he hadn’t been weakened by Ansel’s feeding. Nash was right behind Coyote, and Mick made it a staggering second later.

“Look at me, Janet,” Coyote said.

I turned my gaze to him, the vision of myself through his eyes fading. I saw only Coyote, his stern face and dark god eyes that no longer held any power.

“You can’t fix it,” I said. “So I will.”

Nash’s ice gray eyes were a cold contrast to Coyote’s dark ones. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I smiled at him. “Hello, Sheriff. Do you remember what fun we had out by the vortexes? Want to do it again?”

Nash recoiled, and so he should. The encounter had been violent and nasty, mostly with me doing all the violence. Nash hadn’t known what was going on at the time, but Mick and I had filled him in since then.

The real me, the Diné woman screaming deep inside myself, begged me to stop, but the new me, the Stormwalker-Beneath goddess, was angry. I loved the men in this room, but they had their places in my life, and when it came down to it, they were pretty useless. The goddess in me had to fix everything, even if those men had to be sacrificed to do it.

I stood up. “I will cleanse this place,” I repeated.

“Stop her,” Mick said.

“No, don’t.” Cassandra had been crying again. “Let her. What choice do we have? We can’t win, and if she can destroy the curse and the ununculous, I say, so be it.”

Mick hemmed me in with Coyote and Nash. Coyote said, “If she unleashes what’s inside her, you’re going to wish you were facing the ununculous. We’ll all die.”

“What does it matter? Either Janet kills us or the sorcerer does. I’d rather it be Janet, who can take him down with her.”

“Glad you feel that way,” Fremont said. “I don’t particularly want to die at all.”

“Or me,” Maya agreed in a hard voice. “Sit the hell down, Janet.”

I laughed. After all this time, after everything I’d done for them, they still didn’t trust me. They deserved to die, my so-called friends who belittled me and bothered me, whined at me to solve their problems, and then tried to stop me when I wanted to go after the evil in the world.

I turned my smile on Coyote. “You can’t stop me, powerless god. Or you.” I swung on Mick. “Dragon sacrificing his blood that others might live. So noble is the dragon. The one who wants to drag me to his Pacific island and trap me there.”

“Hey, I’d go with him,” Maya said. “I’d love some beach time.”

“He’d pen me up in his lair,” I said, my voice dripping scorn. “His mate, he calls me. More like his pet.”

I smacked the man I loved with a wave of water that washed him off his feet. Mick responded with fire that slammed me back onto my ass. A dragon after being drained by a Nightwalker is still five times more powerful than an ordinary human being.

I was on my feet again, my magic—both Stormwalker and Beneath—gathered in my hands. My mind’s eye found all the wards in the walls and over the windows and in the doors, the hex clinging to them like a sticky black infection.

All I had to do was burn away the infection, every atom of it, and the wards would be clean. The hex had doubled in strength, and the task would take all my power, but I could do it. I knew the walls would melt into rubble under such forces, and we’d be buried alive by three stories of hotel, but at least the magic of the sorcerer, who’d dared to penetrate my realm, would be gone.

I raised my hands. Water and white light streamed out of me, and I opened my mouth to cry the words of power that would begin the cleansing.

And found myself falling over the stool and to the floor, crushed by a blanket of blackness that sucked out every bit of my power and left me helpless.

Nash Jones, the walking magic void, had tackled me. He pinned me to the floor in the perfect law-enforcement technique for subduing a suspect, his magic-null field absorbing storm power and goddess power alike.

I screamed and screamed as my magic drained. It was like having my soul ripped out. I beat on the floor, but Nash was a big guy, and I couldn’t dislodge him.

Mick crawled to me. “Back off, Jones. I think she’ll be all right now.”

If being weak, magic-less, aching, exhausted, and for some reason, hungry, was “all right,” then sure, I was. I lay limply on the floor as Nash got off me and to his feet, our mighty sheriff none the worse for wear.

Mick lifted me into his lap. “You okay, baby?”

“Sorry,” I croaked.

He kissed my forehead and cuddled me close. That was my Mick. Forgiving me for turning into a crazy, murderous, insulting bitch who’d just tried to kill him. Times like these kept our relationship strong.

Dear gods.

WITH ME DOWN for the count, my head pounding with the worst magic hangover I’d had in months, and Mick still weak from the blood draining, Nash took charge. Back in the lobby, he grilled us all for possible answers to the predicament.

Ansel wasn’t there—fairly sated, he’d gone back to the relative coolness of the refrigerator, which he said would keep his blood thick and his hunger down for a while. But the bloodfrenzy still danced in his eyes, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he’d need to feed again.

As Nash stood like a drill sergeant grilling his troops, my gaze strayed to Maya. She huddled in one corner of a sofa, her elegant legs pulled up under her, her beautiful eyes riveted to Nash. She loved the idiot, and one day, I was going to smack him upside the head and make him understand that.

“The best thing to do is the summoning,” Cassandra repeated stubbornly. “I will give myself up, John Christianson will have his revenge, end of problem.”

“Like hell you will,” Pamela growled. “I’m not letting that asshole kill you.”

“But this all-powerful sorcerer is the cause of this hex thing, right?” Nash asked. “And if he’s dead, no more spell?”

Nash didn’t have much knowledge of magic—only what he’d learned, reluctantly, from me and Mick—but he was good at grasping essentials.

“I think so,” Cassandra said. “Some hexes can outlast their creator, but this one is so intense, it needs big magic to keep it up. If the ununculous dies, I’m sure this hex would go or at least weaken enough for someone like Mick to break it.”

“Then we kill him,” Pamela said. “Simple as that.”

Cassandra wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “If it were that simple, someone would have killed him a long time ago.” The Cassandra I knew would never wipe her runny nose with anything but an antibacterial tissue. She looked awful, her hair dangling loose from its French braid, her eyes red-rimmed in her sallow face. “No one here is strong enough to best him, except maybe Coyote, and the hex has made sure that Coyote can’t fight.”

“Could we conjure something else, then?” Fremont asked. “Someone bigger and stronger to kill the ununculous for us?”

“With this hex in place?” I rasped. “Who knows what would go wrong if we tried that? Besides, if Cassandra is right about how powerful the sorcerer is, we’d have to summon something with enormous power, like a god or one of the demon deities.”

“And then we’d be left dealing with the god or demon deity,” Mick said. “No thanks.”

Nash nodded. “It would be like asking the leader of the strongest gang to take out the leader of a weaker one. Then we’d just be in debt to the top gang leader. Not a good idea.”

“I was thinking something more like an angel,” Fremont said.

Coyote, sitting, still naked, against the wall, finally contributed to the discussion. “You start calling gods, and you risk messing with the vortexes. Gods come when they want to. They don’t like being summoned.”

“No kidding,” I muttered. “Sometimes they won’t even answer their cell phones.”

“I heard that.”

“I’ve conjured angels,” Fremont said. “Well, one. Once. Sort of.”

I had my doubts about that—I wasn’t sure Fremont had enough magic to summon anything, but even if he had, lesser beings could pretend to be angels.

“Maybe we don’t have to kill the sorcerer,” Nash was saying. “Couldn’t we contain him? Force him to remove the spell?”

I couldn’t help laughing, sounding a bit drunk. “What are you going to do Nash, arrest him?”

“Not a bad idea,” Fremont said, animated. “Do a binding spell—I can help with that—and then Mick threatens to burn the man’s balls off if he doesn’t drop the hex.”

“True,” Maya said. “Men are very attached to their gonads.”

“Unless they have ice in their veins,” Cassandra said. “Like this ununculous.”

Nash cast his gaze on Mick. “Could you do it? Could you restrain him with magic?”

“Possibly. Cassandra can help.”

Cassandra pressed her lips in a tight line and shook her head. “We won’t be able to. But it doesn’t matter. Summon him, and I’ll die. I’m ready.”

“Cass—” Pamela began, and I joined in the protest. Coyote cut us off.

“Before you all go getting excited,” he said, “what Cassandra’s not telling you is that calling a dark sorcerer doesn’t simply involve drawing a pentagram, lighting incense, and doing a little chant. A summoning like this one, strong enough to keep the hex from interfering, will take a sacrifice. A blood sacrifice. A death. And I’m not talking about a chicken you later make into stew.”

My mouth went dry, and Fremont’s eyes widened. “You mean a human sacrifice?”

“You got it.”

I hadn’t known that. I thought of my crazed plan to slip off on my own and summon the sorcerer myself and felt cold. No wonder Coyote had given me the evil eye.

“I know,” Cassandra said, resigned. “I figured the sacrifice would be me.”

NINE

THE ROOM ERUPTED IN NOISE. MAYA’S VOICE rose above the others, first in English, then in Spanish. Inside the saloon, the mirror kept on singing. We’d graduated to Oklahoma! and “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

Pamela leapt away from Cassandra in fury, her fearsome mouth in a bloodred snarl. “Is what we have that bad, Cassandra? That you’d walk away from it and die?”

“I’d be dying for you, sweetheart,” Cassandra said. Her calling the seven-foot walking nightmare “sweetheart” made me want to giggle hysterically, even with my headache.

“I vote we sacrifice the Nightwalker,” Pamela said. “Get rid of two threats at once. What’s Ansel doing but waiting to drain us dry?”

“Typical,” Ansel’s voice came from the kitchen doorway. He leaned on the doorframe, his stance unthreatening, but I saw the red shine to his eyes. “Changers. Half animal, half human, not one thing or the other. You think like animals. Rut like them. You must be fun in bed.”

“She has a point, though, Janet,” Fremont whispered to me. “He is the most dangerous of us.”

“Ansel is not being sacrificed,” I said in a loud voice. Ansel would have heard Fremont anyway—Nightwalkers had terrific hearing. “It’s not Ansel’s fault he’s blood frenzied. When the hex is broken, he’ll revert to normal.”

“Sure about that?” Fremont asked worriedly.

No, I wasn’t sure. Nightwalkers were unstable by nature. Ansel might decide he liked the taste of living blood and be unable to give it up again.

“Don’t anyone look at me,” Maya said irritably. “I know I’m the only one here without so-called magical abilities, but the fuck I came here to have someone stick a knife in me.”

“Yeah, me either,” Fremont said.

I sat up. “No one’s getting sacrificed, because we’re not calling the sorcerer. We’ll think of another way.”

Coyote huffed a breath. “Like you blowing up the building? Forget that. I’ll be the sacrifice, ladies and gentlemen. You can stick the knife into my heart.”

Everyone stared at him in silence. I opened my mouth to object, but Mick beat me to it. “No, they’ll need you once the hex is broken. The logical choice is me. As long as I become dragon after I get stabbed, I can heal from it.”

His words worried me. Mick was so far into his dragon bad-ass I’ll-do-anything-to-nobly-save-you mode he might just let himself be killed—permanently. “Too risky,” I said. “What happens if there’s too much time between the knife thrust and the sorcerer removing the hex, or us killing him? I’m pretty sure you’d have to shift right away, and you can’t do it while we’re locked in here.”

“There’s not much choice,” Mick said.

“There is,” Coyote said. “Me.”

“Stand down,” Nash began, but Maya cut him off.

“Don’t you dare volunteer, Nash Jones. You do, and I’ll kill you myself.”

“Listen to Maya,” I said to Nash. “Magic won’t kill you, but I guarantee a foot-long blade to the heart would.”

Coyote raised his voice over ours. “There’s no more argument. I’m doing it.”

“But your powers are gone,” I said in alarm. “You might die for real.”

Coyote’s smile became genuine. “Aw, Janet. You mean you’d miss me? I’m touched. But I’m a god, sweetheart. Sacrifice, life and death—it’s all part of the job.”

“He’s right,” Cassandra said in a choked voice. “His blood would boost the spell through the hex.”

“No!” I tried.

Coyote stood up, walked to the middle of the room, and lay down flat on the floor. “Sorry, Janet. It’s got to be done, and it’s got to be done now. Mick, grab the knife and the incense. Let’s get chanting.”

I COULDN’T STOP them. Cassandra made us sit in a circle—Ansel included—with Coyote at the center. Because Cassandra didn’t trust herself on her emotional jag to work the necessary magic for the summoning, Mick conducted the ceremony.

He stripped off his shirt and knelt, his sculpted muscles gleaming with sweat. His dragon tattoos glowed with fiery light, and the bite marks where Ansel had fed were black against Mick’s neck.

Coyote was the calmest, lying flat on his back, arms at his sides, eyeing the knife blade without fear. I had no idea whether Coyote was working some ploy—he couldn’t really die, could he? He must be planning some trickster god thing behind his unruffled expression. He’d let Mick stab him and then spring to his feet as soon as the sorcerer showed up, rip the guy’s head off, and laugh at us for being afraid.

Wouldn’t he?

Sage burned in a bowl, its sweet smoke dulling my senses. I was drained from the magic I’d tried to work in the kitchen, and with Mick’s warm voice intoning the spell, plus the smoke, I wanted to drift to sleep in spite of my fears.

Mick spoke phrases in Latin, a language I’d never bothered to learn. He raised the knife, clasped in both hands, and called the ununculous by name, which, Cassandra had finally revealed, was Emmett Smith.

I’d started laughing when she said it. I’d expected something grandiose like Lucifer or Ezekiel or Damien, and she gave us Emmett Smith.

Maya sat next to me, folded in on herself, her face on her knees. She rocked back and forth a little, miserable, and I didn’t have the strength to comfort her. Nash at least had seated himself protectively beside her, his gun in his lap. Fremont sat on my other side, wedging himself against me to seek my protection, because Ansel was beyond him. Then Cassandra, then Pamela, and around again to Nash.

Mick’s face ran with sweat. His voice wound louder and louder, until finally he shouted the mage’s name and slammed the knife into Coyote’s chest.

The blade entered with a wet, meaty sound, and blood washed out to coat Mick’s hands.

“Holy shit,” Fremont whispered. Maya whimpered and turned her face to my shoulder.

Coyote’s body arched as it fought to live, but Mick held the knife hard in the wound against Coyote’s struggles. Ansel’s nostrils flared at the sharp stench of Coyote’s blood, and he lunged forward, unable to stop himself. Pamela and Nash silently grabbed him and hauled him back.

I saw Coyote’s blue aura start to fade, a darkness rising from the chalk marks in the circle to suck the aura into it. The darkness swallowed Coyote’s aura and became palpable, clinging to Mick’s hands like ink. Mick kept chanting, tears mingling with his sweat and the blood that splashed his body. Under him, Coyote’s struggles weakened. Then his eyes went blank, his breath released in one gurgling gasp, and Coyote went still.

I held my breath, certain that any minute Coyote would sit up again, laugh, and ask whether the spell had worked.

Any minute. Any minute now.

I didn’t realize I’d whispered the words out loud until Maya lifted her head and glared at me. “What is the matter with you? Mick killed him. I’m going to be sick.”

I thought I would be, too. Coyote didn’t move. He was a human body, dead on my Saltillo tile, eyes staring, unseeing, at the ceiling. My boyfriend had just killed him.

“So where is this big, bad sorcerer?” Fremont demanded in a shaky voice. “Shouldn’t there be a flash and a bang or something? And smoke? Where is he?”

Nowhere. The room was empty. Mick peeled his hands from the knife as though he had to force himself to, the look on his face one of anguish and self-loathing. I wanted to go to him, to comfort him, but I couldn’t move.

“Nice,” a voice said above us.

Cassandra scrambled to her feet. I shot up as well, adrenaline propelling me out of my stupor.

A man stood above us on the second-floor gallery. He wore a business suit, his tie dangling as he leaned on the rail to look at us. His balding head gleamed in the faint light from the windows, as did his wire-rimmed glasses.

“What was he?” he went on in a dry, emotionless voice. “A god minus his powers? Powerless gods are always so pathetic.”

Cassandra stood as one stricken, and Emmett Smith looked her over with interest. Ansel had quieted, although Nash still stood between him and Coyote’s bloody body. Even the magic mirror had gone silent.

“You touch Cassandra, and you die,” Pamela said thickly.

“She’s calling herself Cassandra now, is she?” the sorcerer asked. “Fitting choice.” He started down the stairs, his glasses glinting as he studied us. “With a Changer woman stuck in the between stage. Interesting. What else do we have? A dragon barely containing his power, a minor mage with an inferiority complex, and a Nightwalker in a blood frenzy.” He drew to a halt in front of Maya. “But this one is human. Poor thing. This must be hard on you. I’m surprised they didn’t use you as the sacrifice.”

“Screw that,” Maya said, her head up. “This is a new dress.”

Emmett chuckled. “Now I understand.” He stopped laughing and peered at Nash, who had moved himself protectively in front of Maya.

“But I don’t know what you are,” Emmett said. “I’d have guessed just human, but . . .” He shook his head and turned away, as though determined to solve the mystery when he had more time. “And you.” Emmett pointed at me almost joyfully. “You, young woman, are something extraordinary.”

“Stormwalker,” I said. “This is my hotel. But you knew that.”

“No, I had no idea. And Stormwalker is not all you are. Your aura is amazing.” He sniffed. “You’ve got goddess in you. Goddess and something else . . . I can’t quite . . . Oh, damn, hang on.”

Emmett pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed his nose. He looked at the handkerchief in surprise. “Nosebleed. I never get those unless . . .”

He looked at us—no, at me—and his aura suddenly flared blacker than that of the most evil Nightwalker I’d ever encountered. “What the hell is this?” he demanded.

Mick answered him. “This is us, breaking a curse.”

“Curse? Cassandra, explain. Did one of your hexes go wrong?”

“One of my hexes?” Cassandra said. “We’re breaking your hex. These people haven’t done anything to you. If Christianson wants me, fine. Janet and her friends have done nothing but take me in when I needed somewhere to go.” Her voice broke.

Emmett pressed his handkerchief to his nose. “Christianson? What makes you think I’d waste a good hex for someone like Christianson? The man is a selfish, grasping, weak little bastard.”

“How about for the millions he pays you?” I suggested.

“Yes, I take his money. That doesn’t mean I live at his beck and call. I was surprised when you started working for him, Cassandra. You’re too good a witch for that walking cesspit.”

“I didn’t know what he was like,” Cassandra said. “When I found out, I left.”

“Good for you.” Emmett glanced around the lobby. “I can’t say much for where you ended up, but I admire your moxie.” His gaze came back to me. “But then there’s her. You might be smarter than I think.”

I raised my hands for attention. “I hate to break up this little reunion, but what are you saying? That Christianson didn’t hire you to kill Cassandra?”

“I wouldn’t have taken the job if he had. Cassandra’s a damn good witch, and I don’t waste power like that. I might need her someday.”

“I don’t understand.” Cassandra looked at Coyote, lying dead at our feet. He wasn’t coming back to life, not a move, not a peep. “This was for nothing?”

“Nice gesture, the sacrifice, but unnecessary. Next time you want to summon me, just text me.”

I looked up into Emmett’s face. He wasn’t even as tall as Fremont, who was a few inches shy of six feet, but Emmett’s lean body made him look taller than he really was. The sorcerer’s suit was finely tailored, and he wore a silk shirt and tie. His glasses weren’t off-the-rack from a discount optical shop; they were designer, with tiny diamonds winking in the corners. I didn’t waste time wondering why such a powerful mage would need glasses. Likely he wore them for effect.

Emmett looked like an ordinary but successful businessman from a big city, the kind you’d find all over Los Angeles or New York. That is, until I looked behind the glasses and into his eyes.

I saw there a cold, hard ruthlessness, with all the warmth of frozen metal. In the darkness, I couldn’t tell the color of his irises, but it didn’t matter. There was power in those eyes, uncaring power that would take and take and have no remorse about who it had to destroy to keep on taking. Power and no conscience, the most dangerous combination in the world.

“You didn’t cast the hex?” I asked him.

“No. Nice one, though.”

“Can you tell us who did?”

Emmett dabbed his nose as he tried to stare me down. Lucky for me, I’d grown up staring down my grandmother, a small Diné woman who would have had this man crumpling at her feet.

He shrugged and turned away, implying he’d let me go, though I knew better. He strolled to a wall and put his hand on it.

“Ah, a double hex. Very clever. And it used your own wards to ride in and infect the place. This took power. Precision. Planning. I can see why you thought I’d done this.” He sniffed the wall, then brought his fingers to his mouth and tasted them. “There’s demon in this. Succubus, I’d say. But more than that. A demon-goddess, who enjoys playing succubus for her own reasons . . .” His voice died, and his dark aura suddenly constricted. “Oh, no. Oh, you didn’t.”

“What?” I demanded, marching to him. “Oh, we didn’t, what?”

Emmett looked at his handkerchief again, his voice rising. “Damn it to hell. You brought me here. You summoned me to lock me in her trap.” He raised his hand, darkness surrounding it. “You stupid bitch, you brought me here!”

He let the darkness fly, not at me but at Cassandra. Pamela jerked Cassandra out of the way, but the arrow of darkness followed her like a heat-seeking missile. But Nash was there. He shoved himself in front of Cassandra, and the spear of darkness—so black it shone with its own light—shoved itself right into Nash’s chest.

Nash flinched the slightest bit, his mouth firming as the magic met the void inside him. Emmett watched, openmouthed, as his magic was sucked into nothingness. Without so much as a flicker, the magic vanished, gone as though it had never existed.

Nash straightened up, eyeing Emmett coldly, none the worse for wear.

“How the hell did you do that?” Emmett asked, dazed.

Nash didn’t answer, because of course, he had no idea.

Emmett slowly turned his ruthless gaze on me. “What is this, Stormwalker? What did I ever do to you that you’ve brought me to my death?”

“She didn’t do anything.” Cassandra’s hysterical tears returned. “I’m the victim here.”

“Janet.” Mick was at my side. I didn’t look at his hands, still covered in Coyote’s blood. “Something is terribly wrong.”

“No kidding.”

Mick’s voice was hot as he whispered into my ear. “If he didn’t cast this hex, if a demon-goddess did it, then how the hell did she? We’re back to whoever brought in the seed.” His eyes were black, fire dancing in them.

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I haven’t been anywhere near the vortexes lately, and if my mother had touched me in any way, I’d know. She’s sealed in. I promise you.”

“Then if it wasn’t you, who?”

We exchanged a long glance, and then both of us turned to look at the man hovering at my shoulder. Not Emmett Smith.

“Fremont,” I said carefully. “About this ‘angel’ you conjured . . .”

Fremont’s brown eyes widened. “You believe me?”

“Yes. I do. Why don’t you sit down and tell me about it?”

TEN

“SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL.” FREMONT RUBBED HIS forehead, his eyes taking on a faraway glow. “I found this spell in a book I bought at Paradox. That’s our local New Age store,” he said for Emmett’s benefit. “I just wanted someone to talk to. It didn’t seem dangerous or like dark magic. It’s not at all what we did here with . . .” He broke off, looking at Coyote’s body covered with congealing blood.

“And she had sex with you,” Emmett said. “Didn’t she?”

Fremont looked embarrassed. “She was an angel. I was going to say no?”

“She wasn’t an angel, you stupid little fool,” Emmett snapped. “She’s one of the most powerful demon-goddesses of the earth. She heard your little conjuring spell, took her succubus self to you, and seeded you with the hex. You trotted in here and leaked the curse into the wards. She must have guessed that Cassandra would believe the hex was all about her, because Cassandra always did think herself the most important witch in the room. In the end, Cassandra, or one of you, would summon me, and now the demon-goddess has me trapped. I hope you’re happy.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “And why should we think this is all about you?”

“Because it is. The demon-goddess has been after me for decades, has used every wile she’s had to trap me. All because I killed her son. I needed his magic, and his blood, and he was a fucking crazy demon, for the gods’ sakes. Why shouldn’t I kill him?”

“I can’t imagine why that would upset her,” I said.

“And now she traps me with such a simple ploy. The spell of an incompetent wannabe mage that I’d never notice in a million years. Damn it!” Emmett jammed his handkerchief to his nose again.

I walked to him, stood under his stupid bloody nose. “First,” I said, “lay off Fremont. He’s my friend, and I get annoyed when people yell at my friends. Second, a man died to bring you here, so you need to make yourself useful, to not let his death be in vain. Who is this demon-goddess slash succubus, how do we break the hex, and what is it with your nosebleed?”

“I used to get nosebleeds when I first started using big magic,” Emmett said, irritated. “I couldn’t handle the pressures. Looks like the hex has taken me back to that happy time. Weakening my magic—I should sue you.”

I could see that going over well in court. “Just tell us how to break the hex, oh powerful mage.”

“Fuck if I know. Hexes like this are unique to the caster. You’ll have to ask her yourself. Once I’m far, far away, if you don’t mind.”

“We’re locked in, shit-brain,” Maya said hotly. “We can’t get out, and I’m willing to bet you can’t walk out either.”

Emmett glared at her, his eyes almost glowing with his rage. “How dare you—”

“What’s her name?” I interrupted him.

Emmett’s handkerchief was firmly against his nose now, but he took his awful gaze from Maya and focused it on me. “No, you don’t. You’re not strong enough to face her, and neither am I. Not yet.”

I wondered what he meant by “not yet,” but I didn’t really want to know. I didn’t plan to wait long enough to find out what he had in mind for getting out of this, and I had the feeling it wouldn’t involve saving any of us.

“Fremont,” I said. “Show me how you conjured the angel.”

“That won’t work,” Emmett said.

“It might,” Cassandra broke in. “She’ll come for Emmett sooner or later, but if she likes Fremont, she might come to his call.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Emmett said frantically. “You can’t fight her while you’re under her hex.”

“I don’t plan to fight her,” I said in a hard voice. “None of us will. We’ll give her what she wants—you—and then she’ll lift the hex. End of problem.”

“You think you’re so smart, do you, little Stormwalker? If she can best me, then she’ll turn around and feast on you. She’s always hungry, worse than the bloodsucker here. She devours everything. I don’t care how much goddess magic you have in you; you won’t be able to stop her.”

That didn’t sound promising. Coyote stared lifelessly at the ceiling, his skin gray with death. Maya had taken up a throw and tucked it gently around him. Coyote wasn’t waking up or coming back to life. He was gone, my friends were hurt and scared, and this entire adventure had come about because of Emmett Smith’s search for power. Emmett was going to pay for that.

“Janet isn’t alone,” Mick said, quiet in his anger. “And the succubus wants you, not us.”

“Why don’t we just kill him?” Pamela asked, pointing at Emmett. “He’s human, in spite of all his sorcerer magic. Sheriff Jones can shoot him, and then we can give this demon woman his dead body.”

“Don’t think that isn’t tempting,” I said. “But the demon-goddess wants her revenge, and if I know goddesses, she’ll want to kill Emmett herself. Fremont?”

Fremont shrugged. “It just took a crystal, a candle, and a verse.”

I put my arm around his shoulders. “I love you, Fremont. Let’s do this.”

I WASN’T CERTAIN the simple spell would work, but I wasn’t about to let Emmett know that. Cassandra fetched a clear quartz crystal from her desk behind reception, and I had Mick light another sage stick, because we couldn’t get a candle going for some reason. The curse didn’t want us to have light.

The verse Fremont used was a simple rhyme, straight out of any “witchcraft for beginners” book. But Mick had taught me that chants and candles or sage and crystals are only vehicles for the witch’s focus. The intent of the spell mattered, as did the mage’s concentration and strength, not whether the candle was red or yellow, whether the witch used sage or myrrh, or whether they spoke complicated Latin verses or a few simple phrases. Those choices could help, but the whole spell was so much more than the sum of its parts.

Fremont, though he had only a touch of magical ability, had focus and sincerity. I imagined that the demon-goddess had heard that sincerity, Fremont’s need to connect, loud and clear, and had homed in on him.

She homed in on him now. In a burst of hellfire tinged with sulfur—which is a cheap effect and not necessary—the succubus-demon-goddess was upon us.

Her aura nearly knocked me over. Fremont must not have been able to see it—to him she’d appear as the black-haired woman who stood before us. No red-clawed siren in black leather, she was draped in modest robes and had a pretty, rather soft face. She looked almost nice.

Except for her aura. That was sticky, gray-black, and foul. I didn’t sense Beneath magic from her, which must mean she was an earth entity—born solidly in this world, not the one Beneath. But she was old. Ancient. I read that in her eyes, an ancientness that had allowed her evil to build, that had knocked out any compassion she might ever have possessed. That and her son being murdered to feed a sorcerer’s power guaranteed she wouldn’t be friendly.

“Hello, Emmett,” she said. “Remember me?”

Blood ran in rivulets from Emmett’s nose and down his silk shirt as he raised his hand. “Die, whore.”

The demon-goddess watched his dark magic come, a little smile on her face. She lifted her hand, and the darkness harmlessly dispersed.

“Don’t be an idiot.” She moved her gaze from Emmett and fixed it on Coyote. “What have we here? Aw, poor dead little Indian god. They always think they’re better than anyone.”

“He died to bring the ununculous here for you,” I said. “In return, you can lift the hex.”

“Now, why would I want to do that?” the demon-goddess asked me. “Much more entertaining to watch you play it out until your own natures kill you. A few of you I might keep alive with me for the fun of it. Like you, Stormwalker. And that one.”

She was looking at Nash, giving him an interested once-over, much as Emmett had.

“A magic null,” she said as she neared him. “I’ve heard the theory but never seen one.”

She touched Nash’s face. Nash didn’t like being touched, but he flinched and took it. I wondered what would happen if she tried to hurt him with magic—would her power be absorbed into Nash’s doubly enhanced magic void? Would Nash be strong enough to contain it? Probably. That was worth a second thought.

The demon-goddess traced his cheek. “What couldn’t I do with you, Mr. Magic Null?”

Maya growled at her. “Take your hands off my boyfriend, you bitch.”

In response, the succubus picked Nash up by the neck and threw him across the room. Nash crashed into the reception counter, toppled over it, and landed on the floor beyond. Maya gave a cry of anguish and ran to him.

“A magic null who is still human,” the demon-goddess said. “Which means he can die.”

I didn’t dare go check whether Nash was still alive. I didn’t hear Maya wailing in grief, so I hoped for the best. Nash was pretty tough.

“We’ll give you Emmett Smith,” I said. “He hasn’t done much to make us like him, so he’s all yours. Take him and lift the hex. I have things to do.”

“Don’t bargain with me, girl. I’ll take Emmett and anyone else I choose. I haven’t eaten a Nightwalker in a long time, and I see he fed off the dragon. Doubly delicious.”

“Stop it!” Fremont charged to us, anger giving him courage. “Just stop it! This is all my fault. I brought you here. Not them, not Janet. They have nothing to do with this.”

The succubus turned to Fremont, but she didn’t try to touch him. Good thing; I’d have broken her fingers if she had, and who knows what she would have done then? “Aren’t you sweet? I really like this one, Stormwalker. He’s got stamina in the sack, believe me. I might let him live so he can please me again.”

I couldn’t tell whether Fremont found her declaration terrifying, flattering, or embarrassing. “Can’t you do something, Janet?” he pleaded.

I wanted to. I thought about what Coyote had said about the Beneath magic in me tearing open the vortexes. I thought about how I’d felt when I’d drawn on it, ready to blast out the wards and bury us alive, and Nash having to smother me to stop me. I might be just as dangerous as the demon-goddess. Which was the lesser of two evils? Her or me?

The best thing would be for us to let her and Emmett fight it out. Whoever survived such a battle would be weakened, and then Mick, Ansel, Pamela, and Nash could clean up. I and my reality-ripping magic could stay out of it.

The demon-goddess turned to me as though she read my thoughts. “It’s difficult, isn’t it? Watching those you love die? I know exactly how you feel, because my own son was torn apart by this monster.” She flicked her fingers, and Emmett’s nose started streaming even more blood. “But I despise you at the same time, Stormwalker. It’s such a human thing, to throw someone to the wolves in order to save yourself.”

If she were trying to make me feel guilty for my choices, she was wasting her time. Coyote was dead, and the grief in me would know no bounds. He’d died for us, and had known he’d truly die—Sacrifice, life and death—it’s all part of the job, he’d said.

This entire situation was about the demon-goddess and Emmett, and if one or both of them had to perish to solve the problem, I really didn’t care. The world would be minus one demon-goddess and a nasty sorcerer. Good.

“You cast the hex so you could get Emmett here to punish him,” I said. “So punish him, already. I’m getting bored, and I want a shower.”

The demon-goddess smiled at me, and the similarities between her and my mother unnerved me not a little. “Don’t you understand? This is no longer your show, Stormwalker. It’s mine. Torturing and killing is what demons do. It’s fun for us, and I plan to have fun.” She focused on Mick, who had his fire in his blood-caked hands. “Him first. He’s the strongest. And I’m at my peak.”

My heart went cold. She could easily kill Mick, and there wouldn’t be any debate about whether I should stop her.

With one flick of the demon-goddess’s slender finger, Mick’s fire died. Mick looked at me with fire-streaked black eyes, while the dragons came to life on his arms. “Run, Janet,” he said in his soft voice. “Just go.”

He was going to turn dragon. He was going to let the huge beast in him erupt in my lobby and take care of this the dragon way. Chomp.

“Down!” I screamed. “Everybody get down!”

I felt the succubus reach into the hex and let it flare. A Murphy’s Law spell—everything that could go wrong with us, would.

Mick wouldn’t be able to contain his dragon, and he’d kill us all, maybe himself, too. Emmett Smith, mighty sorcerer, was cursing as nose blood gushed all over his pristine suit. He desperately held his handkerchief to his face, gasping for breath. No help there.

Cassandra was flat on the floor, Pamela over her. Her halfwolf body contorted, flashing in and out of wolf and wolfhuman. Claws raked against Cassandra’s back, and Cassandra cried weakly. Ansel, fangs gleaming, eyes molten red, launched himself at Coyote’s body. There was no one left to hold him back.

My Beneath magic, which had been waiting below my surface, now gleefully sprang forth, knowing I wouldn’t be able to control it.

The demon-goddess sensed my building power and smiled at me. Our battle would be the death of us all—whether or not we opened the vortexes, there would be a smoking crater where my hotel had once stood.

“Bring it, girl,” the succubus said.

I forced my hand down to my side, the incandescent ball of light in it fighting to get free. “No,” I said.

“No? You want to, sweetie. You want to see who’d win this fight.”

“Maybe. But they’d all die,” I said.

“What do you care? They’re far weaker than you, even that pathetic ununculous who killed my son.”

“Coyote died to help us. Sacrifice, he said. If you let the rest of them go, I’ll stay and fight you. Give you a chance to kill me.”

The succubus’s gaze moved to Emmett. “I want the sorcerer.”

“Fine. Whoever wins, gets him.”

“Damn you,” Emmett burbled. “I’m not a prize.”

“You are today,” I said. “Shut up. Your hunger for power has resulted in the death of my friend, and you get to pay for that.” The ball of light flared in my palm, its incandescence making everyone cringe, even the big, bad Emmett. My headache vanished, and I felt whole, healed, and unstoppable.

The demon-goddess’s lip curled. “Do you challenge me, Stormwalker?”

I drew a breath to answer, but before I could, someone rushed past me. Fremont, the least affected by the hex, snatched up the knife Mick had dropped on the floor and hurtled himself toward the succubus.

“Fremont!” I yelled. “No!”

Fremont ignored me. I had to banish my Beneath magic again before I could grab for him, and then it was too late.

“I thought you were an angel,” Fremont sobbed, his voice harsh with betrayal. He plunged the knife straight into the succubus.

It didn’t kill her. She was a demon-goddess, immune to the weapons of man. Coyote had died because his god powers had been somehow stripped away, rendering him mortal.

The succubus was immortal and could only be defeated by magic. Collective magic, maybe. If I could get Cassandra and Mick functioning, maybe Emmett as well . . . If I could make the hex work against her somehow . . .

Without stopping to think, I charged. She smacked Fremont away, and raised her hand to knock me aside. I grabbed the forces of the storm outside and filled the hotel with wind.

The hex made certain it turned into a tornado. Wind ripped through the lobby, tearing the remaining pictures from the walls, overturning furniture. It lifted the coyote statue and sent it flying through the air. The statue smashed through a window, tumbling end over end to land in the parking lot outside. The window immediately sealed itself once again, the hex not wanting the living inside to escape.

The succubus laughed at me. She seemed to stand in a bubble of protection, and the wind didn’t touch her. The knife still stuck out of her chest, and she put her hands on her hips and laughed.

I couldn’t reach her. Screw Coyote’s warnings about the vortexes. I had to end this.

I lifted my hand again, my Beneath magic thrilled to come out. I hefted the white ball of magic. “Hey, succubus,” I said.

The succubus’s eyes widened, but not at my magic. Her chest had started to smoke. She grabbed the hilt of the knife and tried to pull it from between her breasts, but the blade stayed inside her as though welded in place.

I snuffed out my ball of Beneath magic and watched, openmouthed.

Sacrifice. Life and death. Coyote insisting on giving his life so that the rest of us might survive.

Coyote’s blood coated the knife. Fremont had shoved the blade into her heart, or whatever passed for a demon-goddess’s heart.

The blood of a god wasn’t the blood of a mortal. Coyote’s blood held his essence, and now that essence wound itself through the demon-goddess.

That crafty little trickster god. It wasn’t his death that would save us, but the knife that had killed him.

The succubus’s sticky gray aura exploded and splattered all over the room. The aura stuck to the walls and worked its way inside, trying desperately to draw strength from the hex.

Forget Beneath magic. I reached for wind still whipping through the room, drawing the cyclone to me and making it mine. I laughed as I sent it at her dying body.

I ripped her apart. As the succubus fell, a misshapen creature ten feet tall, mottled green and blue, and ugly as hell rose from the wreckage of her body. The demon, in its true form, the succubus’s glamour gone. It screamed at me through a fang-laden mouth as it clutched at the knife.

Mick dragged himself up, his tattoos still going crazy, his eyes flickering red. He blasted the demon with a white-hot stream of fire, and I followed with a burst pure from the storm. The demon succubus fought with renewed fury, its chest smoking, but it couldn’t withstand the two of us, Stormwalker and Firewalker, assisted by Coyote’s blood sacrifice.

The demon screamed once more before it fell to my tile floor in an explosion of goo.

“The wards!” Mick shouted. He redirected his magic to the hotel’s walls, and I followed. The black aura of the dead succubus resisted us, but our poor, battered wards burned with renewed brightness.

Our wards twined happily around our magic like pets welcoming home long-absent humans. The hex crumbled and dissolved, our magic rushing through the walls like a river of fresh blood through shriveled veins. The demon-goddess’s aura dissipated with the hex, until both died with a little shriek on the wind.

Mick’s fire went out. The gale swirled around me once, embracing me, then rushed away, leaving the hotel lobby in silence.

The lights sprang to life, followed by a soft hum as the central heating clicked on. Outside, thunder boomed, and then the storm drifted away on a gentle rain.

I turned to Mick, wiping dead demon gore from my face, but before I could reach his open arms, all strength left my limbs, and the floor rushed up to meet me.

ELEVEN

I WOKE IN ONE OF MY FAVORITE POSITIONS, my head in Mick’s lap. His eyes had returned to the dark blue I loved, but the look in them was bleak.

“What the hell happened?” Pamela demanded. She’d reverted to her human form, and she glowered down at me, tall and naked, a Changer woman in all her glory.

“Coyote’s blood,” I croaked.

We all craned to look at Coyote—and found him gone. Vanished, not a trace of him, not even a coyote hair left behind.

“His heart’s blood.” I moved my tongue inside my parched mouth. “Coyote had to die to release it. I guess he figured that whoever we faced would be so powerful we’d need that formidable weapon.”

“So he’s really dead?” Fremont asked.

Who the hell knew? Coyote might have gone back to whatever sacred place gods went to when they left the world, maybe never to return in the form we knew. My heart ached.

“But Ansel tasted his blood,” Pamela said. “I couldn’t stop him.”

I sat up in alarm, clutching my aching head. “Ansel? Is he all right?”

I spotted Ansel on a sofa, cringing against the arm as though trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. The red in his eyes had gone, and dried blood caked his lips.

“I’m fine,” he said in a shamed voice.

“So why isn’t he dead?” Fremont demanded. Fremont looked tired, blood all over his hands, but there was a satisfied look in his eyes. The succubus had screwed him over, but he’d gotten even. Fremont might have inadvertently invited the problem into our lives, but he’d also been instrumental in solving it.

I slumped back against Mick, liking the feel of the strong arms that wound around me. “Because Ansel isn’t inherently evil,” I said. “He’s a human being who got turned into a Nightwalker. It’s a different thing.”

Ansel said nothing as he rose and silently faded up the stairs. Nightwalkers could move without sound, and Ansel vanished quickly into the gloom. He’d be punishing himself for a while, poor guy.

Someone stopped next to me. I looked from pristine leather wing tips up cashmere pant legs to Emmett Smith, his nosebleed gone, his dignity restored.

“All this compassion is making me ill,” he said. He gave me a sharp look. “That demon was an ancient one, Stormwalker, born in the brimstone of the earth, created even before the dragons. Yet your storm magic tore her apart as though she were a paper doll. Even with the trickster’s magic and the dragon helping, you shouldn’t have been able to do that.”

I shrugged. “I was provoked.”

Mick’s voice held a hint of steel. “And I suggest you leave before she gets provoked again.”

Emmett straightened his tie. “Yes, all right, I take the hint. One day I’ll meet you again, Stormwalker—or whatever you are. That, I think, will be an interesting day.”

“Yes, it will be,” I said, pretending I wasn’t as weak as I felt. “By the way, if you happen to see John Christianson, tell him you have no idea where Cassandra is.”

Emmett snorted. “Christianson is an idiot. If he can’t find Cassandra himself, then he doesn’t deserve to.” He gave Cassandra a mocking bow. “I applaud you, witch. I’ll meet you again one day, too.” As he spoke, his body shimmered, and then he was gone.

“Is everyone all right?” I asked wearily. I wasn’t certain I was. I was so damned tired.

No one answered. Pamela and Cassandra were holding each other, and Nash pulled himself up from behind the reception counter. I felt better. If a building in Iraq falling on him couldn’t defeat Nash Jones, a little tumble behind my reception desk wouldn’t be able to either.

Nash hauled Maya to her feet beside him. “What were you thinking?” he demanded. “Calling a dangerous person names makes them more dangerous. She could have killed you.”

“Just kiss her, Nash,” I said.

“What?”

Maya squirmed out of Nash’s grasp and marched away, grabbing her purse from the table where she’d left it. “Fuck you, Nash. I am so out of here.” She banged the front door on the way, and we heard her truck roar to life.

A voice came out of the saloon. “She’s a feisty beeyotch. Gotta love that Maya.”

The magic mirror. I heaved a sigh of relief. “Where the hell have you been?”

Nash answered, thinking I was talking to him. “Behind your reception desk. I was thrown here, remember?”

The mirror nearly sobbed. “I was trying and trying and trying to talk to you. But all that came out were those songs. Not even when I screamed. And I couldn’t focus anywhere but on the saloon. Good thing I love show tunes, but I missed all the sex.”

Mick started to smile. “Hey, maybe there were a few good things about that curse.”

I shared a grin with him, but I for one was damn happy to hear the mirror again. “But you shut up entirely when Emmett arrived, even stayed quiet after the hex broke. I can’t believe you did that by choice.”

“Janet, who the hell are you talking to?” Nash was in front of me now. There were actual wrinkles in his uniform shirt. Two of them.

“But I did shut up by choice,” the mirror called. “That nasty ununculous was here, and he’s got a lot of magic. I thought maybe you wouldn’t want him to know you have a magic mirror.”

That was smart, I had to admit. “Thank you.”

“Oh, you can thank me in many ways.” It snickered. “Ununculous. Sounds like a flower. Or do I mean ranunculus? Do think he’d mind if I called him Flower-Power?”

“Do what you want,” I said.

Nash slid on his jacket. “What I want is to get out of here. Things seem back to normal—that is, as insane as ever.” His shoulders slumped a little. “I can’t believe I condoned a murder, even encouraged it.”

“Coyote’s a god, Nash,” I said. “He’s probably fine.” I believed that, didn’t I? “Go see Maya.”

“In the mood she’s in, I doubt she wants to see me.”

“Go find her, help her, and go to bed with her, for all our sakes. She loves you. Damn it, Nash, you have to try.”

Nash gave me a long stare from his ice gray eyes. Then he gave me a nod and departed. Whether he went after Maya, I wasn’t to know.

Mick drew me back against him. “Good advice. Damn, I love you, Janet. Crazy magic, weird prophecies, and all. Bed?”

“Please.”

He lifted me as he rose, my dragon boyfriend as strong as ever. As Mick started with me down the hall, all the faucets Fremont had opened during the hex suddenly exploded with water.

“Fremont!” I yelled.

“I’m on it!” Fremont grabbed his toolbox.

“Oh, and Fremont,” I said from the safety of Mick’s arms.

“Next time you want to sleep with a woman—check with me first?”

“Right.” I could tell he had no interest in discussing his choice of girlfriends right now. The plumbing called. He charged into the kitchen, and Mick carried me down the hall.

“Oh, yes,” came through my bathroom mirror. “I get to see some action now. This will make up for my downtime.” The magic mirror’s gleeful chuckles died off into protests as Mick shut off the water in there and firmly closed the bathroom door.

MICK MADE ME leave the hotel for a few days and take vacation. Ansel, remorseful and guzzling cow blood by the gallon, offered to stand guard over it for me, and Cassandra, her cool efficiency restored, assured me she had everything under control. Elena showed up to work the morning after the hex, surveyed the wreck of her kitchen, and started an hourslong rant. I was happy I didn’t understand much Apache. We left her to her kitchen, her diatribe, and her knives.

I went with Mick to a place outside of Santa Fe that we loved, where the air was frigid, the snow was high, and beauty existed in every breath. We basked in the joy of time alone, especially snuggled up in bed at night, but I was still uneasy.

Mick hadn’t quite come to terms with his choice of killing Coyote, even though his act had ultimately saved us. I’d tried to find out what had happened to Coyote’s body, but of course, I couldn’t. Plus, I was a bit worried about those flashes of visions I’d had while under the hex. Something coming, they implied. Something not good.

On the third night, I slid into warm slumber after wild lovemaking with Mick and found myself standing outside under the tall pine trees, stark naked in a gently falling snow.

I blew out my breath, which fogged, even though I knew I was asleep and dreaming.

Tracks of a large wolf dented the snow. I followed the tracks deeper into the woods, and there he was, a huge coyote standing in a clearing, moonlight in his yellow eyes.

I stopped myself from rushing to him and throwing my arms around him. I was naked, and he’d like that too much. “Are you alive? Or is this all I’ll ever see?”

Of course I’m alive. I’m a god. The god.

As he spoke, the coyote shimmered and morphed into the man Coyote—tall, broad-chested, black-haired, and as naked as I was.

“Damn you!” My voice rang to the stars. “It’s been days. Why haven’t you told us you were all right? Mick’s eaten up with guilt.”

Coyote winced. “Keep it down, Janet. Little animals are trying to sleep. I didn’t tell you right away because I needed to heal. I had a knife in my heart. Give me a break.”

“You should have told us you wouldn’t really die.”

“But I did die. I had to die. Sacrifice. Death and rebirth. I told you; I’m a god. It’s kind of in my job description.” He shrugged. “Besides, don’t you know your Coyote legends? I can only die if the tip of my tail is destroyed. I wasn’t letting anyone near that.”

“Did you know about the demon-goddess? Did you know that Emmett wasn’t the hexor?”

Coyote shook his head. “I still can’t believe his name is Emmett. And no, I didn’t know. As soon as he showed up, though, everything made sense.”

“Now explain why you didn’t tell me that your blood would help. I was grieving for you, damn it.”

“Aw, that’s sweet. But think about it. Whoever sent the hex could have been listening to us the whole time. Plus, if you’d known, you all wouldn’t have viewed it as a sacrifice. You had to believe I truly faced death—and I did. The attitude of the spell caster is as important as the ritual. More.”

I remembered thinking much the same thing when we chanted Fremont’s spell for his demon.

Coyote touched his chest, which bore no scars. Not one. “And don’t think it didn’t hurt. Mick’s damn strong.”

“Wait. You said that everything made sense once Emmett showed up. But you were dead. So how could you know what happened if you were lying there dead?”

“I was kind of in transition. I heard everything, saw everything, I just couldn’t do anything. I told Fremont to get her with the knife.”

“You told him? How . . .”

“He didn’t realize I told him. I planted the suggestion in his head, and he thinks he acted on his own. That’s fine with me. He needs to feel like a hero.”

“Why didn’t you plant things in my head? I was grieving, you idiot. You couldn’t at least have let me know you’d be all right?”

“Because you needed to figure out the rest of it on your own. I can’t always be there to fix all your problems, Janet. But you smacked that demon down without using any of your Beneath magic. You did good, Stormwalker. I’m proud of you.”

That did it. I ran at him, screaming. My fists met flesh, thudded on muscle.

“Ow.” Coyote caught my hands. “Easy. Still healing.”

I tried to jerk away, but he kept hold of my fists. “Just because it worked is no justification!” I shouted. “What if I hadn’t known what to do, and we’d all died? What if even one of us had? You’d have let Maya or Fremont die so I’d learn a lesson? For your principles?”

“Not principles.” Coyote’s voice went stern, even harsh. “Life or death. The lesser or the greater evil. It’s the kind of choice I have to make every day.” He fixed me with his god stare, the one that terrified me. “It’s the kind of choice you will have to make.”

I shook my head, kept shaking it. “No. I would never decide that one of my friends had to die.”

“And yet you did. You chose me.”

“Because I thought you would come back to life, you asshole! And I was right. You did.”

“Because I chose to,” Coyote said. “Because you need me.”

He finally let me go, and I backed away, jamming my arms over my cold chest. “I would never, ever sacrifice those I love for any reason. Ever. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, I hear you.” His look was somber. “And yes, you will.”

I unfolded my arms. “Bite me,” I said, and I turned and walked away.

“Go on back to your lover,” Coyote said behind me, voice gentling. “Comfort each other the way you do.” A pause. “Hey, mind if I watch?”

“In your dreams,” I called over my shoulder.

“Or in yours. Whichever.” He chuckled. “You know, Janet, you do have the sweetest ass.”

I flipped him off and kept walking.

The dream faded and I woke in Mick’s arms, his blue eyes half open, his drowsy smile welcoming me.

I could still hear Coyote’s laughter in the night. It dissolved into high-pitched coyote yips and then faded on the wind.