Dreamwalker (Stormwalker #5) (14 page)

Sam struggled to shut his mouth. I wanted him to before he spilled details about what he and Maria got up to in the master bedroom of her nice condo.

“Mick, can you do anything?”

Mick came to stand behind Sam and placed his big hands on the man’s shoulders. “Just relax.”

Sam shivered, hard, sweat filming his skin. Under Mick’s touch, he began to quiet. Mick must be using a little healing magic, or some dragon juju to counteract Emmett’s spell.

Then Sam’s body jerked and went perfectly straight, rigid across the seat and back of the chair. His face turned from white to a bright shade of puce, and he screamed, a terrible scream. As Lopez and I watched, openmouthed, his skin began to smoke.

“Mick, stop!” I cried.

Mick started to pull his hands away, then frowned and jerked at them. His eyes widened as his fingers began to fuse to Sam’s shirt.

I lunged for Mick, ready to yank his hands away, but Mick danced back. “No—don’t touch me.” His voice was far too calm. “Lopez, take Janet out. I mean out of the building. Everyone else in it too.”

“Mick …” I stared in horror, Mick’s hands were melting, becoming one with Sam’s flesh.

“Go!” he said.
“Hurry.”

There was only one way Mick could deal with this, I realized. I grabbed on to Lopez and started tugging him out the door. “Come on. We need to get the prisoners out. Fast.”

The dragon tatts on Mick’s arms started to flow around and around, their eyes bursting with red flame. Mick’s fingers elongated and grew down into Sam, who was screaming in a high, shrill keen.

“I can’t leave them in here,” Lopez protested. It was his duty to make sure the prisoners were okay. I imagined Nash was pretty insistent about that.

My grandmother had taught me how to make people obey. I seized Lopez by the ear and pulled him, protesting, out into the hall, and then I pushed him toward the cells.

Behind me, I heard Sam’s screams merge from pain into absolute terror, and then the walls began to bulge.

Chapter Fourteen

Lopez fumbled with the coded lock on the steel door that led to the cells. The door and lock were new—Nash had been quietly triumphant when he’d obtained the funding for it. Lopez preferred old-fashioned keys. His fingers slipped on the pad and the lock buzzed red, not letting us in.

Lopez started to try again, but I batted his hands aside, fried the lock with a burst of Beneath magic, and yanked open the door.

Behind us, the walls of the interview room exploded outward, throwing bricks, mortar, nails, insulation, and probably many toxic substances toward us. I shoved Lopez into the corridor with the cells and slammed the door behind us.

Lopez clearly wanted to know how I’d futzed the lock, but he sprinted with me to the cells at the end. The two men inside them were still on their bunks, but they were writhing and kicking, as though being squeezed by some unseen force. The heavily muscled one turned over and puked onto the floor.

I wondered if Sam’s spell had triggered whatever Emmett had dosed them with as I zapped the lock of the first cell with a tiny ball of Beneath magic.

The problem with using such magic was it started to take hold of me. It was best when I grounded myself, balancing myself with my storm magic, but I was fresh out of a storm and too agitated for balance.

Lopez had started trying to fit his key into the lock of the second cell, but my burst of magic melted the lock and his key and nearly burned his fingers. He dropped the keyring but I kicked it aside, yanked open the cell doors, and ran into the first one.

“Get him out!” I yelled to Lopez, waving my hand at the second cell.
 

I grabbed the man in the first cell, who was still puking, under the arms, and dragged him up. He was about twice my size, but Mick had taught me how to haul around people bigger than myself. I pulled him into the corridor just as Lopez came out with his guy. Both men were limp, helpless, cramped in pain.

The building shook again. A shriek like a banshee tore the night, not the cry of a dragon, but some other kind of terrible magic. Mick would break his way out, I knew, but I also knew he’d try to do it with minimal damage. Mick was dangerous but not chaotic. Anything else happening was courtesy of Emmett.

An explosion rocked the building deep inside it. A shower of debris raced down the hall outside and slammed into the steel door between us and the rest of the jail. I dove flat, pulling Lopez with me, in case that steel door came bursting down.

It held. The door bulged, bricks, rebar, whatever else was in walls smacking it with denting force. The door bent, but stayed in place.
 

The lights died instantly, without even a warning flicker. Debris rained from the ceiling of the one-story building, striking my skull, back, and the hands that tried to protect my head. Dust clogged my nose and grit cut my skin. In the pitch dark, I felt Lopez huddle next to me, trying to shield both me and himself. The two thugs were lying in misery, one groaning, the other making whimpering noises.

We hunkered down and waited. After a sickeningly long time, the shower of ceiling pieces died away. Silence descended. The building stopped shaking, and Sam’s screams had vanished. I concluded that Mick had flown the hell away—whether he’d taken Sam or not remained to be seen.

Lopez moved beside me, coughing in the dust. The ceiling groaned in a way I didn’t like, and I struggled to my feet.

“We need to get out,” I said.

“Any ideas?” Lopez asked, not in anger, but brisk efficiency. “We can’t use the door.”

Not only was it be blocked, rubble from the broken building might flood in on us if we opened the door.

I touched Lopez in the dark, guiding him gently behind me. “Stay
here
and don’t let these guys move.”

“Okay.” I heard Lopez’s boot scrape in the darkness, then he spoke sternly to the thugs. “Come on, stop whining. We’ll do as the nice lady says.”

I would like to have used a bit of Beneath magic to light my way, but I feared dividing my attention, in case I couldn’t pull myself together to do what I had to. I felt my way, step by step, using the cell’s bars to guide me, to the end wall.

I put my hands flat on the concrete and took a long breath. I coughed, dust and floating insulation clogging my throat. Resting my forehead against the wall, I tried to calm myself, but calm wasn’t coming.

I worried about Mick, who’d turned dragon to keep from becoming one with Sam or whatever other weird magic Emmett had in store for us. I hoped also that the desk clerk had found the sense to dash out the front door as soon as he heard the walls come down in the back.

I gathered my Beneath magic within me. I had to concentrate, or this would end in disaster. I wanted to break a hole in the wall big enough for the four of us to escape, but I could end up bringing the rest of the roof down, or blowing up the entire town of Flat Mesa. I never knew with Beneath magic.

I remained with my arms pressed flat against the wall, leaning my cheek into the unfinished brick. I let the Beneath magic rise, not focusing it on one point—my fingers, for example—but let it permeate every limb, my torso, even my face.

The magic filled me, embracing me in heat that was at the same time burning cold. I heard Lopez gasp and say,
“Shit.”

I opened my eyes. A silver white glow lit the cell block. It was emanating from me—from my entire body. I felt the magic crackle through me, power mounting in increments, like an intense light slowly warming and coming to life. I let the power grow, directing it—I hoped—to the outer wall.

The bricks began to smoke. I screwed my eyes shut and held my breath, exhaling dust. The wall heated beneath me, growing red hot, then hotter still. It burned me, but then it didn’t. I remained intact, leaning on the wall that began to melt.

Lopez was swearing in a soft voice, in English, then Spanish, then English again. “Janet,” he said after a while. “You okay?”

No, I wasn’t. I started laughing, the power inside making me giddy. I could change the nature of a substance, and I didn’t even need a blowtorch.

I took the very essence of the wall—its bricks, mortar, rebar behind it, the paint and stucco on the outside—and compacted it into its individual molecules, then atoms, then nuclei, then what Mick told me were called quarks, each one tinier than the last. I made the wall dissolve, rendered all substances it was made of into microscopic dust.

With a sudden burst of light, the wall blossomed a hole about six feet by six, sweet night air flooding into the cell block.

Lopez wasted no time. He had the first thug up in a fireman’s carry and out of there. I stood still, my body shaking and on fire, the light consuming me and at the same time throwing illumination, like a torch, into the parking lot.

Lopez charged past me again and grabbed thug number two. “Come on,” he shouted at me as he ran out, the big guy over his strong shoulders. He reached a hand to me.

“Don’t touch me,” I said sharply. My magic hadn’t shut off—it was busily dissolving the floor, more of the walls, and flowing up into the ceiling like powerful and rapidly eating acid. “Find Mick. Tell him I need his help.”

I tried to dampen the Beneath magic, but it often had a mind of its own. It liked destruction, so when I used it for that, it latched on and kept going. Like an eager dog that didn’t want to stop until it had chewed up everything in sight, the Beneath magic continued to eat away at the jail.

I had spent a terrifying night here, and it drew on that remembered panic, deciding to obliterate the place for me. The ceiling shuddered, bricks and whatever was packed inside the ceiling raining on me like a deluge of hail.

“Janet,”
Lopez cried. He ran for me, stretching out his hand, ready to haul me out.

“Go
away!
” I shouted, and slapped him with a burst of white magic. Lopez sailed backward, landing in the parking lot on top of the thugs.

I pushed a bubble of magic around myself, trying to keep the ceiling from crushing me in the magic’s exuberance. If I could press the bubble outward, calm the magic down, and then dive through the hole, I might just make it out of the jail alive.

The Beneath magic, on the other hand, wanted to go on a wrecking spree. It didn’t care that it would kill me along the way. It was heartless, eternal, and would find another way to go on without me.

I drew a breath, the air still under my magical canopy, and pressed it outward. I’d practiced meditation and other calming magics with Mick, he knowing that I needed all the help I could get. Thinking of him, his dark eyes, his flash of sexy smile, helped, as did the cool feel of the turquoise and silver ring on my finger.

I exhaled. The Beneath magic would ease, and I would walk out of here and find out what had happened to Mick. And then I’d kill Emmett for putting him in danger like that …

A sudden darkness squeezed me, robbing me of all breath. My head came up, my meditation shattered.

What …?

“Janet,” snarled a familiar voice. “What the hell have you done to my jail this time?”

Nash walked right in through the hole I’d made. In the presence of his null field and magic-canceling aura, the Beneath magic squeaked and died in an instant.

The next moment, the entire cell block collapsed. Nash grabbed for me, but he couldn’t reach me in time, and he sprang back out of the way.

I heard Maya’s shrill scream outside, and the ceiling came down and buried me alive.

***

I woke reluctantly, finding myself in a bed. I kept my eyes firmly closed and twitched a finger.

“Ow,” I groaned.

“Take it slow, baby.” The warm, growly voice I loved rumbled around me.

I let out a breath of relief. Mick was all right. Not destroyed by the building he was trying to break out of or fused for life to Emmett’s chauffeur.

“Weird spell,” I said. My words came out an incoherent mumble.

“Just rest.” Mick’s breath brushed my face. “You were screaming in your sleep. Bad dreams?”

Dreams?

I popped open my eyes, and confusion hit me between them.

I was in a motel room on a lumpy bed, a water-stained ceiling above me. The curtains at the window were open, moonlight spilling in. I could see only tall trees, thick stands of conifers that didn’t grow near Magellan. Arizona has plenty of soaring pine trees, but not these thick-limbed walls of green.

The air was cool, a sharp bite of high elevations and northern climes. Mick was in a T-shirt and underwear, which he only wore when we were up north. In Magellan, he slept naked most of the time, but at more northerly latitudes he liked a layer of fabric between his skin and the night. Dragons hated being cold.

I swallowed. “Mick, where are we?”

“Montana. Remember?” He gave me a look of concern with blue eyes that were shading to black. “We got in yesterday.”

Cold fear flooded me. I craned my head to look around at the motel room, the same one I’d been in when Coyote, Mick, and the mirror had awakened me from the first dream. I was back as though no time had passed.

“Coyote,” I said.

Mick put a soothing hand on my shoulder. “I heard coyotes in the night. Came really close. They’re gone now.” The soothing touch turned to a caress. “You gonna be all right for some riding?”

I put my hand to my head, my heart sinking. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

As I’d raised my hand, I’d seen that the silver and turquoise ring was gone. I rubbed my third finger, missing the pressure of the cool silver.

“Sure,” I repeated. “I’ll be fine.” Now to get myself to believe that.

***

We said good-bye to the bikers we’d met at the little motel and headed out not an hour or so later. I followed Mick through Montana, heading west again.

As in the last dream, my nagging memories of the future me began to slip away. It didn’t matter that I lay buried beneath the county jail, perhaps stuck there forever. Mick was leading me into wild country, the two of us alone and free, without care. This reality was far preferable to the one I’d left in the future, and I didn’t fight losing it.