Dreamwalker (Stormwalker #5) (30 page)

“This is Emmett we’re talking about,” I reminded him. “You remember. The man who threw you around like you were nothing?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Ansel lifted his slim shoulders in a shrug. “He’s human. If he’s distracted fighting you, he might forget to fend off my attack until I have my teeth in him.”

True, but Emmett could dose his own blood to hurt a Nightwalker. I had to admit that Ansel was good in a fight, though, and the more attacking Emmett at once, the better. I told him I appreciated his help and went on with my planning.

My grandmother also refused to leave—no surprise—and so did Elena. “I have my own territory to defend here,” Elena said. “Mr. Smith needs to learn he can’t have everything his own way.”

I knew I couldn’t convince them to go short of knocking them over their heads and dragging them off, so I nodded. “Fine, but stay in the kitchen. This will be bad, and I don’t need you getting hurt.”

“We fought him before, Janet,” my grandmother said. “And won.”

“You were on the fringes of his fight with another mage, and a goddess defeated all of us.” I pointed at the kitchen door. “Go.”

Grandmother gave me an annoyed look, but at least she went, Elena behind her. I found Ansel again and asked him to guard them, and he gave me a reluctant nod.

That left me, Mick, Cassandra, Drake, and Pamela, who refused to leave Cassandra’s side. Colby and Gabrielle were still out looking for Nash.

I took up my position in the saloon, Mick beside me, Drake flanking, and Cassandra with Pamela at a table, Cassandra ready to work some powerful spells.
 

Emmett filled the mirror. The skull of his face was horrible, and his eyes had enlarged to fill the sockets with glowing white. He still wore his glasses, emeralds winking in the light from his eyes. Like a close-up on a large movie screen, we could see only Emmett and nothing behind him.

I wanted to wait for Nash, who could turn the tide, but all at once the mirror started rattling. Emmett’s hands were on the sides of the frame, as though he could grasp it from his side, and he was shaking it hard.

The frame clanked against the wall, its banging dislodging the wine glasses hanging up near it, sending them shattering to the floor. Then the mirror went dark.

While it was a relief not to see Emmett’s face anymore, my heart dropped. Emmett was learning how to manipulate things inside the mirror, and I had the feeling he was on his way out. I clasped Mick’s hand, said a prayer to any god who was listening, and reached for the storm that was now coming swiftly out of the mountains.

The mirror shattered. The lovely, smooth sheet of glass Flora had restored cracked, and a piece shot out of its middle. The glass took the same crazed pattern it had worn before, a fragment falling from the frame.

Emmett’s reflection shot across the cracks, and then he emerged from the mirror. He didn’t step or fly out, he simply solidified in front of us.
 

He no longer looked like the gruesome, half-dead thing—his slim body and smooth face was restored, along with his suit. Why he cared about looking like this, I didn’t know, but if I’d learned nothing else about Emmett, I’d deduced that he was severely vain.

He attacked. No waiting. Magic bolstered by Gabrielle’s Beneath power sliced directly toward me and Mick.

Mick saved me by the straightforward method of tackling me to the ground. The Beneath magic slammed across the room and rendered the wall between the saloon and lobby rubble.

“Damn it!” I yelled as I came to my feet. “I just had this place redone!”

Emmett threw another bolt at me. The last time I’d fought him, out at Chaco Canyon, he’d conjured up all kinds of dark, malevolent spells designed to tear us apart from the inside out. Now he blasted away with Beneath magic alone, as though he’d used it all his life.

I anchored myself with the coming storm and reached inside to release my own Beneath magic, letting it flow up in a protective bubble around me and my friends. Emmett, without hesitation, began to hammer it down.

But I’d learned something from Flora and her spell—that magic was stronger if mages banded together. Hence the reason I’d bolstered myself with two dragons, an excellent witch, and a strong Changer. Touching their magic, especially that of the dragons, helped ground me against my Beneath powers as well.

Cassandra, seated at one of the tile-topped tables, Pamela protectively behind her, used her fingers to draw invisible sigils. I felt the air change, growing colder, flowing around her as though she created her own storm.
Air and fire,
Flora had called Cassandra’s magic.
A wonderful combination.

I let Cassandra get on with it and turned back to Emmett.

Mick and I had a strategy—we’d decided that pointing and shooting wouldn’t work, but distraction and combining forces might. I reached for lightning that had come ever nearer the hotel, fed some of it to Cassandra to bolster her spell, and whacked Emmett with the rest of it.

He batted the crackling energy aside. Drake and Mick, coming at him while he focused on me, sent fire at him, which Emmett again batted aside. Without waiting, I sent another strike of storm magic at him, followed by a ball of white Beneath light.

Emmett opened his hands, gathered all the energies we’d thrown at him, and shot them through the roof Drake had just paid to refinish. I bit back a scream of frustration—those molded tin ceilings were expensive.

Emmett brought his hands back down, a shield of magic between him and me, Mick, and Drake. “You can’t win this way,” he said calmly. “I’m too strong. Surrender, and I might be merciful.”

Cassandra now sent the spell she’d been conjuring. It didn’t fire like my magic or the dragons’; it seeped around Emmett’s barrier and into him while he was focused on me.

Emmett’s eyes widened, and his gaze shot to Cassandra. His shield weakened, and he flinched, his face graying.

“Nice,” he said to Cassandra. “Turning my own blood to poison—diabolical and clever. No wonder Christianson wanted to hire you.”

Emmett dragged in a deep breath. He closed his eyes, balled his fists, then opened his mouth and expelled an inky black mist. The mist hit his wavering Beneath shield and vanished.

Drake hadn’t waited for him to finish. He shot fire into Emmett as soon as the black mist had dispersed, and Emmett again flinched.

Then he opened his eyes, rage flaring, and slammed Drake with Beneath magic coupled with a spell.
 

Drake countered with a wall of fire, but he was thrown upward, slammed into the magic mirror, hit the top of the bar, and toppled forward to the floor. He staggered up, then roared as Emmett’s spell sliced into him. Drake’s hands went to his face, the dragon tatts that clasped his throat and neck fading.

“One down,” Emmett said. He pointed at Cassandra, and she rose into the air, Pamela reaching for her in alarm. Cassandra clutched her chest, gasped out a string of odd-sounding words, and fell again, breathing hard. Pamela caught her and gently eased her back into the chair, then turned a snarl on Emmett.

“Maybe two,” Emmett continued. He easily tossed aside the magics Mick and I hit him with as he’d focused on Cassandra. “Is this the best you can do, Janet?”

The door to the kitchen swung open to reveal Elena framed in its doorway. She raised her hands and began to chant.

The language was ancient Apache, I assumed, at least, far older than what the White Mountain Apaches spoke today. Elena’s voice was clear, beautiful, compelling, and the hotel shook as the pool of shaman power in the basement rose to engulf her.

Emmett was definitely distracted by that. I gathered the entirety of the storm outside, married it to my very angry Beneath magic, joined it with Mick’s fire, and let him have it.

Wind whipped through the saloon, tearing a bigger hole in the roof. Rain poured down, drenching us. The rain could do nothing, though, to quench the fire that seared across Emmett’s body or stop bolts of lightning I slammed into him.

Emmett screamed. I’d felt firsthand in my dream what it was like to be burned by dragon fire. Now Emmett’s body melted with it, his spell to counter it thwarted by the full power of my dual magic and Mick’s fire.
 

Triple threat.

The air around Emmett turned black. Pressure filled my ears, and the building rumbled ominously. I took a hesitant step back, just before the blackness shattered into fragments of obsidian.

I ducked as the deadly pieces sailed by. When I came up, I saw Emmett standing calmly in the middle of my falling-down saloon, brushing off his sleeves.

“Janet,” he said in a quiet voice. “Now you’re starting to piss me off.”
 

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Elena!” I yelled. “If you’re here to help—do it!”

Elena ignored me. She continued to chant, her arms raised, unprotected in the doorway.

“Not yet,” my grandmother said behind her. “It doesn’t work that way. The young are always so impatient.”

Emmett sliced a shaft of magic past them both and blew up the kitchen.

Before the resulting flames could hit my grandmother and Elena, two slim arms came around them, and Ansel leapt upward as only a Nightwalker can. He took them out through the roof, but I didn’t have time to see whether Grandmother and Elena made it to safety, because Emmett was on me again.

“You’re dangerous, Janet,” he said over the roar of fire, wind, lightning, and rain. “All that magic swirling around inside you, and you have no idea what to do with it.”

I couldn’t answer, concentrating on wrestling aside the Beneath magic he threw at me.

“Remember my analogy?” he asked. “When I told you how frustrated you’d be if you saw someone with an amazing camera, who didn’t know what to do with it? How you’d watch them blunder about, ruining it? That’s how I feel when I look at you. All that brilliant power roiling around inside you. Relinquish it to me, and I might let you and your friends live. They’d no longer be a threat to me, anyway.”

“Screw you!” I think I yelled. My hands were slick with sweat, my body cold. I fought, but I could feel myself losing.

He’d do it. Emmett would take my magic as he’d taken Gabrielle’s, leaving me an empty shell. Once he had that, Emmett would wrest away the mirror, and have everything he needed. I didn’t think even Coyote or the Beneath goddess would be able to stop him then.

Emmett chuckled. His eyes became the opaque, steel-colored orbs I’d seen in my dreams. “I am so looking forward to this,” he said.

He brought his palms together, then jerked his arms straight down. Without changing his stance, he turned and swatted aside the fire Mick shot at him, sending it back to burn him.
 

Mick wasn’t there when the fire returned. Moving as fast as a Nightwalker, he dove out a hole in the wall—not running away, I knew, but giving himself space to turn dragon. If nothing else, he could snatch up Emmett and drop him somewhere far away again, maybe into a volcano if we were lucky.

Emmett jerked his hands apart, and his magic began to tear me in two.

I shrieked. The pain that Mick, Drake, and Gabrielle must have felt cut into me and tore me apart, molecule by molecule. Agony stabbed through me as everything that made up my being was studied, dissected, and pulled asunder.

I became sharply aware of my two distinct parts—the Stormwalker with the shaman powers of my grandmother, Ruby; and the child of the Beneath-magic goddess. The magic from Beneath was immensely strong, could do anything, kill anyone. The Stormwalker was of this earth, drawing magic from the ground that had created her.

Drake was on his knees on the floor, rocking back and forth, his dragon-ness gone. Emmett had stolen it, just as he’d done to Mick in the dream. He’d done a similar thing to Gabrielle. Emmett was now trying to separate me from
my
magic, or rather, my magic from me.

Two parts of a whole—Stormwalker and Beneath goddess. I’d been fighting the two natures all my life. Now Emmett, with a flick of his wrist, yanked them apart.

The pain went on and on, so terrible that I became curiously detached from it. I saw my body coalesce into two distinct ones, two Janets, each slightly translucent and hanging a few inches above the debris-strewn floor.

One Janet had skin darkened by genetics and a life in the sunshine. The other’s skin glowed white, the unhealthy shade of a goddess who never saw the sun of this earth.

The two of us were powerful, but I realized immediately that I derived my strongest magic from the mixture. I’d never understood how much until this moment.

It was the grounding of the Stormwalker that let me draw the Beneath magic and focus it. Likewise, my well of Beneath magic let me enhance the storms and direct them where I wanted them to go. I’d been working in the past year to find the exact balance that would make me strong and keep me sane at the same time. I had nearly learned that equilibrium, until Emmett, this moment, stole it from me.

I hung there, staring at myself, seeing out of both Janets at the same time. Stormwalker watched Beneath goddess, and Beneath goddess watched Stormwalker.

Mick chose that moment to tear off the rest of the roof. His black dragon head peered down, fire in his eyes. He saw the two mes dangling in the air, and stopped.

“No,” I told him, both Janets speaking in tandem. “If you kill him now, I’ll never live.”

Mick must have understood that, or Emmett would already have been snatched up. Mick drew his head back, his eyes filled with rage and frustration.

“Get Drake, Cass, and Pamela to safety,” I told him, my voice chorusing.
 

Mick reached down and plucked up Drake. Cassandra raised her hands. “No, I’m not letting this bastard win.”

She’d die trying, I saw. I didn’t want to lose Cassandra, but Mick backed off. He would understand that she needed to fight. Pamela looked unhappy, but she would stay with Cassandra and protect her while I couldn’t.

Mick withdrew, but I knew he wouldn’t go far. I held on to the comfort of knowing he was near. The turquoise and onyx ring he’d given me clasped the fingers of both Janets, the sensation letting me know he’d never desert me.