From Jennifer Ashley, With Love

  I had to stash it somewhere. But while I ran through ideas for where to take it, the artifact called to me.

  Part of me wanted to know why it had been made and how. The other part of me was busy imagining all kinds of ways I could use the pot to make myself powerful beyond imagining.

  I realized now that the artifact singing away in the cabinet while I’d fought Jamison had enhanced my Beneath magic, which was why I hadn’t been able to damp it down as I had when fighting the slayer.

  The Beneath magic was now throbbing and humming through me, not having subsided in the least. Crackles of it moved through my body, popping in my ears. The magic leaked out through my fingers, contacting the handlebars and lighting up the bike in electric arcs.

  If I didn’t contain the magic, I was going to fry myself. My beautiful new Softail would be a melted heap on the highway, and I wouldn’t be in much better shape.

  The bike sped on, fed by power. I checked my rearview mirror, hoping no police decided to try to pull me over. I was afraid of what I’d do to them if they did.

  My right-hand mirror—the one with the piece of magic mirror in it—was still dark. The mirror still hadn’t recovered from the fire, or it had buried itself too deep to be reached.

  And I suddenly knew exactly how to fix it.

  Yesterday, I’d worried about hunting for a mage powerful enough to bring the mirror back to life, yet trustworthy enough not to try to kill me and Mick to steal it. Today I knew with clarity that I didn’t need another mage.

  All I had to do was—

  “No!” I yelled it out loud, clenching the handlebars to keep myself from reaching for the mirror.

  If I healed the mirror, Cassandra and Mick would know instantly—the loudmouthed thing would make its presence known in every mirror and every shard in the hotel. Neither Cassandra nor Mick would take long guessing how I’d done it. The surge would be so strong that the dragons might sense it in their compound, through the mirrors my mirror had penetrated there.

  The dragons would fly straight for me, and if Pericles had an eye on them, he’d follow. And then there was the Nightwalker Paige harbored. He wouldn’t be up during the day, but he’d be coming for the pot as soon as he woke. Why he or Paige wanted it, I didn’t know, but magical talismans could cause a feeding frenzy.

  Then the artifact told me exactly how to deal with Pericles, dragons, and the Nightwalker. In one of the visions it gave me, I saw myself holding the pot in one hand, while building up a ball of my goddess magic in the other. The vision showed me Pericles rising higher and higher on a vortex of my magic until he was a speck in the sky. Then the magic disappeared, and Pericles fell down, down, down to splatter across the ground.

  The goddess in me laughed.

  Thunder rumbled behind me and spread to fill the land. A glance into my good rearview mirror showed blue-black clouds building up on the southern horizon and racing toward Magellan.

  The artifact explained that I’d no longer have to wait for storms to form to use them—I could create and build them myself.

  The first icy balls of hail fell on me as I sped out of Magellan toward my hotel. Traffic dried up and disappeared as I left town, and I raced toward the Crossroads alone.

  Sheets of rain mixed with hail fell with the intensity only a desert storm can bring. I could barely see the road through the hail and the mist boiling up from the hot pavement. Hailstones crashed against my helmet and beat on my exposed body.

  A sensible motorcyclist would stop and wait for the wave of rain to pass. I kept going. I needed to reach the hotel . . .

  And then what? At my hotel I had Cassandra, a mega-powerful witch and her Changer girlfriend. Then there was Elena, an Apache shaman who guarded a huge pool of magic in my basement. And of course, the Nightwalker. Even the two low-level witches who’d stayed on after the fire would sense the aura of this pot, and if things went as expected, they’d fight me to get it.

  Coyote’s words came back to me: When I said no one is strong enough not to be tempted, I meant it. Including Mick.

  I trusted Mick. I trusted him with my life.

  I thought of Jamison, one of the good guys, and the madness I’d seen take over his kind eyes. He’d been using the artifact to help Julie, and he’d fought me to protect her. Good motives, and still it had driven him to kill.

  Mick was a stronger person physically than Jamison, and he had far stronger magic. I’d also seen what Mick could do when magic turned him against me, and I never wanted to see it again. The fact that I held his true name might stop him, or the pot might tell him exactly how to wrest the name back from me and be free.

  The aura from this thing was already sliding under my skin, urging me to call down the storm and mix it with my Beneath magic. If I did that, I’d be unstoppable. The Hopi gods and Coyote had warned me they’d crush me if I used my powers to hurt or kill, but too bad for them. I’d be too strong for them to stop me.

  In fact, I’d be the strongest magical being in the world. The ununculous? Ha. I’d stand toe-to-toe with Emmett Smith and blast him out of existence. And then I’d go find Bear and tell her what I thought of her horrific game with Coyote.

  No. I bit back a scream. I’d been down this road before, and it hadn’t ended well.

  My hotel was in view. I gunned the bike, flew past the now-wet Crossroads, and kept on toward Flat Mesa.

  Ten miles of open road lay between me and the next town. Ten miles of lightning, hail, and driving wind, while the artifact called me to link my powers with it and make myself invincible.

  I was babbling to it, begging it to stop, when I roared into the parking lot of the Hopi County Sherriff’s department fifteen minutes later.

  I didn’t want to open my saddlebag and pick up the leather-wrapped vessel. I didn’t want to touch it, even with the layers of my riding gloves and the bag between me and it.

  I started sobbing, but I made myself open the hatch and reach inside. I couldn’t risk leaving the pot out here even for a minute—if Pericles or Drake had been following me, they’d grab it as soon as I ducked inside.

  The vessel’s power beat on me. I stumbled from bike to front door, not having the strength to close the saddlebag. The pot howled at me, calling me a coward, making my mind start whispering words of power to bring it to life.

  “No, no, no, no, no!”

  “Janet?” Deputy Lopez looked up from where he was taking particulars from a large but dispirited-looking biker. “You all right?”

  “No!” I flung my helmet to the counter as I crashed my way behind Lopez and down the hall, not stopping until I reached the door marked, Nash Jones, County Sheriff.

  Nash never locked his door, so I burst inside, praying he was there. He was, and he got to his feet when I ran inside, drenched and wild-eyed, clutching a dirty leather bag to my chest.

  Nash swept up all the folders on his desk and slammed them onto his filing cabinet, not because my crazed entrance scared him, but because he wouldn’t want me to get his beloved paperwork wet.

  I dumped the leather bag onto the middle of his desk. “Pick that up. Please.”

  Nash stared at me with his winter-gray eyes. “Why?”

  “Please! Damn it, Nash, just do it!”

  Nash regarded me with stone-faced suspicion, but finally he reached down and touched the top of the bag.

  The noise of a thousand screams filled my head, winding up into piercing shrieks. I covered my ears and yelled with them.

  Nash continued to pin me with his flint-hard gaze, but he finally opened the bag, frowned into it, reached inside, and pulled out the pot.

  Tiny shards of pottery—white, black, and red—leapt from the vessel and flew up to surround Nash. The instant before they hit his skin, they stopped, hovering in midair like a swarm of indecisive bees. Then they reversed, flowing back to the surface of the pot. I heard the click, click, click as they fell into place, then the pot went dormant.

  The voices ceased. The hail, which had
been grating on the window, died away to a soft summer rain.

  I fell into a chair and pressed my hands to my aching head. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  “Want to tell me what this is?”

  Nash scraped the bag away from the pot and set the pot on top of it.

  It was a perfect match for the fake. Ansel had been right to call Laura a talented forger.

  The real pot had the same slightly rounded bottom, the wide flare of the sides, the perfect pull in to the opening, plain without a lip. The inside of the pot was black, the outside white with red and black designs—the tortoise, the bear, and lines representing lightning.

  Made of clay common to this region, it had been built up by hand, baked, and painted, the designs unique to the potter’s clan and family. Then it had been infused with god magic, making it a hundred times more magical than most mages could ever hope to be.

  Now that the pot’s aura wasn’t beating on me, I could appreciate its beauty. It was very old, but the colors were still vivid. The designs had softer and more curved lines than newer pottery, which could be sharp and abstract. Care and skill had gone into the pot’s making. And power. Lots and lots of power.

  I couldn’t know whether the magic had gone in as the woman potter had formed the vessel or whether the power had been added afterward. I only know it had fixed on me as a being with goddess magic and had wanted to teach me to do amazing things.

  It had recognized the powerful magic in Nash, but too late had realized the nature of that power.

  Nash was a negative—a magic null. Even the most immense magics in existence were cancelled out when Nash touched them.

  “Janet?” he prompted, and he didn’t look patient.

  I sighed and told him everything that had happened since I’d left him next to the dead slayer on the 40, ending with Coyote tasking me to destroy the pot.

  “Easy enough,” Nash said. “I have a hammer.”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple. I’m guessing breaking it or even grinding it to powder wouldn’t stop it.”

  “Then how?”

  “I don’t know. I need to talk to Coyote.”

  Nash drew the bag up around the pot again and closed the drawstring mouth. I could still feel the faint hum of its aura, but Nash’s negation was keeping it from tearing at me.

  “I’m guessing you want me to keep this,” Nash said, sitting down again, the wrapped pot on the desk between us.

  “Yes. With you, at all times. Never let it out of your sight. Bad people want to get this.”

  Nash sat straight in his chair as always, hands resting lightly on the desk. “Bad people, who?”

  “Powerful mages like Pericles McKinnon. The Nightwalker who killed the slayer up on the I-40. He’s an old boyfriend of Paige DiAngelo, by the way.”

  “Is he?” Nash’s eyes took on a gleam of interest. He loved arresting people.

  “Careful with him. He either wants this pot for himself to make him stronger, or else he’s working for Pericles. He has a lot of people on his payroll.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me. When he was demanding me to come work for him too.”

  “And you said . . .”

  “I said no.” I folded my arms over my wet shirt, shivering as more water dribbled from my hair. “Of course I said no. He’s creepy.”

  Nash didn’t praise me, but I could tell he was pleased with my answer. “Where can I find Paige and her Nightwalker boyfriend?”

  “In Amy’s old house. Paige is renting it.”

  Nash’s gaze flickered. Bad memories there. Nash had been engaged to Amy once upon a time . . . long story.

  “Maybe Emmett Smith,” I went on. “If he hears about it. You remember him.”

  “Hard to forget. Not the happiest time of my life, me locked into your hotel with you and your friends. I got thrown across a room.”

  “Pericles wants to knock Emmett off his throne, and what better way than with an artifact full of god magic? Pericles certainly will come for it. But you being you, he can’t kill you with spells, no matter how powerful he makes them.”

  “True,” Nash said. “But he can kill me in other ways. He can shoot me, stab me, beat me to death, poison me. . .”

  I lifted my hand. “Yes, all right, I take your point. But you’re Nash. I can’t see you letting someone get close enough to kill you.”

  “I won’t.” Nash said it without boasting. He didn’t have to. “I can’t take this home, not with Maya there. I won’t let her be hurt by someone trying to get to me or this thing.”

  I gathered my long hair in my hands, and another rain of water splashed to his linoleum floor. “She won’t like it if you don’t go home.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  We both went silent a moment, imagining the furious whirlwind of Maya when she found out Nash couldn’t come to her because he was babysitting an old pot for me.

  “Tell her you’re having sex with me,” I said. “She’ll be so busy hunting me down to kill me, she won’t have time to get near the artifact.”

  Nash didn’t crack a smile. “I’ll tell her the truth instead. Meanwhile, you find Coyote and figure out how to get rid of this thing as fast as you can.”

  “That was the plan.”

  “Good.” He glanced at his paperwork, then back at me, clearly wanting me out of there.

  I didn’t want to go—it was calm in here, peaceful even, despite the pot’s presence. Nash’s null field always had a soothing effect on my crazed magic.

  He gave me an icy look when I didn’t move, but I knew that underneath that ice—somewhere—was the man Maya had fallen madly in love with.

  I pulled myself to my feet, aching all over, and headed for the door. “Thanks for understanding. Not out of your sight, remember.”

  “I heard you the first time.” Nash lifted the pot and held it loosely in his hands. “Tell Lopez to get back here with a mop and towels.”

  * * *

  The storm had died to a flowing rain with thunder around the edges by the time I reached the parking lot again. I put my helmet back on, my hands shaking with exhaustion and release.

  But I wasn’t finished, not by a long way. I needed to find Coyote and ask him how on earth I was supposed to destroy the pot when I couldn’t even get near it.

  Coyote had said it was supposed to have been thrown into Sunset Crater back when the mountain had been a live volcano. Now Sunset Crater was a black, inert cinder cone surrounded by lava flows, rivers of rock frozen in time.

  If an active volcano was the only thing needed, I could always take the pot to Hawaii, to the Big Island, and toss it into the bubbling volcano there. But then, maybe the god magic specific to the San Francisco peaks was important. Hawaii had its own gods, with their own agendas, and who knew what they might do with a vessel full of power?

  Best to search for Coyote. I still didn’t have a cell phone—not that Coyote always answered—so I decided to ride back to the hotel. Bear might have returned there, and despite their bizarre hide-and-seek game, she probably knew exactly where Coyote was.

  I rode on, more fatigue hitting me with every mile. I nearly missed the turn into the hotel, my eyes were so glazed.

  I pulled the bike around the back of the hotel and shut it off, then I found myself on the ground, the bike half on top of me, the back tire spinning in the air. My head hurt where my helmet had hit the ground, the only thing protecting me.

  “Janet. Shit.”

  I heard Mick’s voice, then felt him pull off the helmet, lift me into his strong arms, and carry me inside.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “I need to talk to Coyote,” I mumbled.

  Mick laid me on the bed, hands roaming my arms and legs, looking for injuries. “Shh. He’s not here.”

  “I know. I need to find him. Or Bear.”

  “Love, what happened to you?”

  He peeled off my wet jeans and
shirt, then my bra and panties. I felt the large softness of a towel rubbed on my limbs, Mick drying me with thoroughness. The friction of the towel on my breasts and between my legs aroused me, but not enough to wake me up.

  Mick kissed my face, my throat, my belly. The towel remained draped on my body, but Mick was draped there too, like the best blanket, his mouth a place of heat.

  I didn’t protest when he lifted my hips enough for him to slide into me and start to love me with slow goodness. The towel, still between us, absorbed our sweat in the hot afternoon. His whispers drifted over me along with his magic, drawing off my residual power, healing my body.

  Sometime later, after he’d brought me to beautiful, dark climax, I drifted into exhausted sleep.

  The shrill peal of a cell phone woke me. I jumped, finding the warm weight of Mick stretched beside me like a protective wall.

  He reached down off the bed, plucked his phone from his jeans, and answered it. The strident tones of my grandmother filled the silence.

  “Where is Janet? I need to talk to her.”

  Mick handed the phone to me without a word, not bothering to pretend we weren’t in bed together.

  “Grandmother?”

  “Granddaughter, you need to get home. Right now. You, by yourself. Understand? I don’t want to see that Firewalker with you. You know I don’t like him.”

  I knew nothing of the sort. Grandmother had developed a fondness for Mick in spite of their rocky start.

  “Right now. Do you hear me?” Grandmother’s words grew distant from the phone. “Will you stop doing that?”

  “Janet.” Gabrielle’s voice filled my ear. “Get here. It’s important.” She clicked off.

  Mick took the cell back from me, his eyes changing from warm blue to black. He’d heard every word with his dragon hearing, not that my grandmother had bothered to keep her voice down.

  “Someone’s there with them,” I said, and Mick gave me a nod.

  “I got the not-so-subtle hint that I should come,” he said. “How do you want to do this?”

  I experienced brief moment of gratitude that Mick grasped essentials quickly without arguing. “I ride up alone.” I traced his shoulder, where the line of dragon tattoo began. “You come covertly and back me up. And see if you can find Coyote. I still need to talk to him.”