CHAPTER 9
The next instant I was on top of the hill instead of below it. I laid my hand against the cool green grass and murmured, “Sorry.”
Then I got to my feet and I left Jimmy behind.
Quinn had disappeared. I assumed he was making like a statue in Megan’s garden again, which was where he should be. I should be—
Anywhere but here.
I got in the Navigator and headed for the airport. The only place I could think to go was New Mexico.
Eight hours later, I stepped off the plane in Albuquerque—flights from Milwaukee to the Southwest were few and far between—then rented a car and drove north.
Sawyer lived at the very edge of the Navajo reservation near Mount Taylor, one of the four sacred mountains that marked the boundaries of Navajo land, known as the Dinetah, or the Glittering World. In that world, strange things happened. Especially around Sawyer.
I drove through flat, arid plains that would eventually give way to mountain foothills dotted with towering ponderosa pines. Canyons surrounded by high, spiked, sandy shaded rock shared space with the red mesas immortalized forever in the westerns of John Ford.
I was still a few miles from Sawyer’s place when a lone black wolf appeared next to my car. Most wolves wouldn’t have been able to keep pace at 60 miles per hour, but this wasn’t most wolves.
I pulled to the side of the road and stepped out. The beast paused in the mesquite scrub and stared at me, tongue lolling, spooky gray eyes fixed on my face.
“How did you know I was coming?” I asked.
He tilted his head, didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Sawyer might be more than a wolf, but he still couldn’t talk.
“I’ll meet you at the house.”
I made a move to get back into the car, and he let out a low woof, then pawed at the dirt and shook his whole body as if he’d just climbed out of an icy cold bath.
“Why don’t you shift back so we can talk?”
He lifted his upper lip and showed me his teeth.
“Oookay.” I stared at him for several seconds. “You didn’t get yourself cursed again, did you?”
Sawyer had been cursed by his mother, the Naye’i, or woman of smoke. For years, centuries, millennia—who knew?—he’d been unable to leave the Dinetah as a man. But since I’d torn her to shreds, the curse was broken.
I contemplated Saywer’s fuzzy ears and bushy tail. Unless it wasn’t.
I sighed. Sawyer obviously had no desire to return to his human form at the moment, and since making a wolf do anything, especially this wolf, was damn near impossible, I’d have to compromise.
“If you can’t beat ’em.” I opened the trunk of the rental, then pulled a silk robe from my duffel. “Join ’em.”
A gift from Sawyer, the robe had been fashioned in every shade of midnight—blue, purple, black with sparkles of silver—the image of a wolf flickered in the folds. Skinwalkers can shape-shift, but they need a little help. Sawyer, in human form, had tattoos everywhere. They depicted mammals and birds and insects—every single one a creature of prey. To shift, he touched a tattoo and became whatever lay beneath the stroke of his fingers. I could do the same. Touch him and become them.
However, sometimes, like now, touching Sawyer’s tattoos wasn’t an option, so I used the robe.
Quickly I lost my clothes. The jeweled collar around my neck had been bespelled, which allowed it to shift shape along with me. A good thing, since a vampire werewolf was something I really didn’t want to be.
I swirled the garment around my shoulders and embraced the familiar bright flash of light that heralded the change. A blast of cold, followed by heat, then the fall from two feet to four, the shift from human to wolf. It didn’t hurt, not really, but it freaked me out every single time.
Phoenix.
Sawyer’s deep, melodious voice echoed in my head—the telepathy that existed between shifters in their bestial forms.
What’s going on? I asked. The curse should be broken.
It is.
He circled closer, slid along my body, rubbed his face against mine, and I let him. While human, I didn’t trust him. He kept too many secrets, told too many lies. But in this form we were pack, joined in a way no one else could ever understand. Animals don’t lie. I’m not sure they’re capable of it.
If you can leave the Dinetah as a man, then why are you furry?
He whirled and took off across the deserted terrain. I hesitated, but only for an instant. In this form certain things called to me, and running was one of them.
True wolves can cover 125 miles in a day and run 40 miles per hour. Shifters are much faster, and skinwalkers can move so quickly they seem to disappear in one place, then appear in another. Part of the reason we excel in this area is that we love it. Running frees us.
I chased Sawyer until I caught him; then I jumped onto his back and we rolled onto the ground, tussling and snapping, nuzzling and nipping. But all too soon, he sidestepped and ran away again. Sawyer wasn’t much for play, unless it was sex play. The man was a sexual god.
Maybe that was hyperbole. But not by much. He’d had centuries to hone his skills. He could seduce anyone, was comfortable doing anything. Unfortunately, sex meant nothing to Sawyer but a means to whatever end he was after at the time. That didn’t make the sex any less spectacular. But the aftermath was a bitch.
I understood why he was the way he was. His mother had screwed him up. Didn’t they always? However, Sawyer’s mother had screwed him up by actually screwing him. The federation had helped to make Sawyer a head case to rival all head cases by using his talent as a catalyst telepath—he could free blocked supernatural abilities through sex. He’d certainly unblocked me.
That he’d drugged me and slept with me to do so was still a matter of contention between us, but since I’d discovered the truth about his mother, I was a little less likely to plunge a knife into his back when he wasn’t looking. I still hadn’t forgiven him, but I kind of understood why he’d thought it was okay. His boundaries were as fucked up as he was.
We ran for miles. It felt so good just to be out in the fresh air, with the wind in my fur and nothing else to do but be.
Night hovered at the edge of the horizon. Mount Taylor loomed ahead, towering and beautiful. Full of mystery and magic. It was on that mountain that I’d become who I was right now. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
There was destiny and this was mine. I hadn’t wanted it. Still didn’t. But we very rarely get what we want. We move on and we live or we die, but we deal.
Sawyer headed away from the mountain, across the scrabbly land. Just when I was about to ask where we were going and why, he paused, crouched and seemed to disappear from the earth.
I let out a surprised woof and his head popped up as if he’d been buried in the dirt. Come, his voice commanded me.
I followed more slowly and saw that the dry ground had crumbled away into a fairly deep hollow, one side open to the steadily descending night and the other trailing back into a twisting cave beneath a rock outcropping the shade of sand. Sawyer stood with his head inside the cave and his tail dappled by the shadows of the setting sun.
What do you smell? he asked as I joined him.
I took a whiff. Something wild and gamey, not human but not completely inhuman, something that did not belong, yet something I recognized but could not quite put a name to.
I don’t know.
Not coyote, not wolf, he mused.
No. Those I’d smelled before.
He crawled in.
Hey! Not a good idea.
What if the animal that had been living in this place came back and found us there?
Sawyer didn’t respond, and he didn’t reappear. I stood outside for a few more seconds; then after a quick glance behind me, I went in too.
The place was a burrow, tight and warm and dry. It smelled of whatever had found it, a lot of them.
Maddening. His thought came to me loud and clear along with the flavor of his emotions. In this form feelings were like auras, scents perhaps. Laughter smelled like syrup. Fury like fire. And right now, overlaying the smell of unknown beast, I caught a whiff like sweet-and-sour sauce. Confusion. Sawyer wasn’t sure what to make of this place and this intruder any more than I was.
Why don’t we go outside? Wait and watch for them to return and then we’ll know.
He lowered his head in agreement. I tried to turn and trot back toward the gray oval of the entrance and so did he. His chest bumped my rear end. My tail slid across his nose. We froze, tangled together, pressed close and unable to move without pressing even closer. Then his breath brushed over me, and I understood the meaning of “being in heat.”
Sawyer had lived as a wolf. He’d mated as one. He wanted to do so again, and he wanted to do so with me. I’d resisted. The idea made me squirrelly. Or at least it had until today. Today my beast was howling for release, my skin twitching beneath the fur, the scent of Sawyer, of me, of this place, making me consider lowering my shoulders, lifting my rump, then allowing him to mount me from behind and—
He moved, and I bolted from the burrow, slamming into him so hard he in turn slammed into the wall and caused dirt to sift over us like rain.
Panicked, I reached for and became myself, the air going from hot to cold as the bright flash of magic that surrounded the shift faded. I stood in the moonlight naked and panting, my body still aroused, my mind churning like a storm-shrouded sea.
Another flash of light warred against the stars in the navy blue sky, and then Sawyer stood next to me. At least he had tattoos between him and the night.
In human form, he wasn’t handsome. His face was too finely angled for that, but he was striking, with silky black hair trailing past his shoulders, his bronze skin a sharp contrast to his strangely light eyes.
I’d never known a Navajo to have gray eyes, especially a full-blood like Sawyer, which led me to believe those eyes had marked him as a skinwalker, a sorcerer, a witch from birth. Since the Navajo fear the supernatural and hate witches above all else, this probably explained a lot about Sawyer.
“When we’re wolves, Phoenix, we’re wolves,” he began.
“We’re not.”
I pulled my gaze away from the sleek, glistening expanse of his skin. No matter how much he infuriated me, scared me, confused me, if Sawyer took off his clothes—and he did that a lot—my mouth went dry and my mind went south. No one on earth, in any century, had a better body than Sawyer.
“Wolves can’t think,” I continued, “can’t reason, can’t talk to one another with their minds.”
I drew back my arm to slug him; I don’t know why. I couldn’t hurt him. I didn’t know if anyone or anything could. He grabbed my wrist, quicker than the snake tattooed on his penis. I’d never been sure if that was Sawyer’s idea of a joke or not.
My other hand came up, also clenched into a fist, and headed right for his blade of a nose. He snatched that wrist too. Our bodies smacked together—breast to chest, hip to hip.
His snake was awake.
I had an instant to think, What the hell? and then we were kissing. If you could call it that. More of a battle—with teeth clashing, tongues plunging, tiny nips at the lips and the chin. We might be human—or then again we might not be—but we were behaving more like animals than we had only moments before.
I’m not exactly certain what got into me, besides him. Sure, I was still aroused from the encounter in the burrow, and being naked in the pine-scented shadow of Mount Taylor with the breeze stirring my hair and the light of the stars dancing across my skin would make anyone moon mad.
Perhaps I needed to have sex with someone for no other reason than that. No exchange of power—I already had Sawyer’s and I didn’t get double no matter how many times I tried—no favors to be granted, no boons to be asked, no forgiveness to be begged. Just sex with a man who knew better than any how to have it.
I tugged on my wrists, and he let them go so I could run my open palms over his incredible body. As I touched each tattoo the essence of the beast flickered—wolf, hawk, crocodile, tarantula, snaaaaake.
The hiss of a rattler slid through my mind even as the sleek, hard skin of Sawyer slid through my hand. He cursed, then nipped my collarbone. He was as on edge as I was.
A growl purred through the air—him or me? Hard to say. His hands at my hips, he twirled me around, my back to his front. We were nearly the same height, Sawyer maybe an inch taller, which allowed his erection to rest in the cleft of my buttocks. The sensation was exquisite. I rubbed against him like a cat.
He cupped my breasts, lifting them like an offering to the goddess of the moon, her silvery breath a hint of frost across our skin.
His lips at the curve of my neck caressed; his teeth worried a fold, a siren call to what lay captured inside of me. His tongue trailed along the collar that bound me, tickled beneath it, and the demon within me roared.
I bent at the waist, took him in from behind. As always, he knew what I wanted, what I needed, better than I did. Fast, hard, no words, only actions. Make me forget, make me feel but not think, make me come.
He held me to him with one arm around my waist, palm warm at my belly as his long, supple fingers stroked me higher and higher even as his other hand teased my nipples until they peaked and ached and burned. His body slammed into me so violently the slap of skin on skin echoed in the still and silent night, the sound as enticing as the actions.
I wanted more and he gave me more, he gave me all that he had, all that he could, until together we convulsed, our bodies shuddering against each other, within, around, as one.
When the glow faded—it always did—I straightened. He stepped back. I cast him a glance, but he was staring at the moon and not at me.
He looked exactly the same as he had the first time I’d seen him, and he always would. Sawyer was ageless, virtually indestructible and, for those reasons and several others, damned dangerous. Lucky for us he was on our side.
I think. With Sawyer, one could never quite tell.
I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, howls erupted from the darkness all around us. Weird howls. Howls that did not belong in the New Mexico desert. More like calls, maybe cackles.
“Foxes?” I asked.
“No.” Sawyer tensed, muscles gliding beneath marked skin. The tattoos seemed to live, to breathe, even dance. Since they were magic tattoos, fashioned by a sorcerer wielding lightning rather than a biker guy with a needle and ink, dancing wasn’t completely out of the question.
Shadows flickered, meeting, melding, then separating into strangely hunched figures that moved with a rolling yet oddly jerky gait.
“What are they?” I whispered.
“Hyenas,” Sawyer said, even as their hair-raising laughter rose again toward the moon.
“In New Mexico,” I clarified.
Sawyer cast me a quick, unreadable glance. “They aren’t real hyenas.”
“Duh,” I muttered, my gaze returning to the steadily multiplying shades.
Sawyer and I had no weapons but ourselves. Good thing we were pretty amazing.
I reached for his biceps where the image of a black wolf howled. But Sawyer stopped me with a quick shake of his head as he circled my wrist and drew my hand much, much lower.
For an instant I resisted. This was no time to play with the snake; then Sawyer spoke. “The only animals the hyenas fear are the big cats.”
My gaze lit on his thigh, where the image of a tiger roamed. I laid my palm on Sawyer’s leg, high up where his pulse beat thick and heavy.
“I hope you’re right,” I said.