The rest of the trip was uneventful. Jimmy drove. I didn’t. I slept; he didn’t. I expected a visit from Ruthie; none came. Instead, I dreamed of Hardeyville, and I feared that we would lose every battle to come, because I wasn’t ready for this, and I wasn’t sure I ever could be.
We approached the outskirts of the Navajo Reservation near dusk. The reservation spread across three states: Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, with the largest portion in Arizona. The area occupied by the Dineh, what the Navajo call themselves, was larger than ten of the fifty United States.
The terrain was so different from home. Flat, arid plains of salmon and copper gave way to mountain foothills dotted with towering Ponderosa Pines. Canyons surrounded by high, spiked, sandy shaded rock existed not far from red mesas immortalized in at least a dozen John Wayne movies.
Sawyer lived at the very edge of the 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.
As we got closer to our destination, my shoulders tightened. My neck ached. I found myself leaning forward, fighting the opposing pull of the seat belt as I strained to see the house and outbuildings.
I was so focused on what was coming that I almost missed what was already there. But a dark flash to the right drew my reluctant attention.
A wolf loped at our side. Hard to say if it was real or—
Well, it was real, as in there. But was it an actual wolf, or was it another were?
I opened my mouth to tell Jimmy, then shut it again. His policy was to shoot any wolf that he saw, and it wasn’t a bad policy if a wolf was found near humans. But this one wasn’t. The animal was running along minding its own business.
And it was so beautiful. Sleek and black. Wild and free. I’d always liked wolves, or at least the idea of them. Until yesterday.
The beast wasn’t huge, as most of those in Hardeyville had been, but it could be a woman, a small man, hell, it could even be a teenager. What did I know? But if it was a Nephilim, we needed to kill it before it killed someone else. I gave in to the inevitable.
“Jimmy,” I murmured.
His gaze went immediately past me, narrowed, and he jerked the Hummer to the right as if he meant to run the wolf over. Between one blink and the next, the animal was gone.
Jimmy wrestled the Hummer back on the road as I pressed my nose to the glass and squinted.
“Where did it go?”
He didn’t answer, just continued to stare at the road, fingers tight on the steering wheel, jaw working as he ground his teeth loud enough to make me wince. He seemed angry, not scared, and I wasn’t sure why.
“It disappeared,” I murmured. “That wasn’t a werewolf.”
Or at least not the kind we’d seen in Hardeyville.
The more I thought about it the more certain I became that this wolf had not been an actual wolf. I didn’t know much about them, but I doubted they could keep pace, with a car on the highway. We had to be going seventy.
And that vanishing act. Too damn strange.
The car lurched to the right again, and my gaze flicked to the side of the road, expecting to see the black beast, if not running, then attacking. But outside the window, the empty desert loomed.
I had bigger problems than a speedy, disappearing wolf. I had Sawyer. His place materialized out of the desert like a mirage.
Darkness had fallen in the last few minutes as it always did here—fast and hard. The colors at dusk were some of the most beautiful in the world—vivid fuchsia, muted gold, and hunter’s orange swirling through the brilliant blue of an endless ocean. In the evening they faded like a watercolor painting brushed by a cool black rain.
The Hummer’s headlights washed over the homestead. Someone waited in the yard. I didn’t have to get any closer to know who that someone was.
The house—a small ranch with two bedrooms, a kitchen, bath, and living area—sat right next to the traditional Navajo hogan, a round dwelling made of logs and dirt.
Fashioned after the sky, which was in turn considered the hogan of the earth, the building contained no windows and only one door, facing east toward the sun, so the inhabitant could greet each new day.
Behind it, dug into a short rise, was a smaller hogan, which was used as a sweat lodge. Between the two, a ra-mada, or open porch, had been built. This was used in the summer months for both eating and sleeping.
Jimmy stopped the car and I got out, moving jerkily as if I were in a trance. Maybe I was. What I wanted to do was run, hide, burrow in somewhere and be forgotten, but the first sight of Sawyer pulled me like a magnet. I couldn’t stay away.
I’d never understood what he was. Psychic? Perhaps. Magic? Probably. He was a mystic, a medicine man, but even that didn’t explain all the things he’d done, the power that rolled off him like the heat that wavered above the pavement on a scalding summer day.