It was going to hurt.
I jerked back, my lips forming “no” but my voice too bound by horror to set the word free.
The Dagda’s intent gaze bored into mine. “Do you choose to spare him even if it means the end of the world?”
And that “no” I’d been choking on flew free.
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?