“So that’s okay?”
“What else we gonna do?” Ruthie asked. “We need the key, the book, somethin’.”
“All right,” I said, glancing at Sawyer. “What do you have to do?”
His lips quirked, and suddenly I remembered what Xander Whitelaw had told me about Navajo skinwalkers.
They have sex with the dead.
I made a face. “Uck.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Sawyer pointed out.
“I’ve never been clear on all the powers of a skinwalker.”
“And you never will be,” he returned.
I narrowed my eyes. I wished I could make him tell me, but Sawyer still trumped me in power. Which might be why he refused to let me in on all his secrets. He wanted to keep it that way. He was so damn annoying.
“Whitelaw had a lot of theories,” I began.
Sawyer’s smile died. “So he did.”
“How many of them were true?”
“Hard to say.”
I started ticking off all that I knew. “Shape-shifting. Check. Witchcraft. Bingo. Cannibalism?”
Sawyer didn’t answer.
“Killing from afar by use of ritual?”
The smile returned, but he still didn’t speak.
“Travel on storms?”
That legend probably came about because skinwalkers could move faster than the wind. So, technically true.
“Power from lightning?”
I’d seen his mother throw lightning like Zeus. Never had seen Sawyer do it, but that didn’t meant he couldn’t.
“Associated with death and the dead.”
Obviously, since he planned on raising Xander’s ghost and asking him some questions.
“Incest.”
Sawyer’s face went as still as the dark mountain behind him.
I guess I wouldn’t call the last a power but rather the source of any weakness. Another curse. The first but not the last Sawyer had received from his mother.
“Sorry,” I murmured.
What had happened to him at the hands of that psychotic evil spirit bitch wasn’t his fault, and I shouldn’t be reminding him of it now. Or ever again.
Sawyer continued to make like a mountain. I glanced at Ruthie-Luther and spread my hands—code for Do something.
She sighed. “Sawyer.”
Her voice was gentle, the one that had soothed me when I was sick, strengthened me when I was weak, taught me what I needed to know and told me what I needed to hear. No matter what she’d done for the sake of the world, the fact remained that she’d done a lot for me as well. Regardless of her motives, Ruthie Kane had saved me from the streets and myself. She’d saved a lot of people. I was going to have to cut her some slack.
Eventually.
Sawyer’s dark gaze moved to Luther’s face and softened. I wasn’t sure what lay between Ruthie and Sawyer. She’d sent me to him when I was fifteen to learn how to control what I was. Hadn’t worked completely; I’d had to come back recently and learn some more.
Sure, it had been beyond strange to send a fifteen-year-old girl to spend the summer alone with a grown man in the New Mexico desert. But I wasn’t an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl and Sawyer wasn’t really a man.
If Social Services had found out, they would have yanked me from Ruthie’s care quicker than a starving cat snatched a baby mouse from its nest, but they hadn’t found out. I now knew that Ruthie had controlled more than just the federation—or rather, the federation had members just about everywhere in very high places, and if things were discovered that weren’t supposed to be, it was an easy task to wipe memories from human minds. Or, in some cases, wipe those human minds from the face of the earth and move on.
Besides, Sawyer had never touched me inappropriately. The first time. Not because he had any morals to speak of but because he was scared of Ruthie. Considering Sawyer, I had to wonder what lay in their past and just how much power Ruthie had that I didn’t know about.
Ruthie reached out for Sawyer with Luther’s hand, and Sawyer took it. Seeing the two of them connected like that was kind of weird. But right now Luther was Ruthie and the touch seemed to help. Sawyer straightened, removing his hand from Luther’s as he got down to business.
“I’ll need something from him.”
“From him,” I repeated, confused.
“A part of the person who is now a ghost. Hair, nails, skin.”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh, well,” Sawyer said, and headed for his hogan.
“ ‘Oh, well’?” I glanced at Ruthie-Luther. “That’s it? ‘Oh, well. Have a happy end of the world.’ ”
“What do you want me to do?” Sawyer stopped, turned. “Conjure something from nothing?”
“Uh . . . yeah,” I said in my best “duh” voice, which Sawyer ignored.
“There has to be a connection. Something to tell the . . .”—he waved his hands vaguely—“powers that be who we want to bring forth.”
“This is such BS,” I muttered.
“Lizbeth,” Ruthie murmured. “Think. Where can we find a part of Xander?”
“Got me. We burned him,” I said. “Had to. He was a mess.”