CHAPTER 10

The flash came again—bright light and icy heat, the whoosh of the breeze as I fell. I’d never changed into a tiger, wasn’t sure what to expect.

I’d discovered over time that shape-shifting—at least for skinwalkers—had nothing to do with our human shape. When I was a wolf, I was a wolf. Less than a hundred pounds despite being quite a bit over a hundred pounds as a human. As a snake, I was a regular-sized snake. As a tiger, I appeared to be one big mother—maybe three hundred pounds if the size of my paws and the drag of flesh on my bones was any indication.

A second flash drew my attention to Sawyer. Damn, he was gorgeous. Orange coat, brown stripes, sleek, muscular and even bigger than me.

The hyenas were toast.

Unfortunately, they didn’t appear to see it that way. Instead of running for their lives as a good hyena should when confronted with a tiger, they surged forward.

Sure, there were a bazillion of them. But tigers were mean if the roiling, burning fury that pulsed in my blood was any indication. Seeing the hyenas here, on my land, my place, my territory, made me want to crunch their bones like uncooked spaghetti.

The pack came at us like a wave. I went with my instincts; they were all I had. One swipe from my mammoth paw and the first hyena’s neck broke. I sank my teeth into the throat of another and twisted, then just kept smacking and tearing, snatching and yanking, mowing through the throng on the left as Sawyer did the same from the right. With any luck, we’d meet in the middle unscathed.

If I’d been nothing more than human I would have died. I had no idea what killed a hyena shifter—silver, gold, bullets, knives, strangulation with the cursed entrails of a billy goat. However, a fight to the death between shifters works nearly every time, and the telltale burst of ash from each hyena proved it was working just fine right now.

That was the good news. The bad news? There were too many of them. They were legion—again.

They tag-teamed us. I began to bleed. Would a skinwalker die if bled to death by the wounds of another shifter? I didn’t know.

What I did know was that to kill me, they had to kill not only my skinwalker nature but my dhampir and vampire natures as well. Not that it couldn’t be done. It would just take time. But from the number of hyenas tumbling over the dunes, time was on their side.

What should we do? I thought.

Sawyer replied, Keep fighting. Help will arrive.

Help? From where? What? Who? How? And most important—when?

Two hyenas engaged me from the front, and as I smacked them around, a third snagged my leg and clamped down. Hyenas have the most powerful jaws in the animal kingdom. I roared as bones snapped.

The thunder of my call made the shifter flinch, and I pulled away. But I was hurt, couldn’t move as fast, wouldn’t heal completely until I shifted back into my human form, which I couldn’t do with an army of hyenas all around.

Sawyer jabbed and parried, tossing animals willy-nilly. He was bleeding too; one particularly nasty wound flapped open on his shoulder, making him gimp as badly as I did. I began to get a little scared. We weren’t going to last forever.

Help! I thought. A plea. A prayer. Right now, not much more than a platitude.

Then a roar split the heavens. Everyone froze, glanced upward. I almost expected to see fire raining down. Perhaps a huge celestial hand sweeping from the sky and scooping Sawyer and me to safety.

Hey, I had lost a lot of blood.

Instead, a lion stood on a nearby rise, the desert breeze ruffling his mane, the rising moon throwing silver sparkles across the golden expanse of his fur.

He loped down the hill, came at the army of hyenas with wild and savage abandon. Waded into them with claws and teeth and snarls. They scattered like pigeons. Unfortunately, they regrouped like pigeons too.

I braced myself for the onslaught, then sent out a thought to the lion: Run, Luther!

Luther was a street kid we’d picked up last month south of Indianapolis. He was a Marbas, the offspring of a lion shifter and a conjurer. His parents had been killed by other lions—a cadre of shifters descended from the demon Barbas—and we still weren’t sure why.

Luther had become the latest addition to the federation. He was an accomplished channeler and a damn good fighter—living on the streets tends to make that happen. I should know.

For an instant I thought he hadn’t heard me. Lions and tigers are similar, can even interbreed. Ligers, anyone? Or tigons? However, we aren’t the same species, and our telepathy might be funky.

But Luther cast me a scornful glance—the type every teenager gives his idiot parents—then went right back to fighting the hyenas. He seemed to be enjoying himself, crunching and munching his way through half a dozen.

My leg was healing—slowly, but I could put weight on it. With the addition of Luther, we held off the tide. However, at this rate, we weren’t going to win. It was only a matter of time until they did.

Luther roared, both pain and fury, and I drove forward, finishing off every hyena in my path until I reached him. Ever since I’d met the kid, I’d felt a bizarre affinity for him, a near maternal devotion I didn’t understand but couldn’t shake. When I saw one of the speckled beasts with his teeth sunk into Luther’s neck, I grabbed the freaky humpback by his hump and tore him free.

Luther bled from several nasty gashes, but they didn’t slow him down in the least. He turned to face another wave, and I snarled. He ignored me some more.

I couldn’t force him to leave; I had my paws full. But if we lived through this, we were going to have words. Despite Summer’s dig that I was no longer in charge, I was. Especially of Luther.

I don’t know how long we fought the hyenas, how many we killed or how many more poured into the fight. But there came a time when it was just Sawyer and I in the middle of the fray, and my chest seized up, thinking that some of the ash floating through the air was Luther.

Then I saw a flash of leonine tail at the outskirts of the melee. Luther trailed a circle of bloody footprints around the hyenas. And as he did so, they stopped fighting, milling within the confines of the paw prints, bumping against one another and snarling but never breaking the plane.

Now what? I thought. Should we slaughter them while they were confined? Or perhaps leave them within the charmed ring forever?

Get out, Sawyer ordered. Quickly, before the spell is complete.

Neither one of us had any problem stepping past the bloody circle. As soon as my pads touched the pristine dirt on the other side, a faint chanting arose. Foreign and rhythmic, yet still I recognized Luther’s voice in my head.

Blood, the moon, a chant—magic was definitely afoot. I stood back, so did Sawyer, and we watched and listened as the kid weaved an unknown spell.

The night stilled. Silence pressed on us as heavy as a rain-drenched quilt. Then the hyenas began to glow as if the sun poured down on them alone. A tiny flame blazed on each and every one—like E.T.’s heart light—then with a final yipping laugh-howl they burst into ashes. Bizarrely, not a single fleck landed outside that charmed space.

What in hell did you teach him? I murmured as Luther turned and loped toward Mount Taylor.

Not that, Sawyer answered, then followed the lion back home.

Me, I had a car to retrieve, clothes to put on. I might not care if Sawyer saw me in only my skin, but the kid was another story. I wasn’t that comfortable with shape-shifting. I doubted I ever would be.

Sawyer and I had run a long way as wolves, but I was able to retrace the miles just as easily as a tiger. Sure, a tiger was probably more conspicuous than a naked woman, but weird stuff happened around Sawyer’s place all the time.

The locals avoided the area, especially at night. The Navajo are very superstitious. They believe that all sorts of evil spirits walk in the darkness, and they’re right.

Sawyer had been outcast by his people. He lived at the edge of the Dinetah. No one talked to him, visited or even, I’d been told, said his name out loud, so I didn’t have to worry about running into any of the Navajo at this time of night. And if a white person happened by and saw me, well, they’d be much more likely to write off seeing a tiger than a naked woman to their imagination.

My car was right where I’d left it, my clothes too. I slipped into both and moments later the steady hum of the tires on the pavement lulled my still-racing heart back to a more normal beat.

The hyenas had scared me.

Not just that there were hyenas where they did not belong. That happened in my world. But that there were so damned many of them. Would Sawyer and I have been able to handle the swarm without Luther and his spell? How long until something I couldn’t handle came along?

Tiny sparks appeared to my right—the lights of Sawyer’s place. I wheeled off the main road and headed down the dirt drive. The night was too dark to see everything, but I knew what lay at the end of the lane as well as I knew the tattoos that graced Sawyer’s skin.

The house—a small ranch with two bedrooms, a kitchen, bath and living area—sat at the foot of the mountain, along with a hogan, a traditional Navajo dwelling made of logs and dirt.

Behind it, dug into a hill, was a sweat lodge, and between the two ran an open porch that could be used for both eating and sleeping when the temperature climbed too high.

Sawyer lived in the hogan most of the time, and though he used the coffeemaker in the kitchen, he often cooked his meals over an open flame. Right now that flame leaped toward the sky, sending flickers of shadow and light across the two figures in the yard.

Since Sawyer often wore the traditional breechclout of the Navajo several centuries in the past, I was surprised to see him in a pair of jeans. He’d tied his long hair back with a strip of rawhide, throwing the planes of his face into sharp relief.

Luther was dressed nearly the same as he’d been the first time I’d seen him. The clothes were just newer and a whole lot cleaner. Sneakers, jeans several sizes too large and a T-shirt. Plain. Olive green. Something an army recruit might wear in basic training, which is kind of what this was.

He appeared to have put on some weight. A good thing; the kid had been far too skinny. He was tall—probably six-two—and his feet and hands revealed the promise of more growth to come.

His skin was darker than mine, lighter than Sawyer’s, his hair kinky and a gorgeous combination of gold and sun-streaked brown. His eyes were light—hazel right now, turning amber when his beast began to purr.

I climbed out of the rental and confronted the boy. “I told you to run.”

He rolled his eyes. “Why would I run away when I came there to save you?”

“To save us.” I glanced at Sawyer, who shrugged. “Did you know he could do . . . whatever that was?”

Sawyer shook his head.

“Who taught you?” I demanded. “Summer?”

The fairy had struck up a friendship with Luther, or perhaps it was vice versa. The kid had issues with strange men. I didn’t blame him. I’d seen what lay in his past, and it was much the same as what lay in Jimmy’s and my own—people we should have been able to trust proving untrustworthy.

“The fairy has been obsessed with Sanducci, as usual.” Sawyer took a drag on a cigarette he hadn’t had an instant before, then blew out a stream of smoke on a sigh. “She’s been no help training the boy at all.”

“So you’ve been training him?”

“Some.”

My gaze sought Luther’s. “That’s okay?”

Luther nodded. Where, at first, he’d been unable to stand near Sawyer without twitching, would sidle closer to me whenever possible, now he seemed more confident, less uncertain and no longer frightened at all. Might have been teen bravado and very good acting, but I didn’t think so.

“You’re sure,” I pressed.

“I’m as powerful as he is.” The kid lifted his chin. “He tries anything, I’ll tear him up.”

Behind the boy’s back Sawyer’s smirk was illuminated by the red-orange glow of his cigarette. We both knew better, but there was no point in telling Luther. If he felt safer believing he could take Sawyer, then let him. Sawyer would never touch Luther inappropriately. Sawyer had been touched that way enough himself.

“Why’d you fight at all if you knew a spell to get rid of them?”

“Because I could,” the boy said with all the arrogance of his youth and the pride of his lion.

“Just because we can fight doesn’t mean we should. Especially if there’s a way to end the Nephilim without bloodshed.”

Luther’s gaze flicked to mine. “I needed blood.”

“Theirs?” He shrugged, which I took as a “yes.” “You aren’t ready to fight yet.”

The boy’s shoulders straightened. “Am too. I been fightin’ all my life.”

“Not things like this.”

“I did fine.” He spread his big hands wide. “Not a mark on me.”

“Anymore.”

“I heal just like you and him.”

“We aren’t indestructible, Luther. We can die.”

“Speak for yourself,” Sawyer murmured, and I shot him a glare. He wasn’t helping.

“You brought me here to become one of you,” Luther insisted. “I can’t if you don’t let me.”

“But—”

“He’s right, Phoenix,” Sawyer interrupted, flicking the remnants of his cigarette away. “He’s more prepared than you were.”

Luther had known there were demons out there, had sensed them and fought, if not actual Nephilim, then humans who were close enough. When I’d discovered the whole demon deal, I was more shocked than I should have been.

I was a cop once. I’d seen things that still made me start up in the night, sweaty and shaking. I should have figured out the score long before Ruthie’s death opened my eyes.

I contemplated Luther. “You need to be more careful.”

He snorted. “They’re all toast. I think they need to be more careful.”

Which reminded me.

“If Sawyer didn’t teach you the spell and Summer didn’t, then—”

The air stilled, yet my hair stirred in an impossible breeze. Luther’s carriage changed; his head tilted in a way that was more feminine than masculine; his shoulders rounded so that he seemed ancient and tired with it; even his eyes grew darker, appearing brown instead of hazel.

He opened his mouth, and Ruthie’s voice came out. “I taught him, child. Who do you think?”