Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(2)
Desperate. He doesn’t have to say it. I get it.
The runner was a kid on a motorbike. Short and squat, so runner was a bit of a misnomer, but he wore a pair of ancient Nikes, duct tape wrapped carefully thick around the toe and reinforcing the seam at the heel, so what do I know? He sat in my yard with the bike’s motor idling loudly, making my dogs bark. I came to the door to tell him to go the hell away. That I wasn’t in the monster-hunting business anymore. But he told me Lukachukai needed help and nobody else would come and there was a little girl and besides they were paying. I said it wasn’t my problem, but the kid was persistent, and the truth was I was interested. All I’d been doing the past nine months was staring at the walls of my trailer, so what else did I have to do? Plus, I was getting low on funds and could use the trade. So when the kid refused to leave, I decided I’d go to Lukachukai. But now I’m starting to regret it. I’d forgotten in my months of self-imposed isolation how much I hate a crowd, and how much a crowd hates me.
The uncle spreads his hands, eyes begging where words fail. “I thought, maybe once you saw . . .”
And I do see. But I figure the Begays are holding out. Maybe they don’t want to pay because I’m a woman.
Maybe because I’m not Him.
“This is bullshit,” the brother says loudly, and his challenge sends a nervous titter rippling through the gathering. “What can she do that we can’t do?” He gestures to encompass his posse of friends along the wall. “Clan powers? She won’t even tell us what her clans are. And Neizghání’s apprentice? We only have her word for it.”
At the mention of Neizghání’s name my heart speeds up and I can’t breathe past the knot in my throat. But I force myself to swallow down the familiar hurt, the ache of abandonment. The pathetic flutter of desire. I haven’t been Neizghání’s anything for a long while now.
“Not just her word,” the uncle says. “Everyone says it.”
“Everyone? Everyone says she’s not right. That she’s wrong, Navajo way. That’s what everyone says.”
A general burst of murmuring through the crowd, comparing notes on my wrongness, no doubt. But the uncle quiets them down with a flapping wave of his hands.
“She’s the only one who came. What do you want me to do? Send her away? Leave your sister out there at night with that thing that took her?”
“Send me!” he shouts.
“No! The mountain’s no place to be after dark. The monsters . . .” His eyes flicker to me, the person he is willing to send up the mountain after dark. But there’s nothing like consternation on his face. After all, he’s paying me to risk my life, although it’s a pretty stingy deal. The nephew is a relative, and another matter. “We already lost one,” he finishes weakly.
For a moment the boy looks like he’ll challenge his uncle, but he catches his mother’s gaze and his shoulders fall. He exhales loudly and slumps in his seat. “I’m not scared,” he mutters, a final volley. But it’s not true. He’s all show in those army castoffs and he surrendered quick enough. I glance over at his boys against the wall. Quiet now, looking everywhere but at their friend. I revise his age down a few years.
I let my eyes drift toward the boarded-up window where outside the sun is swiftly setting. If I had a watch, I’d make a show of checking it.
“Seems to me all this talk is just wasting my daylight,” I tell them. “Pay me what I’m worth and let me do my job or don’t pay and let me go home. Makes no difference to me.” I pause before I look at the mother. “But it might make a difference to your daughter.”
The boy flinches. I get a small tick of pleasure watching him flush in shame before a voice cuts through the heavy air.
“Do you have clan powers?” It’s the first thing the mother’s said since she asked if I could find her daughter. She seems startled by her own outburst and raises her hands as if to cover her mouth. But she stops short, lowers her hands to her lap, and grips the fabric of her long skirt before she adds quietly, “Like him, the Monsterslayer. The rumor is you do. That he taught you. That you’re . . . like him.”
I’m not like Neizghání, no. He is the Monsterslayer of legend, an immortal who is the son of two Holy People. I’m human, a five-fingered girl. But I’m not exactly normal, either, not like this brother and his friends. If the others asked, the boy or the uncle, I would refuse. But I won’t deny a grieving mother.
“Honágháahnii, born for K’aahanáanii.” Only my first two clans, but that’s enough.
The crowd’s muttered suspicions rise to vocal hostility, and one of the boys barks something ugly at me.
The mother stands up, back straight, and silences the crowd with a hard stare. Her eyes fill with something fierce that stirs my sympathy in spite of my best efforts not to give a damn. “We have more,” she says. The uncle starts to protest, but she cuts him off, her voice louder, commanding. “We have more trade. We’ll pay. Just find her. Find my daughter.”
And that’s my cue.
I roll my shoulders, shifting the shotgun in the holster across my back. Habit makes me briefly palm the belt of shotgun shells at my waist and the B?ker hunting knife sheathed against my hip. Fingertips brush the throwing knives tucked in the tops of my moccasin wraps, silver on the right, obsidian on the left. I sling my pack over my shoulder and turn on silent feet, moving through the muted crowd. Keep my head up, my hands loose, and my eyes straight ahead. I push the door open and step out of the stifling Chapter House just as the brother shouts, “What if you don’t come back?”