Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1)(27)
“Lightning out of a clear blue sky,” Kai says. “Weird.”
“Yeah, weird.” Although I know it’s anything but. Lightning without a cloud in sight means one thing.
Visitors.
Chapter 11
“We going inside?” Kai asks.
“Hmm?” I keep my gaze on my trailer, waiting for something, some sign to let me know what I’m walking into. We pulled up a good ten minutes ago, but I’m still sitting in the driver’s seat, unwilling to move.
“Inside. This is your place, right?”
“Yeah, but I’ve got a visitor.”
He turns his head to look briefly around the empty driveway. “How can you tell?”
“Lightning. And you hear that?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly.” I rub my hands on my pants, psyching myself up. “I’ve got dogs, three of them. Rez mutts, not afraid of anything. And right now I don’t see them anywhere, but mostly, I don’t hear them.”
And there it is. A flicker of a curtain. A face peers out, only briefly, and then the curtain falls.
I let out a sigh, somewhere between relief and disappointment. I recognize that face. Part of me thought for a moment it might have been Neizghání in there. What that reunion would look like, I’m not sure. But I don’t need to worry. That wasn’t Neizghání’s face in the window.
“I want you to wait here,” I tell Kai. “Get the shotgun out of the back. If I don’t come out in fifteen minutes, come in with the gun. Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to shoot anybody, but try to look menacing if you can. I’ll probably be okay.”
“Probably?”
“Yeah. He’s likely just here to talk, but I won’t want to be alone with him any longer than that.”
Kai’s staring at the windows of my single-wide now, his face somewhere between thoughtful and nervous. My visitor hasn’t come back to the window for a second reveal, but I can feel the air around us thickening, the dread heavy enough to make me jittery.
“If he won’t hurt you, should I really come in waving a shotgun?” Kai whispers, even though we’re alone in the truck.
I nod and whisper back, “Sometimes you need to make a good first impression.”
The look he gives me is incredulous. “With a shotgun? Who the hell is in there?”
I’m pretty sure that first question was rhetorical, but I answer the second one best I can. “An old frenemy. His Navajo name is Ma’ii. You probably know him as Coyote.”
I open the truck door and step out. The high desert has finally begun to cool off as evening approaches. The faint smell of ozone flavors the air, remnants from the lightning that my houseguest used for transportation. A sense of the uncanny sets my senses on edge, and something animal and instinctual in me tells me not to go into my home. That what waits for me in there means me harm. That instinct isn’t wrong exactly. It’s saved me more than once in dealing with the Bik’e’áyée’ii. But this time I’m not listening. Coyote has come calling, and I want to know why.
I push down the impulse to run away and take the few steps up the dirt path to the front stairs. I bound them in one leap and open the door.
Chapter 12
When I was fourteen, before the Big Water, when the TVs still worked and the melting of the polar ice was generating reports of record storms from Florida to Maine, and the flooding along the Eastern Seaboard made Hurricane Sandy look like the female rain of a light summer shower, Coyote came to me. He came in a dream that first time. He would wait another year, until I had lost not just my family and my place in life, but my entire self, to manifest physically. But it is still that first time, when Coyote-in-a-dream visited me, before I woke up to the nightmare of a Big Water world, that I remember best.
He wore a dapper gentlemen’s suit right out of the Old West. His shirt was a white high-collared affair, tucked into trousers that were striped an outrageous crimson and olive and gold. Over the shirt was a double-breasted vest of the deepest red velvet. It was topped off with a golden puff of a silk cravat, embroidered with delicate rose-colored thread. A gold watch hung from a chain tucked in his vest pocket, and over his shoulders spread a camel-colored topcoat with a thick gray fur collar. The coat flared out around him when he walked, like the mantle of a rogue king. He carried an engraved mahogany walking stick with a golden handle, and greeted me with a wide mocking smile and a tip of his top hat. He was every inch the gentleman scoundrel from some old Hollywood Western.
I think now that it must have tickled him, a creature who could change his shape as easily as humans shed clothes, to dress the white man’s frontier dandy when visiting a Navajo girl. He looked splendid, of course, but the choice was subtly cruel. I knew the stories of the Long Walk, of duplicitous land agents and con men. To remind me of them was no accident on his part.
We sat together in that dreamland sipping whiskey from china cups. The tickle of the amber liquid down my throat had a caramel twinge set for a child’s imagination, but the warmth it produced in my belly and the slightly fuzzy sense of reality it created in my head were real enough. He stretched long legs out in front of a heartily crackling fire and told me horror stories.
Of how long ago, in a world before I existed, birds had plucked his eyes out and eaten them. How beavers had beaten his body with their long flat tails until he was a bag of molted skin holding shattered bones and burst organs. How it felt to have his toes and fingers, the latter now gleaming hooked and clawlike in the dreamfire, crushed one by one, grown back, and then crushed again.