Hexed

it,” Cassandra said. “What better place to hide my magic than in a place permeated with it? When I drove by your hotel and saw the wards all over it, I knew I’d struck lucky. Even if you hadn’t been looking for a manager, I’d have washed dishes for you, anything for a chance to live here. Plus your aura held so much innocence, Janet, I knew I could trust you.”
    “ My aura?” I stared. “Held innocence?” This was the first time in my life I’d heard someone refer to Janet Begay as innocent. Janet, the Stormwalker with the goddess-from-hell mother and magic she was just beginning to understand, was a long way from innocent. Most people called me “troublemaker,” “pain in the ass,” or “oh-my-god-it’s-her-let’s-run.”
    Cassandra smiled at me. “Trust me, Janet, after knowing the people I knew, your honesty was refreshing.” Her face fell. “But I’ve put you—and Mick and everyone here—in the worst danger.”
    “You think the blood message in the bathroom means Christianson has found you?” I asked.
    She nodded. “ And I can’t risk that he won’t kill everyone in this building to get to me. I have to go.”
    Cassandra started to rise, but I pulled her back down. “Don’t be stupid. If they’ve found you, the safest place for you is here. We have Mick, and I’ll call Coyote—if I can find him—and we’ll get Pamela up here. There’s some damn strong magic within these walls. We’ll defend you. It’s what friends do.”
    Cassandra looked pathetically grateful. Mick and Coyote were the strongest magical beings I knew, but my magic is plenty damn powerful as well. Mine is a mixture of earth magic—Stormwalker power that I inherited from my Navajo grandmother—and the crazy, white-hot goddess magic from Beneath.
    Beneath is the shell world below this one, where the evilest of the gods got stuck when Coyote and others sealed the cracks between that world and this one. The vortexes around Magellan held gateways to that world, and one of the evil goddesses stuck down there was my mother. I’d inherited the nasty, unpredictable, insanely powerful Beneath magic from her.
    I’d recently learned to twine my Diné-inherited storm magic and my Beneath magic to temper both, but earth magic and Beneath magic mix like oil and water. It’s like having a blender inside you all the time. An angry blender.
    Cassandra flinched. “No, I don’t want Pamela here. I don’t want her hurt. If they don’t know about her, they can’t use her to get to me.”
    Pamela was a Changer, a shape-shifter who could take the form of a wolf. She and Cassandra shared a small apartment in town, and Cassandra had met her here, in my hotel, the day Pamela had tried to choke the life out of me.
    “Pamela will be pissed as hell if you keep her out of it,” I said.
    “Yes, but that means she’ll be alive.”
    “Good point.” I got up. “But I’m calling Coyote. It never hurts to have a god on your side.”
    “I’ll reinforce the wards,” Mick offered. “Janet is right; this is the best place you can stay. Plus I can have a phalanx of dragons here anytime I need them. I don’t care how powerful a mage Christianson sends—he can’t work magic if he’s being fried to a crisp.”
    Cassandra got to her feet at the same time we did, the emotion in her eyes touching. “Thank you, Janet. Mick. You are good people. I should have told you right away.”
    I shrugged. “We all have our secrets.”
    Mick, who had more secrets than most, returned my look blandly and said he’d head to the roof to work the wards.
    Cassandra and I returned to the lobby, she to reception and I to my office to hunt down my cell phone. I never could remember to carry the damn thing, so anytime the cell rang, I had to race to find it before it went to voice mail. I’ve never made it yet.
    I didn’t make it this time, either. Finally locating the thing stuck in the big potted plant that Juana had obviously watered before our adventure upstairs, I was brushing dirt from it when Coyote himself waltzed through the hotel’s front entrance, followed by Maya Medina, my on-call electrician and pretty much my best friend.
    Coyote was a tall, broad-shouldered Native American with a long black braid and intense dark eyes. He didn’t come from any specific tribe that I knew of, because he was Coyote—trickster god, being of raw power, and a royal pain in the ass. He wore his usual jeans and jeans jacket, cowboy boots, a