Jamison put Julie to bed himself, and then he came downstairs and checked that the doors and windows were secure. He took Naomi by the hand. “Come with me. I need to show you something.”
“You mean there’s more?” she asked. “I don’t know if I can take more.”
“You need to understand.” Jamison pressed a brief kiss to her lips, one that told her his fires hadn’t been dampened at all.
She locked her fingers around his, and he led her outside, heading for the art studio that waited silently in the corner of the yard, away from the now-empty parking lot of Hansen’s Garden Center. Back here, in the private world Jamison had carved for himself, all was quiet and serene.
He unlocked the padlock on the door of the studio and ushered Naomi into his sanctuary.
THREE
Jamison loved his art studio. He’d constructed it like he would a hogan, but the roof was copper sheeting with a huge skylight to let in the sunshine as he worked. The door faced due east, and he’d scattered corn to bless the studio before he’d moved in his sculpting tools.
In the middle of the room a table held the chisels with which he created the sculptures that for some reason people paid big money for. He sculpted what moved him, from stones nature put in his way—an abstract hawk, the stillness of a wolf watching his prey. He breathed a prayer and a bit of magic into every piece.
He also sculpted things from scrap iron, or custom designed decorative wrought iron for extra money.
His iron-working tools stood against the north wall with an acetylene torch that he’d refilled when he cleaned up this morning and scraps of twisted iron he’d been working on before he’d gone.
Jamison led Naomi inside and jerked the cover from the sculpture he’d been working on the night he’d left. The head of a mountain lion peered out of orange red stone, its shoulders ending in a jagged line of reddish rock. Naomi reached out and touched it with one slender finger, her eyes filled with wonder.
Jamison had found the nearly smooth red sandstone in a wash near the Pink Cliffs and hauled it the twenty-five miles back here. He’d let the stone rest for a few months before he’d taken out his tools and carved what he saw inside it.
“I don’t understand,” Naomi said.
Jamison put his hand on the sculpture, the porous stone cool and rough. “I was working on this that night. It was freezing out here, but I couldn’t stop. The sculpture was coming—like magic. And then . . . ” He trailed off.
He couldn’t explain the terror, the feeling that he’d been choking, dying. Watching his hands and arms change before his eyes, suddenly finding himself on all fours thinking and seeing like a wildcat.
Naomi’s blue green eyes were wide. “You were sculpting a mountain lion, and then you changed into one?”
Jamison caressed the stone. “It scared the shit out of me. I thought I’d gone insane. When I changed back, with my clothes all ripped, I was afraid a skinwalker had cursed me. Then I changed to the lion again, and again. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control it.”
“Why didn’t you call for me?”
“And tell you what? That I kept turning into a mountain lion?” He shook his head. “I was so scared I’d hurt you, hurt Julie.”
“So you just left?”
“I didn’t trust myself to come back into the house and say good-bye. I had to go.”
“You told your family,” she said, hurt. “They knew you’d gone to Mexico, but they wouldn’t tell me anything more.”
“I called my grandfather on the way out of town. I told him to get word to you, but he decided you shouldn’t be told everything. He wanted to prevent you from coming after me, he said, which would have been too dangerous. He was right.”
“So he knew where you were the whole time?” Naomi’s voice rang with anger and outrage.
“He knew I’d gone to Mexico, but not exactly where. Even I didn’t know exactly where I was going.”
“He should have told me. I know he doesn’t approve of me. He says I bewitched you, which I always thought was funny, since I’m a notorious Unbeliever.”
“He isn’t wrong.” Jamison crossed to her, but he didn’t reach for her. If he touched her, he’d want to keep on touching her, to drag her upstairs and have sex with her again. Maybe have sex with her right here. He needed her every second.
“You did something to me, Naomi. You made this Diné boy leave the land of his people so he could lie in your bed. And I don’t regret one second of that choice.”
“Just tell me what happened in Mexico.”
Jamison walked away from her, around the other side of the half-finished statue. The mating frenzy still hadn’t left him, and if he was going to talk, he needed to be as far from her as he could be. “I went to Mexico to find people like me, other Changers. I needed to know what was happening to me.”
“How did you even know where to look for them?”
“Coyote told me.”
Her brows shot up. “Coyote, the drifter?”
The man who called himself Coyote was a Native American, from what tribe Naomi had never discovered, who liked to hang around the streets of Magellan. He didn’t seem to be homeless, but no one knew where he lived or where he went when he disappeared. He was a big man with black hair, youngish and amiable, always joking with the locals and entertaining the tourists.
Coyote always greeted Julie with a big smile and would crouch down on his heels to speak sign language with her. Naomi had once asked him where he’d learned to sign, and he’d shrugged broad shoulders and said, “Around.” The townspeople regarded him as mysterious, sometimes annoying, but harmless.
“Don’t tell me Coyote is—what did you call it?—a Changer too?” Naomi said.
“No, he’s Coyote.”
“Huh? I’m lost.”
“He’s Coyote the god,” Jamison said gently.
Naomi the Unbeliever gave him a skeptical look. “How could he be? He hangs out with bikers at the the Crossroads Bar.”
Jamison stifled a laugh. As though gods were above fraternizing with bikers.
“Coyote does whatever he wants, and he has fun at the Crossroads.” Jamison sobered. “I was standing in here, sweating and terrified, and all of a sudden he was at the door. He knew what had happened. He told me that other Changers could help me and told me how to find them. He drove me down to Nogales and across the border himself, in a ratty pickup. Then he disappeared. Literally. Truck and all.” Naomi ran her fingers along the sculpted head of the lion. “How did you get the rest of the way?”