“Nope. Trust me. Don’t move the shovel away until I say it’s okay.”
“All right, sensei.” She did as instructed and then I quit dividing my attention, turning back fully to the magical spectrum. As the skinwalkers attacked various points on all the walls, I began to unbind the rock into its component silica and carbonate parts. As it dissolved into dust and the stored heat vented upward like a furnace blast, I channeled the material into the outer walls of cellulose in the log, essentially petrifying it and upping its strength considerably. There wasn’t nearly enough silica in the rock to petrify the whole log, so I concentrated it in a two-foot area and made it about four inches deep. The skinwalkers would have a much tougher time punching through that, even with their unnaturally strong muscles and bones — and if they did manage it, they would probably injure themselves in the process. Once I’d used all the silica, I divided my focus and let Granuaile know she could lower the shovel.
I didn’t know how much of that the Navajos caught, but I figured I wouldn’t have to worry about explaining the effectiveness of magic to this particular group. They might wonder what I’d done and how, but they’d never doubt the possibility of it. Their faith, after all, combined with Frank’s singing and sandpainting, was constructing a far more effective ward against the skinwalkers than anything I could come up with.
“Need another rock?” Granuaile asked.
“No, let’s wait and see if this works first.” I placed myself directly behind the petrified portion of the log and raised my voice to taunt the skinwalkers. “Here, kitty, kitty!” I made kissy noises. “Come and get me over here!”
One of them obliged. One second I saw nothing but darkness to the north, and then in the next fraction of a second there was a sickening thud, of a distinctly duller and lower tenor than from previous impacts, and then a skinwalker fell gracelessly to the ground — directly on top of the ward surrounding the building. The bobcat screamed and scrambled away from it, but it was literally burned by the contact. It held still for a moment to assess the damage, and that allowed me to check it out as well. There were white lines seared across its fur now, in the weblike pattern I’d seen before in the ward. It was only a narrow strip, as if he’d been thrown on the grill for a few seconds, but his awkward, slower movements proved he had been crippled by it — by that, or by crashing headlong into petrified wood. He wouldn’t be jumping at the hogan with nearly the strength or ferocity he’d had up to that point, if at all. Allowing myself a tiny smile, I checked the log; it was fine.
“Yeah, get me another rock,” I said. “That worked out well.”
Granuaile moved to comply, but Frank shook his head urgently and Sophie spoke for him. “No more rocks,” she said. “We need what’s left for the ceremony.” They were still burning herbs on top of the rocks, and apparently they were more important to the process than I thought.
My apprentice looked at me helplessly. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll make do. The odds have evened out a bit in any case.” With only one skinwalker attacking the hogan, I could keep up with the damage being dealt to the structure. It would be a long night of work, but it was manageable. I sighed with relief; we would get through this.
I sighed too soon.
The crunch of gravel under tires and the rumble of a V8 reminded us that Darren Yazzie had gone to Kayenta for a few goodies, and now he was returning at a spectacularly unfortunate time.
Eyes widened around the hogan and voices faltered, but Frank Chischilly sang on. Failing to complete the ceremony properly might offend the Holy People — and that would rather defeat the purpose of having a ceremony in the first place.
“It’s Darren!” Sophie said, putting a hand up to her mouth in worry. “I asked him to go to town for me — I didn’t think we’d be dealing with them so soon!” She moved toward the door, and one of the crew members — I’d never been introduced — slid over to intercept her.
“Ain’t nothin’ we can do for Darren except hope he figures it out and turns around,” he said. “Anyone who goes out that door will die. Ain’t nothin’ faster than a skinwalker.”
He was right. Those things were faster than Leif and therefore faster than anything I could manage with the aid of magic. Moralltach or no, I couldn’t keep them from taking me down. They were so alien to the magic I was familiar with that I wondered if even the Tuatha Dé Danann could handle them.
<Stay, boy,> Oberon commanded.
Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.
Granuaile fished her cell phone out of her jeans and hope bloomed on her face. “There’s actually a signal here!” she said. “We can call him.”
It was far too late for that, signal or no. The hammering on the hogan ceased, and we heard a thunderous impact against metal and shattering glass. I rushed to the east wall, where the door faced the road, and peered through a gap in the door’s hinges. Frank kept chanting over Darren’s startled cries. Through the wee gap, I couldn’t see much except for his truck’s headlights cresting the lip of the mesa. The lights shuddered violently as the skinwalkers rocked the vehicle. A yell, two gunshots — he must have had a pistol in his glove compartment — more broken glass, a bobcat scream, then a human one, and then the headlights reeled crazily and disappeared. A rolling, crashing noise followed, as Darren’s truck tumbled off the graded road and down a half mile of rocky hillside. I doubt he survived it; my only hope was that one or both of the skinwalkers had taken the plunge with him.
Frank kept singing, but everyone else had fallen silent. Sophie was doing her best to be stoic about it, but I saw tears on her cheeks and she’d probably be plagued by guilt for years if she didn’t get help.
I patched up all the logs with bindings while we waited to hear something that would tell us the fate of the skinwalkers. There were no more bobcat growls or attacks on the hogan. A tense half hour passed with no sounds from outside, all of us wishing the silence would last another minute and yet feeling that it couldn’t possibly last any longer. What broke the silence, finally, wasn’t a bobcat. It was a human voice — or, rather, two of them, on the outer edge of what could be called human. The voices were hoarse and throbbing with menace, and they spoke in Navajo on the north side of the hogan.
Peering through the cracks, I saw the skinwalkers in their human form. Though they kept moving from place to place in a blur, they would stop briefly here and there, as if they were following some unseen connect-the-dots pattern on the mesa. In their brief flashes of stillness, they were lean, of stunted stature, and unclothed. That didn’t mean they were underwhelming; their menace was simply concentrated, like frozen orange juice fortified with Vitamin Evil, and their eyes kind of reflected that, a liquid fire glowing out of their sockets with no pupils. The bobcat skin was gone, so now it was just them with that spirit wrapped all around and through them; their human auras were tainted with black ichor. I was curious to see where Hel must have cut them, but neither of them looked wounded. Whatever it was they were saying, they kept repeating it, and lots of eyes shifted briefly in my direction before looking away, pretending that I wasn’t there. Frank winced the first time he heard it but then grimly continued to work on his sandpainting and lead the singing.
I flipped my faerie specs off. “What are they saying, Sophie?” She pretended not to hear and, in so doing, set an example for the others. No one would meet my eyes. They began chanting in time with Frank — he’d apparently reached a sort of call-and-answer section in his “sing.” And I think it would have been a casual passage under normal circumstances, but in this case they were belting it out and supporting from the diaphragm, an unconscious agreement that they should drown out the skinwalkers with their raised voices. Somehow, the skinwalkers’ voices cut through it without increasing their volume.