Ilona Andrews - Hex Appeal

And wind up gibbering in the corner of their nice, cozy asylum.

“You’re saying anyone practicing magic is a Nephilim?”

“Or the offspring of a Nephilim and a human.” Evil spirits liked to propagate all over the place. It was kind of their thing.

“A breed,” Jimmy spat.

I lifted a brow. Considering he was one, that was an interesting reaction.

“Also fairies,” I pointed out. “I use white magic.”

“So the white and the black have nothing to do with the good or the evil of the magic itself but with the way the magic was received?”

“Anything good can become evil if it’s used in an evil manner.”

“By an evil being.”

“Right. And evil can be used for good.”

“No way.”

I thought of my dreams, the whispers, a promise.

“You’d be surprised.” Before he could question me further, I continued. “A sorcerer, by definition, takes his magic.”

“How do you take magic?”

“By killing someone you love.”

Jimmy flinched. “No one who’s human would do that.”

I wasn’t so sure. I’d met some humans who rivaled the Nephilim for evil. We weren’t supposed to kill them, but … accidents happened.

“Which is why we need to know what kind of sorcerer we’re dealing with so we know how to kill him. Some are part shifter, part vampire—Well, basically anything that creeps can take some magic and become a being that’s even harder to kill.”

Now that I thought about it, Ruthie’s sending Jimmy after a sorcerer alone would have been a very bad idea. As it was … not knowing what kind of murdering magician we were dealing with was a very bad idea. Once again, I got that prickle at the back of my neck.

“Tell me exactly what Ruthie said.”

“She sent me to get you.”

I glanced sideways. “Why me?”

He stared out the front window as if the never-ending highway that disappeared into the flat, soon-to-be Iowa plane was beyond fascinating. “I didn’t ask.”

“No?” That smelled like a lie, but I couldn’t see why he’d bother.

“Ruthie says ‘jump,’ I say ‘how high?’ Don’t you?”

Not in exactly those words, but yeah, pretty much.

“What else?”

“That we should go to the foot of Mount Taylor, where we’d find a sorcerer, and you’d know what to do.”

I’d had better instructions. Then again, I’d had worse. And if Ruthie’d said I’d know what to do, I had to believe I would. No doubt whatever sorcerer we’d find there would be a type I’d found, and eliminated, before.

I began to tick them off in my mind. The Nagual, a Mayan Jaguar shaman, he’d died by silver dipped in blood.

The Aghori, a Hindu cannibal that ate magicians in order to ingest their magic. I’d used hemlock on him.

While I doubted we’d find a Hindu sorcerer in New Mexico—I’d found stranger things in stranger places—I did carry hemlock in the trunk.

I also carried knives made of every metal known to man, bullets in the same colors, crossbows, arrows, assorted poisons in solid and liquid form, animal and human blood, as well as ropes, chains, and whips. It paid—usually in lives—to be prepared.

“Killing what they started out as won’t kill them?” Jimmy asked.

“Once they’re a sorcerer, you’ve gotta kill that, too.”

“How?”

“You know why they burned witches?”

Jimmy shrugged. “Why?”

I tightened my fingers on the steering wheel, then focused on the distant horizon.

“Because it worked.”

Mount Taylor loomed large from the flat, arid land like a pyramid in the midst of Egypt. As we rolled closer, the ponderosa pines that dotted the foothills turned what had appeared from a distance to be a gigantic blueberry snow cone into Tso dzilh, the sacred mountain of the south.

Mount Taylor was one of four mountains that marked the boundaries of Navajo land, known as the Dinetah, or the Glittering World. Strange things happened there—always had, always would.

Jimmy stirred. He’d been sleeping since we hit the New Mexico border. You’d think his being unconscious would have made the trip easier. Unfortunately, it only meant my gaze kept flicking to him, cataloging memories I’d retained from my dreams.

Like the way his lashes lay on his cheeks, thick and dark, reminding me of how they fluttered against my belly in the wake of his lips.

Or the supple length of his fingers, which could leave me gasping, straining, begging with just one stroke.

When the wind whistled through the tiny crack he’d cranked in the passenger window, ruffling across his skin, stirring his hair then flicking the scent of cinnamon and soap into my face, my whole body tingled with the memory of things that hadn’t even happened.

Jimmy sat up, staring at the huge blob of land that filled the windshield. “Needle? Haystack? Hell,” he muttered.

“I know where to go.”

He cast me a quick glance. “You are good at this.”

“I am,” I agreed, though again, his praise warmed me. “But you see that?” I pointed to the billowing cloud of smoke that trailed toward the excruciatingly blue sky. “We should probably check it out.”

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire?”

“Where there’s destruction, there’s usually a Nephilim. That looks like more than a campfire.” It looked like half a town was burning. “If that isn’t the work of our sorcerer, it’s probably the work of something else we need to kill.”

Jimmy’s hand went to his pocket, where he traced the outline of his switchblade. “Fine by me.”

When we reached the blaze, we discovered enough pickup trucks and old, dusty cars to fill a honky-tonk parking lot and a pyre surrounded by at least a hundred people, who stared at the leaping, dancing flames as if mesmerized.

“Zombies,” Jimmy whispered.

In our world, they might be.

I got out of the car, opened the trunk, grabbed a few machetes, and tossed one to Jimmy. He lifted his brows, and I shrugged. “If parts of them start falling off and they try to bite you?” I made a chopping motion. “Off with their heads.”

I didn’t think they were zombies—I doubted the walking dead would be hanging around so close to a fire since it was one of the few things, along with decapitation, that killed them—but I wasn’t going to bet Jimmy’s life on it.

As we approached, a few of the observers turned. They were all Navajo, and quite obviously alive—no decaying eyes, moldering arms, putrefying thighs, or gangrenous tongues. Lucky us.

Hell, lucky them.

I paused and laid a hand on Jimmy’s arm. The ripple of awareness when my palm touched his skin made me shiver despite the steady beat of the sun on the crown of my hat.

He cast me a curious glance, and I lowered my voice to a range that no human could hear. “The Navajo still believe in monsters. We haven’t had to dust anything out this way in ages. They do it for us.”

“You mean…?” Jimmy let his gaze trail back to the massive, billowing bonfire. “We should just walk away?”

“Well…” I hesitated. “Why don’t we make sure it works, then walk away?”

The Navajo whispered among themselves.

He walks in darkness.

He is the night.

Born of smoke.

Death.

Beasts.

Magic.

I think we’d found our man.

We stood there for hours, waiting for the fire to die. We couldn’t see anything through the thick, choking smoke. We also didn’t hear anything but the crackle of the flames, and we didn’t smell anything but burning wood and acrid fumes.

That should have tipped me off right away. Nothing burns without screaming. Nothing dies without moving. Nothing turns to ashes without one hell of an unpleasant smell.