Free Chaos Bites by Lori Handeland Page B

more hours of sleep. Being captured, threatened, wounded, then shape-shifting and healing took a lot of energy.
    We’d also keep watch. I didn’t think the hired killers would come back, but who knew what might.
    Luther insisted on taking the first shift since I’d been hurt worse than he, and therefore I’d had to expend more energy to heal. Since he was right, I let him.
    I fell into bed, into sleep, into the dream.
    I’m on Mount Taylor, one of the four sacred mountains that mark the boundaries of Navajo land. They refer to it as their sacred mountain of the south or the turquoise mountain . There Sawyer found the stone I wear around my neck. The mountain is magic, and it is his.
    He had a secret place on the banks of a clear, cool mountain lake where he went to perform rituals he dared not practice anywhere else. Perhaps that is what has drawn me here—a ritual, a spell, magic.
    I stand next to the lake in the night and listen to the mountain rumble. A few million years ago Mount Taylor was an active volcano, and sometimes, when Sawyer walks across its surface, the mountain still shakes. I wait for him to step out of the trees as he has done so many times before, but he doesn’t.
    “Sawyer?” I whisper.
    The wind cants across my face, bringing the scent of water, evergreens, the earth. Sawyer’s scent but the mountain’s, too. Is he here or isn’t he?
    Then I catch a hint of smoke. My eyes search the darkness, but no telltale glow appears. I breathe in. Not a forest fire, not even a campfire, but cigarette smoke.
    “I know you’re there.”
    A match is struck; the flare of a flame draws my eyes. For only an instant before the tiny fire goes out I see the shadow.
    Of a wolf.
    Though Sawyer can turn into many beasts, the wolf is his spirit animal. Perhaps, now that he is a spirit, a wolf is the only form he has.
    The scent of cigarette smoke continues to waft my way. I breathe it in like a lifetime smoker on her second year of abstinence.
    I assumed Sawyer had been smoking since the Mayans discovered tobacco. He probably showed them where to find it. So I’m not surprised that even in death, he’s got a cigarette.
    A tiny orange glow draws my eyes to the forest. I don’t think, I run, but before I get there it’s gone. So is Sawyer, if he was ever there at all.
    In the distance the low buzz of a motor begins. My chest suddenly feels heavy, as if something is weighing it down, perhaps despair. Every time Sawyer disappears, it reminds me of the day he died. Because right after I killed him he went poof.
    He’d been dead and then he’d been gone. No body. No ashes. No Sawyer.
    I turn back to the lake. Reflected on the surface are clouds in the shape of a wolf, yet when I look up the clouds are as nonexistent as Sawyer appears to be.
    “Where are you?” I shout.
    “Everywhere.”
    The voice comes from right behind me. I spin. Again there is nothing but smoke.
    “Am I dreamwalking?”
    “The dead don’t dream, Phoenix.”
    “Don’t call me that.”
    He always had, and I never minded. Until I met my mother, heard him call her the same thing, discovered they’d once been lovers and then he’d had to kill her.
    His sigh is the wind with just a hint of rain. “What should I call you? Lizzy?”
    “You really want to call me Lizzy?” Jimmy’s the only one who’s ever called me that.
    The mountain rumbles beneath my feet. Guess not.
    “If this isn’t dreamwalking, what is it?”
    “Just a dream . . . Elizabeth.”
    The name stirs my hair as if Sawyer himself is touching it. Teachers, librarians, social workers, lawyers, cops—people who don’t know me and don’t want to—call me Elizabeth. But Sawyer knows me. I think, sometimes, better than anyone. When he murmurs Elizabeth I like it.
    “So”—I trail my fingertips over my hair where I imagine he has—“you’re only in my head?”
    “Where else would you like me to be?”
    I can feel his heat against my back, as if he’s right here