Here’s a sneak preview of Fissured: Book Two of the Pipe Woman Chronicles, coming in September 2012!
I think it was Shakespeare who said, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Good thing he’s dead, or I’d have to punch him.
That thought occurred to me one evening in early February, when I arrived home from work to find that I couldn’t get in my own door. It had been a rough day – they all seemed to be rough days lately, what with getting the private mediation practice going – and this was just about the last straw for me. I felt like I had two choices: whimper like a baby, or get pissed off. I opted for the latter.
I set down my litigation case (which is the size of a suitcase and about as heavy) and pushed hard on the door; something gave on the other side, and the door opened just wide enough for your average supermodel to walk through. I, however, have a fair amount more padding than your average supermodel. I did fit, once I’d shucked off my down coat, but it required a good but of grunting, as well as a howl when the door handle gouged a rift in my midsection.
Once inside, I discovered the problem. Joseph’s work boots littered the entryway, and the top of one of them had wedged itself under the door.
Joseph himself sprawled on the sofa, one hand propped behind his head and the other holding the remote. His hair – long, black, and slightly wavy – was pulled back into its customary queue, but it was rucked up on the throw pillow his head was resting on. His long legs overshot the other end of the sofa, his stocking feet perilously close to the lamp on the side table. He was steadily clicking through the channels, but I could tell he wasn’t concentrating on the screen – his deep blue eyes were too unfocused.
“Joseph,” I said loudly. “A little help here?”
“Naomi!” He jumped up off the couch. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“No idea how you could have missed it, with all the racket I made,” I said testily, pointing to the offending footwear.
“Whoops, sorry. I kicked them off and tossed them from the couch. I guess my aim wasn’t very good.” He unstuck his boot from under the door, then lined up the pair neatly in front of the closet – but not before rescuing his jeans jacket from the back of the chair nearest the door and hanging it inside. He even fetched my coat and litigation case in from the hallway and put them away, too.
“There,” he said. “Hi.” And then he gave me a proper welcome home.
Maybe I should have put air quotes around “home”. The condo we were currently making out in, in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood, was undoubtedly my home. But Joseph lived with his roommate and fellow Ute Indian, George, in a double-wide out on the plains, more or less in the direction of Denver International Airport – although more often than not, he slept here.
A few weeks earlier, a Lakota Sioux goddess had charged him with being my Guardian. Why did I need a Guardian, you ask? Why, because She had chosen me to save the world.
Like they say on Facebook, it’s complicated.
When I’d met Joseph Curtis in December, I was engaged to marry Brock, the asshole I’d been dating off and on for about ten years. Joseph wasn’t my type at all – too thin, too secretive, and (she admitted, shamefacedly) too blue-collar. Then, well, various things happened, I broke up with Brock for good, and Joseph and I went through some pretty unusual experiences together – including the discovery of a primal physical attraction, the origin of which kind of mystified us both.
Now that the woo-woo had receded a bit, though, the problems in our relationship were resurfacing – problems that I suspected could develop into fatal flaws. We seemed to disagree on everything I considered important to building a long-term relationship: where we preferred to live, for one thing; our individual levels of ambition, for another.
And, of course, his habit of leaving his stuff all over my apartment drove me batshit.
If only I didn’t feel this visceral need for him.
“How was your day?” he asked when we came up for air.
“Oh, you know,” I said. “I did paperwork, met with two prospective clients, did more paperwork, went out for a networking lunch, organized my office, and did more paperwork. I think I might have actually practiced law for fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“That’s better than yesterday, though, right?”
“Not by a lot,” I smiled tiredly, “but yeah.”
He grinned. “So things are looking up,” he said.
“Oh, absolutely.” I sighed. “I had no idea how much work was involved in running your own business.”
“But even if you’d known, you still would have left your old job.” It was a statement, not a question. Until just a few weeks ago, I had worked for one of the most prestigious law firms in Denver. Then one of the firm’s clients enlisted us to help him force Joseph’s grandfather out of his home, and I decided I couldn’t work for a law firm that would help someone do such a despicable thing. So I quit. Which was just as well, as it turned out; the firm was going to phase out my mediation practice anyway.
“So how was your day?” I asked as we ambled toward the kitchen. “You seemed distracted when I came in.”
“Hmm? Oh. No, not really. What should we thaw for dinner?” He dropped his arm from around my waist and headed toward the fridge.
“Oh, come on. Don’t try to bullshit me,” I said. “You were clicking through the channels so fast, you couldn’t even see what was on.”
“Was I?” He continued rummaging through the freezer, his back turned to me.
A thought struck me. “Nothing weird happened today, did it?” I asked him. “Nothing, y’know, woo-woo-ish?”
He turned around, frozen entrée in hand. “I’d rather not talk about it on an empty stomach, if you don’t mind.” He consulted the package. “This thing is going to take about half an hour in the oven. Is that okay, or are you starving?”
This is what I meant by “too secretive” – this “man of mystery” routine of his. He’s what some Native Americans call a skinwalker: someone who can change shape pretty much at will. Some skinwalkers are limited in the number of animals they can morph into, but Joseph can take on just about any form. It had certainly proved to be a useful skill in our battle to save his grandfather’s home, but it freaks a lot of people out, and some Indians believe skinwalkers are evil. So out of necessity, Joseph had developed a corollary talent for misdirection. If asked a question he didn’t want to answer, he would evade or delay. He didn’t do it malevolently – I was certain he didn’t have an evil bone in his body – but the habit was ingrained and a lot of the time he did it subconsciously.
He was getting much better about it, at least around me. He recognized how hard it is to build trust in a relationship if one person is constantly avoiding difficult discussions. But still, sometimes he forgot. Like now. And sometimes – especially lately – I didn’t have the energy to call him on it.
To be perfectly honest, I was beginning to wonder whether this match made in White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman’s heaven was worth the effort.
I was suddenly exhausted. “Why don’t you pick,” I told him. “I kind of don’t care. I think I’m going to go take a nap.” Then I went into the bedroom and shut the door.
He didn’t follow me. Maybe he was afraid I’d punch him if he did.
I took the time to hang my silk dress and blazer neatly on hangers to air out – new entrepreneurs don’t have an unlimited dry cleaning budget – and donned a t-shirt and sweatpants before crawling into bed and turning out the bedside lamp. I was tired. I had never had to concentrate so hard on business development before, and the schmoozing was wearing me out. Plus I was finding that the bookkeeping was beyond me. I was going to have to hire an accountant this year, for the first time in my life. Where the money was going to come from to pay for it, I had no idea – it seemed as if I was spending so much time generating new business that I didn’t have any time to make money. I was sure there was a
happy medium – a balance between doing paying work and doing the stuff that you need to do to run a business – but I hadn’t found it yet.
I thought I might be too keyed up to fall asleep, but I must have nodded off while Joseph was banging kitchen cabinet doors. I found myself drifting through a jungle. A hot, damp mist was rising around me as I wandered a game path through the undergrowth. I heard the cry of a big cat nearby, and then a voice at my ear hissed, “Beware!”
I jolted awake. The room was only a little bit darker than when I’d gone to bed. My alarm clock said about twenty minutes had passed.
“That was spooky,” I said aloud, hoping the sound of my own voice would dispel the lingering sense of dread the dream had engendered. It didn’t work. Groggily, I got out of bed and shuffled out to the living room.
Joseph was back on the couch. He sat up when I opened the door, though, and made room for me. I sank down next to him, blinking, while he rubbed my back with one hand.
“Sorry,” I said. “Just couldn’t do it right then.”
“I know. I’m sorry, too.”
I sighed and leaned against him. “Weird dream.”
“Tell me,” he said, snugging me to him. I wrapped my arms around his waist and told him about it. I felt him stiffen when I mentioned the big cat.
“You had the same dream?” I asked, pulling away a little bit.
He hesitated. Clearly this was the thing he hadn’t wanted to tell me about earlier. Then he sighed in defeat. “No. But I went for a run this afternoon” – went for a run, in Joseph-speak, means I shifted into the form of a coyote and chased prairie dogs out by the trailer for a couple of hours – “and on my way home, I could have sworn I saw a jaguar.”
“That’s weird,” I said. “They don’t typically live around here, do they?”
He shook his head. “I see mountain lions occasionally, especially up near Grandfather’s, but jaguars are mostly jungle cats. I thought maybe it had gotten loose from some wild animal collector’s menagerie, but I pretty much know about everybody in the metro area who collects exotic animals and as far as I know, nobody has a jaguar.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t a mountain lion?”
“Positive. Mountain lions don’t have spots.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah.” The kitchen timer dinged. “Come on, dinner’s ready.”
I waited until we were settled at the breakfast bar with our plates of chicken casserole and glasses of wine before I brought it up again. “You think the jaguar you saw was real?”
He sighed and pushed away his plate. “I don’t know what to think,” he said honestly. “It just didn’t feel right. It was like I was looking at it through a distortion lens – the jaguar itself was clear, but the landscape around it was fuzzy.”
“Maybe it was a vision?”
“It wasn’t anything like any vision I’ve ever had before. It might have been a spirit animal – a totem – but I couldn’t tell you whose.” He shook his head again. “I have no idea what the hell it was. I was all set to forget about it.” Although, he left unspoken, it did prompt me to come down here and wait for you to come home. He looked up at me. “But now you’ve had this dream. Who was it who told you to beware?”
I pondered my own food. “I dunno. I didn’t recognize the voice, other than that it was male.”
He shrugged and reached for his plate. “I guess we could ask Grandfather.”
“Or Shannon.” My best friend, Shannon McDonough, was fey on her Irish granny’s side, with a little added oomph from White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman. She was another member of our ad hoc woo-woo team. “I’ll call her after supper.”
But I forgot that after supper I had intended to do some work. While Joseph cleared away the leftovers, I hauled out the litigation case and dumped a pile of papers from it onto my desk: reports I needed to read, notes from a mediation session I needed to transcribe into my computer (oh, for the days when I had a secretary to do it for me), and an application for a small business loan to tide me over until my clients started paying me. Which was never going to happen if I didn’t mail them invoices for the work I’d done in January. I had installed a program to generate the invoices on my laptop, but that’s as far as I had gotten with it.
“Wow,” Joseph said, glancing at the pile. “Anything I can do to help?”
His question was sincere, and I knew it, but it still irritated me. “Not really, no,” I said shortly.
“I can call Shannon,” he offered.
“No thanks,” I said. “She’s my friend. I’ll call her.”
“You know,” he said, his temper rising, “I’m just trying to be sympathetic.”
“It’s not helping.”
“No, really?” He didn’t usually resort to sarcasm. “If I’m just going to be in the way, maybe I should just go home.”
“Maybe you should.”
This was dangerous ground for us. He had gotten into my apartment the first few times by shapeshifting into a bird and flying down my chimney. We both knew it would have classified as breaking and entering if he hadn’t had the excuse that the goddess made him do it. I’d certainly been welcoming enough later, but he still harbored a near-constant fear that eventually I’d kick him out.
We glared at each other for a minute. Then he stomped into the kitchen and ran water for the dishes with vehemence.
There was no way I could concentrate now. I tossed aside the report I’d been holding and went to get my ski jacket.
He turned, his hands still in the dish water. “Where are you going?”
“Out,” I said, and did.
I walked rapidly for a couple of blocks, to take the edge off my irritation. The night sky was clear and crisp, the neighborhood bars noisy. Feeling antisocial, I stuck to the quieter streets, finally turning right onto Wynkoop near Union Station. I was aiming, more or less, for the trail along Cherry Creek. Maybe hiking an urban trail wasn’t the smartest thing to do after dark, but Speer Boulevard, which is pretty heavily traveled, is well-lit and runs parallel to the creek – although the creek and the trail are several feet lower than the road bed, and the space between street level and the trail is lined with a sloping concrete retaining wall. Anyway, I wasn’t feeling particularly smart just then.
I passed one or two people headed the opposite way, but mostly I had the trail to myself.
The exercise and the sound of the water rushing by me both served to calm me. By the time I approached the Colfax Avenue underpass, I was beginning to feel human again. I was thinking about turning around and going home when the ambient light began to dissipate. It was as if I were walking into a bank of fog – unusual in semi-arid Denver – or maybe smoke, although I didn’t smell anything burning.
Then I got the feeling that something was watching me.
I glanced around. I was alone on the trail, and I couldn’t see anyone either at the top of the retaining wall or on its banks. Still, the sense that I was being watched persisted.
I knew it wasn’t Joseph. I felt sure I would have known if it were him. This was someone – or something – else. Something other.
My heart rate sped up. I tried to calm my breathing, but I didn’t have much luck.
The mist or smoke or fog was thickening, to the point where I could see only a few yards in front of me. I was coming up on the footbridge across the creek, just before the multi-lane underpass, and I didn’t relish the thought of crossing over it while I was being stalked.
I stopped at the edge of the footbridge. With one hand on the railing, I turned around to head back.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it launch itself from the top of the retaining wall – a yellow streak – and then I felt it wham into my left shoulder. The impact knocked me flat on the bridge deck, the intruder landing on top of me.
I cried out as I hit, conking my head on the railing support bar. But then I got a good look at my stalk
er and was too scared to make another sound.
The big, spotted cat’s front claws pierced my winter coat as it held me down; its back paws straddled my legs and its tail brushed my ankles as it twitched back and forth. Its muzzle was inches from my face, its eyes glowing like coals. I could smell its oddly fruity breath as it opened its mouth. Its fangs gleamed unnaturally in the dark. I shut my eyes and turned my head away; I was sure I was moments from death, and crazily, I thought it would hurt less if the cat ripped out my throat than if it bit off my face.
Then I felt sandpaper on my exposed neck.
Then, I swear, the monster began to make a rumbling noise. Jesus God, do jaguars purr?
Still scared, I opened one eye just as the rumbling stopped abruptly and the cat’s head jerked up. It looked down the trail, back the way I’d come. Now an unmistakable growl issued from the jaguar’s throat as it crouched atop me. It screamed once, then launched itself off me and disappeared into the mist.
I pushed myself up and sat for a second, disoriented. Then a shape rushed at me out of the thinning mist. Fear gripped me again. I screamed.
Then I realized it was Joseph.
His eyes glowed amber as he reached me. I clung to him, babbling about being attacked by a jaguar. He helped me up and checked me quickly for injuries. Then he left me for a few moments to see if he could find some trace of the cat.
I held onto the bridge railing, swaying, while I waited for him to come back. My adrenaline level was dissipating as quickly as the mist or smoke or whatever it was, leaving me almost too weak to stay upright. My head ached and my jacket was ripped on the shoulders where the cat’s claws had gripped me.
I heard someone approaching and gasped, but it was Joseph coming back. He shook his head. “Nothing. There are tracks just on the other side of the bridge, but then they disappear.”
I laughed shakily. “Maybe it didn’t really happen.”
“Oh, it happened,” he said. “Are you okay? Can you walk?”
“I think so,” I said. “Sure.” Still, I leaned pretty heavily on him as we started back to my place. “What made you come after me?”
“You were gone a lot longer than usual. Then I remembered the jaguar I’d seen, and I started to get worried.”
“I’m glad you came,” I told him. But then I remembered the voice from my dream that had told me to beware, and how terrified I’d been of Joseph as he arrived on the scene, his identity shrouded by smoke, and I wondered which beast I was supposed to be wary of – the jaguar or the coyote.
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