Natural Evil

  Dedication

  To my editor, Heather, and to Amy, and my fabulous cover artist Angela Waters. Thank you all for your championship, talent and hard work!

  And especially to you, the readers.

  Chapter One

  The Depths

  Claudia couldn’t tell that the sizable lump on the highway shoulder was a body. Not at first.

  She was traveling 110 mph on I-80W through a solitary stretch of Nevada. Sage, silvery tan, gold and light brown, splashed across the expanse of desert ringed by snow-covered dark mountains. The pale sky mirrored the land with great swathes of silver-lined gray clouds. The windswept silence was immense as ferocious heat boiled off the pavement and radiated from the afternoon’s piercing yellow-white sun. She had heard it said that the desert spaces of the world were where the Djinn came to dance.

  Afterwards, she never could say why she’d stopped to investigate. She’d simply obeyed an impulse, slammed on the brakes and reversed. No other vehicles were visible on either side of the highway, and she was the only thing alive. Or so she’d thought.

  Her 1984 BMW came even with the lump. Her heart sank as she stared at it. It was some sort of canine, an unusually large one. Not that she was any judge of breed, but it had to be a domestic animal. It certainly wasn’t a wolf or a coyote. The body was muscular, with a large, powerful chest and a long, heavy bone structure that was still graceful, and a wide, well-proportioned head. The dog had taken some horrific damage. Its neck was thick and swollen, and its dark brown and black coat scored with large raw patches.

  She wondered what it was doing in the middle of the desert, if it had been hit or if it had been traveling unsecured in the back of a truck and fallen out. Possibly both. She hoped it had died fast.

  One of its huge front paws twitched.

  She slammed the BMW into park and grabbed her water bottle before her brain caught up with her actions. As she lunged out of the car, she shed the insulation she had worked so hard to acquire, shifting through an invisible barrier to fully enter into and connect with her surroundings.

  She fell to her knees beside the dog. Hell, forget unusually large—it was freakishly massive. She might not know much about dogs, but she knew few breeds reached that size. Bigger than a German shepherd, too heavy for a Great Dane, it had to be some kind of mastiff. Damn, it was not only alive, but it looked like it might be conscious. It was panting fast and shallow, muzzle open and tongue lolling. Its eyes were closed, the surrounding muscles around the eye sockets tense with suffering.

  “Good Christ,” she said. The wind roared through miles of solitude and snapped away the words.

  She eased a hand under the dog’s head, lifted it and tried to trickle a small amount of water into its mouth. It had a set of wicked chompers, white, strong teeth as long as her fingers. Hard to tell if it noticed or reacted to the water. She thought not.

  Claudia was a bit taller than the average woman, with a weight that fluctuated between 140 and 145 pounds. The dog was easily half again her size, perhaps 200 or even 220. No normal human woman could hope to lift that kind of dead weight into the back seat of her car, but Claudia was not quite a normal human woman.

  She had a Power that manifested as telekinetic ability, but it was just a spark, so she had to be touching whatever she chose to use it on. She could manage a bit of telepathy if someone was standing close enough to her, and her spark might be enough for her to travel to an Other land, one of those magic-filled places that had formed when time and space had buckled at the Earth’s formation. Might or might not. She didn’t know. She’d never tried.

  As far as Power or magical ability went, her telekinesis wasn’t much, but it did allow her to do a few interesting things. For one thing, she might be able to boost her lifting capacity enough so that she could get the dog into the back seat. Unfortunately, its injuries were so severe, she would probably kill it when she tried to move it.

  She thought of her .40 caliber Glock. The gun was stored in the trunk of her car along with her suitcases and camping gear. She never underestimated the impact of a single, well-aimed bullet, for good or ill. One shot, one kill, as the sniper in her unit used to say. In this case, it would be a mercy to put the dog out of his misery. Death had to be better than this slow, solitary expiration in the desert.

  Putting him down might be a mercy but everything inside her rebelled at the thought. She set her jaw. If the dog didn’t die, she would get it—she glanced down the dog’s body and discovered that not only was he male, but he hadn’t been neutered—she would get him some help.

  Once she made the decision, she moved fast. She dug through the canvas bags of camping supplies in her trunk until she located the ground tarp. Refolding the plastic into a smaller size that the dog could still fit on, she left enough room to grasp the edges. Then she laid the tarp on the ground beside the animal.

  The next ten minutes felt like enduring a two-year tour of duty. The dog’s suffering was a gravity well that held her anchored to its wretchedness. The wind blasted the bare skin of her arms and face with tiny stinging grains of the scorching pale sand. The sand had crusted the raw edges of the dog’s wounds, until she moved him and the wounds reopened. They bled brilliant, glistening crimson that trickled through the pale ivory-gold of the crusted sand. Normally the two colors looked lovely together.

  She talked to the dog, random words of encouragement, and she exercised her extensive vocabulary of swear words as she strained her leg and back muscles along with her telekinesis. At last, she managed to shift him onto the tarp and then into the back seat.

  During the worst of it, the dog opened his eyes and looked at her. The intelligence and the bright pain in his eyes were twin spears that shoved into her heart. When she finally slid into the driver’s seat again, she had to clean off her hands and wipe at her own wet eyes before she could see enough to start the engine.

  The dog didn’t die.

  Less than two minutes later a county patrol car swooped up behind her, lights flashing.

  She pulled onto the shoulder and parked, rolled down her window, moved her Ray-Bans to the top of her head and watched as a gray-haired man in a short-sleeved, tan uniform walked up to her car. His bladed, smiling face was lined with good humor and friendliness. He braced a hand on her door.

  “Lady, that’s some well-maintained engine you’ve got under this hood,” he said. “I tagged you at one twenty-five.”

  She handed him her New York driver’s license and registration. The license photo was of a lean, fit forty-year-old woman, with straight ash-blonde, shoulder-length hair, green eyes, spare features and a somewhat crooked nose. She had broken it once in Kandahar. He glanced from the license to her, verifying her identity.

  She said, “As you can see, I’m not from around here, and I’ve got a badly injured dog in the back seat. Can you direct me to the nearest animal hospital or vet—or better yet, could you show me and write the ticket afterward?”

  The man’s quick, dark gaze shot to the back seat. She watched his expression change. “That your animal?”

  She shook her head. “Found him by the road a few miles back.”

  He glanced at her dirt- and blood-smeared T-shirt and cargo pants. “You got him in the car all by yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  The skin around her mouth tightened. “Adrenaline, I guess.”

  His grave gaze met hers. “Might be kindest if I put him down.”

  His hand had moved to rest on his firearm. Something inside her went cold and still as she tracked the movement out of the corner of her eye. Her hands clenched on the steering wheel. In retrospect, storing her gun in the trunk of her car had been a stupid thing to do.

  “Might
be,” she said. She kept her tone soft and even. Nonaggressive. “I had that thought myself. But it wouldn’t be fair. He’s endured a lot to get this far. And even though he was awake, he didn’t bite me when I got him in the car. I’m going to give him a fighting chance. Don’t tell me there’s no vet for a hundred miles.”

  A decision wavered between them, invisible like a heat wave rising off the pavement. She moved her left hand to her thigh and clenched it into a fist as she tracked his resting on his gun.

  The trooper tucked her license and registration into his shirt pocket and straightened. “There’s a vet nearby. Follow me.”

  That was how Claudia and the dog got a police escort into Nirvana, Nevada, population 1,611.

  The town was located in the foothills of a small mountain range, its streets laid out in a simple north/south, east/west grid system. She followed close behind the sheriff’s patrol car. He sped through the quiet neighborhood streets and pulled to a stop in front of a ranch-style house that had a screened-in front porch that faced west. A dusty Dodge Ram pickup was parked in the driveway.

  She placed the sheriff in the latter half of his fifties, but he was a fit man who could move fast enough if the situation warranted it. Even as she parked behind him, he was out of his patrol car and striding toward her BMW.

  She set her sunglasses on top of her head again and slid out of the car to join him. They considered the grim mess in the back seat.

  The sheriff took a breath. Rodriguez, his name tag said. “We really should have the vet put him down. One quick injection and he wouldn’t feel any more pain.”

  She kept her expression noncommittal as she nodded. “He’s made it this far,” she said. “So I think not. Can you grab one end of the tarp while I pull him out?”

  He sighed and nodded. Together they used the tarp as a stretcher. She glanced up as they carried the dog to the house. A man had come to the front door when they’d parked. He held the screen door open for them. As they approached, she caught a glimpse of a weathered face under an equally weathered cowboy hat. He was older than the sheriff by at least ten years. The sprinkle of hair showing underneath the cowboy hat was white.

  The man said to Rodriguez, “Kitchen table.”

  The sheriff blew out a breath and nodded. They went into the house, through a living room filled with large, worn furniture and piled with books, down a short hallway into a kitchen that was stocked with a couple of old refrigerators, white-painted cabinets, scarred Formica countertops and a worn linoleum floor. The floor felt uneven under her footsteps. She glanced down. There was a metal drain in the floor near the back door. The kitchen had a pervasive odor of disinfectant. It was probably perfectly clean, as the scent suggested, but she still wouldn’t be comfortable accepting an invitation to eat a meal in it.

  The kitchen table was metal and bordered by picnic-style benches with a chair at each end. They eased the dog onto the table. The man in the cowboy hat pushed past them. She watched his battered profile grow intent. He pulled a pair of latex gloves out of a drawer and said, “Move the benches and chairs into the hall, John.”

  “You got it.”

  She stepped into a corner as the sheriff pulled furniture out of the way.

  She kept an eye on the sheriff as she said to Cowboy Hat, “This is my dog. I’m paying his vet bill, and I want you to do everything you can to save him.”

  Rodriguez paused. His stillness lasted only a heartbeat. She would have missed it if she hadn’t been watching him.

  She turned back to Cowboy Hat. He had raised bushy, white eyebrows.

  Rodriguez moved the last bench aside as he said, “This is Doc Dan Jackson. He’s the only vet within sixty miles.”

  “People kept knocking on my door with their injured pets,” said Johnson. “Gave up trying to retire seven years ago.”

  “Dan, this is Claudia Hunter. Says she found the dog on I-80.”

  It was her turn to raise her eyebrows. Rodriguez didn’t have to pull out her driver’s license in order to introduce her by name. Showed he was paying attention. The vet unlocked the cabinet and withdrew vials of clear liquid and a syringe.

  She moved. When the vet turned, she was standing between him and the dog on the table. She met the sharp inquiry in his eyes with her own clear gaze. “Doesn’t matter if I haven’t had him long. He is my dog now.” She looked down at the vials he held in his gnarled hands. She repeated, “I want you to do everything you can to save him.”

  Jackson opened his hands to show her what he held, turning the vials so she could read the labels. He said, “Your new dog needs to be anesthetized so I can work on him. I’m going to sedate him with a combination of Valium and ketamine so that I can insert an endotracheal tube and administer Isoflurane, which is a gas anesthetic. Then I’m going to try to save his life. That okay by you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then get the hell out of my way,” he said.

  She stepped back, watching closely as he administered the injections. Maybe it was her imagination, but it seemed the dog eased and began breathing easier almost immediately. The vet gave her a scowling look. “Get the hell out of my kitchen too.”

  “I want to help,” she said.

  Jackson moved quickly to insert a tube down the dog’s throat. “You a vet tech?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “An EMT? Human nurse? Any goddamn thing that might be useful?”

  “My unit got shot up a couple times in Afghanistan,” she said. “Once we had to deal with the aftermath of a roadside bomb. I’ve triaged more than my share of wounds and sometimes they were ugly. I didn’t bandage animals, and I wasn’t a medic. But if you need an extra pair of steady hands from someone who won’t faint at the sight of blood, I can provide it.”

  Jackson snorted without looking up from his work, but after a moment he said, “Grab a pair of gloves. Top drawer on your left.”

  She opened the drawer, pulled out a pair of latex gloves and yanked them on.

  Rodriguez folded his arms as he watched the exchange. His original friendly expression had morphed into a scowl. He said, “Isn’t that against the law, Dan? You could lose your license.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said the vet. “I’m not letting her actually do anything surgical on the animal, and you’re not the veterinarian State Board. Like she said, an extra pair of steady hands. Speaking of which, hold this a sec.” He thrust an implement at her.

  She looked at it with interest. It was kind of like a scalpel, nice and sharp on one end. It would make a good hand-to-hand weapon.

  “I have questions I want to ask you,” Rodriguez said to her.

  “So ask,” she said. She stood balanced on the balls of her feet and kept her eyes on the vet as she held the implement in one hand and flipped it, then flipped it again.

  As she twirled the implement between her fingers, Jackson glanced sidelong at her. He said irritably, “Stop that.”

  She stopped and stood quietly as she watched him inspect the dog. He probed the dog’s swollen neck, and his face tightened. He held out his hand and she handed the implement back to him. “Still has rope tied around his neck,” he said. “Get your fingers over here. Keep his skin pulled back so I can cut the rope off.”

  “Shit.” She bent over and pulled the swollen, abraded flesh apart as best she could.

  “Can you take me back to where you found the dog?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “That’s a pretty glib response,” said the sheriff. “You actually give your answer any thought?”

  “I’m from New York,” she said tersely, sparing the sheriff a single sharp look. “I’m not familiar with this area. The desert all looks the same to me, and I wasn’t paying attention to where I was when I decided to stop to investigate the lump beside the road.”

  “First you say you found the dog,” Rodriguez said. “Now you say he’s yours. Animal torture is against the law.”

  “For God’s sak
e, John!” Jackson snapped.

  “Something doesn’t add up about her story,” Rodriguez said, his voice hard. “There’s no damn way she could get an animal of his size and weight into her car all by herself.”

  She angled her jaw out. Should she tell the sheriff about her telekinesis? She thought over recent events and stuck by her original instinct, remaining silent.

  The vet said, “This dog was dragged behind a vehicle before the rope broke. Go check her goddamn bumper. If you find something, arrest her. If not, go away. We’ve got a lot to do here and it’s going to take a while.” He lifted one shoulder in a fatalistic shrug. “Unless, of course, the dog dies.”

  “I’ve said that a lot in the last forty-five minutes,” she said. That dog had one of the strongest wills to live she’d ever seen. She had a feeling he wasn’t going to die on Jackson’s table. She added to Rodriguez, “If you’re going to ticket me, set it on the counter along with my license and registration. I’ll pay it before I leave town.”

  The sheriff was silent for a moment. Then he growled, “Fine.”

  Rodriguez slammed out the front door. In ten minutes he was back. He slapped papers on the corner of the counter. He said to the vet, “Call me.”

  Jackson nodded without a break in his work. The sheriff left without another word.

  Claudia’s stomach was in a knot by the time Jackson finally got the rope cut away from the dog’s neck. They washed him next, cleaning him of sand and grit. There were raw wounds all over his body. Jackson’s aged face was set, his pale blue eyes burning. She had a feeling she looked the same way. He took X-rays, diagnosed broken ribs and wrapped them, and he had to cut out two bullets. They worked for a long time in a silence that was broken only by Jackson’s brusque commands. She did everything he told her to do, and she did it quickly.

  Jackson’s medicine was mundane, which was to say, he did not use spells in any of his procedures. She didn’t sense any sparks of Power on him or anywhere in his house, but then her magic sense was almost nil. Most creatures, items and places felt mundane to her. She’d never bothered to try discovering if her spark of Power was enough to cross over to an Other land because, in part, she couldn’t sense the land magic of the crossover passages.