She stopped, her feet hovering above the ground as if she were floating in water. Yes, there were people speaking somewhere out in the darkness, and they were nearby. Feeling no fear, she moved toward the sound, following it to the base of a cliff. The voices drifted down from above her. Grasping the stone wall before her, she found she could easily pull herself up along it. Higher and higher she climbed, her body as light as a cotton sheet.
Pulling herself over the edge, she held still for a moment. The voices were much nearer now. There were two, a man's and a woman's, and she recognized both. For the first time, a vague sensation of fear passed through her. The presence of the fox, dark and unnatural, loomed large in her mind. Alighting on the sandy rock beneath her, she willed herself forward, step by step, toward the voices and the presence both.
As she drew near to the far edge of the mesa, she could see two figures standing upright in the moonlight. Moving as close to them as she dared, she stopped to listen.
"You really ain't all that bright, is you?"
"My intention was not to harm her."
"Then why did you have me distract the old woman? Just so you could go have a peek?"
"The young one is as dangerous as the old, but she does not know her power. I had to be sure she has not yet awakened to that knowledge."
"That sprout ain't no threat. I would have had her body and soul both if the other bitch hadn't showed up. She talks big, sure, but she's just a kitten behind them guns and such."
"You speak in ignorance, demon."
"Ain't the first time."
"Victoria Dawes is-" The woman fell silent. Her eyes gleamed. "She is here."
The Indian's red gaze shifted from her companion, sweeping the barren rock for signs of the intruder. When her eyes swept over her, Victoria shuddered.
The woman took a step toward her.
Victoria backed up.
The woman advanced again, her eyes passing over Victoria but not seeing her. She sniffed the air. "She is very close."
"You're out of your gourd, woman. Ain't nobody here but us."
"Be silent." She took another step. "She is here and not here. Her power has stirred inside her."
The woman cast off the blanket covering her body. As before, she was naked save for a fur mantle wrapped around her throat. She crouched and bowed her head, fingers splayed out on the rock. The edges of her figure blurred in the moonlight. Her black hair faded to the grey of old ashes. Her body grew smaller. Ears sprouted from her skull. Her nose stretched forward and her eyes sank backward.
In the space of a heartbeat, the Indian witch had vanished, and a grey fox stood in her place.
Wonder filled Victoria, but it turned to terror as the fox's eyes settled on her. The creature broke into a run. Before she could react, it leaped at her, teeth bared.
Victoria jumped to her feet. Her cold limbs ached at the movement, but she could barely feel them. Her head swung this way and that, searching for the fox-that-wasnot-a-fox, but it was nowhere to be seen.
Behind her, something snapped. Spinning around, gun in hand, she took aim at the sound. The campfire burned cheerfully back at her. Beyond it, Cora still lay wrapped in her blanket. Seconds ticked by, marked by the frantic rush of her breathing, but nothing stirred. The dark presence of the witch was gone from her mind.
Slowly, Victoria allowed herself to relax. The revolver's barrel drifted downward as she sat back down onto her perch. Her head spun. She massaged her temples with her free hand, trying to sort reality from what surely must have been a dream. A fever dream brought on by the long day she had spent walking through the desert, back bent beneath the sun's wrath. Her brain had roasted like a honeyed ham in the heat, and now it was playing tricks on her.
She couldn't shrug off how real it had felt, though. The sensation of flying over the hard-packed desert soil, the coolness of the rocks beneath her fingers as she climbed up the mesa, the voices of their two adversaries as they held their council; if dream it was, it was the most vivid one of her life. Even the dreams she suffered as a child did not possess the same level of clarity this one did, even if they had frightened