Ghosts of July (Shamans of the Divide, Book 1)

Chapter Nineteen

A quick glance around the inside of Coyote's fishing cabin and I was pretty convinced that nobody in the history of romance had ever been, or ever would be, wooed in the place.

There was a rustic wood stove in a far corner off to the left—the only room in the cabin aside from the closet-looking bathroom partitioned off by a flimsy sheet that served as a door. Fantastic.

In the center of the room was a worn and patched brown velour couch that looked like it pulled out into a nightmare of a sofa bed. A stack of musty, dingy blankets were piled on top of the seat cushions from the last time someone had slept on them. A card table was pushed against a side wall and sat over a mini-fridge. A camp stove on the table gave the space away as the kitchen. In the far corner was a broken bookcase that had all but collapsed into the wall beside it. There were a few rifle catalogs and, as far as I could tell, a couple of magazines that the truck stop sold behind the counter only. Renn caught where my gaze had fallen and rushed over to his uncle's bookshelf.

"Sorry," he mumbled, tossing the entire stack of magazines, guns, boobs, and all, into the corner and moved quickly to toss the old bed linens on top of them.

"This is nastier than I thought," Renn said quietly. "I'm sorry. It was all I could think of. I'm pretty sure we're on the reservation, too, so at least we could hope for some sacred ground protection."

"Does that really work?"

"I don't know," he said honestly and shuffled things around as best he could to make his uncle's man cave a little more hospitable for the night. "It's a nice thought but it's been so long since something this evil came across I'm not sure anybody knows what's warded and what's not."

I'd heard of warding from a couple sci-fi books I'd checked out from the library a few summers back. They were spells that kept bad things out.

"Who does the warding? Are there specific people?"

"Coyote does most of it around here," he said as he gave the sofa bed handle a yank. It didn't budge at first, but on his second try, the thing flew out from the depths of the couch and nearly landed Renn on his butt. I laughed, mostly at him and not with him.

He flashed me a grin as he walked around me in search of clean blankets. Clean-ish, I suppose. I was pretty sure nothing in that cabin would qualify as clean in the last decade.

"I think there are some shamans from Iowa that specialize in warding," he said as he dug through a cabinet beside the dilapidated bookshelf. "They teach people like Coyote enough to help them out in situations like this. But not everything."

"Sacred knowledge?" I asked and sat on the edge of the thin, striped mattress. It reminded me of the old camping mattresses from my Girl Scout days.

"Something like that. It took them decades to perfect the art. They specialize in it."

He turned around a produced a stack of folded wool blankets that smelled like mothballs and Lysol. It was a start.

"Does everybody have a specialty?"

He shook his head.

"A lot do, from what I understand, but not everyone. Coyote doesn't. He's more like an all-around handyman and the warders from the Iowa reservation are the electricians."

Renn shooed me off the bed and set to laying out the blankets in a stack. When he was finished, he stood up and examined the make shift bed.

"Not my greatest work, but you should stay warm enough in there."

He smiled at me and I stood there a little too long smiling back like a starry eyed kid. I couldn't help it. His brown eyes were just about golden in the glow of the tacky lamp in the corner and with his hair mostly out of the tie, it hung in his face across his eyebrows and I wanted more than anything to reach across and smooth it out of his eyes.