Firewalker Read Online Free PDF

climb slowly into the passenger seat while Nash retrieved his gun and the Nightwalker’s and got inside. He leaned over me to stow both pistols in the glove compartment, blood still staining his neck.
    “You all right?” he asked me.
    “Am I all right? You’re the one bleeding to death.”
    “I’ll take that as a yes.” Nash sat up, put the truck in gear, and pulled slowly onto the highway, the same as any other vehicle that was approved to proceed. The other patrollers never even looked at us.
    Not until we were well down the dark road, dipping and climbing along canyon walls, did I see that Nash’s hands shook as he gripped the wheel, his face gray.
    “Shit, Nash, stop and let me drive.”
    “No way am I letting you behind the wheel of my brand-new truck. There’s a first aid kit behind the seat. Should have some gauze and antibacterial spray in it.”
    I dug around in the rear of the cab, found a pristine white box with a red cross on it, dragged it onto my lap, and opened it. Bandages, antibacterial, aspirin, sterile gauze, tape, and other useful items were stowed inside in neat compartments.
    “This isn’t a first aid kit,” I said. “It’s a mobile emergency room.”
    Nash didn’t answer. I extracted a wad of gauze and scooted across the seat to wipe the blood from his neck.
    I had to reach around him, because the Nightwalker had bitten the left side, and Nash grunted impatiently when I inadvertently blocked his view of the road. There was no place to pull off on this stretch, the highway moving through cuts that left maybe a foot of space on either side of the pavement. Besides, I don’t think either one of us much wanted to stop.
    I squirted Nash’s neck with a little antibacterial and pressed more gauze over the wound, fastening it with sterile tape.
    Nash returned both hands to the wheel when I sat back and started cleaning up. “What the hell was that thing?” he asked.
    “A Nightwalker. In layman’s terms, a vampire. Except it’s real.”
    “A vampire.” Nash digested this with a few soft swear words. “And you’re saying I killed it?”
    I finished putting the supplies back into the first aid kit and closed the lid. “The Nightwalker is a creature of magic, but you cancel out magic. A null, Coyote called you. The Nightwalker got enough of your magic-negative essence in it, which destroyed it.” That was what I had thought would happen, and I was gut-wrenchingly relieved that I’d been right.
    “I felt something change in me,” Nash said. “I was losing blood, I was dying, and then it all stopped. It was as if something freezing cold formed inside me and moved to him through my blood.”
    “Interesting.” I’d speculated with Mick over the summer how Nash had become a magic-absorber, and neither of us could figure it out. I’d never met anything like him, that was for sure.
    Nash contemplated the road in silence, and I knew this was hard for him. Up until a few months ago, he had been the biggest Unbeliever in all of Hopi County. Then he’d seen dragons, watched Coyote shift from man to animal, fought skinwalkers, seen what had come out of the vortexes, and had me attack him with storm magic.
    “I don’t want it to be real,” he said after a time. “I’m trying not to let it be real. It’s not what I grew up believing.”
    “I know.” I nodded. “Believe me, when a storm first reached out to me, it scared the shit out of me. I thought I was chindi , a sorceress filled with evil. The sad thing is, I wasn’t far from wrong.”
    “What am I, then?”
    “We’re not sure. Coyote called you a null, a walking magic void. You’ve taken the brunt of some amazing power and never broken a sweat.”
    “Did you know for sure that I could kill that Nightwalker thing?”
    I hesitated but decided to be truthful. “I figured it was worth a shot.”
    He shot me a scathing glance. “What the hell were you going to do if it didn’t work?”
    “Shoot him, maybe. Run for