The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries Read Free Page A

First People’s Power. They wove the Power around them like capes of
stone and used it to destroy the First People. That’s why they are gone. Their fire has gone out of our blood, because they were too stupid to realize—”
    “ Our blood?” Ash Girl asked, surprised. “But you are a god, not a man.”
    He turned toward her.
    Moonlight filled the eye sockets of his mask and illuminated the interior. He stared at her through intense black eyes, and she saw something familiar in their shape.
    Ash Girl scanned the long lashes, the delicate brow visible through the right socket.
    He must have known the instant she knew.
    “Yes. Go on. Scream, Ash Girl. Scream her name before it is too late.”
    She grabbed for her knife.
    He caught her hand and, as they struggled against each other, he whispered, “I’ve never forgotten the feel of you, my daughter.”

1
    W ILLIAM “DUSTY” STEWART LOOKED OUT OVER THE desert-worn hood of his battered Bronco. A thin layer of dust had sifted over the older, rain-pocked dirt that had been partially cemented to the seared blue paint.
    How like this elemental land to claim everything for its own—to mark it, infiltrate it, and become one with it.
    Behind his Bronco, a convoy of vehicles threaded across the picturesque New Mexican terrain. A land of colored earth surrounded them, dotted with turquoise sagebrush, vibrant green rabbitbrush, and a pale scattering of chamisa.
    Stewart rubbed his jawline with a callused right hand, feeling the stubble. He’d had trouble remembering to shave all of his life. This morning had been worse than usual. Today marked the beginning of a lifelong dream. Today he’d sink his first shovel into Chaco.
    Six feet tall, blond and muscular, he wore faded Levi’s, a pair of worn Nacono boots, and an oversize T-shirt emblazoned with a Mimbres lizard and the logo for the Casa Malpais site over in Springerville, Arizona. The desert had punished his fair complexion. His oval face with its straight nose and blunt chin had a weathered look. Eventually he would have to pay for those years of sun, wind, chill, and dust. Crow’s-feet already etched the corners of his blue eyes. Not good for a man in his mid-thirties. He’d overheard women say he was too damned good-looking. A blond Adonis. Not that good looks had ever gotten him anywhere with women.
    A familiar unease crept around just under his consciousness. Don’t even consider it. Open that door to the past, and you’ll spend all day dwelling on it.
    Funny how something that happened long ago could stick with a man, screw up his whole life.
    At the crest of a low ridge, Dusty glanced back through the dust boiling up behind the Bronco. The land could not be escaped, not here. Grains of sand infiltrated clothes, homes, and machinery. Its tan, gritty texture eventually came to permeate everything.
    The vehicles that followed his were strung out across the sage-speckled desert like gleaming beads, a quarter mile apart, linked by fading plumes of dust. To follow any closer meant clogged air filters, jammed cassette players—critical equipment in a land of only two distant radio stations—or stuck doorlocks, or automatic windows. Any other mechanical thing that liked to function in a clean, lubricated environment existed at its own peril.
    Automotive engineers in Flint, Dearborn, or wherever these trucks were designed, didn’t quite understand what “off-road” really meant in the West. Over the years, and with the development of the “Sport Utility” class, something had been lost in the translation. Suburban mothers braving three inches of slush in Peoria as they carried four kids to basketball practice wasn’t quite the same challenge as being buried up to the fenders in slimy brown Kayenta mud fifty miles from the nearest pavement.
    As Dusty’s Bronco rocked and jolted along the rutted dirt road, he glanced out the side window at the gnarly cactus and yellow-tufted rabbitbrush. Here and there the