The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  Bo finally stood up from the fire and came over to where they were talking.

  “You know it’s always a pleasure seeing you,” he said to Cassie, “but I’m guessing you’re here for something a little more serious than putting Jack in his place.”

  “My place, your place,” Jack said with a laugh. “I’m easy.”

  “Joe sent us,” Cassie said. “Those dream wolves you’ve been chasing kidnapped Jilly out of the rehab. He’s on their trail now and wants you to meet up with him.”

  Wendy was astonished in the change that came over Jack. He went from teasing joker to serious in the blink of an eye. Where before she wanted to back away because he was too forward, now it was because he was too scary. Joe could do that, too, though his teasing was usually silly rather than lewd. She wondered if this ability to switch moods so quickly was another canid trait.

  “How long ago?” Jack asked.

  “We just left him.”

  Jack nodded to Bo. “Come on, partner. Let’s finish this business.”

  “We left him at—” Cassie began.

  “We can find him,” Jack said.

  They took a few steps and then vanished, as though they’d slipped behind a curtain of air. Wendy stared at where they’d disappeared.

  “How’d they do that?” she asked.

  “Once the People have been to a place, then can usually just will themselves to and from it. It’s something that comes naturally to them—like their shapeshifting. We can do it when we’re dreaming, and we can learn how to do it outside of dreaming time, but it’s harder for us.”

  Wendy looked past Cassie to where the red rock canyons seemed to go on forever. The view was so magnificent it seemed to stop her breathing. The red stone vibrating against the green of the junipers and ponderosa pines, the immense sky overhead, so blue it could make your eyes sting. She’d never seen anything remotely like it back home except in picture books and nature specials.

  “We should get back to the rehab, I guess,” she said, unable to keep the regret out of her voice. “Lou’s going to be having a fit.”

  Cassie nodded. “We should, but I just want to try something.”

  Wendy followed her to the edge of the mesa. Cassie cupped her hands and gave a sharp, resonating cry that seemed to rise from the bottom of her chest and soar out into the canyon.

  What …? Wendy thought as Cassie repeated the sound a couple more times.

  But then she was unable to do anything except take a startled step backward and stare.

  A giant dragon lifted up from behind the line of hoodoos directly in front of them, golden and shining. Wendy stared at it in an astonished awe that grew only more profound when the dragon suddenly broke up and she realized it had been made up of hundreds of birds, flying in formation.

  “They’re golden eagles,” Cassie said. “Joe’s told me they like to put on this show if you ask them politely enough. I don’t know what that sound he taught me means, but it sure seems to work.”

  “I … I never …”

  Cassie grinned at her. “Me, neither. I thought he was putting me on when he told me about it.” She took Wendy’s hand. “That’s something to remember.”

  Wendy could only nod.

  “Unfortunately, now we have to go back to the real world,” Cassie said.

  “It won’t seem as real as this,” Wendy said. “This seems like the template on which our world was based.”

  Cassie gave her fingers a squeeze in agreement. Then she led her away.

  5

  MANIDÒ-AKÌ

  I hope I wasn’t too rough on Wendy, but there just isn’t the time to be polite. Who knows what these wolves want with Jilly? I only know it can’t be good. And to make things worse, they’ve hidden their trail. The damnedest thing is, I don’t even think it was willful. It’s not a canid trick—I’d see through that. It’s something else, something that slides away from my mind every time I try to look at it straight on.

  I remember what I said to Lou, back in the rehab.

  It depends on how you view the world and what you expect to see when you look at it.

  That works here the same as it does back in the World As It Is.

  Thinking about Lou makes me realize how little he’s changed over the years. He was always steadfast and true—a rarity in a man these days, little say a cop. I know Jilly’s grateful for how he took her off the street back when, but it’s him being who he is that keeps them friends.

  Cops just see too much of the wrong end of the world. You can see how it wears them down. They can’t match the stats up on the rez, but more of them eat their guns than you’ll find in a cross section of regular citizens. The ones that don’t are either in AA, or still drinking, or have closed down their ability to feel much of anything.

  All these years gone by, and Lou still cares. Plays everything too tight by the book, so far as I’m concerned, but you’ve got to give him credit. The only thing he’s lost is any kind of lightness in his heart. I guess in a job like his, that’s the first thing to go. It’s why cop humor’s so grim.

  I shake my head and bring my mind back to the problem at hand.

  What did I expect to find here?

  That’s easy. Jilly and the wolves that grabbed her from the rehab.

  Why can’t I find them?

  Because they’ve hidden their trail.

  Hidden it how?

  I roll a cigarette and light it, studying the woods around me.

  Something hidden. Something secret.

  And then I know. It’s the secret, the one that binds them, Jilly and her sister. Jilly and Angel both refer to victims of abuse as Children of the Secret, how the secret gives these victims a connection the rest of us can’t have—something deep in their bones that answers to each other when they meet, doesn’t matter how long ago they had to live through their own private hell.

  So I’m thinking, that’s where they’ve gone. Into someplace only they can access, these Children of the Secret. To find them, I have to get myself into that head space if I can, but I don’t know if it’s possible, and I don’t think I have the time. But then I realize I know someone who can help me and she won’t be as hard to track down, because she’s not hiding from me.

  Like I’ve said, I’m no derrynimble, but I do have a gift of being able to find things in the dreamlands.

  I close my eyes and concentrate on her. It’s kind of like how Holly Rue—that friend of Jilly’s with the used bookstore—describes how you can access other people’s computers over the Internet. You send out a little search program and it goes pinging against firewalls until it finds a computer that isn’t protected and sends the information back to you.

  What I’m sending out instead of a program is a need to find something, but otherwise it’s not much different. It’s just as random and there’s not really all that much mysterious or magical about it. When it bangs up against what I’m looking for, it sends an echo back and I know where to go.

  I get a quick return on this search. Doesn’t surprise me—she’s only been in the dreamlands for a few hours and everything being new to her, she wouldn’t have gotten far. I take a last drag of my smoke, put it out, and store the butt in my pocket. Then I find me a quicklands trail and head off to find her.

  6

  NEWFORD, MAY

  Lou was pacing back and forth in the hall outside Jilly’s room when Sophie arrived. She got the feeling he’d been doing it for a while. As they drew nearer, the policewoman who’d escorted Sophie from the front door of the rehab center cleared her throat.

  “Sorry to bother you, Loot,” she said, “but this lady was saying—”

  She broke off when Lou turned and waved her off.

  “It’s okay, Barb,” he said. “Thanks for bringing her.”

  “Where’s Wendy?” Sophie asked as the policewoman returned to her post. “I came as soon as I heard, but the cab took forever to get to my place.”

  Lou pointed at the blank wall acr
oss from Jilly’s doorway. Sophie’s gaze followed his finger, then returned to his face.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “You and me both, Sophie. All of a sudden everybody’s walking through walls, except they don’t end up on the other side. Nope. They’re just gone.”

  “Gone?”

  Lou made a helpless gesture with his hands. “There’s a room on the other side of that wall, but there’s nobody in it.”

  “Wendy walked through a wall?”

  He nodded. “Along with Cassie and Bones. And before that—at least according to Wendy—it was Jilly’s sister and her partner carrying off Jilly.”

  “But—”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Lou said. “It’s nuts. But I saw them go. They stepped right into that wall like it wasn’t even there, and then they were gone.”

  Sophie ran a hand across the plaster of the wall.

  “If it’s a trick,” Lou said. “It’s a damn good one.”

  “It’s not a trick,” Sophie said.

  Lou nodded slowly. “So, are you going to follow them?”

  “I wouldn’t know how.”

  “I think I’m kind of relieved,” Lou told her.

  “Relieved?”

  “Because if you went, I’d have to go with you and …” He shrugged. “This world’s already weird enough for me. I don’t need to add the problems of another to it.”

  “It’s not all bad over there,” Sophie said.

  “So you have been over?”

  Sophie gave him a small smile. “Only in my dreams.” She looked away from him, back at the wall. “You say Cassie and Joe followed after Jilly?”

  Lou nodded. “With Wendy in tow.”

  “Well, that’s something. Joe’ll know what to do. I think he was born there.”

  “So it’s not just a shtick—his reading fortunes and making like he knows more about the world than you and me can see?”

  “He’s for real,” Sophie told him. She sighed. “Though it’s not something I’ve ever been comfortable admitting to—knowing about this sort of stuff, I mean. But I guess I’ve always thought of Joe as this trickster figure who’s got one foot in our world, another in the dreamworld. Jilly says he’s way older than he looks and—how did she put it?—potent.”

  “Tricksters,” Lou said. “They’re like con men, right?”

  “I suppose they can be. But Joe’s on our side. No matter what’s going on over there, he won’t let anything bad happen to Jilly.”

  “He’d better not,” Lou said.

  Sophie nodded. But she knew it wasn’t going to be up to Joe. While she had no idea what was really going on anymore, she was sure of this much: things had spun way out of anybody’s control.

  Except for maybe Jilly’s sister.

  7

  MANIDÒ AKÌ

  The honey-blonde pit bull doesn’t seem too surprised to see me come walking out of the woods into the meadow where she and her pack have set up camp. I made a point of calling out before I came into sight—to give them warning, but also to let them know I’m aware of their presence. As I step into the clearing, the dogs rise to their feet and watch me with those flat gazes of theirs. I know a couple have slipped off—I can hear them circling around behind me in the bush.

  I go down on one knee once I’m in the clearing to bring my head closer to the level of theirs and wait, palms open at my side, nothing threatening. The pack doesn’t move until the two circling behind me are in place. Then the honey blonde approaches me.

  “My name’s Joe,” I tell her. “We didn’t take the time to introduce ourselves properly the last time.”

  I wait a moment, but there’s no response. I know she understands me, but I don’t know if she can make herself understood. She’s got some old blood in her, but it’s thin and she’s probably never tried to communicate with anybody except for the members of this pack—her fellow prisoners, back in the World As It Is.

  I’m pretty sure she recognizes a kinship with me—the one that goes back to my mother’s side. My mother was some old yellow camp dog up in Kickaha territory, the story goes. Had a lot of the old blood in her, but nothing to help connect her to that side of her heritage. She’d slip in and out of her shape—yellow-haired woman, yellow-haired dog. No control.

  I was told she was in human form when she met her a handsome black-haired man with old corbæ blood in him. She couldn’t talk—I don’t know why; didn’t have a voice in her dog shape either—but they got along the way folks have since the beginning of time when they’re attracted to each other. She stayed with that crow man long enough to give birth to me, but then the canid in her got too strong and she went back to the camp and I got raised by my father and my uncles and aunts on the corbæ side.

  One of my aunts told me later that my father used to go back to her on a regular basis, follow her around the camp in crow shape, but she never shifted back. It’s not a happy story, but it could’ve been worse for me. I could’ve never been born. Or I could’ve had parents like Jilly’s.

  Does this honey-blonde pit bull see any of that story when she looks in my eyes? I can’t tell.

  I would’ve come to them in dog shape myself, but that would’ve put a whole different dynamic in place. I would’ve looked different, smelled different. Hard to say if they would’ve recognized me before taking me down. I’m not saying they’re particularly vicious. It’s just that, bred the way they were, treated the way they were, attacking first is pretty much hardwired into their thinking.

  “Just in case you’re wondering,” I say, “we’re square. You don’t owe me anything. I didn’t need anything more for setting you free than knowing you’re out of that place I found you and living free.”

  She’s watching, still listening, still silent.

  “So what I’m asking now is a favor,” I tell her. “Nothing more. You can say yes, you can say no, and I won’t think the worse of you. But if you can help me out here, I’ll be beholden to you, no question.”

  Then I tell her my problem.

  The pack never loses its wariness while I’m talking. It’s all stiff legs and flat stares. I decide maybe we need something here to put everybody at ease.

  “I’m going to put on my own face,” I say to the honey blonde. “See if you can keep your boys from jumping to the wrong conclusions.”

  With that I let one of my true faces show, that of a yellow hound—what I got from my mother’s side. It’s not one I wear often.

  “There’s not a lot of dignity in it,” I tell Cassie the one time she asked. “A man with a dog’s head—it reminds me too much of all those paintings you see at garage sales of dogs playing poker.”

  “And a coyote or a wolf’s better?”

  I remember grinning. “Maybe, maybe not. But it looks a bit more mythic, don’t you think?”

  “I think I like your real face better.” She touched the palm of her hand to my cheek. “This is your real face … isn’t it?”

  “It’s my real human face,” I told her.

  Dog, crow, man. Talk about your mixed breeds. I’ve got it all sewn up.

  The pit bull pack bristles as I let the rest of me change. Now they’ve got a strange dog in their midst. I hear one of them growl, over on my right. There’s movement behind me. But before anyone gets too antsy, the honey blonde gives a sharp bark and nobody moves. She and I do the dog thing and smell each other’s asses—it’s not my favorite part about this shape—but I seem to pass muster. I have to go through it with the rest of the pack. When the last one’s done you can feel the tension ease.

  The honey blonde bumps my shoulder with hers. When she sees she has my attention, she heads off toward the woods. She pauses at the edge of the clearing and barks. I nod and trot off after her. The rest of the pack stays behind.

  I could maybe use their help, too, depending on how many wolves Jilly’s sister has got running with her today, but I don’t press my luck. I figure the honey blonde helping me is alread
y more than I could hope for right now. Once I told her we were square—and I know she could see I meant it—she didn’t owe me a damn thing. It’s only her big heart that’s got her doing this for me. Or maybe it’s what I told her, about Jilly.

  After all, the honey blonde’s one of the Children of the Secret, too. She’s strong. A survivor. But the real measure of her heart is that she’s willing to put something back, to help someone who can’t help herself. In that she’s closer to Jilly than Jilly’s sister will ever be.

  Jilly

  MANIDÒ-AKÌ

  I lie there in the damp leaves for a long moment after Toby’s deserted me, then I finally get up and try walking away myself. I don’t manage to take more than a half-dozen steps before that geas thing grabs ahold of me, almost physically yanking me back. When I turn around to face the gulch, the compulsion eases into a steady, summoning pulse once more. I still feel the need to go down to where my sister’s haranguing the Broken Girl, to go down and let my dreaming self become swallowed by helpless flesh again.

  The geas hasn’t gone away; it just doesn’t actually hurt anymore.

  It’s funny how your perspective changes as your circumstances do. Only a few hours ago my low point was being trapped in my bed as the Broken Girl. But I still had the support of my friends. I was still in a medical facility where all my needs were looked after. I was still able to fall asleep in my bed there and go wandering the cathedral world as my dreaming self.

  As things stand, I’d be happy to wind the clock back a few hours to then. Was it so bad? I even had a date, for god’s sake, with the first normal, sweet guy I’d met in years.

  Okay, so we wouldn’t be able to do the kissy-cuddling thing. Truth is, we wouldn’t be able to do much of anything except watch the movie together and talk. But in a way, with my history, that wouldn’t necessarily be such a bad thing. There was the possibility that, given time, we could become pals. And then, if anything else came out of it, maybe the part of me that shuts down when relationships get too intimate wouldn’t engage because it would already know Daniel. It would know he was sweet and no threat and nothing like every man in the early part of my life had been.