“Right, right. The end of San Jose as we know it.”
She hadn’t expected him to stiffen, or for the cat to make a sound of protest from beside his feet. Seriously? Winchester House could be bad, but that bad?
She definitely had to think about this. It was either too good to pass up, or too dire to let go, or too insane to have anything to do with. Possibly some combination of those things.
“Give me your contact info. I’ll get back to you.” She held up a hand to forestall another reminder. “I know, I know. Soon.” She shook her head. “Look, I’ve got to talk to my team. It’s a huge road trip.”
“Airline tickets,” he said. “I already have them. Tomorrow afternoon.” He graced her with another long look, pulling the sunglasses from his coat. “My name is Trevarr.”
She’d have no luck spelling it, not the way he pronounced it in that accent of his. Trey-VARRR, with a definite extra R or two on the end, though he didn’t quite roll the throaty sound.
He stood, pushing the ice cream aside, and somehow she should have expected his next words. “Lisa McGarrity. I’ll find you.”
~~~~~
Garrie called Lucia on the way home, dropping quarters into a pay phone. Her cell phone was a deliberately simple thing, as dumb as they got these days, and still the previous evening’s activity had fried the thing. “Bring one of the spare phones,” she told Lucia. “And meet up at my place.”
Lucia responded with caution. “There’s a big designer sale over at the —”
Garrie didn’t care where. “Lu,” she said. But relented enough to add, “You can try to talk me into new clothes, if you want.”
She could all but see Lucia’s calculating understanding of that offer. That important, eh? But then she processed the wardrobe potential, gave the patented Burque “Eeeeee!” of exclamation and hung up.
Garrie reached the condo only a few moments before Lucia, her progress slowed by a full stomach and the rising heat, her face flushed and hair no doubt completely out of control, spiked where she’d pushed it away from her face.
She let them in, gestured Lucia at the kitchen and the cold drinks, and headed to the bathroom to splash her face off, summarizing the late morning encounter on the way. By the time she wrapped it up, she and Lucia sat in the modest main room with iced drinks and the overhead fan pushing air around.
Lucia’s jaw dropped, revealing expensive pretty white teeth. “He said that? I’ll find you? How very James Bond of him.” She made a purring noise, slouched in Garrie’s favorite chair — white with narrow green stripes and the best sink-into-me-stuffing ever.
“Don’t toy with him,” Garrie said sharply. “I don’t think he’s safe. He’s sure not telling me everything.” She put her mug of iced horchata on the rug, leaning back against her not-so-favorite chair. Homemade by Lucia’s auntie, the cinnamon-spiced rice milk was cut with real milk for Garrie’s gringo taste buds, and it was her favorite comfort drink in the whole world.
Not doing much good on this particular day, as her unease about the situation rose. Didn’t know if she dared to believe the very strange man called Trevarr, didn’t know if she dared not to. Winchester House, gone amok without a reckoner on board...
Lucia’s oh-so-perceptive eyes narrowed slightly, accenting their almond shape. “And yet you’re thinking of doing this? Because don’t try to bullshit me. I know you, chica-let.” She said it cheeklet, and in a tone to poke.
Garrie scowled back at her. “Yeah, I’m thinking of it.” She bent forward to lift the vocational book from the leather-wrapped trunk of a coffee table, letting it drop back down onto a pile of fashion magazines — most of them Lucia’s, as if distributing such things would change Garrie’s casual-funky wardrobe. “Look at this thing! I’m actually considering toenails! Or event planning! Or what the heck — there’s picture framing. I kind of like the sound of that.”
Lucia shuddered delicately. “If it’s a money thing —”
“Don’t even go there. I’m good for years if I’m careful. Rhonda Rose lived in a time when a woman was at the mercy of society — no way she was going to let me splurge those early gigs. Jeeze, if she’d been born in our generation she’d have a CNN show on investing by now. Rhonda Rose Knows!” Garrie gave the book a baleful nudge. “It’s just... I’ve got to do something more challenging than ghost poo roulette!”
“I don’t think the challenging world of framing is quite what you’re looking for.” Lucia shifted her dreamy focus to the lazy ceiling fan. “Let’s talk more about our friend Trevarr. Tell me how about the shirt. Talk about his eyes again.”
“Silvery. Spooky,” Garrie said shortly. “Come on, Lucia. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it, too. Things have been quiet around here for years — nothing but vague, unsettled human spirits. We haven’t seen anything from darkside for over a year, and even then it was just a small pack of glooms.”
“This is a good thing,” Lucia pointed out. Denied the opportunity to wallow in the details of their mystery visitor, she sat up straight, crossing her legs and pulling a pillow into her lap. Her pink fleece shorts and cap-sleeved, belly-baring matching top disappeared behind it, leaving her with an alarmingly naked look.
Juice Couture. Not a thing Garrie would have known before her late teens, when she first met Lucia. Rebellious Latina princess, swamped with relief to have met someone who understood her inexplicable perception of emotions; the only member of the current team to have met Rhonda Rose before she departed. Now she looked at Garrie and repeated, “A good thing, Garrie. A nice happy Sim City, no big evils. Maybe we just took care of them all.”
Garrie slanted her a disbelieving gaze. “You really believe that?”
Lucia gave it a moment and suggested, “Maybe they all went somewhere else?”
Garrie made a face. “I suppose I could go on the road.”
“Road trip!” Lucia practically squealed, and the pillow went flying. “We can track down the bad vibes and play pied piper! Let’s start with New York City. I’ve always wanted to shop in New York City.”
“Or,” Garrie said, “we could start in San Jose. Where we know there’s a problem. Lu, he already bought tickets.”
Lucie turned her sternest look upon her. “Garrie,” she said, long suffering. “I’ll be there if you go, you know that. But who just said he’s not safe? Much better to talk about his butt and drive off in the opposite direction, yes?”
Garrie shrugged. “Can’t have it both ways,” she said. “I can’t whine about boredom and then turn away from the most interesting thing to happen in ages just because it comes with a potential sting. None of the reckoning comes with a guarantee — you know that.”
“Yeah?” Lucia said, entirely unconvinced. “I think maybe you can. Because I think maybe this one comes with an actual warning label.”
~~~~~
::They will come,:: Sklayne told Trevarr, all assurance and certainty against Trevarr’s pensive silence. ::The people will all come.::
They’d come for the Garrie person, and the Garrie person would come because she couldn’t not. He’d heard it in her voice, felt it in her very presence: she’d be there. She hungered for it, thirsted for it... needed it. A small person wrapped around much power.
As was Sklayne himself. Sklayne who didn’t need the airline tickets Trevarr had purchased after watching the Garrie person for several days, learning her team and her energies and her bristling-with-motion ways. Because the money was easily come by, and they could afford to discard the tickets if they went to the place called San Jose on their own.
::They will come,:: he said again, pretty certain that Trevarr sat awake and not nearly warm enough in the banking heat of the Albuquerque day, sitting not in one of the city’s stuffy rentable rooms but alongside the Rio Grande river where they’d first arrived, the satchel waiting to serve as pillow.
Sklayne unfolded himself from cat and blanketed around Trevarr’s shoulders, both of them used to much warmer climes but Sklayn
e the only one of the two who could generate the necessary heat. ::She will come. She wants.::
The Garrie person wouldn’t even know what she wasn’t seeing at that besieged Winchester house, immersed as it was in roiling spirits. She might sense it, but she wouldn’t identify it. Wouldn’t focus on it. Because Trevarr said no, we must keep her from Ghehera.
So she would never know the real stakes, the true action occurring in layers just out of her reach. She’d do her part, leaving Trevarr free to do his.
Or Trevarr believed it would be so.
Sklayne did not. Sklayne believed that the Garrie person would become aware. She would meddle. She would seal her own fate.
But either way, Trevarr would accomplish what he’d been sent to do. And then they could go home. Not in disgrace, not in trouble, not failing Blood Honor.
Home.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 4
San Jose, Here We Come
Ascertain your ethereal destination before embarkation.
— RRose
Maps are your friends.
— L.M.
Things hadn’t gone as Garrie had hoped. Road trip, she’d told the team, scattering messages over voice mail with the cheap phone Lucia had brought her, one in an ongoing series that she barely dared to carry in the first place. Expenses paid. San Jose, Winchester House, details on the way. Actual reckoning!
She’d known Lucia was in. She’d figured on Drew, still green and new and excited about it all. But she’d gone so far as to count on Quinn, too.
Mistake.
Garrie shifted in the airline aisle seat, wishing it reclined just another degree. Finally she kicked off her plain canvas sneakers and pulled her knees to her chest, sighing as the plane straightened out to level flight, clouds pressing in against the windows.
Beside her in the middle seat, Trevarr didn’t appear to notice. He’d closed his eyes at take-off and now appeared to sleep, buffered all around by the muted roar of the plane’s engines and his own personal assumption of space.
But appeared to sleep wasn’t the same as sleeping, or even the same as relaxing. Looking at the tension in his features and the faint flair of naturally defined nostrils, thinking back to his acutely alert assessment of the plane’s furnishings and the various exit doors, Garrie quite suddenly realized that her new client simply didn’t like to fly.
She wouldn’t go so far as to think the word afraid.
The businessman in the window seat had managed to squish himself deeply into the corner, giving the middle seat as much space as possible. Garrie caught him eyeing Trevarr, from neatly clipped-back hair to the black duster to the high, worn boots and of course the gloves. The man caught her eye, sharing an expression that meant can you believe this guy?
Garrie gave the man the faintest of shrugs, the faintest of smiles. Yeah. Go figure.
Her thigh cramped; she stretched the leg and tucked her foot beneath her, yoga in an airplane seat. And she knew in her heart that her restlessness didn’t come from sitting in an uncomfortable seat beside a less than comfortable man, but because two rows behind them, the row of three seats held only two of her team.
She knew without looking that Lucia was planning her shopping, content and calm. Years of dealing with undirected, unrecognized talents had defined those coping mechanisms, that perfect facade of a shallow young woman. Drew sat beside her, his daily stubble shaved except for a spot that now looked suspiciously like a neonatal soul patch. He’d had a rolled-up Archeology in his back pocket when they boarded; no doubt he was already deeply engrossed.
But there was no Quinn. Quinn, with whom she’d once had an early, brief affair and now counted as friend. Brilliant mind for detail as long as it wasn’t anything mundane, and the one who usually provided the crucial piece that pulled their work together.
The team felt unaccountably incomplete without him.
“Can you do the job without him?” Trevarr asked her, not turning his head or so much as twitching in his seat. The businessman startled at that deep voice with its faint accent, giving Garrie a look of faint betrayal as he realized they were travel companions.
“Really, I don’t blame him,” Garrie said. “He can’t run out on the store when he just asked for extra hours to fill in the reckoning void.”
Though she thought that at one time, he might have done just that.
I don’t do people. Maybe I don’t do teammates very well, either.
Trevarr looked at her this time. “Can you do the job without him?” But his voice held little in the way of challenge, and more understanding than she’d expected.
Her gaze wandered away from his, chicken that she was, and ended up on the stark black hair of the older lady across the aisle and one row ahead of them. Not a color found in nature. “He can probably do this just as well by phone as on site. As long as we can be his eyes...”
But who knew what Quinn saw when he looked at something — what he noticed? What he took back to his books?
Trevarr’s hand settled beside hers on the arm rest, startling her; she stared at it, finding nothing more than long fingers and blunt hard nails, a certain amount of long-term hard living written across the knuckles. “The leaving is not easy,” he said. “But sometimes necessary.”
She hunted for equilibrium. Hard enough on the ground, but in midair? Hah. “You’re an expert?”
His face hardened a little... but only a little, a flicker of there and gone again, as if he fought to keep something from the surface. His hand tensed beside hers.
Oh-ho!
But she didn’t push. Kindness, she thought, deserved kindness. And so together they sank back into their thoughts, regrets both separate and yet now somehow shared.
I just wish...
Because it really had not gone as she’d hoped.
~~~~~
Drew greeted Garrie outside the early evening Albuquerque airline ticket counter lines, hauling a framed hiking backpack stuffed to capacity and parroting the message she’d left him.
“Pack for a couple of days of easy San Jose weather and come to the airport?” He rolled his eyes. “That’s A-B, Garrie. Way A-B.”
Garrie shifted her second-hand overnighter tote on her shoulder and looked to Lucia, eyebrow raised.
“Ass-backwards,” Lucia murmured, busy with her smart phone. Her expression lit up, shopping endorphins already kicking in. “Union Square in San Francisco!” she said. “Coach, Gucci, Prada... and street performers on the side. What’s not to like?” She looked up just in time to catch Garrie eyeing her giant black, sleek Andiamo bag of ballistic nylon and leather. “That,” she said, “is for what I bring back.”
“There’s Quinn!” Drew gestured at the revolving door. Quinn was easy to spot, tall and blond and moving without hurry.
Without luggage, too.
“Not going,” he said without preamble, even as he approached the group. Lucia frowned, as if unable to comprehend the words, and Drew’s mouth opened — but he glanced at Garrie and closed it.
For the words landed hard on Garrie, hard enough to rock her. “Quinn...” She cleared her throat. “You’re sure? We could use you.”
“I’m not sure that’s true, or you would have checked with me before...” He trailed off, indicating their little procession. Avoiding her gaze took little effort; he just didn’t look down. He and Trevarr were nearly of a height, but Quinn had nothing of Trevarr’s faint menace — none of the whatever it takes about him. The oldest of them at twenty-seven, he liked to keep his brain, that extraordinary repertoire of trivia, as busy as possible. “Besides, my resources don’t exactly travel lightly. I can be of more help from here.”
Garrie looked over her shoulder, found Trevarr in line at the ticket counter — his impatience palpable as he inched closer to the Southwest counter, watching them. The travelers lined up in front and behind had somehow contrived to leave a noticeable buffer zone around him.
She didn’t blame them.
�
��Look, chicalet,” Lucia said, voice quiet. “You know I’m in. The shopping, right?” As if she wouldn’t have gone on regardless. “But maybe Quinnie has a point, yes?”
Garrie shifted uneasily. “Point about what?”
“Communication.” Quinn said. “Making decisions for the rest of us.”
“We’ve always talked about anything big,” Lucia added, in case Garrie hadn’t figured it out yet.
“So that’s what this is?” Garrie crossed her arms to glare up at Quinn and then uncrossed them so she wouldn’t look as defensive as she felt. “You’re staying to make a point?”
Quinn shrugged. “Yeah, maybe I am. We should have discussed this, Garrie. There was time, and you know it. This is just you seeing a shiny and going for it because you miss those shinies.”
“Don’t you?”
“That,” he told her, “is not the conversation we’re having. Have you even noticed we still don’t know what this really is all about?”
Drew chimed in, head bobbing in agreement. “Right. I mean, I’m gonna miss classes over this.” Part-time student since their work had slacked off, he nurtured dreams of morphing into Indiana Jones and applying his extra sense of history to great archeological discoveries, although he currently struggled to restrain his talents in the unforgiving classroom setting. Garrie hardly knew how to say she’d already told them most of what she could. “San Jose,” she offered, again. “Winchester House. Client is willing to pay our way. If it’s for real, how could it not be worth a look?”
“Winchester Mystery House?” Quinn said, and not as though it was a good thing. Definitely not as though it was a good thing.
Garrie spoke quickly, before the not good thoughts changed anyone else’s mind. “Look,” she said, “I know what you’re thinking. It’s a big fat hairy tourist trap. And it is, but just maybe it’s more right now. Besides, there’s shopping for Lucia. And Drew, you know there’s gonna be history behind the place.”
Oh my God, she sounded desperate.
She was desperate.
There was a pause, as they all made silent note of the desperate.
The Reckoners Page 4
