The Reckoners

by Doranna Durgin

  Then Quinn cleared his throat. “Winchester Mystery House,” he said, taking on his recitation voice. “Thirty-eight years in construction, completed in September 1922. Seven stories until the 1906 earthquake; four remaining. Two basements, forty bedrooms, forty staircases, nine hundred fifty doors —”

  Drew’s eyes glazed over at the thought.

  Quinn’s hadn’t.

  Garrie asked, much more tentatively, “You’re sure — ?”

  He shrugged, not looking at her again. “I can’t afford to walk away from the bookstore right now.”

  “Look,” Garrie said, though he hadn’t asked again. “You all know what I know. The house works just as Mrs. Winchester wanted. The ghosts are really there. But something’s gone wrong and they’re turning dark — and it’s about to get out of control.”

  Quinn eyed Trevarr, and his genial gaze went harder than Garrie had ever seen it. “Says the guy who stalked you into coming with him?” As if he could hear from that distance, Trevarr stiffened, turned his head to look directly at Quinn, sunglasses barely cutting the force of his regard.

  Garrie squelched an astonishing impulse to throw herself between them. “Hey,” she said sharply, startling Quinn into glancing her way. “If it’s for real, then we’re stopping disaster. If it’s not, we’ve got a free ride to San Jose.”

  “I’ve always wanted to see the Winchester House,” Lucia said, her voice somewhat smaller than usual.

  “Dude,” Drew said, earnestly, “the history in that place.”

  Quinn looked at them all a moment, glanced at Trevarr again, and shook his head slightly. “Just make sure they’re round-trip tickets.”

  Garrie sighed turned to Trevarr, briefly displaying three fingers and pointing to herself, Lucia, and Drew. He gave the slightest of nods and held their place in line.

  When she turned back to her reckoners, she found herself looking at Quinn’s back as he walked away.

  ~~~~~

  The flight didn’t take long, and they disembarked without the benefit of any San Jose trivia from Quinn. Garrie failed miserably at pretending not to notice, and Lucia failed at pretending not to notice Garrie’s failure, and Drew didn’t have a clue.

  But even standing in the San Jose baggage claim area with night covering the plate glass windows along the exterior wall, waiting for Lucia to grab her suitcase and Drew to find his backpack, Garrie could still see Quinn walking away. And deep in her heart, she knew he’d had cause.

  Equally deep in her heart, she knew she’d do it all over again. Maybe that made her suck just a little bit.

  But they were here and she needed to think about now, so she found Trevarr off to the side with his satchel, waiting for them and somehow all but blending into a support column. From there he watched the room, radiating a don’t-tread-on-me aura that created an obvious buffer zone. All for the better, she thought.

  And then she frowned, because she hadn’t expected to see layers in his expression, or to get the faint, fleeting impression of... What was that? Loneliness? Homesickness?

  Or maybe it was the outdated granola bar she’d given him on the plane.

  Either way, she made her way over without trouble and with no particular goal. When she got there, she found herself in what felt like awkward silence. Finally she asked the most important thing that came to mind. “What happened to the cat?”

  He looked down at her. “Not my cat.”

  “Oh, please. It followed you across town.”

  He looked back at her with no evident need to respond. If she’d thought she’d seen something in him those moments before, there was no sign of it now. In fact, his focus changed, his head lifting.

  Garrie followed his apparent gaze to discover that Lucia had gained possession of her suitcase and now smartly trundled it along on its little wheels, heading for the door and the nighttime chaos of darting taxis and bright overhead lights. Drew trailed her, and Garrie scrambled to keep pace as Trevarr followed them out the door. Fine. Be that way.

  “We’ll be at the Moorpark,” Garrie told them, waving the scrap of paper with the scribbled confirmation number. “We’ve got adjoining rooms. Club Queen.”

  Lucia gave Trevarr a quick, assessing glance, and Garrie heard her unspoken words clearly enough. Adjoining rooms, hmm? Garrie sent her an exaggerated frown. Not safe!

  “Hey,” Lucia said, understanding perfectly. She flipped sleek black hair over her shoulder. “You’re the one who went for it.”

  Drew recovered from the jostle of someone moving through the pedestrian flow. “What..?”

  “Secret girl stuff,” Lucia said easily.

  “Never mind, then.” Drew adjusted his backpack, hastily uninterested and fully aware that Lucia would start spouting about tampons if he pushed it. Lucia shared an eye roll with Garrie, a men are so easy signal, and aimed herself at the curb, stumbling slightly as someone rudely jostled her, shifting smoothly past to brush against Trevarr and skim on through the crowd.

  Or to try.

  Holy crap! Garrie startled as Trevarr moved. Lightning fast, more predator than man, he clamped down on the young man — stopping the guy so abruptly that his feet nearly walked out from under him.

  Danger, danger, Will Robinson! Garrie opened herself to complete ethereal awareness, hunting threats in instant, automatic reflex.

  But she found nothing more than a hazy gloom of a darkside presence clinging to a passerby and a skittering movement in the carefully landscaped bushes at the edge of the parking structure itself. Nothing hovered around this young man in particular.

  Nothing but Trevarr, who silently, implacably, held out his hand to the guy in a demand that Garrie didn’t quite understand. The young man stirred himself to indignation, his lip curling with attitude, his fists clenching in denial. Garrie’s personal hackles rose in alarm; she took a step forward. Don’t get in his face, you stupid boy.

  “Garrie,” Lucia murmured.

  Right. Because it would be so smart for her to get in the middle of it, too. Garrie stood fast, shaken by sudden regret that she’d gotten them tangled with a man who could so swiftly turn feral — not to mention her impulse to march back to the ticket counter and put them on the first return flight to Albuquerque. What had she gotten them into? Whatever it was, people were starting to notice — staring and murmuring and reaching for cell phone cameras.

  Ethereal breezes shifted, an unfamiliar sensation that interrupted all such thoughts; Trevarr’s hand clamped down as the guy’s eyes widened in something closer to panic than fear and he made a startling attempt to jerk away. To no avail, and Garrie squinted against another shift, unable to stop herself from checking around again.

  The guy stopped fighting, and reached into his pocket to pull out a...

  Garrie frowned. A necklace? Strung on a braided cord that gleamed scaly black in the mercury lighting, a heavy metal disk dangled out in the open — but only for an instant. Trevarr scooped it out of the air and deposited it in the pocket of his duster with the ease of long familiarity. He tipped his head toward Drew, offering up his first staccato words of the encounter. “His, too.”

  Drew stiffened and began patting his pockets — a search aborted when the young man meekly held out a battered brown wallet. The moment Drew took it, the erstwhile pickpocket glanced at Trevarr — an instant of indecision — and then made a break for it, sprinting wildly across to the roadway to the tune of blaring horns and the squeal of brakes.

  “How —” Drew said.

  “Wow,” Lucia said.

  “Showoff,” Garrie muttered, not meant to be heard. But Trevarr turned to meet her gaze, and she could have sworn she saw that faint gleam of humor returned to the silver of his eyes.

  Not that he lingered with it. No, he merely indicated the curb chaos and said, “I’ve found that taxi drivers rarely stop for me.”

  “Oh, I’ll do that,” Lucia said, and moved out of the pedestrian flow, stepping up to the curb — skinny jeans and baby doll top, Alb
uquerque girl already gone California Dreamin’. Trevarr looked again at Garrie and she was sure of it. Somewhere inside that intimidating exterior, a smile lurked.

  A smile and something else, and about that, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 5

  Kehar: Still Back Then...

  Nevahn braced himself on the handle of his tool kit, rising to his feet not with age-borne aches but simple stiffness. Too much time spent kneeling on this day, twisting awkwardly to repaint golden glyphs around Solchran’s primary well piping, far uphill of the village.

  It was a deep well, wrought first by pick and shovel and then in trade with a local wyrm of some appetite. The wyrm had made out nicely, considering it was but doing what came naturally — digging a burrow and sealing the edges with ethereal power.

  It hadn’t eaten anyone. There was always that.

  The piping was more of a human thing, requiring regular maintenance. Only when glyph-welded would it siphon water downhill to the fountain, the community reservoir, and the communal cooking huts. A blessing, all of it.

  Nevahn was inclined to count his blessings these days.

  But he’d barely reached his feet when a shrill scream cut the air, a thing of youthful terror. And another, and then a shout of fury, and a third young voice joining in, breathless as its young owner pelted downhill in an obvious crash of underbrush from outside Solchran’s boundaries.

  “Nevahn! Nevahn!” A thin, high voice cried out.

  Nevahn had no speed to his bulk, but he ran all the same. Drekhar and Selikha sprinted up through the winding village paths below, not yet visible but calling out. Everyone else was at the platinum fields, mining the village’s lifeblood while the black fog ebbed into low tide.

  Nevahn reached from the village edge from below as the youngling skidded to a stop there — her eyes white and wide against her dark complexion, tears tracking her cheeks. Just as awkward as her brother Ardac had been at that age. “Krevata,” she said on a sob. “Jahnjahn. Ardac.”

  Nevahn spoke sharply then. “Trevarr?”

  She nodded and pointed mutely at the glimpse of movement far uphill, tangled firs and winding vines obscuring almost all.

  Nevahn well understood her fear. Buffoons the Krevata might be, a physical mishmash of features and unfortunate desires and always riding the edge of defiance with Ghehera. But they were also quick to take offense — and they were Ghehera’s favored race, for what they could offer. Not to be trifled with, as were all the semi-ethereal rekherra.

  It did not do to escalate trouble. And Trevarr...

  Even still a youth, Trevarr would not back down. Not for human, not for semi-ethereal. Especially not for semi-ethereal.

  “Stay here,” he told the girl — but almost instantly changed his mind. She wouldn’t. “Come, then. But behind me!”

  That, she would do. Nevahn pushed his barrel-shaped body relentlessly uphill. He batted away the underbrush, following a mere trickle of a footpath until he reached the flattened place where youngsters habitually slunk away to feel brave, drink pilfered ale, and boast their prowess.

  Oh, this was bad. Farking bad.

  Ardac stood flushed and furious at the outside of a confrontation that stoked all of Nevahn’s fears, and slight Jahnjahn crumpled at the feet of a young Krevata child that had wound itself into a self-delighted frenzy.

  The Krevata was like all its kind — a ridiculous creature tattooed in bright colors and otherwise unclothed, knees that bent backwards beneath a tubular body, an exposed tangle of genitals, spindly arms and flat black eyes in a face that might have belonged to a wyrm. The nose was the most of it, a huge curving slope barely differentiated from the rest of its features, a tiny red mouth beneath.

  But that awkward body held strength and a cruelly whimsical nature, a child of a race that played nasty games just to see how others would react — or to see how long they would bleed, or to explore whether they could extract energy to feed their physical pleasure.

  This particular child was no different than any of them. It spoke in nasal tones, a crude pidgin of its own glottal language and the common tongue of Kehar. “Weak,” it said, and laughed at its victim. Jahnjahn lay unmoving, his face bloodied.

  Selikha and Drekhar came charging up behind Nevahn, crowding him. “Klysar’s Blood!” muttered Drekhar, and made to push past.

  Nevahn stopped him with a blocking arm. It would not do to add temper to this mix.

  Besides, Ardac was already pushing his luck, spitting threats he couldn’t begin to enforce. “If you’ve hurt him —”

  In those furiously trembling words, Nevahn understood instantly what he’d before only glimpsed — Ardac had grown into tender feelings for Jahnjahn. Had not yet had the chance to express them or act on them, such as a youngster could. And now he stood exposed by them, made impotent by not only the Krevata child.

  Trevarr.

  Because even at this age of fast growth and awkwardness, Nevahn’s half-blood son stood taller than his friends, lanky in a way Nevahn had never been. His hair hung as wild as ever, barely jerked back into the scrap of a tie. His hand wrapped comfortably around the hilt of his knife, the one with nearly invisible glyphs of sharpness on the blade.

  His oft-darkened eyes glowed silver with rarely roused power.

  Ardac’s fiercest fury wasn’t aimed at the Krevata child at all, but at this erstwhile companion who’d outgrown him in every way.

  The child gave a delighted laugh, a skittery sound like a chisel scraping over rusty iron, pointing at Ardac. Seeing the humiliation.

  “I had this under control,” Ardac said darkly, with as much dignity as he could manage.

  The child laughed again, its fleshy nose bobbing. “Never me,” it said, confident in the way of any child that knows it won’t truly be contained. Even if the villagers tried, it would simply shift states. Ethereal, untouchable.

  Nevahn said, “Krevata child, you do not belong here. Respect the treaty of your elders and return home now.”

  “My toy,” the child objected, one knobby finger pointing at Jahnjahn. “Not done.”

  “Yes, done.” Nevahn glanced over his shoulder, giving Selikha a meaningful look. “Our fastest runner is on his way to your elders.”

  Selikha ducked away, off to turn the lie into truth. Once alerted, the Krevata elders would quickly fetch the child, if only because blatant violations of the treaty were an insult to Ghehera, no matter how favored the offender.

  Ghehera’s attention, once drawn, often lingered.

  But the runner would take time to reach the Krevata. And then the elders would take time to get here.

  And the child knew it.

  “Mine,” it said, entirely unmoved.

  Ardac turned another shade of impotently desperate. Nevahn eyed Jahnjahn, wondering if he even still lived — so still and limp, all this time. So bloodied. A kick from those powerful hind limbs could easily deal a fatal blow.

  Drekhar swore another soft curse behind him. “Maybe we should fall back —”

  Nevahn shot him the quickest of glares.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Drekhar said. “We have nothing to gain, and far too much to lose, if it’s already too late for the boy.”

  Trevarr eyed Drekhar in a way that said more than his words ever would. There would be no falling back, not on this day.

  “Ours,” he told the Krevata child, a certainty in his voice for all its youth.

  Drekhar cursed more loudly, added an under-his-breath, “Don’t —”

  Ardac glared just as furiously. “I’ve got this,” he said, even though he didn’t.

  The child skittered another laugh, hunkering slightly on its backwards knees.

  Nevahn’s heart sank. It had recognized Trevarr’s challenge, and its response was inevitable: it would play with them, shifting its state, eluding them, returning to worry its victim. And then it would carry tales to its elders, crying tears of fear and hidden del
ight.

  Such were the Krevata, even at this age.

  “Losing!” the child proclaimed, fading even as it crouched to leap away.

  Trevarr’s eyes flared. With startling speed, he closed the distance to the half-shifted child and snatched it up at the nape, scruffing it like a kit.

  The child snapped back to a fully corporeal state with a squall of surprise.

  Nevahn thought he might squall with surprise, too. Since when had any hand been able to hold fast to a Krevata in transition?

  “You should leave now,” Trevarr told it, enough darkness in his words so even the child could hear it. It wiggled in his grasp, kicking out at him with a snap that would have broken bone had it connected. Trevarr jerked its scruff and the kick went wide — and the next. With little heed to such gyrations, Trevarr hauled the child upslope. It squealed, a tinny scree of noise, its feet scrabbling to find purchase.

  “Don’t —” The word burst from Nevahn before he could stop it. Don’t hurt the child, by all of Klysar’s Blood. Don’t start a war.

  Trevarr cast a glance over his shoulder, eyes burning bright. Revealing what he was, just as his every move did the same.

  Revealing, too, a dark, dry understanding of his father’s unspoken concern — and the hurt that concern caused him. Never had he lost control. Never had he done anything but control the child, leaving it without so much as a bruise. Nevahn winced — knowing the moment could not be undone, no matter how he regretted it.

  He doubted anyone else got so much as a glimpse of that hurt.

  Trevarr escorted the child away, toward the notch in the ridge that would take it home, leaving eddies in the fading fog at their feet.

  For an instant, there was only silence between those who remained — a hesitation, as if the Krevata adults — or Klysar forbid, Ghehera — might descend on them.

  Then Ardac fell upon his friend, who finally stirred. Nevahn hurried to reach him also, turning him to find eyes opened but dazed, nose and mouth bloodied, a cheek bruised, and a glimmer of excess energies dancing at his temple where he’d taken a blow. “Ah, there,” he said. “You’ll be fine, boy. Ardac will see you home.”