The Reckoners

by Doranna Durgin

  Ardac threw him a grateful look, crouching to help Jahnjahn up. And Nevahn’s attention shifted back to the hill, where his son trod the dangerous forest paths without looking back, his eyes agleam and his hand on the scruff of a semi-ethereal rekherra that should have been mere wisps through his fingers.

  Drekhar’s voice came in a low growl. “Nevahn... ”

  “Don’t.” Nevahn didn’t look at him, or ease the pain in his voice.

  Because he already knew. Trevarr’s blood wouldn’t stay hidden much longer.

  He’d be seen. He’d be found.

  And then they would all answer to Ghehera.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 6

  Desert Waiting

  Know your spiritual boundaries.

  — RRose

  Good fences make good neighbors.

  — L.M.

  Sklayne waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  How long, to do this thing called flying instead of using the oskhila to move from place to place?

  Bored.

  He thought cat, and took that form through dry desert hillsides north of the Albuquerque where Trevarr had left him. He met with a skinny dog-like creature on long legs with a hungry gleam in its eye.

  He thought big and watched the creature skitter away.

  But not very far away. Sklayne, too, was hungry.

  Silty alkaline soil, dark thin night, crunch of bone. Dog-like creature no more.

  He drifted east, to the brief, steep foothills and encroaching dwellings. From the darkness came a human giggle, feminine and beguiling. Then a deeper voice, much beguiled. Right here in Sklayne’s boring waiting place, this private area beside the big homes that thought much of themselves.

  Sklayne consulted his stomach. Full enough.

  Time to play.

  But Trevarr wouldn’t approve. Trevarr would say hide.

  Sklayne, being contrary, hid by not hiding. He let himself go from cat, a quick push outward into being everything, then abruptly condensed down into the coherency of Sklayne. Invisible Sklayne, hovering unnoticed.

  The male human dropped a blanket to the ground with careless distraction, sweeping the female up to the sound of that throaty giggle.

  More interesting than the crunch of bone, oh yes. Sklayne extended himself to hover closely beside them, tasting — and so startled by those flying human feelings and sensations that he snapped back as if overstretched, fizzy feeling bubbles popping inside his head, the internalized cat self going yow!

  Oh, tasty! Why had Trevarr shared these fizzies on his own bonding adventures? The giggles, the soft lip and body noises, the happy groans... something more than Trevarr and his pleasure encounters had ever generated.

  Fizzzzzz.

  Prepared this time, Sklayne expanded and hovered closer, still entirely undetected by preoccupied humans who had no sight to see him anyway.

  Tug.

  No! Sklayne hissed faintly at the call, a sizzle of grounding electricity that the humans might even have noticed if they weren’t so full of oh! and yes! and now, baby, now!

  Tug.

  Sklayne made a mouth — enough of one to protest, at that. “Mow!”

  But Trevarr was his. His being, and his responsibility. Sklayne’s, and no other’s.

  TUG.

  “Mow!” said the mouth again, and Sklayne went.

  He found the nearest power line, the anchor around which he’d confined his meanderings: a stark tower rising out of parched scrubby desert. Already he was distracted from his human diversion, already he homed in on the lines that would lead him to the subtle but familiar call from Trevarr. There he subsumed himself. The New Mexico night went flat and distant; happy zinging energy sparkled at the edges of his awareness.

  ::Shiny!::

  He gamboled along the way, moving faster than thought and yet tumbling within himself, snagging at the zing. Catching the zing, gobbling it down oh yes.

  A fine refreshing dessert after the dog-like creature.

  Far too soon, he popped out of the wall socket into an unfamiliar room. Trevarr’s room. Sklayne perceived minor glyphs of protection without distinct effort; perceived the nearby small person of great power and her companions of smaller, quieter presence.

  “What by Klysar’s balls were you doing?” Trevarr stood before him in this room he’d claimed and protected, his coat and satchel tossed over a chair, his shirt tails out, his feet bare with the tall boots set off to the side. But then he added, “No. I don’t want to know. The cat, if you would.”

  Sklayne thought cat. Much with the ears.

  “Better,” Trevarr said, and went so far as to run his knuckles from the cat head to the cat tail. Sklayne was horrified as the cat spine, of its own accord, arched to the touch.

  Trevarr failed to notice, however. Trevarr was already looking at the door between this room and the space occupied by the small person.

  Sklayne felt it again, that which came upon Trevarr more often now. The tension. The guilt. And now, regret. And what by Klysar’s tiny little man-parts — what was — ?

  Guilt and regret and the strange tight taste of fizzy —

  Fizzy?

  ::No. No, no, no.::

  Sklayne wanted to go home. Sklayne wanted the guilt gone and the tension restored to the fierce focus of the hunt. Sklayne wanted to thrive and play and trick Ghehera simply by helping Trevarr survive.

  Not things that would happen if Trevarr diverted himself here, if he liked what he tasted — if he even realized what he tasted.

  Sklayne snapped sparks along his spine. ::She is what you need.::

  Trevarr looked down at him, a little surprised and a little resistant.

  Sklayne wound between his ankles with a commanding, upright tail — a little flick, a little spark. ::Use herrrr, atreyvo.::

  Yes, indeed. Small person of much power, understanding so very little, and in far over her head even if she’d understood it all.

  ::Use herrrrr.::

  ~~~~~

  The sudden gust of ethereal breeze, close and unexpected, jarred Garrie out of her meditative state and brought her back to the here and now, eyes still closed. What — ? Such a brief burst of activity, so hard and strong and then gone again, tasting of bright air and desert dust. Just... what?

  The universe provided her with no answers, so she sighed and took a break from the wide sweep she’d been running. She sat cross-legged on the overstuffed chair in the corner of the classy, mahogany-appointed room, leaving Lucia sprawled across one bed looking at the room service menu while Drew’s lanky self tested just how much of the other queen bed he could occupy — though not for long, to judge by the sound of it. His voice seemed suddenly to come from the roomy bathroom, echoing against the stone floor and counter top.

  “Check it out! Dryer, coffee maker... on top of the DVD player! Way phat! And a robe — there’s a robe in here!”

  “You can’t say way phat,” Lucia told him. “You’re totally mixing cultures. Eras, even. And there’d better be a robe, because I didn’t pack one. But this is nice — their free breakfast is white rice, miso soup, and tofu. Más guay!”

  “We already got take-out,” Drew objected, his voice louder as he emerged from the bathroom; he threw himself back down on the bed and commenced to rustle among crumpled bags. “I bet we could kind of warm it up on the coffee maker plate, too.”

  “Oh. My. Dios,” Lucia muttered. “We will not. And while we’re at it, there will be no crude man stuff while we’re sharing this room. No freeform burping, farting, armpit noises, snoring, or failing to brush your teeth in the morning. You got something outstandingly smelly to do? Clench your cheeks and find the public bathroom.”

  “Geeze,” Drew muttered, subdued. “Maybe I should stay next door with Trevarr.”

  Dead silence followed that statement.

  “Good,” Lucia finally said, deadpan. “Let’s just knock on that door and ask him, yes?”

 
“Um.” Drew’s voice shrank. “Clenching.”

  Good choice, Drew.

  But listening to their squabbling wasn’t getting the job done. She’d been running a wide sweep over all of San Jose before that unexpected smack of breeze had knocked her out of it. But now the breeze was gone, and she should go back to work.

  She knew the lay of the land in New Mexico — the ethereal lay of the land. The bright spots, the dark spots... the sticky places and the unpredictable ones — she knew them all, in a permanent internal map. It was a job made considerably easier by the fact that she strictly respected the reservation boundaries — the ethereal world felt much different within that territory, and she wasn’t uppity enough to pretend otherwise. Know your boundaries, Rhonda Rose had told her... advice with many layers of meaning, all of which Garrie took to heart.

  After all, it was her job, in the big picture, to rebuild weak fences in the ethereal map, as well as usher trespassers away.

  Here, in this new place, her first order of business was to get a sense of the map and its boundaries — not to listen to Drew’s off-tune humming or to think about the man occupying the room beside them.

  She allowed the conversation between Lucia and Drew to fall into the background and reopened herself to the breezes — cautiously at first, until she confirmed that the gusty little activity nearby had settled. She was tempted to hunt for it, to identify it — but patterns were the important thing at the moment, not individual blips and breezes. So she pulled back to wide focus, sinking away from analytical thought... imagining herself as a giant ethereal spy satellite over San Jose.

  She quickly found the frenetic and obvious downtown, activity that faded along the dry brown ranges surrounding the city. She found pools of silence and, toward the south where the ground turned fertile and green, bright happiness. Little green smiley faces for the southern area, yeah.

  San Jose in general looked to be a happy ethereal place. The blots of darkness were hazy, the deep darknesses confined to discrete individual spots that made Garrie long to investigate... to fix.

  But she was here for a reason. Winchester House.

  And she’d found it.

  The house hunkered in central San Jose, a roiling haze of colors. True, they were colors so thoroughly mixed as to be mud, their intense bubbles of purity popping up only long enough for a glimpse before the mud consumed them.

  That wasn’t good. Wasn’t good at all.

  She drifted closer, drawn in by the riptide breeze of activity until being there was no longer just about the sight of it, but also the smell and the sound of it. Fetid swamp breezes cut by slices of sharp citrus, a dank pressure against her awareness, a low grind of protest.

  And screaming.

  The sound clamped onto her like a leg-hold trap. Deep moans spiraled rapidly up the scale into shrieks, tangling furiously within her — stealing her thought, stealing her calm. The muttered underlying cacophony built, snarling, and then burst into a sudden chaotic din, a chorus made of voices subsonic and ultra-sonic and everything in between, buzzing and twining and reverberating into complete incomprehensibility.

  She couldn’t think. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t flee. And still the sound climbed and spiraled battered away until she screamed back at it inside her head, no longer capable of thought at all.

  “Garrie!”

  The sound cut off. The only remnant was the strangled noise she made in her own throat — but that, too, passed, leaving nothing but confusion.

  Garrie filled her lungs deeply, ignoring the leftover whimper she made on the way. And then she smelled leather, and realized she no longer sat in the chair but on the hard floor, against hard muscle, supported by an unexpectedly personal touch, her head against one big hand. She opened her eyes and found Lucia crowding close, her precise features charged with worry. Drew pushed in beside her, his lank hair askew and eyes all puppy-dog big and by God that was a soul patch.

  “Garrie.” The voice, again, was Trevarr’s — rumbling both in her ear and against her back. He held her with care, with consideration; one hand supported her head.

  She looked up at him in surprise — at being there, at what she’d experienced... that she’d been caught up in it at all. Nothing like she’d ever seen before. Felt before.

  His concern, writ so clear, quickly shuttered away to something less personal. His hands tightened at the back of her head, around her shoulders, before lightening considerably. Or maybe she imagined it. He asked, “Are you well?”

  “I’m back,” she said, not quite answering the question. No, dammit, she wasn’t all right. She was mad. What the hell had that been? How had it grabbed her? Everything she’d been through, everything Rhonda Rose had ever taught her, and she sure hadn’t been ready for that.

  I’ll be ready for it the next time, youbetcha.

  Carefully, not wanting to put her hands anywhere she really didn’t want to put her hands, she disentangled herself, ending up on her knees not far from him. Her attention went inward a moment, caught by the echo of the screams still bouncing around in her mind. No words in those distorted sounds, but... a plea for help, a demand for surcease, a roar of fury...

  Lucia crouched beside her. “Garrie?” she asked, voice as worried as her face. “You okay? What happened, chicalet? What was that?”

  Garrie pulled herself together, applied some firm to her voice — and knew it hadn’t quite taken. “He’s right,” she said — speaking to Lucia and Drew, although it was Trevarr’s gaze she met, head-on silver. “He’s totally farkin’ right. Winchester House is gonna blow.”

  ~~~~~

  A restless night later and the house itself loomed large before Garrie — a massive Victorian café au lait structure with bold brick-red roofing and white trim, its piecemeal construction perfectly visible from the outside. Rooflines jutted up at a variety of levels behind the conical corner tower, the rest of the house full of dormers and overhangs and beguiling nooks and crannies. The ticket booth courtyard allowed only a limited view of the palm-studded grounds beyond its hedges, where lush trees and lawn, riotously colorful flower beds and bushes created a bold green water-sucking island in the middle of brown, brown summer San Jose.

  All on the other side of the ticket booth, while Garrie, Trevarr, and the team stood on this one, waiting for someone to open the booth and start taking money.

  Standing there with breakfast sitting uneasily in her stomach, Garrie felt no particular alarm at their surroundings. No darkness. No roiling swamp of muddy color, no thought-shattering chorus of resentment.

  The tower with its conical roof, however, was seriously cool.

  And she was hardly putting herself out there. Shields up, Mr. Scott! She tugged at the hair just behind her ear. Now was no time to become a redshirt reckoner.

  “Garrie?” Lucia hovered beside her, clutching her satin Louis Vuitton Love tote. The violet color set off her skin perfectly and matched the sunglasses perched at the top of her head. Of course. “Things okay here? Because I brought some baggies, but I don’t have enough for Armageddon, you know?”

  Garrie hardly had any comfort to give her. Not after the night she’d spent not sleeping in the wake of her unexpected contact. She shrugged. “Last night, I went knocking. Today, we’re just tourists.”

  Drew’s cell phone burbled a tune Garrie vaguely recognized as the heroic theme of an online game. “Quinn!” he said, answering it with the kind of cell phone voice that made everyone else part of the conversation whether they wanted it or not. “Yeah, we’re here. It’s huge!” He moved the phone from his mouth to inform Garrie, “Six acres, Quinn says.” And then, back into the phone, “But wait, seriously, that’s the whole grounds, right? Right.”

  At the head of the line, decked out in that leather duster and somehow not discomfited by the rising heat of San Jose’s summer morning any more than he’d been by Albuquerque’s dry desert afternoon, Trevarr glanced back at Drew’s disruption with a pensive expression. Hidden behind
the sunglasses, shadowed by the booth’s extended roof...

  He, too, seemed to be thinking of the evening before.

  “It’s quiet,” Garrie told him. She took another look around bright green landscaping with its gathered splashes of living color and stone sculpture and wrought iron, all washed out by the morning sun, all looking oddly veiled to Garrie’s eyes. She dared to ease open her vision... and yet saw nothing else. She looked back to Trevarr, found him attentive... shook her head slightly. “I mean... it’s really quiet. I would have expected...”

  “There’s no one here?” Lucia whispered, looking around them.

  “Yeah, the hotel is great!” Drew said loudly into the phone. “You should’ve come, maybe we could have had a room to ourselves, and then I wouldn’t have to worry so much about —”

  Lucia, swift to shift gears, gave him a discreet kick with her pointy-toed flat. The shoe’s cute little braided metal details jingled slightly; Drew’s jaw dropped. Trevarr took two long strides and acquired the cell phone.

  “He will talk to you later,” he told Quinn, and then seemed uncertain how to close the connection, holding the phone out as if it should do something on its own. Garrie took it and snapped it shut.

  Behind them, the short tail of the line offered a smattering of applause. Lucia took the phone from Garrie with graceful fingers and tucked it into Drew’s front shirt pocket. “They didn’t want to hear it, either,” she informed him sweetly.

  The ticket booth associate, perhaps sensing restlessness among the natives, slid into place a few moments early. He processed Trevarr’s payment with undue speed, allowing Garrie’s crew and their plus-one to enter the tiny courtyard between the booth and the gift shop with its attached café.

  “I’m gonna check out the gift shop,” Drew said, giving Trevarr wide berth. “Might be able to get a read on — I mean, um —” he glanced at the family coming through from the booth behind them — “pick something up.”

  “I’m gonna hang for now,” Garrie said, meaning she wasn’t ready to go looking — not ethereally, anyway. “Come get me when they’re going to start the tour, will you?”