Widdershins

by Charles de Lint

  Joe nodded. “Like I said, I only just found out what happened to her.”

  “That’s not why I’m bringing it up. I just thought you should know that cousins from the buffalo clans were in attendance. Many of them.”

  “I’d heard she was close to Pijaki-tibik’s son—he still their chief?”

  Walker shook his head. “He got voted out at their last clan gathering for being too moderate. Minisino’s their chief now and he’s more hard-line—like the Warrior’s Society up on the rez.”

  “Considering what happened to your daughter,” Joe said, “they’ve got my sympathies.”

  “I know I should be feeling the same,” Walker said. “Moon knows, I want those bogans brought to some kind of justice. But with the buffalo clans mustering under Minisino . . . this could lead to a war.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Joe told him.

  But Walker wasn’t finished.

  “I don’t think Anwatan would want her death to be remembered as the start of another conflict between our people and the fairy courts.”

  “The way your daughter died,” Joe said, “that wasn’t the first time the aganesha have murdered one of us in the last few years. It’s time the fairy courts learned that we’re only going to take so much of their bullshit.”

  “But if there’s war, even more will die. Cousins and fairy both.”

  “I know. But it’s not up to us, and right now I’m more concerned with getting Jilly and her friend back.” He turned to me. “Can you show me the place where she was taken from?”

  I nodded and we all trooped back to the hotel. By the time we reached the building, Walker didn’t look a whole lot different from Joe—black braids, jeans and a flannel shirt, cowboy boots. The antlers were gone, though I thought I could still see ghosts of them when he was in my peripheral vision. We met Eddie in the foyer and I made introductions. If he was surprised at how our little company swelled by three, he didn’t ask about it, sparing me having to make something up.

  “Are you staying another night?” he asked.

  I knew he was trying to find a polite way to tell us that any extra nights we might stay wouldn’t be comped.

  “I think so,” I told him. “But don’t worry. We know we’ve used up our freebie nights.”

  I shot a glance at Joe and saw he had no patience for any small talk right now. He just wanted to find Jilly. We were on the same wavelength, so I left the other band members with Eddie and took Cassie and the two cousins up to the room Jilly and I had been sharing.

  “I can’t believe I slept right through them taking her,” I said when we were inside.

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Joe told me. “They’d have been in and out so fast and quiet, you probably wouldn’t have seen them if you’d been awake.”

  He and Walker made their way around the room, looking for I don’t know what, because there wasn’t anything to see. After a few moments, Joe turned to Walker.

  “I had a protection spell on her,” he said, “and it seems to have worked just fine. It took her away before they had a chance to grab her.”

  Walker nodded. “Only where? All I see is a dead end. The trail leads into the between, then nothing.”

  “I know. It wasn’t supposed to work like that. It was supposed to take her into the Greatwood.”

  “The last cards I drew showed her in a forest,” Cassie said, “except it looked like something around here.”

  “And she seemed safe,” I added.

  “At least that’s one small blessing,” Walker said.

  Joe nodded. “Heavy on the small. I want to know where she is.”

  “So,” I said, “even if the fairies get the bogans to talk, it won’t help, will it?”

  “Not to find Jilly,” Joe said. “But what about the other girl? Nobody put any kind of a mojo on her, did they?”

  He looked at Walker. When the cerva shook his head, Joe turned to me.

  “Let’s see her room,” he said.

  As soon as we walked in, Joe and Walker obviously got something.

  “Well, they sure as hell grabbed her,” Joe said.

  Walker nodded. “I’ve been where they’ve taken her. That’s an old, almost impassable wood with a few inhabitable glades. But I don’t sense that she’s there anymore.”

  “Neither do I.”

  I wondered how they could do that, just stand here, looking into the air, and know what was going on a world away. But it wasn’t the time for questions like that.

  “Maybe we’ll get a better take when we’re there,” Walker said.

  Those crazy eyes of Joe’s went dark with a feral humour.

  “Yeah,” he said. “And maybe there’ll still be a few bogans hanging around that we can convince to tell us more.”

  “I’m coming with you,” I said before they could leave.

  Joe looked from me to Cassie. “Someone needs to stay here in case something comes up while we’re gone. And no offense, but I don’t think your friends downstairs could necessarily handle what might be coming down.”

  I knew what he was thinking. What did I have to offer? Cassie was the one with the mojo.

  But Cassie weighed in on my side.

  “I’ll stay,” she said. “Geordie needs to be doing something more useful than waiting around.”

  I guess Joe didn’t want to waste time arguing the point because he just nodded, gave Cassie a quick kiss, then turned to me.

  “Stay close,” he said.

  He started to cross over, and I hurried to where he was already vanishing from the room as though stepping through an invisible door. He was gone by the time I got there. But Walker put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Come on,” he said.

  And the hotel room dissolved into a forest glade with tall trees rising up all around us.

  I got a little lurch in my stomach from the crossing over, but not like I had when I’d first done it a couple of years ago. I still had a sour taste in my mouth, though, and my heart was beating way too fast.

  Walker dropped his hand from my shoulder, and we walked over to Joe. He was in the shadow of a tall standing stone, crouched down with one knee on the grass. Something in the vegetation had obviously caught his attention. He ran a finger through the grass, and it came up with some sticky liquid on it, dark and red. He held his finger under his nose, then nodded. It took me a moment to realize it was blood.

  “She’s a fighter,” he said to us.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She killed at least one of them.”

  I remembered the other card of Cassie’s, the one that showed a bogan funeral in the Tombs. When I told Joe, he just nodded.

  My gaze went back to the bloody grass at his knee.

  “And Lizzie . . . ?” I asked.

  “There’s only bogan blood here.”

  “The Tombs,” Walker wanted to know. “That’s in Newford?”

  Joe nodded. “But let’s see where this trail takes us first.”

  He wiped his finger clean on the grass. Standing up, he led us across the grass and into the forest. We didn’t get far before we ran up against an impenetrable wall of thorns and undergrowth.

  “She went through that?” I asked.

  Joe shook his head. “There’s a smell here I don’t recognize. Fairy, but it’s not one of the bogans.”

  “Look at this,” Walker said.

  While we were studying the wall of vegetation, he’d wandered over to one of the nearby trees. He pointed out the blood on the bark of its trunk, the wooden spikes on the ground at its base. When we joined him, we saw the holes in the trunk from which the spikes had obviously been pulled.

  Oh god, Lizzie, I thought, but Joe seemed to be reading my mind.

  “It wasn’t your friend. The bogans had somebody else nailed up here. One of their own—or at least some kind of fairy.”

  “And there was someone else here, as well,” Walker said. “I don’t know the scent, but it’s definitely a cou
sin.”

  “Maybe it was the blind man that Mother Crone saw,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Joe said.

  He took the scent from one of the spikes, then let it fall back onto the grass.

  “A cousin handled this,” he said, “and so did Lizzie. I guess she was taking down whoever they’d nailed up.”

  Walker shook his head. “So, now it’s fairy against fairy, cousin against cousin. This gets worse all the time.”

  “Unless it’s not a racial thing,” Joe said. “Maybe we’ve been coming at this all wrong. Every race has its assholes. Could be all we’re dealing with is a bunch of freaks who just happen to be fairy and cousins. Could be the targets are all random—just whoever happens to get in their way.”

  Walker frowned. “I thought it was only humans I didn’t understand.”

  “Hell,” Joe said. “Most of the time I don’t understand anybody.”

  “But why these senseless killings?”

  Joe shrugged. “Who knows? Until we actually track down one of these little freaks and—”

  He broke off, lifting his head to look back at the wall of brush where Lizzie’s trail ended.

  “Incoming,” he said.

  Walker hadn’t needed his warning. He was already moving to the trail’s end, Joe right behind him.

  “What is it?” I asked, bringing up the rear.

  But then I didn’t need anything to be explained to me, either.

  Two figures stepped out of the between—a bogan and a man almost twice his height who, with his milky-white eyes, had to be Odawa. The bogan made a cry of warning, but the blind man didn’t seem to have needed it. His sightless gaze went right to us.

  “Grab the bogan!” Joe called to me, as he and Walker moved in on Odawa.

  I was willing to give it a shot, but I never got a chance. Before I could get my hands on the little man, before Walker and Joe could tackle Odawa, the blind man changed his shape. One moment he was a man, the next an enormous salmon was writhing there between the trees. It was the size of a shark, and when its tail shot out we were all swept from our feet. I banged up against the wall of brush, lost my fiddle case in the tangle of thorns, and had the breath knocked out of me. Walker hit a tree headfirst and went down hard. Joe managed to roll with the blow, coming to his feet almost as soon as he went down.

  But he was too late to do anything. The salmon turned a blind gaze toward the bogan who—reluctantly, it seemed to me—caught hold of its dorsal fin and swung himself onto the fish’s back. Then up the salmon went, swimming off into the air, moving in and out of boughs and tree trunks like it was avoiding stone outcrops in rapids.

  I got to my feet and all I could do was stare, slack-jawed at the impossible sight.

  The salmon was maybe twenty, thirty feet away from us when a large crow rose from the ground where I’d seen Joe moments before. When I say large, I mean it was twice the size of a normal crow, but it was still no match for the salmon. As soon as it got near to the fish, the salmon gave a flick of its tail and knocked the crow from the air. It went tumbling, head over talons, and fell into the branches of a tall pine.

  By the time it got itself free, the salmon and its rider were long gone.

  The crow sailed back to us, changing into a man once more when it was on the ground.

  “Goddamn,” Joe said. “I should have had him.”

  “No, he was too strong for us,” Walker said.

  He was sitting up against the trunk of the tree he’d hit, one hand on his head. I went over to help him up, then went and untangled the strap of my fiddle case from the thorns and brush. I was moving mechanically, trying to get my mind off what I’d just seen.

  I’d forgotten that Joe had both corbae and canid blood in him. Man into crow, crow into man. That had been weird enough, but I couldn’t get the image of our last view of Odawa out of my head.

  “Tell me I didn’t just see a giant fish go swimming off through the air,” I said.

  Joe just looked at me.

  “No, come on. I know you’re all shapechangers, but he was swimming through the air.”

  “There’s water in everything,” Walker said.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “When someone from one of the fish clans is powerful enough, he can swim through anything.”

  Joe wasn’t interested in any of that.

  “I didn’t know that guy at all,” he said. “Not the look of him with those blind eyes, not the smell of him.”

  “I’ve seen him before,” Walker said. “From a distance. He’s been through these woods more than once, but he always kept to himself. He moved with such assurance, I would never have guessed he was blind.”

  “I guess he’s like Daredevil.”

  From the look they both gave me, I realized that neither of them got the reference.

  “He’s a character in this movie,” I explained. “It’s based on a comic book where a guy loses his sight, but all his other senses are intensified.”

  “I suppose . . .” Walker said.

  “We need to make a decision,” Joe said. “Do we backtrack their trail to see if we can find Lizzie, do we follow them, or do we go back to see what Tatiana’s found out?”

  “I don’t see much success in the first two,” Walker told him, “and I’d rather avoid the latter if I could. Maybe the two of you should go to the fairy court, and I’ll see where Lizzie’s trail leads me.”

  I’d just as soon have done the same, but I waited to hear what Joe had to say. I figured I was here by his good graces, and it’d be up to him whether I came or went.

  Joe looked away into the forest for a long moment before turning back to us.

  “Maybe there’s a fourth choice,” he said. “Something that didn’t occur to me until right this minute. There’s somebody else that might help us. At least she’s helped me find Jilly before. She’s got this connection with Jilly—something to do with what they both had to go through growing up. Thing is, I already owe her a favour and she hasn’t called in the marker on it yet. Asking for another might be pushing things—like I was trying to take advantage of her good nature—and I wouldn’t want to piss her off.”

  “You make it sound dangerous,” I said.

  “Guess it could be, depending on her standing in the pack. I used to see her more often, but not so much in the past few months. Could be somebody else has gone all alpha, and she might not even be running with them anymore.”

  “She’s one of your canid cousins?” Walker asked.

  Joe shook his head. “Sort of. The blood’s thin, but the heart’s big.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Joe turns to me and gives a slow shake of his head. “She doesn’t have a name—none that I ever heard her give out of anybody else ever used.” He gave us a humourless smile. “She can’t talk, you see.”

  I thought about what Joe had said, how Jilly and this friend of his had shared certain experiences growing up.

  “Somebody . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say cut, though I couldn’t erase from my mind the image of a man slicing off some little girl’s tongue. “Took away her voice?”

  “She never had one—I mean, not like we do. She’s a pit bull. I found her in some freak’s backyard, chained up with the rest of her pack. Fighting dogs, born and bred to kill each other in the ring. So I let them go. Showed them the way into the otherworld where they could make a new life for themselves. And before you ask: no, she doesn’t owe me anything for doing the right thing. I made that clear to her when I tracked her down later and asked for her help.”

  “But if she can’t talk . . .”

  “Then how can she help us? That last time she took me right to Jilly.”

  “So what are we waiting for?”

  “Nothing. Except I’m going alone—it’s safer that way. You and Walker check out where that trail leads, see if you can’t get a line on your friend Lizzie.”

  “And Odawa?” Walker asked.

  Joe looked up
between the trees where the giant salmon had swum away through the air, a bogan clinging to his dorsal fin.

  “Damned if I know how we’re going to deal with him,” he said.

  Without wasting any more time, he stepped away into the between and it was just Walker and me.

  “Are you ready for another trip into the between?” he asked.

  “If it gets us any closer to finding Jilly and Lizzie . . . just bring it on.”

  Grey

  Joe’s concise with whoever he’s got on the other end of the phone, just laying out the main facts with none of the details. He listens for a moment, then looks over to us.

  “Cassie’s with Geordie,” he says, “and they’ve got something that I need to check out. Can you hold the fort here?”

  He steps away into the between before either Jack or I can respond.

  Mother Crone gets up from her chair, heading for where Joe disappeared. I don’t know if she’s planning to follow or what, but Jack grabs her arm as she passes by him.

  “I didn’t hear an invitation,” he says.

  “It’s just—”

  “And according to Tatiana, we’re free to come and go as we like—or did I get that wrong?”

  “No,” she says. “But I’m concerned about Geordie.”

  “Then maybe you should have been helping him instead of running to the queen to see what you’re supposed to do. Do you have to check in with her to see if it’s okay to blow your nose?”

  “You don’t—”

  “Yeah, I know. You like me as much as you don’t like Joe. Feeling’s mutual, darling. But right now, you need to keep being a good little fairy and sit down and wait with us like Tatiana told you.”

  Her face is dark with anger, but she shakes her arm free of Jack’s grip and returns to her chair. Her two little treekin glare at us from where they’re sitting, but Jack only grins at them and comes back to me.

  I turn so that I’m facing away from them.

  “You’re being a little harsh,” I say, soft, so only he can hear.

  Jack motions me out of the chair with a nod of his head. When I get up, he walks me to the far side of the room.

  “Fm just playing the card Joe would want me to,” he says, pitching his own voice so low that I have to lean in to hear him. “Until we know where everybody stands on this, we need to act a little hard-core. Don’t forget—they outnumber us something like a hundred to one in this place.”