Jamie sighed. “All right. Tell me what you know.”
Whiskey Jack flickered out of existence when he’d finished speaking, vanishing like a hologram when the lights were turned off. Jamie took a moment to digest what he’d been told. He looked around the pretense of his study, looked down at his hands.
We never know when we’re well enough off, he thought. We’re given great gifts, but we never appreciate them for what they are. We keep wanting more and more, until one day our greed forces it all to be taken away.
Well, he had no one but himself to blame.
He rose from his chair and let the illusion of body and room disappear. His spirit hovered for a moment in Memoria’s electronic web; then he allowed the intruder to siphon him away with the vitality of the House that he was so busily stealing.
As he was drawn back to his homeworld, he drew the House and its inhabitants along with him.
8
John Tucker pulled his car up to the curb in front of the address that Blue had given him and killed the engine.
He was the head of security for a special branch of the RCMP that investigated the paranormal. The official name for the branch was Mindreach, named after a project in the early eighties dedicated to researching and documenting the viability of psychic resources; since then their mandate had been broadened to encompass the entire gray area of experiences that could be collected under the term paranormal. To the other horsemen, the men who worked that branch were known as the Spook Squad.
Tucker was in his mid-fifties and still in top physical condition. He was a big man, just topping six feet and weighing in at two hundred pounds. His hair and eyes were gray; his squared mustache almost white. He’d been with the force for thirty-six years—ten years of that time heading up the Spook Squad—but the weirdest thing he’d ever been involved in hadn’t been a part of his work, although it had started there. It had all gone down in that strange block-long building directly across the street from the address where he was now parked.
He’d been skeptical of Mindreach’s mandate until that time, but the events in Tamson House had changed all of that. Whenever talk came down of cutting the small branch’s budget, he was on the front line, cashing in favors to keep it viable. Tangible evidence was hard to come by, but he knew their work was important, because one day, somewhere out there, another Tom Hengwr was going to show up. The difference was, this time they’d be ready when the shit hit the fan.
His belief in Mindreach’s importance even overrode the guilt of what he’d had to do in the final cleanup after what had happened in the House. Hengwr hadn’t been the only threat at that time; J. Hugh Walters, a business magnate, had also been involved. He was too high up to take down, had too many connections in the local and federal government, so Tucker had dealt with him using the only option left.
That assassination, necessary though it had been, had him sitting at his desk more than once, typing up his resignation. Mindreach was what made him tear it up each time—Mindreach and his wife, Maggie. She’d been through the same shit; she’d helped him make the decision. And it was only because he knew that her respect for the law—she was a Crown attorney—was as great as his that he let her talk him out of it.
“We didn’t have a choice,” she’d tell him, always making it a collective deed, although he’d been the one to pull the trigger. “And if you walk out on Mindreach now, you’re throwing it all away. Because it’s going to happen again. We know now that it’s possible; next time we might not get so lucky. Next time it might not be contained the way it was with Thomas Hengwr. And if you’re not there...”
She didn’t have to finish. He kept working; he kept the branch alive. But some days he couldn’t help but wake up wondering if it wasn’t all a lie. Maybe the ends had justified the means—that time. But who was he to call the shot? He’d been right once; there were no guarantees he’d be right a second time. And solving the problem the way he had, how did that make him any different from the bad guys?
It was a circular argument, with no easy answers. Hearing from Blue, seeing Tamson House, brought it all back again.
He studied the long dark building now, then turned his attention to the house where Blue and Sara were waiting for him.
Everything looked normal, he thought. Maybe Blue was overreacting.
But then he noticed the owls.
The birds were everywhere—on the eaves of houses, on trees, streetlamps, telephone poles, even on the car parked in front of him.
“Shit,” he muttered.
He took his revolver from the seat beside him and got out of the car, clipping the holster to the back of his belt where his jacket would hide it. Blue had the front door open before he reached the porch.
“Thanks for coming,” Blue said, stepping aside to let him in.
“No problem, Farley.”
Tucker smiled at Blue’s pained expression. Glen Farley was the name on Blue’s birth certificate; there weren’t many people who could get away with razzing him about it. Only this time, Tucker didn’t get a rise out of him.
Tucker’s smile faded into a frown. Things were definitely serious.
“So what’s going down?” he asked as he stepped into the front hall.
Blue just pointed to the couch in the living room. Tucker took a few quick steps over to where Sara was lying and knelt down beside her. He put a pair of fingers up against her throat, then looked over his shoulder at Blue.
“Did you call an ambulance?” he asked.
Blue shook his head. “She needs magic, not medicine.”
Magic. Right. That shit again.
Tucker sighed. “Do you want to run the whole story by me?”
Blue pulled up the coffee table. Sitting on its edge, his gaze shifting from Sara’s still features to Tucker’s face, he filled Tucker in on all the details as he knew them. He finished his explanation upstairs where the residents of the house were. The old woman regarded them with amusement, for all that she was bound to a chair. Her companion lay on the bed as motionless as Sara did on the couch downstairs.
Tucker dug a quarter out of his pocket and tossed it at the man. Just as Blue had said it would, the quarter sparked against something just a fraction of an inch from the prone figure on the bed and was hurled across the room. Tucker watched the quarter spin on the floor, then finally lie still. An odd, pungent odor stung his nostrils, but it was gone before he could place it.
“You see?” Blue said.
Tucker nodded and drew Blue back out into the hall.
“What did you want from me?” he asked when they were out of the bound woman’s earshot.
Blue ran a troubled hand through his hair. “Fucked if I know,” he said. “Have you still got the same gig—chasing spooks and Elvis pretenders?”
Tucker nodded.
“Well, I was hoping your people might have developed something by now that we can use.” At Tucker’s puzzled look, Blue added, “You know. Like something to cut through that guy’s force field or whatever it is that he’s got protecting him. Maybe something to contain his magic so that he can’t turn it on anybody else.”
“Sounds like you’re talking about the kind of gizmos that the Ghostbusters used,” Tucker said.
“Is that so farfetched?”
“Fercrissakes, Blue. That stuff’s just a fantasy.”
“And this isn’t?”
Tucker started to reply, then nodded. “Okay. I get your point. But you’re clutching at straws. We don’t have anything like that. Christ, we don’t even have any hard evidence that this shit’s on the level, little say having gotten around to developing equipment to deal with it.”
“We’re talking about Sara here,” Blue said.
“And I’m leveling with you. This isn’t security-clearance bullshit. You do realize that ninety-nine-point-nine percent and then some of our loyal taxpayers haven’t a clue that something like Mindreach even exists in the first place?”
Blue nodded. “I’ve jus
t got to do something for her. It’s eating me up, John—you understand what I’m saying?”
Tucker was worried about Sara as well, but the larger proportion of his concern was directed at the nameless figure that lay on the bed in the room they’d just quit. From what Blue had been telling him earlier, this guy could be even more powerful than Hengwr had been and that was something he didn’t need.
“I hear you,” he said.
“So talk to me,” Blue said. “Give me some feedback. What the hell do we do?”
“We wait,” Tucker told him. “I’ll call Maggie and have her come over. She can sit with Sara while we watch in here.”
“And then?”
Tucker shrugged. “We play it by ear. There’s nothing else we can do.”
It wasn’t enough. He could see that in Blue’s features—where frustration warred with resignation. He felt the same himself, but what else could they do? There were no other options.
“Okay,” Blue said.
His voice had taken on an uncharacteristic dullness. He hoisted his rifle and stepped back into the bedroom. Tucker hesitated for a moment, then went downstairs to look for a phone. He’d spotted one in the bedroom, but didn’t see any reason he should let their captives be privy to any more information than they already were.
He paused in the doorway of the living room to look in on Sara again.
“This sucks,” he said.
He headed farther down the hall to where he could see a wall phone hanging just inside the kitchen door.
9
It happened so fast, Sara didn’t have a chance to protect herself. One moment she had her hand on the doorknob, the next she could feel her spirit being sucked out of her body into...
Elsewhere.
She was no longer on a porch, no longer in Ottawa, no longer in her own world. She experienced a stomach-wrenching sensation of vertigo. A sound like flies trapped against glass buzzed in her skull, droning against the breathy airing of a distant flute that soon faded. The buzzing remained until she opened her eyes.
The place to which she’d been taken appeared to be a wide mesa top. She had the sense of physical form, but she knew that although she could feel a desert wind touch her cheek and brush against her hair, although the ground felt solid underfoot, it was all an illusion. She could still sense her body, lying where it had collapsed on the porch of that house on Clemow—but her awareness of it was like looking through thick gauze. The mesa top, the night sky above, brilliant with stars, the endless expanse of desert that stretched off in all directions from the mesa, the pretense of a shape she wore now, were far more immediate, far more real.
She remembered what Pukwudji had said about their enemy creating his own Otherworld and realized that it was there that she’d been taken. She turned in a slow full circle, sand gritting realistically under her shoes. It was only when she completed the circle that she realized she was no longer alone.
A figure stood at the edge of the mesa, in a direct line of sight from where she’d first appeared. It had its back to her. A shiver of dread traveled up her spine, but when it turned, she wasn’t confronted with the enemy she’d been expecting.
The man who returned her gaze bore an uncanny resemblance to her Uncle Jamie. Remembering what Emma had told her of her meeting in the forest, Sara stifled her first impulse to run to him.
“Sairey?” he said. “Is that you, Sara?”
The voice was perfect, but she didn’t trust its perfection. If the enemy was capable of creating a perfect pretense of her own body in this place, when she knew it lay slumped on an Ottawa porch, then he was similarly capable of calling up a perfect replica of her uncle.
“What are you doing here?” Jamie asked.
For all her distrust, it was hard to ignore his presence—hard to ignore the possibility that, somehow, this really was Jamie calling to her.
“Is that you really you, Jamie?” she said, unable to stop herself from hoping.
He nodded and stepped closer to her.
“Jack’s being kind,” he said. “I would have given anything to see you one more time, but after all the mistakes I’ve made, I never had the courage to ask.”
She couldn’t help herself. The closer he came to her, the more she fell into believing that this really was Jamie. All the years of mourning his death dissolved under a rush of affection.
“Who’s Jack?” she found herself asking, as comfortable with him as though they were sitting in the Postman’s Room again, having one of their rambling conversations.
“Whiskey Jack,” Jamie said. “The coyote man.”
He stood just an arm’s length away from her now. He seemed more diffident than she remembered him to be, but she realized immediately that that was because she was putting distance between them.
“I’ve missed you,” she said.
She stepped into his arms and returned his hug. He felt the same as always—sturdy and just a little stout. His hand moved on her back in a familiar pattern. He smelled of pipe tobacco and old books. She held on to him for a long time before she would let him go.
“What are you doing here?” he asked again.
She explained briefly, then added, “Where is ’here’?”
“We’re in the mind of our enemy,” Jamie told her. “Or more correctly, in a world created from his thoughts.”
Sara thought of what Pukwudji had told her when he found her trapped in a glade of the first forest.
“Like the ghost of the forest he created that’s trying to swallow the House?”
“The House is back where it’s supposed to be,” Jamie told her. “I’ve done that much right.”
“But the forest’s still a threat, isn’t it?”
“Not as much as the enemy is.”
“Who is he, Jamie?”
“I know what he is,” Jamie said. He described the man as Whiskey Jack had to Emma and Esmeralda. “His name’s not important.”
Sara nodded. She looked around the mesa top. The wind still blew its hot dusty breath in from the surrounding desert; they were still alone. Above them, the constellations hadn’t moved. Time, it seemed, stood still in this place.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“I have to take him down the Path of Souls,” Jamie said.
Sara was surprised at Jamie’s indirectness. He was usually so plainspoken.
“You mean kill him, don’t you?” she said. “Blue was going to do that—that’s how I ended up here.”
“He’s already dead,” Jamie explained. “He had to die—that was the price for making his attempt to acquire the House’s power. Everything has its cost, Sairey, especially magic. You know that.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. What use is the power if he’s dead?”
“With the power, he can bring himself back to life.”
“But there has to be a price....”
Jamie nodded. “When the House’s magic is his, he’ll have the power to make somebody else pay in his place. Somebody else will die, while he returns to life—revitalized. Perhaps even immortal.”
“That’s possible?” Sara asked.
“It is.”
“Well, then why didn’t you ever come back?”
“I wasn’t willing to sacrifice someone else, Sairey. It’s that simple.”
Sara felt stupid and a little ashamed. Of course, Jamie wouldn’t do that. To cover her embarrassment, she turned the conversation a few steps.
“So you’re going to show him the Path of Souls?” she asked.
Jamie nodded. “Take him on it, yes.”
“And then what happens?”
“Then his threat will be ended and things will be back to normal except that the House will need a new guardian.”
It took Sara a moment to digest that.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re the House’s guardian.... “
Her voice trailed off as what he was trying to tell her finally dawned on her.
“Yo
u can’t do it, Jamie.”
“I have to do it. The only way to be rid of him is for a willing soul to take him.”
“But then you...
“I’ve had a good life, Sairey—and an extension to it that few are allowed. And death isn’t an ending—it’s a beginning. Jack’s told me about the wheels of our life. We step from one onto another. Change is natural.”
“Whiskey Jack is a liar.”
“This time he’s telling the truth.”
Sara shook her head. “You can’t know that.”
“But I do. Don’t forget—I was almost there once. But the wheel of the House took me back before I could finish my journey.”
“Jamie...”
“I’ll miss you, too,” Jamie said.
He tousled her hair, then put his arm over her shoulder and began to walk her to where he’d been standing when she first saw him.
“Remember what Ha’kan’ta’s people have told us of the Place of Dreaming Thunder?” he asked.
Sara nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“That’s where I’ll wait for you.”
A hundred protests rose in her, but they couldn’t get past the thickness in her throat. And then they were at the edge of the mesa and she was looking down at their enemy.
He hung in the air, arms and legs outstretched and surrounded by a nimbus of light that was both a circle and a square so that he looked like a physical representation of da Vinci’s The Proportions of the Human Body. But unlike da Vinci’s famous sketch, the man who hung here was neither young, nor well proportioned. He was instead an old man, his features sharply defined, his skin almost translucent so that the blue veins made a networking pattern, his body a sad image of scrawny torso and scrawnier limbs.
Sara shivered. There was nothing overtly threatening about the man. If anything, he seemed pathetic; but the nimbus of light that surrounded him crackled with a raw, dark vitality—stolen vitality—and she didn’t doubt either his evil or his power for a moment. She understood immediately why he had to be dealt with—now, before he returned to her homeworld.
He seemed entirely unaware of them—eyes closed, his features confident and reposed—or perhaps he didn’t consider them enough of a threat to worry about. When she thought of how easily he’d pulled her out of her body and brought her here, she decided it was the latter.
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