“Vehicles invested with love.”
Consuela nodded. “Cars. Pickup trucks. Bicycles from one’s childhood. Even old wagons and carts. Anything that somebody drove and loved enough to give it a life after it’s been scrapped in the first world.”
“So why have they been chasing us? Gordo wasn’t some scrapped vehicle in another life, was he?”
Her raven aura appeared on her shoulder, eyes wide, and shook its head, but it was Consuela who answered. “They’re after you.”
“That’s nuts. I don’t have some inner car totem.”
“No, but you’re alive and you were on the roads of the dead. That makes you fair game.”
“So were you. Unless you’re…” He let his voice trail off.
“Alive, dead,” Consuela said. “That kind of thing doesn’t apply to beings like Gordo and me.”
Thomas turned his attention back down to the road. The salvage crew was approaching Gordo with wariness. Then one of them looked up and saw Thomas. He pointed and said something to his companions, then they all looked up and started moving toward them. When the first one reached for a handhold, Gordo growled, a big, chest-deep rumble that Thomas swore was making the rock ledge they were perched on shake. He could see the huge dog bunching its muscles, ready to pursue the salvagers. But before he could spring at them, the tractor-trailer’s horn blasted and the big vehicle lurched forward, cutting him off.
“Tell me somebody’s driving that thing,” Thomas said.
He turned to Consuela. Again, her aura was no longer present.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s enough to keep Gordo busy and they’ll be after us.”
Sure enough, the salvage crew were already climbing up toward the ledge. Gordo was behind the truck, no longer in sight.
Crap, Thomas thought.
But he didn’t pause to argue. He scrambled up the cliff after Consuela, the threat of the salvagers enough to make him take chances with precarious holds he never would have normally trusted.
He didn’t look down as he climbed—he’d learned that lesson the hard way as a kid, when he’d almost broken his leg from a fall. Instead, he concentrated on the lip of the cliff above. He took the same route Consuela did, which made the climb a little easier, though no less dangerous.
As they neared the top of the cliff he noticed something funny about the sky. There appeared to be lines running across it, parallel to each other. It wasn’t until they’d scrambled up the last few feet that he realized what he was seeing. That wasn’t a sky above them—not a real one. It was a sky painted on boards. The sheer impossibility made him giddy with the absurdity of it all.
He pulled himself up onto the cliff top. “Well, thank God for that,” he said, collapsing on his back.
“What are you doing?” Consuela said. “They’ll be up here soon and there aren’t any boulders we can roll down on them.”
Si’tala suddenly manifested on her shoulders, urgently pumping her body up and down as though doing knee bends.
Thomas grinned and waved a hand at them, then pointed upward. “See that?” he said.
“I’m not blind,” Consuela answered. “Give me a hand. Those boards look old. With any luck we can push enough of them aside to get out of here.”
Thomas shook his head. “That just tells me that all of this is a dream. This whole day has been weird from start to finish, but come on. A sky painted on a bunch of boards that stretch as far as we can see? Let the salvagers come. I’m going to wake up at some point and all of this will have been meaningless anyway.”
Consuela dropped to his side. She grabbed him by the shirt and pulled his face right up to hers. In his peripheral vision, Thomas saw Si’tala’s raven eyes peering at him with equal urgency.
“We can’t save you from them!” Consuela yelled. “These are the dreamlands and you’re not here like you usually are, your spirit travelling while your body lies asleep in its bed. You are here, and if those salvagers catch you they’ll suck the life out of you the same way they do anything else that strays onto their roads. That’s what sustains them.”
“This is insane.”
She let him go and he fell back to the rocks. She stared down at him, the bizarre slats of the painted sky behind her. Si’tala studied him as well, her expression dark and unreadable.
“Stay and die,” Consuela said, “or accept what you can’t believe and live another day. You have a choice, but the window is closing with each moment you wait.”
Thomas thought of his sisters and brother. Of his mother and Auntie. If he were gone, who would take care of them?
The charity of the tribe, he supposed. But his family was his responsibility. Taking care of them was his job.
He’d been accepting the impossible all day. Why stop now?
“Okay,” he said.
Consuela stepped close and lashed out with one foot. Thomas dodged the blow but it wasn’t aimed at him. He heard someone grunt, the sound of hands scrabbling for purchase. A distant thud.
“That buys us a moment,” Consuela said.
“Did you kill him?”
“No such luck. He landed on the ledge.” She cupped her hands. “Let me give you a boost. See if you can reach those boards.”
Those boards.
This was insane.
But he got to his feet, put a foot in the saddle of her hands. She lifted him up, over her head, her arms straight. She was stronger than he expected and held him steady as he used the heel of his hand to hammer against the nearest board.
It burst upward in a cloud of dust and dirt that came back down in a shower with bits of old, rotted wood. He was blinded by the bright light of another sky beyond the boards.
How was that even possible?
Don’t think, he told himself.
He grabbed hold of another board on one side of the rectangular hole he’d just made and hammered it with the palm of his free hand. More debris showered him. The light grew brighter.
“Hurry up!” Consuela called.
He leaned a little to the side, bracing himself by his grip on the one board. Consuela continued to hold him steady as the heel of his hand drove up into yet another board. A fourth, a fifth. By then there was enough room that he could pull himself through by turning to one side. He got a grip on the board with his free hand and hauled himself up.
Without bothering to look where he was, he lay flat out and reached down a hand.
“Move back,” Consuela told him.
He did as she said and a huge raven rose up out of the hole he’d made. He looked back down to see the top of the cliff, the men climbing, the truck on the road far below, trying to run over Gordo’s enormous body. Tires spun, sending up clouds of red dust, but the truck couldn’t budge the dog.
Vertigo hit him and he would have tumbled back down through the hole if Consuela hadn’t grabbed him by his belt and pulled him back.
“We need to get moving,” she said.
Thomas stood up and looked around. They stood in the ruin of an old barn in the middle of some desert. Half of one wall remained of the structure. The rest had tumbled down uncountable years ago. No other structures were in sight except for a stone fireplace that stood in the midst of another mess of dried and broken wood. There was no break in the desert. The scrub spread out as far as he could see to every horizon.
“What about Gordo?” he asked.
“He’ll get to us when he can. He wouldn’t miss a visit with your Aunt Lucy.”
My dead Aunt Lucy, Thomas thought.
But all he did was brush the dust and debris from his clothes, shake out his hair, and nod. She wanted stoic? He could play stoic.
“Then we’d better head out,” he said.
Consuela started to walk, picking what appeared to Thomas to be a random direction.
“What about the salvage crew?” he asked, falling in step with her.
She shrugged. “Now that we’ve made it to here, we can lose them. But I’d stay off
the roads of the dead for the next little while.”
“Wasn’t my idea in the first place.”
“Don’t think I won’t hear about it from your aunt.”
All things happen at the same time, Thomas thought. So had she known beforehand that they would escape? And if so, why hadn’t she known that they’d run into trouble in the first place?
On her shoulders, Si’tala looked at him as though she could read his mind. She rattled her beak. It made no sound, but Thomas heard a vague clatter inside his head.
39
Jerry
Jerry shoved away the chair that had tripped him, and got to his feet. He hesitated, torn between going after the girl and finding out what was happening with Aggie.
“I need a first aid kit and some duct tape—quick!” Marisa yelled out. That settled it.
“On it!” Jerry called back. He grabbed a white case with a red cross on it from the shelf beside his desk, then tried to think of where they kept duct tape.
“Here,” Ralph called as he tossed the roll to Jerry. “Ambulance is on the way.”
“Get an APB out on that kid,” he told Ralph as he ran toward the holding room.
Ralph nodded, then pulled his gun and went out the door after Sadie.
Jerry knew he wasn’t going to catch her. He’d already heard one of the pickups start up and go tearing out of the parking lot.
What a clusterfuck of a day.
But there was no time to worry about Sadie, or the chief, who was still on the line, or the suspects that were supposed to be in his lockup but had escaped into some otherworld desert.
He ran into the holding room and dropped down beside Aggie. There was too much blood. How could there be so much blood already?
Why wasn’t that ambulance here yet?
Aggie’s eyes were closed, but she was still breathing. Trouble was, she was bleeding out. Marisa had both hands pressed against Aggie’s stomach. The old woman’s blood oozed through her fingers.
“When you’re ready,” she said, “we’ll get her blouse up and try taping some bandages to her stomach.”
Jerry nodded. And then pray it was enough until the ambulance got here.
He opened a couple of large gauze pads from the first aid kit and sandwiched them together. “Ready,” he said.
Marisa pulled up Aggie’s top and Jerry pressed the pads against the bloody wound. “We should be cleaning this,” he said.
“Yeah, we should,” Marisa agreed as she picked up the roll of duct tape. “But let’s stop the bleeding and let the hospital worry about infection.”
She pulled free a long strip of the grey tape and cut it with her teeth. Jerry adjusted the position of his hands so that she had room to tape the pads in place. Two more strips of tape, and the gauze pads were completely covered and tightly held in place.
“Can I get another pad?” Marisa asked. She used this one to gently sop around the edges of the tape to make sure no blood was seeping from under them.
“Where the hell’s that ambulance?” Jerry muttered.
Marisa checked Aggie’s pulse. Satisfied that the old woman was still with them, Marisa cradled her head on her lap and murmured soothingly to her.
Jerry stood up, wiping his hands with tissues, then going to the door to look out toward the main office. Nobody was manning the front desk, so he supposed Ralph was still out chasing that damned girl. Then he remembered he’d left the chief hanging on the other end of the phone.
He started back to his desk, but before he could reach it, the front door opened. Marisa’s friend Leah and a young Indian woman he didn’t know came through. The stranger lifted her head like an animal sniffing the air. Then she made a beeline for the room where Aggie lay.
“Not so fast,” Jerry told her.
He grabbed for her, but she brushed off his hand and he swore he could hear a low growl as she went by.
“Hang on there,” he said, turning after her.
His hand went to the butt of his gun. “I said—” he started. But the siren of the approaching ambulance pulling into the parking lot outside was enough to distract him.
“What’s going on?” Leah asked when he looked her way.
“Honestly?” he said. “The worst day ever.”
He went to the door to usher the paramedics in, studiously ignoring the faint shouting he could hear coming from his phone as he went by his desk. He led the medics back to where Aggie lay, Leah trailing behind them.
“Who did this to her?” the young woman was asking Marisa.
The blonde was still cradling Aggie’s head on her lap. She gave Jerry a helpless look. He wasn’t surprised at her being intimidated. The stranger loomed over her, radiating danger.
“You need to back off,” he told the woman, hand still on his gun.
The paramedics stopped because he was blocking the doorway.
“I’ll back off when someone answers my question.”
“Please,” Marisa said. “Let the paramedics through.”
Jerry moved to one side as the paramedics entered.
“Get out of the way and let them help her,” he said to the woman. The stranger blinked, then gave a brusque nod. She retreated a couple of steps away so the medics could get to work.
“Who are you?” Jerry asked.
“A friend of Abigail’s.”
“Yeah? If you’re such a good friend, how come I haven’t seen you around before?”
“Abigail doesn’t only have friends in this world,” the woman said.
Jerry so didn’t want to get back into that crap.
“Her name’s Ruby,” Leah said from behind him.
The paramedics were easing Aggie onto a stretcher. Marisa stood up, looking from Leah to the stranger.
“Well, Ruby—” Jerry started, but whatever he’d been about to say dried up inside him when he started remembering.
Ruby.
Aggie had a dog named Ruby whose fur was the same colour as this woman’s hair.
The dog Ruby had gone into the otherworld with Leah, and now Leah was back, and there wasn’t any dog around.
He hated where this was going.
“The girl did this,” Marisa said. “Sadie.”
Ruby nodded. “That’s all I needed to know.”
She stopped by the stretcher and tenderly touched Aggie’s cheek with the back of her hand. Then she lifted her head, a grim look in her eyes. “Her life is in your hands,” she told the paramedics. “I hold you responsible for what happens to her.”
A moment later she was stalking back into the front office.
“Hey, wait!” Jerry called.
She moved so fast that she was out the door within seconds.
Marisa pushed past him and followed the stretcher. “I’m going with Aggie,” she said. “Does she have any family we can call?”
Jerry shook his head. “But I’ll get word out to the rez.”
Leah came over and grabbed Marisa’s arm. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Except for watching that girl—oh, you mean all this blood on me.”
“Well, yeah.”
“It’s not mine.”
“You should change.”
“There’s no time,” Marisa said, turning to catch up to the medics.
“Then I’m coming with you,” Leah told her. “We can swap clothes at the hospital and I’ll go back to the motel to get something clean.”
Marisa nodded, distracted.
At first the paramedics weren’t going to let them in, but Jerry came out and told them it was okay, saying the first thing that came to mind.
“They’re Aggie’s granddaughters,” he said.
He watched the ambulance pull away, standing out in the parking lot until it had disappeared down the road, then finally returned to his desk. He wanted to put his head down and not have to deal with any more crap. Instead, he picked up the phone and began to explain the situation to the chief.
40
Abigail White Horse
Aggie had been here before—in dreams, in spirit, if never in the flesh. That being the case, she could only assume things were not going well for her back at the tribal police station after Sadie had knifed her.
She vaguely remembered the surprise she’d felt. The flash of pain. The sudden weakness. Drifting away while someone repeated her name over and over, asking her not to leave them.
“It’s not like I have a choice,” she wanted to say as the dark cloud washed over her, but the words never left her mouth. They died somewhere between her thinking them and her tongue, then curled up and went to sleep in a corner of her mouth.
And she found herself here.
Pragmatic as Aggie was, she didn’t waste any more time in shock at Sadie’s attack. It was what it was, and if this was how the wheel turned for her today, who was she to protest? In truth, it was almost worth it to be here so unexpectedly because she loved this place as she did nowhere else.
She stood on a ledge, high in the mountains—which mountains, she couldn’t say, but they bore some resemblance to the Maderas she knew so well. Below her, the wild benighted terrain spread out in a cluster of jagged peaks, rolling off into the distance like so many waves of a vast and stormy sea of stone. It was usually night when she came here, but she had never had trouble seeing in the darkness. Sometimes when she came in the daytime she saw eagles riding the winds. They would fly close to where she stood and dip their wings in salute before gliding on. Other times, she would simply stand and listen to the song of the winds. She would remember a time when she was young and in love, and stood in a place like this with more than a memory at her side.
She knew from previous visits that if she followed the ledge it would switch back and take her up to the top of the peak—a large flat platform with a jumble of rocks strewn about like a child’s discarded toys. She went there now, walking easily along the ledge, unconcerned with the drop below. The switchback took her up a gentle incline and then she stood with only the night sky above her and what felt like the whole of the world spread out below.
The Wind in His Heart Page 23
