by Layla Lawlor
Echo City
Gatekeeper #2
Layla Lawlor
Echo City
© 2020 Layla Lawlor
All rights reserved.
www.laylalawlor.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Pronunciation Key
Historical Notes
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Chapter 1
"Look out," Muirin said as a wet branch hit me in the face.
It had stopped raining, but every twig and blade of grass was bowed under its own load of water, ready to dump on the unwary passerby. My rain slicker was useless, designed for water coming from above, as opposed to every direction including below. My sneakers and jeans had long since soaked through. The sword didn't help; I wished I'd left it in the car, because it kept getting tangled in the brush and bruising my legs.
It might be June in upstate New York, but it felt more like October. I wished I'd worn a sweater.
Muirin stopped walking. I rebounded off the hard point of her shoulder, which was at chest level on me.
"See anything?" I asked hopefully, rubbing my sternum.
Muirin shook her head. "Use your sight."
I'd hoped to avoid that. "It would help," I said, "if I knew exactly what we were looking for." The only explanation Muirin had given me for why we were traipsing around the upper end of Cayuga Lake in the rain was something about a "disturbance in local energies," but I hadn't been able to get a straight answer as to what that actually meant.
"Or we could stay here until dark," Muirin said pointedly.
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, focusing inward the way Muirin had been teaching me. My lack of talent for meditation was matched only by her failure to adequately explain to me how to do it. On the other hand, we had practiced enough by now that I was getting better at dropping into a sleepy, alpha-wave state, even while wearing wet pants.
It was what happened next that was still unpredictable. I dealt with the suspense as long as I could, slowing my heartbeat and breathing from my diaphragm, and then opened my eyes—
Oh, nice. The world pulsed in a throbbing, nausea-inducing rhythm, normal one second and smearing into a blur of technicolor the next. The whole world got knocked out of kilter with every beat of my heart. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them. It didn't help, and worse yet, every strobe was a little different. The sky went black, the trees electric blue, before snapping back to green; on the next flash, the sky was dark purple and the trees were negative images with white branches.
"Well?" Muirin said.
I squeezed my eyes shut again—even closed, the darkness flickered rhythmically—and opened them to find it hadn't helped. I hoped Muirin appreciated the effort I was making not to puke on her shoes. "Please give me a little more guidance here. I don't know how much of this I can take."
She oriented on this like a bloodhound on a scent. "Is your second sight behaving oddly?"
"You could definitely say that." Muirin always glowed brightly in my second sight—all living things had their own light, and Muirin, two thousand years old, was brighter than most—but today she threw off sparks like a green-and-yellow Roman candle. "It's blinking on and off, and the colors ... they hurt, Muirin. I never know exactly how it's going to behave, but this is really different." A burning knot of pain had begun to screw itself into my right temple. I shut my eyes and opened them again, this time pouring extra effort into trying to turn it off. Nada.
"Do you see lines of force, or any sort of—" Muirin rolled her hands, a bending flame twining upon itself. "—extra-bright areas? Anything that you don't normally see?"
"I don't know. It's a mess." I covered my eyes with my hands, pressing my fingers against my eyelids until all I could see was roiling blotches of red and black.
Muirin's small, strong hands closed over mine, and she pulled them down. I kept my eyes shut. Muirin pressed something cold and hard into my palm. "Try this."
"This" was a pair of sunglasses, and they actually did help, cutting down the strobe effect to annoying flickering. I could now pick out the small flashes of the forest's animals—mice, birds, whatever. A shooting star flashed through the woods near me, and I lifted the sunglasses to catch a glimpse of a woodpecker lighting on a dead tree nearby.
"Better?" Muirin asked.
"Better." I still had a slight headache and my stomach felt uneasy, but I no longer wanted to claw my eyes out. "Now what am I looking for?"
"Anything that isn't right."
I crossed my arms and planted my feet. "I can't help you at all if you don't tell me what I'm trying to find."
As usual, my frustration rolled off her like the rainwater off my slicker. "I'm not sure myself. I don't want to prejudice you."
"You promised to answer my questions if I asked," I said. "And you can't lie to humans. So, I'm asking: what's the deal?"
Muirin hesitated. Then she reached under her Carhartt jacket and took out a damp New York road atlas, open to the page displaying the northern part of Cayuga Lake. It had been marked with different colored ink in lines and blots and Xs, forming an impenetrable thicket. Between the sunglasses and the surreal color-shifting, I couldn't tell much about the map except that Muirin's markups, while they spread from one side of the map to the other, grew thicker in a few areas of dense color. The biggest and most colorful sprawl was near the top of the lake's blue stripe.
"Where are we?"
"Here." Muirin put a stubby, nail-bitten finger right in the middle of the scribbled mess. "What you're looking at is a record of supernatural activity over the last few years, as thoroughly as I can reconstruct it from Bill's records and my own." There was a very slight hesitation over the name of her deceased monster-hunting partner, but then she went on. "There's been a distinct upswing over the last few years, but not anything that I recognized as a pattern until recently. The recent incident with Scylla is, I think, part of that pattern."
Incident. That was one word for it. In a single violent night, I'd been flung out of my ordinary art-student existence into Muirin's world of myth, magic, and monsters. I touched the hilt of the sword; it was cool to my fingers, but not ice-cold, so that was still okay—there wasn't any danger nearby, at least nothing the sword recognized as such.
"So what you're saying is, things are out of balance?"
"Something like that," Muirin said. "And this general area is the locus of it. I truly have no idea what we're searching for. It might be that the apparent clustering is only coincidence, and there is nothing special here. But if your vision is behaving oddly as well—"
"Which it definitely is." Between the sunglasses and continued exposure, I was getting better at ignoring it, but it still made me faintly queasy.
"Then I expect there is something here. It could be a convergence of ley lines that's become unbalanced, or an ectoplasmic flare affecting the local—"
"Ectoplasmic flare, really? That's an actual thing?"
"—distribution of super
natural fauna," she went on over the top of me.
"Yeah, it's the fauna I'm worried about. Because of monsters."
"I consider that the less likely option," Muirin said, but I would have felt better if she'd sounded a little more sure.
"That's the plan, then? We walk around in the woods until I see something weird?" Or until my headache erupted into a full-blown migraine.
"Unless you have a better idea. My own efforts have produced nothing so far."
I was saved from coming up with a response by a bright flash of something large in the woods behind Muirin. Most animals show up in shades of green and blue, but this was yellow shading into vivid red-violet. In my experience, living things on the red end of the spectrum tended to be magical, and usually weren't friendly.
"Muirin!" I said, drawing the sword.
She'd already swiveled from the hips, supernaturally fast. Her coruscating brilliance kicked up a notch as she shielded herself.
"What did you see?" she asked.
"I don't know." I scanned the trees through the sunglasses, but the world was a murky blur. Pushing them down helped with that a little, but the strobing colors twisted the screws a few more turns into my skull. "It was about the size of a deer."
"There are plenty of deer in the area." But she had a hand under her jacket, where I knew from experience that all manner of interesting little devices lurked.
"I know, but I think—"
I broke off, catching another bright flash in the woods. This time, the animal producing the lightshow paused to look back at us, so we got a good look at it too.
It wasn't a deer, but a dog almost the size of one, rangy and shaggy and huge. Its fur was pale gray, almost white, except for pricked, dark ears and the soot-colored tip of its pointed muzzle. Even at rest, it seemed poised for flight on its long greyhound legs. Dark eyes were fixed on us, set deep in its flat-topped, aristocratic head, and its brush of a tail hung low.
The dog's maroon collar told me it wasn't a stray. Still, I didn't want to engage in hand-to-hand combat against a dog the size of a pony. I glanced at Muirin, but she was staring fixedly at the dog, her face unreadable as a mask.
"Dangerous?" I whispered.
"I am not sure," she said quietly. "It depends on whether its master is nearby."
Wonderful. I didn't bother asking her questions; I knew better than to try to get a straight answer out of her when she wasn't in the mood.
Instead, I said, "Hi beautiful," in my most soothing talking-to-dogs voice. "You're a good boy. What are you doing way out here?"
The ears twitched, but there was no friendly tail-wag. The dog turned away from us and took a single long-legged bound deeper into the trees, then looked back, its pale fur glimmering in the forest gloom.
It almost made me laugh, the follow me body language was so clear. "Is Timmy down the well again, Lassie?" My smile faltered under Muirin's stonefaced expression. "Muirin, do we follow it?"
"I suppose we must," she said.
We struggled through a few hundred yards of sodden thicket before the underbrush began to thin out, the trees becoming larger and more varied. As we followed Lassie up a slowly rising hill, I realized what I'd taken for a natural embankment to my right was actually the remnant of a crumbling stone wall buried in blackberry canes. These Northeast woods are patchworked with the remains of old farms. Looking up and around, I spotted tiny green apples on some of the trees. Our clear space between the trees was resolving itself more distinctly into a path, or perhaps the traces of a badly overgrown road. The rain-washed old orchard could have been lifted straight out of the nineteenth century—or jolly olde England anytime in the last few hundred years—so it was a bit jarring when I almost stepped on a crumpled Pepsi can, a reminder that I was still in the 21st century, and I wasn't the only person ever to come here.
Though I might be the only one with a Great Dane-sized dog as a guide and a 2000-year-old Irish banshee for backup.
We topped the rise and the dog stopped, ears pricked as it sniffed the wet air. There was a house here—and also not-here. In the real world, all that remained was the broken line of the old foundation and a set of wide stone steps leading up to what had once been a door. Through my second sight, however, I could see the ghostly outlines of the house itself—two-story, whitewashed, symmetrical with a central brick chimney. It was not a large house by modern standards, but big enough for its day.
It was also limned in red—a fierce, brilliant tower of red light. Which didn't necessarily mean anything bad, I reminded myself. Magic, by itself, was neither good nor evil. People took it, and did things with it, for good or ill.
But magic itself was just part of the world. And I didn't feel that there was anything wrong with this house. It was strange, but not frightening. On a nice day, with my second sight turned off, I would have found the old foundation an interesting and cool place to poke around.
The dog, satisfied with its inspection of the area, loped to the house and leaped through the transparent wall. Then it looked back at us again, shimmering slightly through the distortion in the air.
I glanced curiously at Muirin. "Faint heart, et cetera?" I said—the only part of the quote I could remember. My roommate Fresca, an English major, would have known the rest.
"Faint heart ne'er won fair lady," Muirin murmured. "Certainly. Proceed."
I approached with the sword in a guard position. Dizziness washed through me when I stepped through the wall, and my vision unexpectedly snapped back to normal. Surprised, I pushed the rain-streaked sunglasses to the top of my head. I could no longer see the ghostly house at all, just the ruins of the foundation, defaced with graffiti. Beer cans and cigarette butts were scattered around a blackened fire circle near where the door had been.
The dog was still there, wet fur matted to its lean, rangy body, sitting at attention beside a woman in a sodden canvas coat who was seated on a low, overgrown pile of rocks. I should have seen her easily through the translucent walls, but the place had appeared empty until I'd stepped through.
She was a few years older than me, perhaps mid to late twenties, with a light brown complexion a few shades paler than mine. Her hair, under a narrow-brimmed hat that had a kind of rakish Indiana Jones vibe, was straightened and teased into stiff, greased curls that made me think of old black-and-white film stars. She was dressed in a slightly archaic way, too. A glimpse of a knee-length skirt peeked out from under her old-fashioned raincoat, and she wore lacy gloves, the kind I'd only seen on old ladies at church.
And she looked familiar. Very familiar. For a crazy instant I wondered if she might actually be related to me, maybe a distant cousin, someone I'd met at a family holiday—the familiarity was that strong and startling.
I reminded myself that she was most likely not really here. The abandoned house and the old-fashioned clothing and hairstyle went together to say "ghost" to me.
Looking up at us, she smiled and absently scratched the dog's rain-plastered head with a gloved hand. "And who might you be?" She addressed the question to both of us, but she was looking curiously at me. There was a soft hint of the South in her voice, not quite enough to be called an accent.
"I don't give my name to one who has not offered her own," Muirin said.
"I'm Lily," the woman in the hat said, and the sense of familiarity twanged again. Maybe she was a famous dead person. Maybe she was no ghost at all, and I'd seen her on TV. She had something about her that I could only describe as charisma—a sense of powerful self-possession and charm, such as my Grandma Geraldine must have had as a young woman.
Muirin jerked her head at the dog. "And is she yours?"
"No," Lily said. "She is her own dog. Are you Muirin?"
"The answer depends on who is asking and why."
Lily held out an envelope. It was made of heavy, expensive-looking creamy paper, and there was a single word written on it: Muirin, in a looping, archaic hand.
Muirin stared at it, and at her.
/> "Go on, take it." Lily smiled again, but there was a hint of impatience. "I know you don't know or trust me, and you can throw this away or burn it, whatever you like. I'm doing a favor for a friend, that's all. I have my own business to get back to."
Muirin's face darkened. "If this friend is the one from whom you obtained the dog, then there is nothing I have to say to him, nor he to me."
But she took the envelope and turned it over and over in her fingers.
Well. Not a ghost then after all, I guess.
The dog raised its head and, flattening its ears to its skull, gave a single sharp bark. Lily and I both looked in the direction the dog was looking. Muirin was still studying the envelope as if it held all the mysteries of the universe.
Something big came bounding toward us out of the woods. I had no idea what it was. I caught an impression of massive shoulders covered in rain-dark fur, an enormous shaggy head, a lashing tail. It was sort of like a bear and sort of like a gorilla, but it was moving too fast to get a good look, covering the ground with impossible speed.
And it was coming our way. It would be on us in moments.
"Here?" Lily cried, scrambling to her feet. "They can't be here!" She drew a fat-barreled red pistol from the pocket of her coat.
The dog burst into motion, leaping over the crumbling foundation stones with a snarl bubbling up between its jaws.
My phone picked that moment to ring.
I had completely forgotten about my regular Sunday conversation with Mom. I should've let it go to voice mail, I really meant to let it go to voice mail, but somehow the sound of her ringtone put me on good-child autopilot, and before I knew it I was saying breathlessly, "Mom, this isn't a good time."
