Storm of Reckoning

by Doranna Durgin

  Lucia had no idea what Robin thought about Trevarr’s boots — the scarred and worn leather, perfectly fitted and long-maintained and complete with a surfeit of buckles. She’d looked, looked again, and said nothing.

  After Trevarr and Lucia, Robin probably found Garrie’s trail prep a relief. After all, she had regular high-top hiking sneakers. She didn’t hesitate to buckle on the dorky hiker hip pack that had little chance of clinging to her wiry frame, or to stuff it with water bottles and spicy jerky for Trevarr. She wore her ubiquitous shorts, full of pockets and slung low on her hips, somehow defying gravity. And while the snug spaghetti strap tank under a tissue-thin long-sleeved shirt covered the new shimmer of her arms in the sun, sunscreen dulled the same effect on her face.

  Lucia wore sunscreen, too, but she never let it dull her face. Lucia well knew how to distract people from the occasional social lapses that came along with her sensitivities. Even if they were much more occasional than they used to be.

  Quinn had waited with impatience, bursting at the seams with normality in jeans, an outdoorsy short-sleeved pullover with macho detailing at the neck, and plain old big feet in plain old cross-trainers, laced up tight for the hike.

  Normal. Totally guy. Was what he was.

  Now Lucia placed her feet with precise care on the trail and gave Robin’s back a quick glare. He’d better mean much to you if you’re using him like this, pajarito. If you’re using us like this.

  And then she sighed, gave her unaccustomed ponytail a tug — high off her head, swingy and fresh — and reached for the most convenient tree to haul herself up the trail.

  “I can’t believe,” Lucia found herself saying out loud, “that you made it down this trail after dark.”

  Robin was just ahead of her — behind Quinn, who was behind Trevarr, who was behind Garrie, who was leading the way as if she’d been in these woods all her life and as if she could barely pace herself to suit them — and she paused to give Lucia a startled glance.

  Lucia was somewhat gratified to see that Robin was as out of breath as Lucia herself, and that her face was flushed with effort. She, too, wore a water bottle pack, and she reached for the bottle now. “You must be kidding,” she told Lucia. “This is Sterling Pass — it’s the hard way in. Last night I took the Arch trail. Short and easy.”

  “What?” Lucia felt her eyebrows climb. “Aie, Dios! There’s an Easy Button?” She dabbed at her brow. “Why, oh pajarito, are we not using this Easy Button?”

  Robin narrowed her eyes at the Spanish word, even though it was an easy one. Lucia waved a hand. “Little bird, yes?” But she, too, had eyes that could speak, and she used them, pinning Robin hard. “And why?”

  Robin glanced up ahead, where Garrie scrambled over a tough, steep section as though gravity was an imaginary thing. Sklayne bounded up an impossible vertical beside her, his claws glinting suspiciously long against a slab of deep red rock. All in all it was a forest most gorgeous — deep green Ponderosa pines with stunty little maples peeking out, all red and sand and rich color where the sun hit the sides of a pass full of high cliffs and fancy rock formations.

  Lucia followed her gaze, abruptly understanding. Garrie.

  Robin returned her water bottle to the small of her back. “Quinn said...” She hesitated, glancing ahead as if to gauge whether they might be overheard. “He said she gets this way. That it’s the price for what she does.”

  Lucia took a sudden deep breath, lips pressed together, guilt coming on hard. Of course Garrie needed this. Of course she did. She’d spent the entire previous day sitting in vehicles. The plane, the car. And then dealing with that cranky ghost to top it off... and finding out that the inn’s little gym room closed at eleven.

  Maybe Lucia would speak to Feather Middleton about that later today.

  If she survived this hike.

  “Right,” she said to Robin. “Energizer bunny, that’s Garrie. Abs of steel. Legs of steel. Buns of steel.”

  “That,” Robin said, “might be more than I want to know.” She looked up to where Garrie, Trevarr, and Quinn now gazed back down at them, and her gaze lingered specifically on one tall, dark and oddly compelling bounty hunter. “What I do want to know—”

  “Oops,” Lucia said, totally not wanting to go there. Trevarr could field his own explanations — or lack thereof. “Looks like they’re waiting on us.” She passed Robin on the narrow trail and scrambled her way up the next treacherous bit of rock-strewn excuse for a path as though her feet actually knew what they were doing.

  Another mile of that and she was more than ready to flop down as the trail topped out. “I can’t feel my feet,” she said, rotating an ankle as she perched on the convenient rock in lieu of the ground. Let some other woman flop. Not Lucia Reyes.

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” Garrie suggested. “Anyway, it should be easier going from here.” She pulled a trail map from one of those many pockets and handed it over — breathing lightly, moving easily.

  “I could hate you, chicalet.” Lucia snatched the map.

  “Probably not,” Garrie said. “Catch your breath, take a drink. I’m going to scan ahead.”

  Check out the landscape, maybe. Check out the etherealscape, for sure.

  Garrie didn’t go as far as Lucia expected before she stopped to gaze out over Sterling Canyon, a stunning vista defined by rugged cliffs and bold conifers, everything red and buff and green with gashes of paler rock wind-blown into swirling rock hollows and forms.

  Sipping water, Lucia rotated her toes within her shoes, taking note of the others. Quinn and Robin stood off to the side in awkwardness, while Trevarr was barely close enough to be called with them at all, expression forbidding as he looked back down the trail.

  Out there at the edge of the world, Garrie tipped her head back — standing square, arms lifting gently from her sides, hands turned out... a receiving stance, with her funky braided bracelets creating the perfect punctuation. The canyon fell away before her; bright blue sky raised up around her. The breeze ruffled her perpetually mussed hair.

  Lucia found she was holding her breath. Found herself suddenly privy to and even part of something much bigger than it had ever seemed before. The exertion of the climb, the intensity of the sky, the harsh beauty of the canyon... it put Garrie in a framework that matched the power she held.

  Aie, caray! Maybe there was something to this Sedona vortex thing after all.

  Garrie relaxed her stance and lowered her chin, looking out over the canyon with the head tilt that meant she was not entirely happy about her thoughts. Sklayne padded out to sit by her feet, chewing on a pine cone. “I’m worried,” she said, which got Lucia’s attention right away.

  For one thing, she was pretty sure Garrie had meant to move out of earshot.

  Sklayne stopped chewing to regard her. After a moment, he gave the pine cone a single precise pat of his paw that sent it skittering over the edge of the trail to bounce down who knew how many hundred feet of dirt and rock.

  “Don’t tell me you’re not,” Garrie said to him. “Before it seemed like the food wasn’t quite right, but at least he could eat enough of it.”

  Sklayne flicked an ear, then a tail. Lucia knew he spoke, in some manner... she knew Garrie could communicate, if not as well or freely as Trevarr.

  She knew, too, that Sklayne had also insinuated himself into her own awareness at least once, back in San Jose. She didn’t like that she still had no sense of when he’d done it, other than a few odd impulses along the way.

  Come to think of it, maybe she was glad to know those hadn’t been her impulses, after all.

  “You mean, because he’s healing?” Garrie’s voice dropped even lower; she tipped a quick look over her shoulder, angled directly at Trevarr.

  It didn’t escape Lucia’s notice that she hadn’t had to look for him. She’d simply known. Okay, that was a little spooky, too.

  And then Lucia paid attention to what she was hearing. For in the immediate aftermath of
San Jose, Trevarr had apparently returned the errant Krevata to Kehar in some sort of battered state — battered enough himself so Garrie hadn’t even been certain he’d survived.

  Not that Lucia would know. She’d been trapped in the Winchester House ballroom with a collection of rioting ghosts, and she’d nearly lost herself in them. But when Trevarr had shown up at the hotel again days later, he hadn’t moved like a man sorely wounded.

  Not to judge by the greeting he’d given Garrie.

  And now, mere days later, he was apparently as he had ever been — a lethal hunter in the middle of unsuspecting civilization. Tall, silent, hard. Not safe, just as Garrie had warned Lucia from the start.

  Except maybe it wasn’t that simple after all.

  “I know he needs something,” Garrie said, in that tight way that meant her temper was rising — even as she fought to lower her voice.

  Lucia got it, really she did. Garrie was protecting Trevarr. What they’d been through together, Lucia didn’t know. She knew it had forged something between them, and hey, bueno for them. But long before Trevarr had shown up, Garrie and Lucia had been through plenty, too.

  She deserved a little trust, she thought.

  “Behkma? Then get it,” Garrie said, lowering her voice even further even as the intensity of her words carried. “How is it not safe? How can you not go back? You know, it couldn’t be any more obvious that there are things he’s not telling me. And you, too. How stupid do you think I am, anyway?” An indignant huff, there. “Dammit, Sklayne, I don’t like being in the dark.”

  Funny, Lucia thought. That makes two of us.

  ~~~~~

  Sklayne made himself scarce as they descended into Sterling Canyon and Garrie was glad of it. Some stinky herb from Kehar would likely help with Trevarr’s whole food thing, would it?

  But no, it would be too easy to go to Kehar and bring some back. And it would be too easy to tell Garrie why that wasn’t an option just now.

  Did that restriction apply to Trevarr’s personal lair, too? A place from which he had seemed to draw strength, and where Garrie had been safe and unseen? A place she’d actually hoped to visit again.

  Stupid mysterious hero type.

  She kicked at a stone or two, but kept her feet solidly on the rugged trail. She wasn’t ready to try reckoning from the other side of life.

  Behind her, the others straggled out. Robin had been tired before the day started, and Lucia was now as disheveled as Garrie had ever seen her — in truth, the glow of exertion on her cheeks was looking more and more like plain old sweat. Quinn hung near Robin, and Trevarr brought up the rear.

  She’d worried that he was lagging at first, until she realized it had nothing to do with the stun gun. No, he was simply covering twice as much ground as the rest of them — watching the back trail, checking different vantages, on occasion just plain disappearing into the woods.

  Hunting mode, Garrie realized. Watching mode. And while she didn’t think there was anything to watch for, it spoke to her of his life.

  Ha. A hike, great idea. Not so much. It had been rugged, all right, and it had taken the edge off. But it had left her far too much time to think.

  “Wait up!” That was Robin, making no attempt to increase her pace as the trail pitch eased. Garrie hesitated and pulled a few quick stretches. By the time Robin — and Quinn and Lucia — had caught up, Trevarr, too, had pulled in from his outrider position.

  “Oh, good,” Garrie said. “The pre-game huddle.”

  “It’s not a game,” Robin said sharply. “But what did you see? Up at the top, when you looked around? That’s what you were trying to do, isn’t it?”

  Trying? Garrie turned to Quinn and repeated Robin’s words out loud. “Trying to do? Tell me again why she came to us for help? If she doesn’t believe in what we do?”

  “I went to Quinn for help,” Robin said distinctly. “He has a knack for putting things together... for figuring them out. I didn’t think we needed you then and I don’t think we need you now.”

  Quinn looked at her with a little start, brow furrowed, his mouth opening...

  Closing.

  Garrie straightened to her full height, such as it was — hiding the startling stab of hurt from Robin’s words and Quinn’s lack of them. From the rejection.

  After all, she’d been fired before.

  “Oh,” she said, making herself remote. Trevarr drifted subtly closer, one hand briefly touching her back. Cold tingling heat. “Okay, then. I misunderstood. It’s all yours.”

  Lucia straightened into long elegance. “We all misunderstood,” she said, and sent Quinn a look that should have quelled his beseeching expression, the one that hoped they’d overlook the moment. The one with a wince behind it, wisely doubting that anyone would.

  Robin hesitated before nodding minutely, as if things were now as they should be. Probably they were, as far as she was concerned. “The going gets easier from here.”

  Lucia looked back at the steep angles they’d just traversed, responding more darkly than was her usual wont. “I certainly hope so, pajarito.”

  Robin gestured vaguely downhill, where two slashing canyon walls cut toward one another and left a wide V in the center. “We’re about to hook up with Vultee Arch Trail. The walk in from the other side is easier, so the Arch is a pretty popular spot as these things go.”

  Quinn put on his trivia face. “There’s even a plaque. To the memory of Gerard ‘Jerry’ Vultee, pioneer aviation developer, and his wife Sylvia, who lost their lives in the crash of their airplane near this site on 29 January, 1938.”

  Lucia shuddered. “Here? They didn’t have a chance. I hope we don’t meet them.”

  “The plaque went up in sixty-nine,” Quinn said. “They’d probably have shown up by now if they wanted to cause trouble. And the actual crash site is a mile north of here on East Picket Mesa.” He shrugged, as if dismissing all that. “Besides, Robin already knows what’s going on. We just need to figure out how big a problem it is and what to do about it.”

  Robin cast a look at Garrie, one that quite clearly said and that is why I called him, and not you.

  Garrie rocked back on her heels slightly, pushing into the warmth of Trevarr’s hand. “It’s all yours,” she said again, as much of a shrug in her voice as she could muster.

  Robin squared her shoulders and stepped out ahead of them. “It’s this way,” she said. “We’ll hit Vultee Arch Trail, and then we’ll head out a little further to the arch itself. You’ll see what I mean.” And she led the way.

  Garrie let the others go ahead before she started that final stretch of steep downhill, the trail now cutting through scrubby growth, manzanita and cactus on this lower slope. She didn’t expect Trevarr to lean in from behind, his hand shifting warmly to her shoulder. Without much thinking about it, she rubbed her cheek against his knuckles, catching his startled expression before she pulled away.

  Not a man used to tender gestures, apparently.

  Lucia offered exclamations of relief as the terrain bottomed out and met up with the Vultee Arch trail, spreading wide to bisect a broad flowering meadow. The path moved into a faint steady uphill that nonetheless felt easy in comparison with the recent terrain. Robin pointed them at a side-path, where a central gash in the rugged formation — red stone, deep green growth spread above the deciduous trees directly before them — turned into a minor slash of a water-worn canyon. A sandstone bridge spanned the sides of the mini-canyon, as level as any road.

  “Drew would have liked this,” Lucia said, a little sadly.

  Garrie took a breath. “Drew is happy,” she said, firmly enough to convince herself. I hope. Because really, who knew? And how long had he known Beth before making the decision to stay in San Jose?

  As if Garrie was one to talk. How long had she known Trevarr before making decisions that changed everything?

  Starting with travel to another world.

  Beth, at least, was innocuous. Tour guide and mild sensitive.
Someone who could understand Drew’s odd moments.

  Although honestly, with Drew there were a lot of those.

  “Forty feet high,” Quinn was saying. “Fifty feet long. Not an arch, per se, but a geological bridge — creek water washed out the rock beneath it. Twenty minutes, and we’ll be there.”

  “Can we climb out on it?” Lucia asked.

  Quinn gave her a surprised look. “Do you want to?”

  “No,” Lucia admitted.

  “Yes!” Garrie said — and then found herself able to laugh as Sklayne exploded out from beneath a bush on the trail of a lizard, batting frantically at it every step and catching nothing but dust.

  The hike was settling her after all, and if she’d come to Sedona through misunderstanding, then she could darned well play tourist while Quinn worked. So she was good with a trail that meant more clambering and climbing than walking; she was good with the giant blue sky and the intense colors and the hot, juniper- and cypress-scented breeze.

  She hitched up her sagging hip pack and headed down the side trail. Soon enough she found herself scrambling the last steep steps up to the arch itself, well-worn sandstone just barely wide enough to navigate without that balance beam feel. High above the ground, it offered her the perfect vantage to watch the others approach.

  Sklayne was nowhere to be found, of course. And she didn’t spot Trevarr until she realized he was much closer than she’d thought, quieter than a man of strength and height should be and standing at the end of the arch.

  She gestured at the opposing canyon side — troll-like rock formations jutting up from a rounded red hillside of pines, brilliant sky above. “Not much like home for you.”

  “No,” he said. Not one for wasting words. He surprised her by adding, “Not much.”

  And then they weren’t alone any more, as the others straggled up past the humped red rock with the memorial plaque. Lucia waved as they spread out beneath the arch, but they made no attempt to climb up. Robin indicated an area to Quinn, who began searching it in slow circles, and Robin and Lucia eventually sat. Lucia was fading; Robin looked beat.