Feather spoke without regard for the awe, pointing at the spot where the massive rock had been. “There, a memorial,” she said. “For our young woman. For her daughter. Billie Tillson. I did learn that much.”
Garrie pulled her thoughts together. She recalled the woman’s ghost, the vague area in her pelvic girdle that Garrie had taken as the point of the fatal injury... bones broken, blood vessels sheared. “That’s what it was all about?”
Billie suddenly stood right where the rock had been. Now she was completely formed, down to the flat belly above her hip-huggers. “I’d only just found out. I didn’t want to change my life — I didn’t want to not do everything I’d always done. So I went hiking that day. And with that, I killed her. I wasn’t careful enough, and I fell.” She put a hand — all rings and string bracelets and henna swirls — on her belly. “I have to face that. That I killed her.” But sudden fury crossed her face. “But don’t let anyone ever say I did this to myself! To her! That’s what I want, now. What I need.”
“I think you already have what you need,” Garrie told her. “When you protected this place, you protected her. You could have fled, or hidden in the safety of all the others. You didn’t. And you know it.”
Billie smiled. “Hmm,” she said. “Groovy. I do.”
Feather declared, “And we’ll have the memorial anyway. Caryn, are you listening?”
Caryn crouched by Feather’s body like a deer in the headlights. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but... yes. I hear you. I — oh God. Yes.”
“You can tell them I was racing to the cleansing circle after Trickle collapsed, and the upset was apparently too much for me. I’d like to be remembered that way, as trying to save him.” Feather thought about this, and nodded. “Yes, that’s good. So, the memorial goes over there. And move the cleansing circle to the vortex. The Journey Vortex.”
“But—” Caryn touched her aunt’s body, a tentative motion. “How can I... how can I possibly stay here? Knowing it’s all my fault that you... that you’re—”
Garrie found herself glad that Caryn couldn’t see Feather’s tight smile. “That’s your penance, isn’t it? Staying. And gathering up this community — start with Theo and his wife, first — did you see their son? I think you’ll find they’ll be willing to help now. And then you help the spirits in this area — you do it right. I gather you’ve learned the difference?”
“What if I haven’t?” Caryn hid her face in her hands. “What if I forget or lose track or...”
“Then come out here. I think you’ll find your reminders.” Feather lifted her head, looking around — pride on her face for what had been created here on this day. She seemed a little taller, lithe instead of thin, healthy instead of dulled. “Caryn... I was dying anyway, child. Not for a few months yet, but it wouldn’t have been too much longer. This was, in its way, a mercy.” As Caryn lifted her tear-tracked face in surprise, Feather gave a final nod. “That’s it, then. I didn’t name this place the Journey Inn for nothing. I’m headed out!”
“But — !” Caryn said, reaching out to thin air as if there might possibly be something to grasp.
“Groovy,” Billie said. “Want some company?”
“We’ve been living in each other’s hair for a while now,” Feather said. “It only seems right.”
No fanfare, no glamour.
Just gone.
Caryn looked to Garrie for confirmation, stricken.
Garrie shrugged. “It happens that way sometimes,” she said. “Not everyone hangs around.”
Or maybe not quite gone.
“Thank you,” Feather’s voice said, light as a breeze in Garrie’s ear. “You and your friends... and your little cat, too...”
Sklayne hissed and stalked away.
Chapter 29
After That
“Learn not just from the living.”
— Rhonda Rose
“Gahhhh.”
— Lisa McGarrity
Garrie closed the door behind her — Yes, Caryn, thank you Caryn, we’re fine, Caryn, we appreciate the rooms, Caryn — and regarded Trevarr with a critical eye.
Here. Sitting on the bed with his legs stretched out. In their very own room.
Because Feather’s death had closed the inn, at least officially. And Garrie and Lucia’s room still lacked a door. So Lucia had taken a new room, and Garrie no doubt could have had a room all to herself if she had wanted.
But with Quinn and Robin still ninety minutes away at the Prescott hospital, Garrie had instead tucked away his tangled cords, power bricks, and devices and made herself at home right here.
Come the next day, they would be at work again — following through, smoothing things out. Especially when it came to the local community, the sensitive members of which were now variously offended, abashed, and embarrassed at the way they’d treated Lucia, and at their failure to handle the situation without outside help.
That was fine with Garrie. She needed to settle herself... and there was no better way than to work through what had happened than to clean up after it.
After a wicked long-distance workout on the elliptical to get things started.
But for tonight, she was simply being with Trevarr. He’d cleaned up and had his wounds tended, as had they all. Garrie sported butterfly strips on her purpled and throbbing forehead, and Trevarr’s refreshed clothing hid most of his brightly colored bandages. His tall leather boots sat discarded by the bed, leaving him charmingly barefoot but otherwise clad — rugged dark pants with their narrow fall front, leather belt riding slouchy low on his hips, shirt of darkest indigo and faintly iridescent, paneled with butter-soft leather.
There’d be no instant healing, as had occurred in San Jose — or even almost instant healing, as had occurred when he’d then returned to Kehar, a bullet lodged in dangerous places. Too much, too fast, Sklayne had said. Too costly, for a body already faltering, even after Sklayne had tanked up on bodies, gone off to suck on a power line, and then done what he could. The rest would come as it did.
So he’d told her, before stalking out to see what small creatures he could torture in the night... muttering something inexplicable about protect the Garrie.
From what, she didn’t know. Huntington was dead, the lerkhet was dead, the vortex was in full whirl.
“Oh! The tea!” Including the plant Sklayne had worked so hard to gather, and which — although the desert sun had made a good fast start on it — he’d personally finished desiccating so Garrie could steep it in strong black tea.
She went to the tiny microwave on the tiny refrigerator beside a tiny counter and fetched the behkma tea, fishing out the limp stalk from Sklayne’s sticky, stinky plant — following his directions with precision. Enough, but not too much.
Trevarr greeted her offering with something precariously close to a glower. “Ah,” she said, handing the mug over. “Not used to healing up the hard way, are you?”
He looked away as she sat on the edge of the bed. His jaw hardened; nothing more. No Lucia hands-flung drama for Trevarr; no guileless in-your-face Quinn or even completely clueless Drew.
What you see is what you get — if you could see it at all.
And there, looking closer, she suddenly did. Enough to understand that he wasn’t thinking of himself, but of her goose-egg forehead and the fingerprint bruises on her arms and hidden under her shorts. Of the moments his injuries had left her fighting her own battle, and of the things that had almost happened.
“Hey,” she said. “It’s okay.”
He said, after a long moment of silent emotion, “It is not.” Finally, he looked at her. “What if you hadn’t—” Hadn’t made it. What if I had failed you.
What if being willing to die for you hadn’t been enough?
“Whoa,” she said, narrowing her eyes and stopping just short of poking him with a finger of ire. “Who ever said you were the babysitter of me? And who got who into that situation?”
He closed his eyes. His hand tig
htened around the mug. “The lerkhet—”
“We all thought that was a good idea. And I’m the one who lost control of the situation! All those different energies...” She flushed. She’d been so unprepared, so overwhelmed. Rhonda Rose had never prepared her for such things. Had never known to prepare her.
I don’t do people. There was a reason for that.
“This is on all of us,” she said finally. “But I’m not sure any of us ever could have been ready for it. I think...” She shook her head, blew out a gust of breath. “I think things are different after what the Krevata did. Whatever Huntington was up to, it didn’t get bad until then. And if things were this fragile around here, I would have known about it a long time ago.”
Her words were supposed to help. But his brief glance showed her a man stricken beyond what she’d imagined this particular man could ever be. Just a glimpse, before he brought the tea up, knuckles white at the handle, to drain the mug.
She climbed onto the bed, making enough room to kneel and then sit back on her ankles beside his good leg. After a moment’s hesitation, she took his hand.
Carefully, because of his arm, but persistently.
For that moment, it was the bravest thing she had ever done — holding her ground against his resistance and the hard shell of rejection behind it, and for that instant wondering if she’d ever really known him at all. Absorbing the very fact that she sat on this incredibly mundane bed beside him — this stranger, who had so recently pushed her up against a wall, responding to her welcome, eyes literally blazing with need and hands invading her body. Tender, wicked, astonishing demand, and wringing the same need, the same reaction, right back out of her.
Did that happen, with two true strangers? And if it did, didn’t they then know each other on some level in a way that no one else ever could or would?
She thought no, and yes. And so she stayed brave, sitting beside him there until his hand softened, ever so slightly, beneath hers.
She said, very carefully, “I don’t do what ifs, Trevarr. I do the best I can. That’s all. And you... you do better than anyone.”
Almost as if she’d hit him, and she didn’t know why. The tightening of his mouth; the flare of nostril. He pulled his hand back... she didn’t let go. And didn’t let go. Until he looked at her, something of defeat behind his gaze. Something of acceptance.
Something of being accepted.
She released his hand. She found his thigh instead, and ran her hand down the length of it; hard muscle twitched in surprise at her touch. “Your problem,” she said, giving him a moment to absorb that she thought he had a problem at all, “is that healing like the rest of us is annoying. It’s tedious. It’s inconvenient.”
His scowl would have intimidated the boldest conversationalist.
Garrie only smiled. Dark power lurked along her bones, simmering deep. She added her own breezes, light and clean and precise. She mixed them together, breathing them up and out, right through her touch along his leg.
The scowl turned startled. Maybe a little wary.
She followed his leg to the hard line of his hip, trickling breezes out along the way. He shifted beneath her touch. “Atreya...”
“Breathe,” she said, so innocently. “You know. Ebb and flow.”
She knew the line she was treading... the push and shove, the things she stirred within him... within herself. Not in the distant safety of some warded, shielded Keharian cave, but here in this cabin with both of them vulnerable and both of them needing.
He could have stopped her.
He didn’t.
His hand, moving to halt hers, instead stilled and subsided. His breathing quickened; his body quickened. He caught her eye and held it, submitting to her touch.
She ran her fingers along his sides, lean flanks that would fill out as he healed, the thickened skin where a bullet had so recently carved a path. She ran them along the curve of rib to the flat planes of his chest, feeling every tensing muscle. She slipped her hands beneath his shirt and imagined she discerned the faint tracery of tattoos that weren’t, watching diamond pupils widen — watching the very moment when he floundered for composure and control — a flutter of eye, head tipping back, the sudden intake of breath.
He gave in return that which had almost been taken from her this day — a sense of self, a sense of control... a sense of intimate belonging.
Because this was the way it should be done. Giving, not demanding. Accepting, not taking. And doing it until what whirled between them ceased to belong to one or the other but only to both.
Along the way she’d somehow pulled her shirt off and shucked her pants, mastered the secondary knot and unfamiliar fastening of his sharply incised belt buckle, and rediscovered just exactly how convenient those front fall pants could be. And if he’d understood her initial unspoken rules — clamping his good hand down hard on the side of the creaking headboard to keep himself from guiding with her touch, the other hand, injured or not, finally reached for her.
She let energies gather and swell into something far, far, bigger than either of them — the dark smoke rising mingled with a bright spark of reckoner clarity, the gathering sweep of wings and shadows. He twisted beneath her with a sound both beseeching and demanding until she finally locked her mouth onto his, all strong tea and bitter herb and canine teeth sharp against her tongue. She guided them together, letting him take them the rest of the way.
Not a taciturn man in love, her Trevarr.
And then she lay gasping on his chest, trying to feel her toes again and clinging to the lingering sense of what she brought out in him — what she brought out in herself. He made her feel small — he’d always made her feel small.
But also just right. And if she just lay here draped over and around him, catching her breath and pretending the rest of the world didn’t exist, maybe she could feel it forever.
“Mow.” The voice was weak and dazed and wondering.
Familiar and small and questioning.
And in this room.
Garrie stiffened. Trevarr — his one good hand already conveniently palming her posterior — clamped down just enough to keep her from levitating off him. Not enough, by far, to keep her from twisting around.
Sklayne. Lying along the front door sill like a draft-stopper, stretched out and limp.
“You!” Garrie’s indignation spiked. “You! You were on the other side of that locked door! Where you should have stayed!”
Sklayne froze, as if just now realizing where he was, and that he was also visible. “Mow!” he said, and poof! big-as-the-world to small again, under the sill and out before she could say anything else.
“Gahhh.” Garrie rested her face on Trevarr’s chest, fully aware that the new catch in his breathing was repressed amusement, if not outright laughter.
Again, laughter from this man. What was the world coming to?
“Easy for you to laugh. Next time, you’re going to be the naked one.” She gave his chest a thoughtful lick along the patterned edge of etched feathered scales, and his fingers flexed into her bottom. But instead of following up, he pulled the quilt over them and, just as they were, they relaxed toward sleep.
She thought she heard something — or someone — purring around her as and the world dropped away to the steady rise and fall of Trevarr’s chest.
Atreyo.
Chapter 30
Kehar: Prepare Yourselves
Nevahn recovered in his tiny new dwelling, weakened by the Ghehera ordeal in ways he couldn’t quite understand. He sought to find himself again, alone except for those moments Ardac sent in his meals — or brought them himself, caring for Nevahn even as he grew into his new role as a leadership role.
Not so slowly now. But he was the only other one of them who had felt the touch of the mendihar. It made him uniquely suited, these days.
Someone stood in the roughed-out doorway of his dwelling; Nevahn heaved himself up to sit, expecting Ardac again.
Anjhela’s
husky-smooth voice greeted him instead. “You’re not looking so well.”
Nevahn’s words came out gravelly and wry. “Thank you for that, by the way.”
“Oh, it was my pleasure.” Anjhela smiled, an expression that could very nearly be called dreamy. “Very much my pleasure.”
“For all the good it did you.” He’d told them he knew nothing, and he’d known nothing. No matter how they plumbed his memories.
“Ah,” Anjhela said, and smiled again. “And thus the reason for my visit.”
Nevahn instantly grew wary. Anjhela’s smile didn’t broaden so much as it grew more satisfied, her lips a sultry curve. “We have found him,” she announced. “Through no help of yours nor his, but merely because he could not help but be at the center of any disturbance on that other world.”
She smiled again, a predatory thing, suddenly close enough to Nevahn’s raised pallet that he could no longer shrink away from the tip of her finger under his chin.
“Through no help of yours,” she said again, lingering over the words. “And there is a price for that. Soon enough, you will pay it.”
Chapter 31
Hunting the Hunter
“Come and take me, then.”
— Trevarr
Garrie slipped back into the cabin just past dawn, fresh from the inn’s workout room as she eased past the brokenly ajar door of her old room and into the one she and Trevarr now shared.
The violence of the previous day seemed far away, and her body still purred from the night — love and sleep, and time during which Trevarr dutifully drank the horrid behkma tea and, played out or not, continued to heal faster than anyone had a right to.
Or so it would have seemed, the way he was using his arm that last —
Garrie put her back to the door she’d gently closed behind her, taking a breath. A deep breath. Get over it. This isn’t a honeymoon.
Or maybe it kinda was. For once, it had taken only an hour of running before she settled enough to face the day. Love and sleep, it seemed, did a body good.
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