“What do you mean, a turtle?” Quinn asked. “There are ten native turtle species in New Mexico, and not a single one of them hangs out in Albuquerque away from the Rio Grande.”
“Someone’s pet,” Robin offered. “Can you get it?”
Sort of, Lucia had said. Sort of. Because there it sat behind the tire all right, its shell round and spiked. With thorns. Glistening, sticky-looking thorns. Garrie dropped her nominal working shields and sent out a probe, a stinging little slap of energy at the turtle.
Not-turtle.
It reacted fiercely to her probe, bringing up a stiff fringed collar of flaming orange. Its mouth opened, jaws unhinging to make way for an emerging tubule—stiff and spiked and throbbing. It crouched, its armored back arching, its energies a dark and roiling little blot. Lucia jerked back, still far too close.
“Fark!” Garrie slung a hasty shield around it, an unconscious imitation of Sklayne’s technique with the sad little not-salamander in the garbage bin. But this moment held no finesse with attack imminent; she jerked the shields tight and twisted.
The creature’s eyes bugged out; its tubule splurted a thick, foul liquid over tire and asphalt. By then Lucia had put hasty distance between them, sounding a belated cry of the obvious. “Not a turtle! Not a turtle!”
Not really even close. It sagged, the tubule withdrawing and the liquid dribbling into its own mouth along the way.
“Wow,” Drew said. “Definitely not a turtle.”
But Robin caught on to the important part well before Drew, or Quinn, or even Lucia. “You killed it,” she said, horrified. “You didn’t even hesitate. You killed it.” She looked like maybe she didn’t want a ride any longer. “I didn’t even know you could do that.”
“Neither did I,” Quinn said, his quiet voice meaning just as much as Robin’s outrage. More. “I didn’t know you could. I didn’t know you would.”
Lucia looked at her with dismay. “Chic—”
So much for the good old days.
She didn’t say I didn’t know, either, although it was true. She said, “It was mostly ethereal.” As if that explained everything. But they held themselves stiff and surprised, and she sighed. “It was damaged inside. It wasn’t fixable. It wasn’t safe.”
Drew scoffed, just a little bit. “It was just a—”
Garrie’s car made a settling noise. A little groan, a little squeak. Air hissed, then whooshed, from the tire as it flattened. A hole pockmarked the asphalt behind it, and the not-turtle collapsed in a mess of half-formed flesh. A steam rose gently from it all, flavoring the air with the scent of rotting feet.
Lucia stabbed an unsteady finger at it all, a squeak in her throat. No one needed words to get her meaning. She’d hardly been any further from it than the tire. Not a turtle at all.
“Change of plans,” Garrie said. “I need a new tire. Then I see the contractor.”
Robin said faintly, “I’ll drive back with Drew.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 20
Thwack Thwack Thwack!
Rhonda Rose
The timing for Lisa’s first dissolution was terrible—even worse than I feared.
The remnant was strongly realized and completely distorted, a young woman of Lisa’s age. And Lisa was, finally, old enough so absences from home were no longer remarked upon. On this night, however, her parents were at the symphony. An anniversary treat, I believe. So Lisa—fifteen years old, still all legs and petite form and a new penchant for skinny jeans, snug shirts, and short untamed hair—was able to wander more widely afield than normal.
More widely afield than I should have allowed. I should never have let her depend on me for her safety, allowing her to push limits because she knew I’d be at her back.
She most likely thought I’d be there this time, too.
Under my supervision, she located an area of ethereal distress, then plotted it out on a map of the city. No more than several miles from her home, but no place for a young woman after dark—an unlit neighborhood northwest of her home and not far from the river and the sedimentation basin.
She rode her bicycle there without concern, sliding through the warm fall evening as though she could see it just a little bit better than anyone else. It wasn’t difficult for either of us to locate the diseased area—it dripped with an ichorous coating of effluvia. The fall wildflowers of the area had died, and the floodplain elms stood bare-branched, broken pieces of themselves all around.
The remnant made herself known quickly enough. She’d seen us coming and she wanted nothing to do with us, spitting ugly ethereal darts at Lisa before we’d so much as broached the street in question.
“That’s just rude,” Lisa said. She was not so much concerned as she was irritated. “That stuff never washes out completely.”
Physically manifested effluvia did indeed persist in a most profound way. Best to shield from it in the first place, but neither of us had accurately perceived the extent of this spirit’s aggressive nature.
As it turns out, aggression was all that was left of her.
We knew her story going in, of course. Lisa’s faculty with internet search engines had seen to that. A girl of Lisa’s age who had killed herself and then lingered not at her own home, but around that of the bully who had played such a role in her short life.
Lisa stopped her bike and glanced over her shoulder, and I knew her well enough to anticipate her question. This was no mournful spirit, as we had suspected it might be. This was remnant of revenge, and indeed if any person might be legitimately subjected to such misery, it would be the young woman who had carried out her siege on the dead girl.
Still, I said, “It isn’t your role to pass judgment, Lisa McGarrity.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled. “Right. Just clean things up so the city stays nice and tidy. I get it.”
But she knew as well as I that such an infection of ethereal malice would only root and spread, affecting far more than the single target in question, and her protest was token. She made an unpleasant noise in her throat and added, “Fine.”
She leaned her bicycle against a street sign, and then on second thought unwound the lock from beneath the seat and secured it. “Fine,” she said again, and stood to face the street and its ethereal darkness. She propped her hands on her hips, impatient with the entire scenario. Before I could voice caution, she slapped a sharp, rude breeze down the street in the direction of those effluvial darts. “Donna! You down there?”
The spirit responded with a meanness of intent I have rarely encountered, spiking cruel ugliness from every part of her manifestation. She didn’t want to harm Lisa so much as she wanted to make her cry, to wring sobs of hurt and pain from her soul. Her voice echoed down the dark street in a vibrating whisper. “Do you want to be my frieeend?”
Lisa looked over her shoulder to me, less certain than she’d been in a long time. “Creepy,” she said, her expression exaggerated lest I somehow not get her meaning.
“Do your best,” I murmured.
Lisa cleared her throat. “No, Donna, I don’t want to be your friend. But I do want to help you.”
It wasn’t a bad start. A spirit so twisted by life experiences of bullying would prefer honesty to manipulation.
The vibrating response was no less malevolent than before. “I don’t need your help.”
“Yeah,” Lisa said. “You really do. Because however this goes tonight, this mess you’re making has got to stop.”
“Beautiful mess,” the voice said, and it came dripping with threat. A bat dropped out of the sky, caught in a random whirlwind of hatred. “Perfect revenge. GLORIOUS retribution.”
Lisa stood a little straighter. Her hands fisted at her sides. “Did you just kill a bat?”
Silence greeted this query, but the spirit wasn’t inactive. Dark ethereal clouds boiled above the house where the girl’s tormentor lived, drawing sparks from the electrical box. To the mundane eye, only the sparks would be visible—but the wildf
lowers were still dead, and the bat had still fallen, and the sparks would still start a fire.
“Hey!” Lisa said sharply, and if I could hardly approve of her informality, I understood her urgency. Already she formed opposing breezes, an attempt to smooth away the damage being done here and to prevent the spirit from inciting worse.
But subtle solutions always took more time than brute force.
“You don’t need help?” Lisa said. “Fine. Come over here and tell me about it.”
“No one listennns.”
“I came here to listen. And believe me, I had other things to do. There’s an MST3K marathon on tonight.”
“Lisa,” I said quietly, but I hardly had to warn her. She took a single step back and then forward again as the unfortunate girl coalesced in the street in front of her victim’s house. Larger than she’d been in life, formed of wiggling scribbles such as those that might have come from a living crayon.
“Here’s the thing,” Lisa said, and although she’d forced her words to be casual, I could hear the strain in her voice. “You need to move on. To leave these people alone. I’ll try to make things right if I can, but this other stuff...this stops tonight.”
I saw it a mere instant before it happened, as that troubled spirit grew more dense, more compact—no longer manifestation of what had been a young girl, but a pure, unadulterated gathering of threat and vengeance.
It sprang.
I cried warning, but Lisa had no need of it.
“No!” she shouted, and again. “NO!” She threw her hands in the air, fingers out splayed, a small and insignificant figure against the backdrop of destruction.
A figure with the power of the world at her fingertips. A power she’d never been forced to draw on in extremity. Never hastily, or without my direct oversight.
She planted a seed of ethereal energy in the young woman’s remnant and expanded it with explosive intent.
Dissolution.
The young woman was no more. She had no chance to heal; she had no chance to continue her journey.
“She’s gone,” Lisa whispered, looking down at her hands. When she lifted her stricken gaze to me it was all I could do to keep from rushing over, from comforting her such as I could. Even as the pall lifted from the neighborhood and a cricket began its lone chirp, Lisa began to cry, looking at her hands as if she wanted to rip them from her body.
Because her grief was as it should be. A loss of innocence, a loss of what she had once been and would never be again.
“I’m sorry, Lisa,” I whispered gently. “I am so sorry.”
And then it happened, the thing I couldn’t have stopped even if I’d been there, the thing Lisa couldn’t have stopped even with all her unfettered power. Her parents. The car. The impact. The etherea shifted so sharply, so emphatically, that Lisa cried out—a wrenching moment of screeching brakes, the intruding reek of blood and hot metal in the air, the lingering strains of beautiful orchestral music intertwined with a sense of violence and impact and release and absence.
This night that Lisa’s parents had gone to see the philharmonic.
“Oh, Lisa,” I said. “I am so very sorry.”
~~~~~
Merely Convenient
Garrie’s meeting with the contractor went as smoothly as such things ever did. Adding to the solar panel installation wouldn’t, he assured her, be an overly complicated situation. Sklayne hovered, his avaricious excitement hardly contained, and Garrie sent him a stern reminder to leave the man’s truck battery alone.
Then the contractor left, and Garrie was alone on second story porch, leaning on her elbows to look out over the trees. Thinking of Trevarr, as ever. Feeling him, some faint sense of him, like a second skin under her own and a second heart enveloping hers.
She blinked rapidly several times and smeared away any trace of extra moisture on her lashes. Couldn’t have that. “I think I’ll get a cat.”
She felt Sklayne more than saw him, a mere ripple of nearby air and a giant exclamation point of reaction in her mind.
“After all, you’re not a cat,” she said, reaching out to scritch behind an invisible ear. “You’ve made that pretty clear.”
A dozen paws captured her hand; sharp teeth closed against skin without breaking through it and just as suddenly released. Sparks followed his progress as he leaped from the railing to stalk across the porch and then revealed the twitch of his tail.
“Not if you don’t want me to,” she said, and turned to lean on her elbows against the railing.
*Spttt!* he said. And then, *Maybe.*
“Up to you.”
*Up to me. Sklayne.* Twitch.
“Well, you let me know.” Garrie examined her newly scabbed knuckles—courtesy of the tire adventure—and said, so casually, “Tell me about the kyrokha.”
*Spttt!* The tail moved a few quick flips, enough for Garrie to know that Sklayne had taken his less usual form, the lean creature with a bobcat tail, lynx ears, and an uncommon number of teeth. *No cat?*
“Totally up to you. I thought it might be nice to adopt one of those relocated barn cats. But if you’re just going to eat it, there’s no point.”
Sklayne sat silent for a long moment—no sign of ripple, no sign of spark. For a moment Garrie thought she’d pushed him too far—playing on his inconsistent insecurities, poking his curiosity...
*Kyrokha,* he said. *Not bad.*
“You said that already. I get it. The one on the mountain isn’t bad. It’s still damaged, though. It’s dangerous.”
*Holy farking shit, dangerous.*
Garrie wiggled her toes, glad to be barefoot on the cool, smooth planks; glad to be distracted from thoughts of Trevarr. “I need to learn something I don’t know. What does kyrokha look like? How does it act? What makes it happy?”
Silence.
But Garrie couldn’t work with silence. She couldn’t go on guessing what she was doing, getting it wrong, hoping she could scramble fast enough to stay on her feet anyway.
“Okay,” she said, as matter-of-factly as possible. As if her heart wasn’t pounding hard. “If you’re not going to be helpful, then you need to go.”
A smear of sparks in shadow.
“Not that I won’t miss you,” she told him, catching her voice right before it quavered. “But if we’re going to do things together, then I need it to be together. Not just when you feel like it.”
He grew more visible as she spoke, but she couldn’t quite make out the details of him. Edges of fur, a twitch of movement, a cluster of sparks.
Until she realized that while her eye was looking for something cat-sized, Sklayne was no longer anything near.
Now he loomed over her, and his exposed double canines were as thick as her wrist. Thicker.
“No,” she said, surprised to feel a surge not of fear, but of anger. “That’s not how it works. You don’t get to bully me when I tell you what I need.”
*Sktt-tt!* Ethereal fire ran down his spine to whiplash off the end of his lashing tail and splatter across the deck, leaving a trail of smoking burn marks.
“No!” she said, standing straight now and glaring, understanding that quite suddenly, she was the one who’d been pushed beyond her limits. “I won’t back off! Just farking tell me what I need to know!”
Bigger yet, looming so big she could hardly take him in, his mouth in an open snarl and fire limning his teeth and whiskers, his eyes a whirling storm. *SKTT-TT!*
The sound reverberated through her body, rumbling in her lungs and vibrating the porch railing against her back. The ethereal breezes tumbled in chaos, manifesting strongly enough to first stir her hair, then plaster it flat.
“You know better than that!” she cried at him, barely hearing herself beneath the storm he’d wrought. “Trevarr taught you better than that!”
That gaping, Kong-sized feline mouth bent closer, opened wider—the teeth so very real, but the energy maelstrom within bearing the greater threat.
She wouldn’t get
into a slap-fight with him. Couldn’t. She wouldn’t win—she wouldn’t come close—and it would cross lines she could never uncross. Even if he’d crossed them first.
Because he hadn’t left.
She stuttered on a breath, squinting through the wind to glare back up at the mouth—all the myriad teeth, the double canines upper and lower, the tongue in a derisive curl, the whiskers bristling with fury, each as thick as a tree branch. You could have gone. But you didn’t. Because you need to win this one. And that means you need—
Me.
Didn’t matter why just now. Maybe he missed Trevarr. Maybe he thought she was a critical piece to helping Trevarr. Maybe it was something else altogether.
But he needed her.
She made herself not-there. Ethereally invisible. Unseen. She sat, her back to the railing and her knees tucked in the circle of her arms. She found the silent place inside herself and went there.
In a fury, the jaws snapped closed, the snap of teeth echoing down into the tiny valley below the house. For a brief moment, the winds picked up so strongly that she closed her eyes. He would perceive shielding, so she didn’t.
She simply wasn’t there.
The storm died. The giant feline visage shrank, collapsing into a small reddish cat sitting against the house. “Mow!” it said, and it sounded frightened. It leaped to the rail where Garrie had leaned and then down again; it ran to the other end of the porch and back again. “Mow!”
It was harder than she expected, watching him panic. Harder yet to sit still for it, waiting for the moment when he hesitated, side flattened against the house and flanks rising and falling, his jaw dropped to pant and his ears canted back.
She took a deep breath, and with the exhalation she let herself be seen again.
His ears flicked forward into little scoops. For the moment, he didn’t react at all, and she wondered if she’d gone too far—and still knew she had to have done it.
It didn’t stop her heart from beating a hard tattoo inside her chest. Especially when he broke that pose and rushed to her, feet pattering on wood, his mental voice still silent as he stood on his haunches and butted his head against her shoulder, her arm, her jaw. His front toes elongated just enough to secure his grip on her arm.
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