Garrie said dryly, “Sklayne would like me to express that the book was given to Quinn.”
Drew coughed. “How ’bout I go get it?”
Sklayne gave a little feline cough in imitation. *How about I come with.*
Garrie smiled with benevolence. “Sklayne would like me to express that he’d be glad to accompany you.”
Drew pushed off the railing. “Geeze, keep him away from my battery, will you?”
The sliding screen closed behind him and Lucia slid into his place at the railing. Garrie turned back to Quinn. “I’d like to keep the Bestiary here, but I’m still good if you want it at your place. Like Sklayne said...it was meant for you.”
A distant slam of car door indicated that Drew was running his errand with purpose. Quinn offered Garrie a look full of uncertainty—a clear awareness that he wasn’t as impervious as he’d probably always imagined himself. “Let’s just keep it here for a while.”
Garrie shrugged. “I can probably translate for you now, by the way—sounds like you don’t need it, though. And I asked Sklayne about the kyrokha. Didn’t get much.” She evoked a Sklayne-like rhythm to her words. “Big. Powerful. Not bad. Except, of course, that this one is clearly broken. And doesn’t want to be here.”
Quinn looked away—opened his mouth, and then closed it. Feeling the weight of Drew’s influence on his actions.
“Quinnie,” Lucia said, and waited him out until he looked at her. “What Drew did was wrong. If you want him out of this—”
Quinn’s sharp head shake didn’t hide his frustration. “There’s no telling when he might come in handy. I mean, two people are dead, and we still don’t know what this thing is or how to stop it, right? And there’s still the Bob to deal with.”
“Yeah,” Garrie said. “Considering he was behind what happened last night. And. Um.” She glanced at Lucia.
“Three,” Lucia said unhappily. “Three people dead now.”
Quinn gave her a sharp look—definitely getting his equilibrium back.
“And,” Garrie said, rubbing her sore arm, “you need to know that I’m not backing off on helping Trevarr.”
Quinn scowled—quick and easy, and entirely Quinn. “You don’t even know where he is.”
“Yeah,” Garrie said. “I kinda do.”
“Hell, he’s not even on this world—what? You what?”
“Chic...” Lucia wrinkled her nose, an are you certain? kind of look.
But Garrie was certain. Especially in the wake of Drew’s impact on Quinn, she was certain. Truth is what they needed now.
Inconvenient as it might be.
“I found him,” she said simply. “And I’m working on getting him back.”
“Just like that.” Quinn stared at her in his disbelief. “God, Garrie, do you even remember what Sedona looked like when Trevarr’s people got done with it? Do you remember how close you came to dying right then?”
“I’m working on it,” Garrie said, as implacably as she could. “For a moment, let’s pretend I won’t go about it in the worst possible way. And while you’re at it, keep in mind that Trevarr is the only inter-world bounty hunter we’ve got. Do you really think if he was here that we’d still be fumbling around with this kyrokha thing?”
Quinn made a disgruntled noise and a face to go with it, crossing his arms along the way. “Fine. If he was here, he would be the key to it all. The question is, does it make sense to complicate things when they’re already such a mess?”
Garrie leaned forward, elbows on knees. “The question is,” she said, “if we don’t get him back, will any of us survive?”
He scoffed, and she pinned him with a look. “Ghehera is aware of me—of us. And they don’t like what they’ve learned. They’ve taken him because they want to find me. If that happens, do you think anyone’ll be in any position to deal with Dana-Bob? Or the mountain?”
Lucia made a sound of dismay, clutching her drink. Quinn said, “Wait, they want you—”
Drew clomped up the stairs in the middle of it all, staggering under the weight of a massive leather-bound tome with thick, uneven pages—unfamiliar paper, unfamiliar script, detailed drawings and a strong whiff of ethereal power around it all. Sklayne trotted up the stairs behind him, tail jaunty.
“Here,” Drew announced, dropping the Bestiary not quite carefully enough to the porch, where it rebounded with an echoing thud. “For whatever good it’ll do.” He hesitated, looking at Lucia’s stricken face and Quinn’s unwilling understanding. “What’s going on?”
Quinn released a harsh snort of laughter and settled back into his seat. “A whole lot more than it seems, apparently.”
Distant road gravel crunched—going too fast, slowing abruptly at the hairpin turn to the driveway, and then briefly picking up speed to the other side of the house.
Quinn sent Garrie a look. “I guess we didn’t sneak up on you, then.”
“Not hardly.” Garrie pushed her glass aside and climbed out of the low chair. “But don’t ask me who this is.”
The front door opened. They all stilled, perfectly aware that anyone who might reasonably invite themselves in was already there.
“Lucia?” It was a man’s voice, and a man’s quick, work-boot footsteps across the entry tile. “Lisa—”
Lucia started. “Rick?”
By that time he’d reached the stairs and come up them an obvious two at a time, finding them out on the porch readily enough—only to stop short as he recognized Quinn and Drew from the trailhead parking lot.
Garrie spread her arms to indicate the house. “So hey, come right on in.” She narrowed her eyes to pin him to a stop. “Oh, wait. You did.”
“Lucia.” His gaze roamed across their gathering, full of frown. He wore his ranger uniform—green pants, grey shirt, arrowhead shoulder patch, and definite signs of hat hair—and a gray undertone rode beneath his deep olive skin tones. “Lisa. I need to talk to you—”
“We did that already,” Garrie said. “We didn’t actually like it very much.”
Quinn stood. He was taller than Rick, broader in the shoulders, just as fit—and nowhere near as affable as he’d been in the park. He might be hearing about their morning conversation for the first time, but he could more than guess how things had gone wrong.
Drew said, “Whoa,” and waved his hands as though he could cancel out the whole situation, but Rick wasn’t looking at him and he wasn’t looking at Quinn. He looked only at Lucia.
“Lucia,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I have to know—can you help stop this thing?”
Lucia drew herself up and glanced at Garrie.
Garrie crossed her arms. It had an element of unwilling go on to it, and Rick didn’t hesitate.
“My partner—my friend—is dead.” His voice shook just the slightest bit. “Right in front of me. He...it...” He gestured, jerky motion that might have been the gruesome charade of a man snatched up and twisted around. “I saw. But I can’t report—” He shook his head again, looking as trapped as any man could.
Garrie got it right away. “You came here,” she said. “You haven’t told your people yet. And you still don’t know what you’re going to tell them.”
“Lie,” Drew advised, still keeping his distance. “You got separated and you don’t know what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened.” Rick’s desperation spilled out all over his face. He took a step toward Garrie and stopped himself. “But I think you do.” He looked back at Lucia, torn. “I know you feel used. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but I screwed up. I’m sorry. But please—”
“What?” Garrie wasn’t without sympathy, and not without irony, either. “Do something?”
Rick let out an explosive breath. “Yes. Yes, do something.”
“Like...what, go to your bosses and the FBI and Search and Rescue and put myself on record as saying what you don’t want to tell them yourself?”
His mouth shut; his jaw worked.
“News flash.” Garrie snagged her glass from the table and let the water cool her throat and her temper—quenching the dark heat that reared up so easily of late. “I don’t need you to tell me to do something. I’ve been working on this all along. We all have.”
Quinn still lurked a little more conspicuously than he might have, but the glare had gone out of his blue eyes. “If it was easy, it would already be done.”
Rick rubbed his hand over his face, smearing dirt there. He’d fallen, Garrie realized. Fallen and scrabbled in the dirt and retreated and then probably stood there helplessly, screaming equally helpless words at his friend—like “Fight that thing!” and “Let him go!” and “Sonuvafuckingbitch!”, not to mention the Spanish she’d leave to her imagination.
He finally managed to say, “I’d really appreciate some water.”
She would have reminded him where the kitchen was. Lucia simply handed him her glass. He downed the water in several big gulps, wiping his chin with the back of his hand as he set the glass to the table. “I’d like to know,” he said, more quietly now even if with evident effort, “what you’ve done so far.”
Quinn’s matter-of-fact response to Rick had a hard edge to it. “We laid down containment, along with a substance specifically meant to repel this particular entity. We’ve been all over those trails—Cienega, Faulty, Bill Spring, Sulphur Canyon. That’s what we were doing the day you saw us.”
Sklayne stropped against Garrie’s shins and hopped most casually from the porch to the table to the gutter, trotting briskly up the roof to his beloved solar panels. *Boring,* he said. *Blah blah blah. Call me if fun starts.*
Garrie didn’t care to consider Sklayne’s definition of fun.
“Containment,” Rick repeated, without understanding it—looking somewhat dazed now. A man trying to process the unthinkable, still faced with the impossible. He spotted the massive Bestiary on the deck and went to it, crouching to flip it open, turning the pages with care—cautious when it came to touching the thick, unfamiliar paper. He glanced up at Garrie, his expression unreadable. “And did you really have a migraine that day?”
“I had a problem,” Garrie said. “That’s all you need to know. And I really did sight the entity out on Cienega, and we really did report the fake bear to protect people.”
“It’s not like we had options,” Lucia said. “You think we don’t know how you would have reacted to the truth? The same way you did react to the truth. But the bear thing got your attention. And the migraine thing got us out of there.”
Rick ran his hand across an illustration that looked like nothing more than Sklayne in his native solid form. The thick pages crackled slightly as his fingers traced crammed lines of rugged glyphs, hesitating at additional illustrations of a forested glade, evergreens dripping with heavy boughs and secondary growth. Hesitating, and visibly pulling himself from his daze and back to sharper thought.
Of course, a forest ranger would know when he saw an animal—or tree—that didn’t belong on this world.
Drew leaned on the wall near the top of the stairs, responding to Rick’s wary bafflement as he stood. “Like, do your people think you’re still on the trail, and will they go looking for you out on that trail anytime soon?”
“Dios,” Rick said, the color draining from his face once more as the implications hit home. “I need to sit down.” Garrie pivoted her chair around for him.
Sklayne’s yeowl split the air. Claws scrabbled against shingle, cat out of control and on the way down. He tumbled off the roof to land near her feet. *Ghehera hunts!*
Ghehera! Garrie grabbed at her silence, making herself invisible to their search.
Rick took one look at Sklayne’s lanky legs and big tufted ears and stumpy lashing tail, his toes spread wide across the deck and his thumbs completely, entirely in evidence—and sprang back from the chair. “Dios!”
Sparks puffed out as Sklayne’s hackles rose. *Silence, the Garrie! Be silent!*
“I am!”
Dana-Bob stumbled into the midst of them from out of nowhere, sans his bike, sans his sharp-edged attitude—all blurry edges and big anime eyes. All perfectly visible to everyone there—and so clearly emitting the impression of Garrie’s breezes. “What is that? What have you done?”
Rick said, “DIOS!” and crossed himself.
“Fark!” Garrie snapped, perfectly aware that Dana bore the imprint of her own breezes. She grabbed Quinn’s resisting arm and pushed him ahead. “Inside. Inside, all of you. The master bedroom closet.”
“Hey, what—” Drew protested, as she latched onto him on the way past, shoving him onward.
Garrie turned to Lucia without hesitating. “You, too—and Ranger Rick there.”
Rick said, “Excuse me? What the hell?”
“You came to put us back in the middle of it—well, now you’re in the middle of it! So get moving!” She crouched by the Bestiary—no telling what vibes it gave off—and flipped it closed, bracing herself. Even so, she staggered a little when she stood with it. Sklayne bounded past her and through the sliding door.
Lucia poked Rick with little patience. “Inside! Or I start calling you Ranger Rick, too!”
Her words galvanized him into action. He snagged the heavy book from Garrie and followed Lucia into the house.
Only one left. Garrie looped a rope of twisted breezes around Dana-Bob and dragged him into the house, all the way to the master bedroom closet. Still empty of clothes but now entirely full of people, lit from above by a solar tube. Garrie closed the door behind them and allowed her silence to fill the small space, pressing against the walls to protect them all and sighing with relief when it was done.
“What,” said Rick, pointing at Dana, “is that.”
Dana said, “Well, excuse me for not-living!”
“What,” said Rick, backing away from Sklayne, “is that!?”
Sklayne hissed, but without any force behind it.
“Fark, I’m trapped with the Stooges,” Garrie muttered. “Sklayne, be smaller. Rick, make a choice. Do you want to see Dana, or not see him? Because he’s going to be in here either way.”
“Why is that again?” Drew asked, crammed into one of the corners. “And is this blood on the carpet?”
*Missed a spot,* Sklayne said to Garrie. He shifted to his smaller Abyssinian form, inspiring another muffled exclamation from Rick.
“He’s got to be here because Ghehera is hunting me. Right now.” She kept the dread from her voice, knowing they needed her calm right now. But if Ghehera had come hunting, it could only mean that they’d given up on Trevarr—and that meant he was out of time. “And Dana has to be here because he’s...”
But she wasn’t sure how to say it. Not without sounding weirdly incestuous.
“Tainted,” Dana finished for her. “Tainted with you.”
“Not exactly how I’d put it,” Garrie said under her breath.
“So this is another thing I’ve got to thank you for,” Dana said. He paused, his head cocked...his eyes shrinking to a more normal size. Growing darker. “On the other hand, now that we’re all in here together...”
Sklayne made an unhappy sound even as Garrie felt a low vibration, a pressure on ears, the whine of tires over asphalt magnified and enhanced and—
“Dana,” she said, warning in her voice. “Don’t do this. Not now.”
The vibration grew louder, the rumble deeper—the stench of burnt rubber in the small space, making it hard to breathe. Or maybe that was the vibration, making her chest reverberate inside. He said, “Oh, but I like now very much.”
Because he thought she was preoccupied—hobbled by keeping the silence. He had no idea well she could multitask.
“Farking dammit,” she said, although her voice seemed barely audible over the weirdly distant wail of sirens, echoes of Dana’s death moments. “You behave yourself, and you behave yourself now.”
Lucia coughed, a hand to her chest; she might have been trying to say something. Rick put an a
rm around her, his face tense with distaste at the stench surrounding them.
*Let me,* Sklayne said, a bite in his tone. *Not living. Not forbidden.*
But Garrie had already spun the breezes she needed, pulling them from this small space, from herself—from Dana himself. She gestured sharply and flung a breeze net into an expert cast, tightening them with a jerk—completely enclosing Dana and snugging down with a tightening bite. The rumbling faded.
The stench would no doubt take longer.
Dana lifted his hands, pushing against the containment. It moved with him like a glove. Garrie kept it snug. “I warned you. I told you what was at stake. And yet here we are again.”
“I just wanted—”
“You,” she said, “keep putting everyone in danger because you’re not getting what you want exactly when you want it! I cut you some slack because of your circumstances, but we’re done with that.”
Lucia disentangled herself from Rick. “Chic, maybe he was damaged?”
“Does it matter?” Garrie asked, thinking of that first dissolution, of the little girl who hadn’t deserved what happened to her in either life or death. “Either way, he keeps risking us all.”
Quinn cleared his throat. “If he was an asshat in life, he left traces of it. I can find them. Give you some sense of whether this is his real nature.”
Garrie paced the tiny space available to her—one step, two—and pinned Dana with her attention. “Reprieve,” she said. “For the moment. Long enough for you to think about this: dissolution means no second chances, no resolutions...no transition. If I need to find you—to stop you—I can. Any time. Just the same way you can find me. You get what I’m saying?”
His eyes had gone small and dark, a void of creepiness. “Yes,” he said. “You’ve bullied me and now you’ve threatened me, when I’ve been the victim all along. So what’s the difference between you and that thing on the mountain?”
*Let me.* Sklayne extruded claws and a scorpion tip to his tail.
Reckoner Redeemed Page 22
