Roiling, murky reds and black streaks, surging up in storm surge waves to splash against the ridges and back again, hard edges delineating its glowering boundaries in bold brushstrokes.
“Fark,” she said. “And crap. Farking crap.”
Lucia inched a little closer to her, looking around with worry. “Is it close?”
“It’s not right on us.” Not quite. Garrie squinted up at the dangerously unsettled mass of the kyrokha. For an uneven fog of anger and hatred and resentment, its boundaries seemed stationary enough.
For the moment.
Quinn stood tall, looking south over the rise of terrain. “There they are!”
Garrie moved uphill until she spotted the shelter, close by the forest edge. Rick stood inside, waving at them—a vague form obscured by the haze of the mountain entity, which had dropped down over the shelter.
“Fark,” Garrie said again, grabbing Lucia’s arm when she would have run for them. “And crap. Farking crap.”
Sklayne made a short feline sound that sounded like a curse—still on the car, although he now sat up as though begging for a treat, his front legs hanging at his chest and his attention riveted on the entity.
Garrie asked, “You think you can do this?”
*Try,* he offered, but he didn’t sound certain.
“Gotta know, Sklayne. One way or the other. Or I’ll make the wrong move out there.”
His front feet came lightly down on the car roof; he crouched there, ears flicking uncertainly.
“Not the whole thing,” Garrie said, as it belatedly occurred to her that he might well think in those terms. “Just right in this area. Around the shelter.”
Quinn looked back with impatience. “If he can’t, he can’t. We’d better get with it, Garrie. Rick’s having a tough time keeping those people in there.”
In fact, he was grappling with a young man who’d clearly had enough of the shelter, no matter the very visible birds caught in mid-flight and Rick’s emphatic authority.
Garrie couldn’t quite blame him. Not when the entity was entirely invisible to everyone there but her, and the little bird bones were probably already gone.
But she could fear for him. She kicked it up into a run, perfectly aware of the incongruous and unofficial nature of their little group. “Stay put!” she cried. “Just wait!”
She sprinted to the entity and then backpedaled a careful distance. Lucia came up beside her, giving Rick a worried look as the young man shook off his grip, no longer about to charge forth into the entity.
“Keep an eye on its DefCon state, will you?” Garrie asked her. “But don’t look too close.”
“No worries, chic.” Lucia’s voice was as dry as it ever got; she closed her eyes to concentrate on the entity’s emotional spikes.
Garrie shifted out of ethereal overlay to get a better look at the shelter occupants: three women and two additional men, not to mention the baby and the white mop of a bouncing terrier, a couple of worn daypacks, and a picnic basket. Back into the ethereal, and she couldn’t help a muttered curse. “Rick, keep everyone there. You’re all—well, you’re surrounded.”
“By what?” the young man demanded, his voice cracking slightly at the end. Not a hiker, for sure...more like an unwilling participant in the picnic, to judge by his clothes, his attitude, and the earbuds looped around his neck. “There’s nothing there!”
Sklayne sniffed along the bottom edge of the entity, looking for all the world like a common house cat scenting a bug. *Not attached,* he said. *Can go under.*
Do it. She kept the thought to herself, knowing it faster and simpler. Be careful.
He didn’t waste time hiding the transition—a POOF and mere glimmer of motion and Sklayne slicked beneath the entity to the tune of Rick’s curse and a round of gasps.
And didn’t show up again.
Garrie forgot to breathe. He’d sounded confident—cocky, as usual—but there was so much they didn’t know about this damaged entity. “Sklayne?”
*Here.* His mind voice came muffled—and then the shelter occupants drew back with a communal cry. A thin skin lined the inside of surrounding entity, shimmering with the faint sandy-red color of Sklayne’s natural coat. *Not barrier. Just showing off.*
She got it. He wasn’t protecting them, only giving them something to look at. “Can you?” she asked, pumping up the pressure on the sprayer.
*Not smart.*
She wasn’t sure any of this was smart. “Okay, I hear you.”
“Hear who?” Rick said, and then shook his head. “Never mind. Just never mind. What can we do?”
“Be quiet, that’s what. Be patient. What did you tell them?”
Rick looked a little sheepish. The baby’s mother put a hand on its small downy head, jostling its sling a little more snugly to her body. She glanced at Rick with no little resentment. “He said that there’s an enraged mountain spirit surrounding us. And eating people. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life.”
“That bird—” said the other woman—one of the hikers, a little woman who should have used sunblock instead of a tanning booth.
“There’s nothing there now,” a man said—another hiker, making both daypacks accounted for.
The final woman was younger than the hikers, older than the troublesome young man, and no-nonsense all over her face. “You saying you don’t see that color? Or those sparks?”
Sklayne obligingly sent a rippled sparks around them all, eliciting a curse from the man who’d said nothing was there.
Garrie didn’t waste any time while they were at it. She adjusted the nozzle on the spray to a fine spritz and sent it—oh-so-cautiously—at the bottom edge of the entity. Just enough, she hoped, to make it ease away without any true awareness of her presence. “Well, Rick is right. Or close enough.” She glanced at him, just an instant of attention away from her work. “You told them you saw someone die today because of this thing?”
“No,” he said, exasperation evident as he spoke over the loud reaction of the entrapped group. “I didn’t want to panic anyone, thanks.”
She shrugged, crouching to get a better angle on the spray and thinking it’s working...I think it’s working...oh please be working...
“Is it working?” Quinn asked, thumping the five-gallon container down behind her. “Because you’re going through that Special Recipe pretty fast.”
“Yeah, what’re you doing? Spraying water at the invisible monster?” the young man asked.
Sklayne didn’t wait for Garrie’s response. He stretched out a nearly invisible arrangement of leg and paw and smacked the kid on the cheek with a scattering of dramatic sparks. The young man stumbled back with an inarticulate sound, tripping over a daypack and then into the arms of the hiking man, who righted him.
“Yes,” Garrie told the group, as if none of that had happened. “Sort of. It’s...it’s...” She glanced at Rick again and he raised his brow at her as if to challenge her to do better than he had. “It’s spirit water,” she said finally, and it sounded as lame to her ears as it must have to theirs. “Sort of. A repellent. If I can...well...pry up a tunnel for you...sort of...”
“We can crawl out,” Rick said, understanding it.
“Is that gonna work?” Quinn asked. He unscrewed the cap to the reservoir of Secret Recipe as Garrie’s sprayer petered out.
“It’s already working—I must have gained an inch or so. If I can tickle it on up...”
“Get them out and worry about the kyrokha after.” Quinn hefted the heavy tank as Garrie unscrewed the sprayer lid, filling the sprayer with a tidy finesse.
Back went the lid, and she gave it a series of priming pumps and went to work again. “Exactly,” she said. “And it’s moving away more quickly now—”
“Not too fast,” Lucia said, breaking her silence but not her concentration.
“Definitely not too fast,” Garrie agreed, glad to see the thing rise up another couple of inches with very little prodding. She retre
ated slightly, misting the area beneath the ethereal form instead of making direct contact. “I know you guys can’t see it, but—it’s working. It’s working great.”
“Yeah, we’ve still got our mojo.” Quinn’s voice was as droll as it came, but she knew him well enough to hear the grin there. They did still have it, when all was said and done.
But oh, that would be too easy. For Lucia whirled, looking behind them—and then looking all around them—frantic and cringing just a little, knowing something was coming but not from which direction. “Garrie—it’s Dana!”
Garrie instantly braced herself, stepping back to locate Dana before he—
Whump!
He hit her full bore, as fully realized as Rhonda Rose had ever been and solid enough to send Garrie sprawling—right into Quinn, who went flailing awkwardly over the jerrycan of Special Recipe.
“No!” Dana shouted, as furious as Garrie had ever heard him and no longer visible. “None of this dangerous shit until you take care of me!”
She rolled up and back on her feet, still crouching low and ready for him to strafe past again. “We just farking talked about this,” she told him, catching the wind he’d knocked out of her. “Wait your turn!”
He swore at her, a resounding rudeness; his sneering voice echoed from all around them, reverberating and bringing with it the same burning rubber-hot metal-thick bloody stench that had inundated them in the closet. “You think you can control me? You can’t. And I’m not standing by while you get your foolish, arrogant ass ripped to pieces by this thing. My turn would never come then, would it? So my turn is now, or I’ll kick this thing in the balls so hard it’ll swallow your friends whole!”
Garrie struggled with her swell of sudden temper, the cold immutable anger that had come with absorbed Keharian energies. No good ever came of handling a ghost through anger. But she could hardly take a time out at the moment.
And she wasn’t certain he was truly a ghost, after all.
So she spoke through gritted teeth, distantly aware of the dismayed and rising voices from inside the shelter and of Quinn climbing to his feet, hauling the jerrycan upright. “Your turn is when I say it is. So back OFF!”
“One kick in the balls, coming up!”
“Garrie,” Lucia said, her voice rising in alarm. “Garrie!”
“I got it,” Garrie said, instantly going just barely into Garrie View—looking down on the area as her body folded neatly into the wild grasses of the picnic area. Sklayne shone brightly around the shelter, a defined bubble of glaringly sharp and fizzy energy, while Lucia and Quinn stood in a spot devoid of ethereal color—Lucia swaying and shocked, Quinn in a football player’s defensive stance.
Easy to see Dana swooping back in at her from the woods, all darkness and blunt hammerhead approach and sharp trailing edges; easy to crouch over herself, braced not for impact but to form an angled shield—one she snapped tight just as he reached her, imbuing the moment with all her precision, all her focused power—
Dana pinballed away, completely out of his own control.
She dove back into herself as his manifestation tumbled, skimming and skipping over the ground until it hit a jagged stump and shot skyward to slam against the mountain entity with unequivocal force.
By then Quinn was hauling her to her very corporeal feet, orienting her straight at the shelter while she staggered with the transition. “Get with it, Garrie! We got trouble.”
“Mow mow mow!” Sklayne’s feline voice echoed warning through the clearing as his thin-stretched sparkle undulated with the movement of the entity.
But Garrie couldn’t quite tear her ethereal gaze from the train wreck of Dana—his impact against the entity, the slow motion recoil of that roiling being...the slow infusion of Dana’s black into the various ugly shades of red.
Lucia lifted her head, looking dazed. “Dana? Is he gone?”
“He’s... He’s something,” Garrie said, finding the sprayer still gripped in one hand, even if she’d dropped the wand. She groped for it, her gaze still on Dana’s impact point. “Gone? I don’t know. I’ve never seen—”
“Lucia!” Rick’s call came sharply from the shelter. “We need some help in here—!”
Only then did Garrie hear the muffled cries of a woman, desperate sounds growing louder. “My foot, my foot!”
Can’t be good.
*Not good,* Sklayne agreed. *Told you maybe. Told you try. Stupid Dana entity. Stupid.*
Definitely not good. Garrie squinted past the entity and the sparkles and the jumble of confusion movement and found exactly what she feared. “Dammit, she’s caught up in the kyrokha.”
“Pull,” Rick said, grabbing the woman from behind, his arms looped under her shoulders and flashing quick annoyance at the others. “Get in here and pull, dammit!”
The woman sobbed. “It burns! God, get me out of here! Help me!”
Garrie gave their tunnel a quick reality check. They’d lost serious ground—half of it or more. But when she pulled the sprayer wand trigger, it emitted only a few drops of Secret Recipe. She swore at it and gave it a few quick pumps, renewing the pressure...but only for a moment.
“It’s cracked—it won’t hold the pressure.” Quinn lifted it from her hand. “I’ll pump, you spray.”
“We’ve got to get in there,” Garrie said. “We’ve got to soak her foot—they’ll never get her free.”
Lucia turned on her in horror. “Chic—!”
But Quinn merely said grimly, “Is there enough room?”
“Commando crawl,” Garrie said. “Sklayne, light up the damned tunnel! Quinn, can you haul the jerrycan?”
He bent for it as Sklayne flowed out to delineate the tunnel. The sky took on a reddish cast, reflecting across the surrounding ridges and emanating from where Dana had slammed into the entity. Quinn froze. “Even I can see that.”
“Chic,” Lucia said, by way of warning, while inside the shelter the two men had joined Rick in his efforts and the woman’s sobs rose to wails and the other two women huddled to protect the baby.
Garrie said, “We can make it if we move now,” because the tunnel was already settling again, a slow jellyfish sort of ooze. She led the way, hampered by the satchel and coat, the sprayer in one hand—crawling low and seeing the tunnel more clearly than any of them.
Lucia followed her, crying “Aieeeee!” all the way through, and Quinn scootched through in an elbow crawl, shoving the jerrycan in front of him.
They burst into the shelter and upright again—the air definitely an eerie reddish cast, Sklayne’s warning sparkle closing in as the entity’s reaction to Dana rippled through its ethereal body.
Garrie pushed through to the trapped woman, giving the cracked sprayer a quick series of pumps. “Hold her still,” she told Rick, ignoring the crowd and the struggles and everything else but soaking the woman’s sock. Quinn pushed in beside her to take the gallon container, pumping it endlessly to keep the pressure up.
So slowly, the entity withdrew. The woman gasped with hope and then, as the entity gave an angry snap of retreat, popped free. The cluster tumbled back onto the picnic table, exclaiming with relief—exclaiming over the welted burns on the woman’s exposed ankle. It took them only moments longer to start in on demands.
Garrie crossed her arms and waited, and eventually they fell silent.
“Rick saved your lives by keeping you here,” she said, “and now we’ll help, too. But a little cooperation would be nice.”
They looked at one another, even the kid with the attitude, and swiftly came to a silent accord. The male hiker spoke for all of them. “What do we need to do?”
“Whatever we say,” Garrie suggested sweetly, through truly not sweetly at all.
Lucia’s hand creeping into Garrie’s revealed her fear, clutching just a little too tightly. Garrie’s temper receded before it. Lucia told the group, “I’m Lucia, and that’s Quinn, and this is Garrie.”
They all looked at Garrie. She looked back. �
�Hey,” she said, as if they’d just met on the street. They all muttered greetings and then they muttered their names, but she didn’t catch them. Because she’d seen what had no doubt sent Lucia’s hand seeking hers, and it took all her attention.
Their tunnel was gone. And Sklayne’s sparkling thin layer of self had closed in on them more tightly than before, while the entity-stained air had darkened with Dana’s influence. “You’d better shield,” Garrie told Lucia. “I think you’re gonna need it.”
Lucia’s hand only closed tighter.
“Garrie.” Quinn looked down at the jerrycan at his feet—upright now, if listing on the uneven grasses.
Wait. The thing was heavy. It should be settled right down into those grasses. She flicked a glance from the jerrycan to Quinn’s gaze, and caught his brief, dark smile—and knew. “Dana,” she said.
“Yeah. I was screwing the lid on when he knocked us over.” He nodded at her sprayer. “We’ve got maybe an inch in here, and what’s left in yours.”
Garrie looked at the entity settling more heavily around them. It still hovered above the inoculated ground, giving them a mighty inch of starter space to work with. “It’s not enough.”
*Not.*
Rick approached her with a wary look, and it took only a lift of her chin to stop him. “Actually,” she said, “I think we’re going to join you under the shelter.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” he said, and there was no point in keeping his voice low. The others would have heard it all at a whisper.
The woman with the baby jostled it gently, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as it gurgled querulously. “That was crazy. What happened out there?”
The woman who’d placed herself so protectively over the child said, “More importantly, what does it mean for us?”
Keep things simple. Keep them really simple.
“We had a visit from a third party,” Garrie said, setting the sprayer aside—carefully, on the corner of the concrete shelter pad. “He behaved badly. It didn’t turn out so well for him, but...”
Reckoner Redeemed Page 25
