Jack pushed Lin another step behind him while he backed away. “Don’t have to tell me twice.”
Lin waved at the Scarecrow. “Pleased to have met you, it’s been very nice.”
“Before you be gone, here’s some free advice. Not all of the Kindred will parley in such a low price.”
So he was getting off easy? His guts were wrung out from the stress. Jack’s mouth tightened. He nodded. That was something he’d always suspected—feared enough that he couldn’t give voice to it even in his thoughts. “Thank you for the deal. I’m sorry you’re annoyed. Interacting with you folk is something I avoid.”
Old Crow harrumphed and pointed a cornstalk-finger at him. “‘Tis kin you are and in play you are and here’s some more advice for free—soon you’ll have to parley with much stronger Kin than—worse than you now see.”
Jack’s mind was tripping along to the meter and jolted when he heard the scarecrow stumble. Why couldn’t he say ‘me’? He watched, slack-jawed like a fool, as Old Crow stood up on the crosspiece and back-flipped off it, winking out of existence as soon as his empty boots hit the ground.
“I don’t know about you, but that sounded like a warning.” Lin’s fingers dug into his coat. “Let’s find your way home…I’ll come back for my car in the morning.”
“Can we stop rhyming now?”
“I really don’t see how.”
~*~
The urge to rhyme gradually crawled back down her throat as they stepped away from the mailbox post. She wondered if Starla had any idea of her mailbox’s secret life. Or her backyard’s secret life, or any of it.
Of all the crew, Jack was the last person she’d expected to have touched on something paranormal. If Starla wasn’t a reincarnation of Tinkerbell, something up there wasn’t doing its job right. And given her own upbringing, she was so well-versed in folklore through osmosis that she should have been seeing things from the word go. Shane—well, Shane had experience with altered states of consciousness enough to know the most dangerous demons lived inside your own head. And if Starla was Tinkerbell, Bailey definitely had a streak of Peter Pan in him, judging by the fact that he still played with Lego bricks more than his own kids did. But Jack—
Jack didn’t need to escape. He had everything—or so she’d once believed. He had talent, charm, style, confidence. He was the first one out of university. The first one married, with the “grown-up” condo, job, respect, while the rest of them chewed their nails over post-collegiate employment. Jack was the one with the plan, which was why, when Bailey had come up with the idea to take his student hobby and turn it into something real, she knew it would work out because Jack had come on board. Jack didn’t need the weird and magical, because his life was magic without it.
He glanced back at her as their feet crunched along the path. “You okay?”
She hoped this place didn’t have broadcast-telepathy or some other weird quirk. “Just trying to keep up.”
His grip on her hand loosened and he slowed. “Sorry.” He seemed to shrink a little into the soft wool of his coat. “I want to get out of this place. That—back there—I don’t know all the rules here. We could’ve gotten in real trouble.” A tic jumped beneath his cheekbone.
She squeezed his hand. Her own mind raced as fast as the fluttering little muscle along his jaw. It had been racing from the moment they entered the reverse-color world. Different world, different rules. And the supreme irony of having a lifetime of subject matter she had nothing but scorn for end up saving their hides from an unknown fate.
The rules of this world placed undue importance on words—not just their meaning, but their cadence and timbre. She’d bet her lunch money that names held power in this place. Not like they didn’t hold power in the real world, otherwise I wouldn’t have changed mine. This place had territorial boundaries, and like nations, they needed careful handling. She would need to know all the players, of course, and which alliances—
She stopped in her tracks.
What the hell was she thinking? This isn’t a game. Either we’re both toys-in-the-attic crazy, or this is a real part of reality that’s been hidden all along. A part of reality that her paranoid, superstitious mother knew more about than she did. No, she taught me plenty. That just makes her right all this time, and makes me very, very wrong.
“L—”
She moved faster than she thought she could, her fingers coming up to seal his lips. “You heard the talking scarecrow. Words have power here. Names probably do, too.”
He nodded around her fingers. She moved them away. “You know, this is pretty much my nightmare for the past three years. I’ve lived in fear that all this—” he waved his arms to encompass the landscape, “—would—”
She pinched his lips together and sighed. “Ahem. Words. Power. Rules.”
Shadows swam behind his eyes. She could see hints of the weight of what he’d been carrying by himself, and could guess the unfinished end of his thought, and wasn’t it just like him to clam up instead of seeking out the friends that might have been able to help him out of it. His gaze shied away from hers.
“One thing at a time.” She turned the pinch into a caress of his cheek, in spite of it all enjoying the feel of the faint stubble of his skin over her fingertips.
His hand joined hers, colder than a hand should be, but alive and real.
How many times had she envisioned holding those cheeks and pressing her lips against that mouth? Countless, even when she’d convinced herself she was over him. Still, none of those times included half of what the reality delivered.
Because the reality was made up of so much unreality, she stood on her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his again. Just to make sure.
~*~
The warmth of her lips on his sent longing flooding through him. He fought the urge to maul her, instead settling for a light touch at her waist to keep her heat close to him. When he broke away, her eyes sparkled, echoing the sparks firing off in his extremities. Finding their way home became even more of a priority when her tongue darted out to touch her bottom lip.
He stepped away, reluctantly. The wind at his face took on a refrigerated feel. He breathed deeply. “This feels like the right direction.” Something pulled him towards the rise. He knew better than to let it take him, but he couldn’t entirely ignore it, either.
“Leading you home?”
“This place isn’t my home.” His answer might have been too quick. She recoiled and shot him a sidelong look. He ducked down. “Sorry. Like I said before, it’s all crazy.” He remembered from before how the landscape seemed to twist and reform around him. “When I stopped chasing the intruder in the cemetery, I started wanting to go home, and the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be…changed.” Distance had melted under his feet, entire blocks covered in one or two strides.
“Geography has no business acting that way.” She linked her arm through his. “Can you imagine if everyone’s desired destination was shortened? People walking different directions would have to fight each other for the right of way. Is that how it works here?”
He cringed at the note of genuine curiosity in her voice. Curiosity, as he’d experienced, did not come without its price. “I don’t know.”
His feet began to crunch over the matted grasses as the dead foliage stiffened with frost. Lin wrapped her flimsy wrap around her shoulders as he picked up the pace. As they approached the cliff on the rise, he realized that it wasn’t a cliff, but the vertical lines of a soaring gothic building. “It’s a castle.” What looked like a ten-minute walk took them barely more than five steps, and the jagged edifice took on more shape.
“Wow.”
“More like what the hell? We’re—” He glanced back and forth at the features of the landscape, knowing full well they teased him and mocked his depth perception. He took another step and the building rushed up to meet him. He now stood toe to toe with a slick-looking cobbled road that ran right up to a…drawbridge? J
ust a few steps away, the snow-pack fell off into a moat of brilliant aquamarine water, with thick ice dams bumping up against each other. A medieval-looking gate, complete with ice-encrusted portcullis, sent a hostile message of unwelcome to anyone attempting to set foot upon the road.
“Wow.” Lin repeated herself. “It’s a castle right out of a fai—”
A head popped up from atop the gate, above the portcullis. “Beeeegoooonnne!” The command was drawn out, in a high-pitched yell, almost a yodel. The figure that poked its head up from the gate was hard to make out. Were those—ears sticking up above the top of a bald head?
Beside him, Lin took a step back. He whirled and saw her off in the distance. The thought of separating from her—of her lost in the Oddways—filled him with a terror that turned his guts to water. He stretched out his hand. She stepped forward and was once again next to him. This time, he grabbed her arm and did not let go.
“I said, begone!” The little gremlin hurled a snowball at them. It exploded at his feet, and Jack could see hard, glittering rocks in the middle of the snowball.
“Hey! That’s dirty pool!” Lin shouted back.
Oh God. “No!” He pulled her against him. “Don’t engage!”
“What? Why not?” She stumbled up against him.
The next volley of snowballs came from the gate, where the little old gremlin poked his cackling head out again. “You are not ready for this place!”
A snowball cracked open on top of his head. Jack felt the cold snow thunk into his skull, and unseen but not unfelt, felt the crown wobble a little. No use in trying to knock the damn thing off, he thought. Lord knows I’ve tried. He brushed the snow and rocks out of his hair and glared back at the gate gremlin. “Asshole!”
“Hey.” Lin elbowed him. “Don’t engage, remember?”
“You are not ready for this place, Winter King!” The gremlin lobbed another sinker at his head. “You are not cold enough yet!”
The snowball sailed just above his head, just brushing his hair. It was enough, however, that he heard the faint ting of the rocks inside it plink against the invisible crown hovering above his head. For a second, the obsidian touched his forehead.
A brain-freeze so absolute it could be cryogenic froze him, blurred his vision, rushed through his sinuses like getting hit with a snowball in the face.
Which he was, another second later.
The crown bounced back up to hover, not touching him. As far as he understood, as long as he didn’t accept it, it couldn’t become a permanent part of him.
“Ow!” His hand went to his eye socket, where the burning sting of cold ice and tiny rocks scoured his skin.
“Jack, let’s get out of here.” Lin pulled him along as he wiped snow and grit from his eyes.
He followed where she led until his vision cleared up. He peered around when he felt the ground underneath them change. “We’re here,” he said, his voice thready with disbelief.
“It’s amazing.” Lin gazed around at the shades of high-rise office buildings that marked the downtown area. Their steel and glass, iron and stone were all painted in shades of white, like construction paper cut-outs, or a carving in ice. “Are we—downtown?” She bunched up the end of her wrap.
Jack searched for the peak of the bank building. “There’s the Tower.” He turned. “And there’s my building, nine blocks down next to the parking garage.” He stroked his chin. “Only thing is, I don’t know how to get back out of the Oddways once I’ve gone in.”
She’d pulled something from the wrap and he saw that it was her smartphone. “Ten-twenty two. Twelve minutes to downtown from the outer ‘burbs? On foot, no less. You can’t beat that with a stick. And they say light rail is the answer.”
It was now his turn to look at her with disbelief. “At least with light rail you can get off the train.” He tugged at her hand and took two more steps, eating up nine blocks as the scenery warped to the entrance to his building. “I’d give almost anything to exit this ride.”
Lin put her smartphone away. “Then you’re in luck, because that one’s easy. You just look for a door.”
~*~
Lin didn’t remember ever being invited to Jack’s “new” place after he and Nancy sold the old condo in the divorce. Bailey and Shane had helped him move. Starla stayed behind and later told her it was some new place downtown that they were sure wasn’t fit for three-year olds, or any-year olds. Peering up at the building, she could sort of see why.
The brick building rose nine stories up. Faint lettering on the side of the building still advertised it as “—off & Sons -old Storage —rehouse” with a patch of lighter brick and fresher mortar where the first parts of the words had been repaired. The building had a neighbor on one side and a Pay Park lot on the corner and boasted the kind of architecture that previous generations saw as functional, but the modern era of concrete and glass saw as unnecessarily fussy. And that urbanites loved.
The first and second floors were covered with a sandstone facade topped with cornices and clearly housed, some time in the past, three storefronts whose mid-century style stoops still held a hint of commercialism, even though the windows were solidly boarded up. Rust-stained holes pockmarked the sandstone where signs had once hung over the ground floor. The second and subsequent floors all sported windows clustered in threes up until the top floor where the building tapered from the flat front to a steep pitch. The bank of top-floor windows could have been a skylight, separated by crown molding from the other floors of the building.
All this, she saw in the light of the frozen photographer’s flash of the Oddways. She stepped towards the center door. The display windows on either side were curved in, and the entrance itself sported a dark green message of welcome against a field of dirty white octagonal tiles. “A door,” she said, and reached for the handle.
The world didn’t straighten itself out. Her hand passed right through the handle and she turned to Jack in alarm.
“Not the right door, I guess. And it’s not the entrance, anyway. The storefronts are just the front half of the space anyhow. My door’s around the side.” This time, he did the leading around the corner to a much more nondescript door under a single, industrial streetlight between the building and the parking lot.
“Is that where you park?”
He snorted. “I can’t afford it. I let Nancy have the car in the divorce.”
She gaped. “But you loved that car. It was a Jaguar. I remember when you bought that thing.”
Jack looked away as he fished his keys out of his pocket. “It was a used Jaguar that was thirteen years old when I bought it. And it was a status symbol. Of a status I no longer possess.”
She drew back. The curt response told her he maybe wasn’t over that car as much as he wanted her to believe. He did say Nancy took everything but the dog. And then came back for the dog.
The thought occurred to her that she was choosing to become involved with a man with an ex, and in spite of all the categorically strange things that had happened during the night, there were some pretty mundane risks to think about as well. Jack had stopped coming around the group when he and Nancy split, and it certainly hadn’t been because Nancy was more welcome than he was. They might have reconnected in a very visceral way—and if she had her way, it would stay down and dirty—but she and Jack still had a lot of catching up to do.
He glanced back at her, his face a mask. “I don’t know if this will work.” He held out his free hand. “And I don’t know the rules.”
“Then let’s find out.” She took his hand and he touched the door latch.
The world turned itself inside out again, and they stood on the cracked pavement, under the orange-stained indigo of night in the city. Urban breezes skittered fallen leaves and a few swirls of trash around corners while the unseasonably-warm December air pressed down in on them.
She lifted her face to the sky, the stars and moon obscured by the buildings. “We made it!” She lowered her head to f
ind his gaze on her, a strange half-smile tugging at his lips. “Jack?” Under the harsh sodium streetlight, his hair looked like brilliant fluff.
“I’m just…really relieved, is all.” He rubbed under his eye and she saw the red mark from where the crazy little goblin-man’s snowballs at the ice palace had hit him.
“We should look at that in light,” she said, stepping towards him.
He looked down into her eyes. “I’ll be okay.” He blinked. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
A giddy, floaty feeling spread out from her midsection down to her toes and out to her fingers. She nodded, without speaking, unable to find any words that weren’t inane and redundant.
He turned from her and unlocked the main latch, the deadbolt, and the second deadbolt, then pulled the steel fire door open with a little bow. “After you.”
She stepped into a short hallway lit with brushed-brass wall sconces. The walls were papered with some sort of textured surface that looked like grass mats, painted baize green on the bottom and buttery yellow above a chair rail of brushed brass that ran the length of the hallway. The chair rail swelled into the door frame of an elevator.
“The um, investor didn’t prioritize updating the foyer decor.”
She couldn’t remember if Jack had ever seen her apartment. “Hey, I’m not one to judge. I live in a World War II-era quad with 1970’s updating, but it’s got a dishwasher and a parking space and it’s off the main drag.” And it had two bedrooms, in case she ever needed a roommate. The elevator dinged and the door opened. “What floor?” She stepped inside and the warmly polished brass turned to stainless steel with wood baffles banding the inside of the car.
He stepped in after her. “Nine. All the way up.”
She aimed for the button and noticed the keyhole next to it. “Fancy. You got the penthouse. You need a key?”
“Broken.” He bit out a laugh. “Guy who owns the place is too cheap and lazy to fix it.”
The doors closed and the lift glided upward. “Well, he certainly took care of the elevator.”
“There were…structural priorities. It’s a work in progress.” Jack’s eyes remained focused on the light that flashed behind brass cut-out numbers until nine illuminated. “Guy’s lucky the place rented out as fast as it did.”
WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening Page 8
