“Whuff.”
She poured canine maintenance kibble into a steel bowl and filled a second with water, then set them both on the cement floor in the treatment room. The coyote ate and drank. It stood for a long moment staring out the open door into the night, then turned to look at her.
“Thank you,” it said in a low, woman’s voice.
It slipped away, silent as shadow, before Deirdre had finished her gasp.
She could wait a couple minutes before she scrubbed down the surgery. She went back outside to watch stars prick the sky. Her coffee was cold, but she drank it anyway.
tasha Dane, who wandered the world in search of scents, sights, and sounds, sat on a branch high up in a Ponderosa pine in the Cascades and opened to night sounds, breathed them in. Coyotes called up the mountain, and somewhere nearer an owl hooted. Small gentle waves lapped the shore of the lake below. Tiny animals moved through underbrush. Breeze brushed through pine needles in the trees above her.
Across the lake, campsite fires starred the darkness among the evergreens, orange images reflected on the dark surface of the lake. She leaned forward, seeking. A guitar strummed across distance; voices sang; woodsmoke blew toward her, and the odor of burning wood and cooking meat mixed with evergreen, earth, and water scents. She closed her eyes and drew in sounds and scents.
It had been a month since she had come this close to people. She had spent time recently in the far north, collecting the almost-not-there scents of different kinds of ice and snow, watching northern lights shift and sheet and shimmer against wide, deep, long night skies.
One night something had thawed in her winter-iced chest. I wonder if it’s spring at home yet.
She had turned south, found winds to drift her down, and here, close to her old home, she saw small signs: leaf buds swelling on trees, some of the earliest flowers poking up through sodden forest floor. Too early yet for frogs to call, but the rain and wind tasted soft with season shift.
A mouse shrieked as an owl caught it. She added that fragment of sound to her collection, then made a sampler of night scents: Ponderosa pine needles both fallen and still on the tree, the stronger scent of sap, earth, some spicy herb nearby. The faintest whiff of skunk spray. Fainter, tints and traces of smoke and food cooking, song and guitar, the murmur of voices across water.
People.
She wasn’t ready to talk to anyone yet. It always took her a while to come back from these journeys. Here, she felt comfortable. People were over there, not beyond sight and sound, but not close enough to notice her. She could get used to them gradually.
Wind nudged her from behind. She laughed and let go of her branch, plunged out into nothing. Air carried her up above the forest.
She looked and listened and smelled and tasted: treetops had a different scent from the scent on the forest floor, sounds carried differently from this height; starlight painted patterns along the pine needles, gleamed on the lake.
She blew out over the lake, toward the campground.
—Wait.—She put out hands, spread fingers, tried to brake, turn, go back to the safety of the forest.
Wooden rowboats bumped a wooden dock below her, and now she could hear conversations. A dog at one of the campsites barked. Another answered.
—No. Not yet. I’m not ready,—she told Air as it tumbled her toward people.
—Really not ready?—
—Really.— She hugged herself. She had no clothes. She couldn’t remember how to speak aloud. She didn’t want to come back to people here, where she knew no one. She wanted to choose her entry.
If Air told her to touch down here and now, she would. She had weathered more difficult things. In the service of Air, she went everywhere, sooner or later. Why not here?
She hovered twenty feet above the dock. Yard light from the little campground store shone on her, sheathing her skin in orange glow.
For a moment she was close enough to touch human-built things, close enough to be seen, to be drawn into local lives.
Air lifted her again.
She breathed out happiness, breathed more in.
She spent the night listening to deep forest.
lia Fuego leaned forward in her box seat and stared down at the lighted stage, where the first instruments were tuning to each other. It was starting: the liquid fire that was music, edging upward from tinder into flame. The instruments joined, one section at a time, each musician searching for and finding the perfect note.
Harry Vandermeer touched her arm. She glanced at him, let him draw her out of the sound. She loved the look of him in his elegant dark suit, the long, graceful hands that were like pale lilies at the ends of his sleeves, the short gold hair that fell neatly against his skull, the gray-blue eyes that held storms and silence. His face in repose looked like he was amused by everything; now it was animated, his expression a mixture of worry and laughter. “We’re in the wrong seats,” he murmured.
The woman sitting on his other side slitted her eyes at him as if to tell him to shut up.
Lia leaned toward him, her shoulder nudging his, so she could hear a whisper. He bent his head. His breath touched her ear.
“We’re in the wrong seats,” he whispered, “if you’re going to do that.”
“What?” she whispered.
He took her hand, stroked it gently. She looked down.
“Oh.” Her skin glowed, its natural darkness illuminated by a layer of orange flame. Flame washed over his hand, curling and curving calligraphies of fire.
Just then the tuning stopped, and her fire faded.
It had been so long since she’d been to a concert hall. She had music in her life every day, one way or another, but a full orchestra? Tonight’s program had some of her favorite orchestral pieces on it, ones she hadn’t heard live in more than fifteen years, some she’d never heard live. Since she had met Harry ten years before, they hadn’t spent much time doing normal things, but she had seen this concert listed in the paper, and mentioned to Harry that she’d like to go, and he got tickets.
She wanted to hear the music more than anything.
“We’d better go,” she whispered.
The conductor came onstage, and applause swept through the audience. It was the right moment to duck out.
“Look,” he whispered. He pointed up toward the back of the concert hall. Some of the pieces the orchestra was playing tonight were pretty obscure, and there were rows of empty seats in the nosebleed section, on the second balcony.
She gripped his hand. They stood up, left their seats, and ran for the stairs.
Maybe, maybe, if they sat all the way in the back, and no one turned around, she could lose herself in the music after all.
“What do you make of this?” the boy asked Terry Dane.
The college bar was noisy and dark, and the band was loud and bad. The kid was dressed in baggy, pleated thrift-store pants and a light blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, not a look Terry could ever remember being fashionable.
He had shaggy dark hair that looked like he had hacked it off himself without consulting a mirror. His eyes, too, appeared dark; maybe they’d be some other color if there were enough light to see them by. How old was this guy? Fifteen? Sixteen? Terry knew the bouncers carded people coming in; the cops had been cracking down on underage drinking lately. He had to be older than he looked.
She sipped her beer and peeked at the thing the boy held out to her. It was dark, glassy, and vaguely oval with bumps, and it filled his palm; his fingers curled around it. She couldn’t see details in the lousy light, except for a few spots of reflected shine from the neon beer ads behind the bar.
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“You’re the witch. You tell me.”
“Excuse me?” Terry set her beer mug on the bar with a thunk. She had heard a lot of pickup lines in the past eight years since she turned legal, but this one took her by surprise. She blinked and leaned forward to peer into the kid’s face. His skin was pale,
and he looked like a teenager, except that the dead expression on his face spoke of someone who was either older or had been through hell or both. “Who are you?”
“You can call me Galen if you like.” His voice came out in a monotone, each syllable equally unstressed, except for a faint upward tone at the end of the sentence.
He smiled.
Terry felt something strange and dark flutter in her chest. His smile charmed her—more than she meant to be charmed. She could tell it wasn’t even a good smile, just a movement of muscles, and yet, unaccountably, she warmed to him. She hated that. “Is there any particular reason why I might like to call you that? Does it hear any resemblance to your actual name?”
“Yes.”
“I get this feeling I know you—” Terry began, a faint echo in her mind. She had seen this boy before, a long time ago. Maybe for just a minute.
“Hey, baby!” said somebody with the build and number jersey of a football player. He leaned heavily on Terry’s shoulder and breathed alcohol fumes into her face. “Wanna have some real fun? Ditch Junior here and come play with the big boys.” He wagged his crewcut head toward a group of large men by one of the pool tables. Two of them waved to her, and all of them grinned.
She grinned back and patted his cheek. “Hey, great! I’ll be over in a minute, okay, buddy?”
“Whoa! Yeah! Uh-huh, huh!” He kissed her cheek and staggered back toward the pool table, then detoured in the direction of the rest rooms.
She wiped saliva off her face. “Well, okay, Galen, what is it you want from me?”
He glanced away from her and swallowed. She saw his Adam’s apple bob. “I think I need some help,” he said. His voice was still monotone.
“This is how you ask for help? Calling me a witch?”
He frowned. He turned back to meet her gaze, his eyes narrowed. “I haven’t talked to anybody outside in a long time,” he said after a few breams. “I’m not good at it.”
“I noticed.”
“There’s a statue in the park across the street.”
Terry’s eyebrows lifted. She sipped beer and waited.
Galen looked away again, his mouth tightening. “I guess I should go home and study conversation. I haven’t tried to talk to a stranger in forty years. What a ridiculous set of skills for me not to have.” He hunched his shoulders and turned away.
Terry touched his arm. Shock tingled through her, so intense and sudden she yelped. Galen turned, startled too.
“Hey, baby. This guy still bothering you?” asked the crewcut man, returned from the rest rooms.
“No, honey. He’s my brother. Give me a few minutes, will you?”
Crewcut slapped her back and wandered away, nodding.
“What are you going to do with him?” Galen asked.
Terry slitted her eyes. She dropped a five-dollar bill on the bar. “Let’s go outside.”
They pushed their way out past close-packed people. The night air felt cool and sharp after the hot. smelly air in the bar, the orange streetlamps sun-bright after the bar’s darkness. Traffic had almost disappeared.
Terry grabbed Galen’s arm and shuddered as the shock of touching him struck her. When it faded, she pulled him across the street into the little park. It was big enough to have two patches of frosty lawn, three winterbare maple trees—it was late February, too early for spring leaves—a bench, a trash can, and, oh, yes, there was a statue there, a stone soldier on a pedestal commemorating the dead in some war a long time ago. She dragged Galen over to it and opened her senses as wide as she could. What had this soldier to do with witching? She didn’t get any hit from it at all.
She turned to Galen, senses still wide, and saw that he glowed. Fox fire gray-green.
She should have expected something like that. Static electricity couldn’t explain the charge he’d given her.
She let go of his arm. “I’m listening.”
He sighed, stepped over to the pedestal, and leaned against it. The witchglow around him changed to a shifting blend of yellow, pink, and red. His face came alive. This time his smile looked genuine. She liked it even more. “I, uh—”
Terry touched the pedestal. Dead stone. What was this?
“It’s this—I was just leaning against this and the statue said go in the bar and find the witch.” Now his voice rose and fell in the tones of normal conversation.
“What made you decide I was a witch?”
“Oh, come on. I can spot witches, no problem. It’s elementary.”
“How?”
He drew a couple signs in the air with an index finger, muttered three words, touched his eyes.
Terry knew the spell. Simple, effective. Make the hidden visible. She sighed. “So what is it you want from me?”
“Here.” He held out his hand, the dark, shiny object still in it.
“Apprentice!” cried a loud voice from behind them.
Terry and Galen turned toward the street. A tall, white-haired man cloaked in black stood on the sidewalk, glaring at them. Galen snatched his hand back and tucked it into his pocket.
“Sorry,” he whispered. He pushed off from the pedestal and ran past Terry toward the street. The man flapped his cloak open, wrapped it around the boy, spun, and both of them vanished.
“Son of a bitch.” Terry leaned forward and touched the statue’s pedestal again, wondering what had brought the boy to life. It felt like stone. She used the see-better spell Galen had demonstrated, but the stone stayed dull, flat, and unmagical, even to her improved vision.
Hadn’t she seen that white-haired man before? Somewhere, somewhen …. Sometime unpleasant.
Where?
She shook her head, then pulled her evening’s experimental spell out of her pocket. She had learned to compress spells into tablets suitable for dropping into drinks. She was trying for a “nice and obedient” spell that didn’t totally rob men of their minds, but she hadn’t gotten the mix of ingredients right yet.
Maybe tonight.
She headed back inside the bar, looking for her crewcut buddy.
Chapter Two
in the small Oregon coast town of Guthrie, the witch Edmund Reynolds laid an Oregon map on the weather-silvered front porch of the haunted house and dropped to sit cross-legged in front of it. Late-winter sun, cool and bright, glared off the map’s white background, almost drowned red and black roads, blue rivers, dark dot-and-dash state lines in light. Sun gilded Edmund’s brown curls, highlighted dust on his green T-shirt and jeans, glowed in the pale hairs on his forearms.
Matt Black smiled. She had found Edmund three months earlier in a pioneer graveyard, and she had stayed with him ever since, longer than she’d stayed with anyone else she’d met in more than two decades of roaming. Across the wander years, she had let go of almost everything she had ever had except her army jacket, and she had spent most of her time talking with things instead of people. Buildings, streets, park benches, drinking fountains, trash cans, cardboard boxes, dishes, railroad tracks, toys, cars, anything shaped by humankind might have a story to tell her. Things talked with her. They liked her, and she liked them.
Maybe she had been ready for a change. It felt strange but nice to hang on to someone human.
Just now she thought Edmund looked like a god who had just been pulled out of a closet, bright and shiny but not wiped clean yet. Everything about him made her happy.
Edmund glanced up at Matt. “Watch what happens when I try a seek spell for Julio.”
“Okay.” She sat down beside him. Salt breeze gusted through her short hair, riffled the edge of the map. She set the toe of her sneaker on a corner of the map and leaned back, her hands flat on the porch boards.
Edmund fished a lead weight on a piece of fishing line from his jeans pocket He murmured to the weight and kissed it, then held the string between finger and thumb, let the weight dangle above the map. “Julio,” he murmured. “Julio.”
The weight circled slowly clockwise above the map. Matt waited. She had se
en Edmund do search-dowsing before. The line would straighten in some direction or another, pointing them toward their quarry.
The circles spun faster, though Edmund’s grip on the line didn’t shift at all. Presently, the line stretched tight, the weight suspended toward the south. Matt nodded. Good. They had a line on Julio. Maybe they could get going soon. She loved staying in the haunted house, but it had been three weeks, and she was getting restless. Something inside her, stronger than anything else she knew, wanted her to keep moving. She didn’t know how to quiet it.
She had promised Edmund soon after she met him that she’d help him look up his old childhood friends so he wouldn’t have to face them alone when they realized how different he had become since they last saw him.
This road was bumpy, but she had already helped him find the first two friends of four, Nathan, a ghost here in the haunted house who had only been lost to Edmund because Edmund was afraid to face him again, and Susan, a friend he had met when he was in junior high here in Guthrie.
Edmund had left town after he had hurt Susan’s father to protect Susan fifteen years earlier. He had scared himself and her.
Matt had gone with Edmund to search for Susan. They found her in Palo Alto using the map-seek spell. She had changed her name to Suki, and cut herself loose of her earlier life, but she came home to the haunted house with them after she and Edmund walked through their mutual past again, examined it with older eyes, changed what they could, made amends where they could, and accepted their younger selves.
They were still two friends short.
The fishing line relaxed and circled again. After half a minute, it pulled to the northwest. Relaxed. Circled for a while, and pulled east. Relaxed, circled. Then the weight jerked straight up, as though tugged by a magnet, and stretched toward the porch roof. “Whoa, spirit,” Edmund said. “It never did that before.”
Past the Size of Dreaming Page 2
