“They are laughing,” Matt said to Lia.
“No, we’re not,” Terry said. “We’re awestruck.”
Matt hunched her shoulders and buried her hands in her coat pockets.
“You look great,” said Tasha, who looked a little strange herself in a pink blouse that bared her midriff, hip-hugging black pants, and flip-flops. She had tied her hair in bunches on either side of her head. Again, no jacket, but she never needed one, Matt guessed.
“Thanks,” said Matt.
“Nathan?” Edmund glanced around.
After a moment, Nathan shimmered into sight beside Suki. “Looks like we’re going out to supper,” Edmund told him, as though Nathan might not have heard about this earlier.
“Taste something for me,” Nathan said.
“I could bring you something back,” Suki murmured.
Nathan smiled and shook his head.
“House, when we get back, are you going to tell us what this is all about?” Terry said.
“I will.”
“I’m taking that glass thing with me. It’s in my purse,” she said.
“Good,” said the house and Nathan at the same time.
Chapter Thirteen
after a noisy supper in a place that seemed too candlelight-and-wine to support such bad behavior, Terry, Deirdre, and Suki went off to the ladies’ room in a bunch. Matt sipped heavily creamed-and-sugared coffee. Lia ate vanilla ice cream in tiny bites. Edmund sat quiet and smiling, and Tasha was eating something with a lot of chocolate in it when a strange teenage boy came to the table and said, “Can I have my heart back?”
“We’re still working on it,” Tasha said.
“I’ve changed my mind. I want it back. Now.” His voice is weird and flat, just like Terry said, thought Matt. His face was expressionless, though pretty. Shaggy black hair, wolf eyes, sort of a wild-animal look. Dressed kind of dorky, work shirt, wonky pants, shiny black shoes. She checked her memory of Julio’s encounter, decided it was the same guy.
“You don’t want to let the children out anymore?” Tasha asked.
“It’s not safe.”
“Why not?” Matt asked him. “Do you really want them to stay inside that thing forever?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll try to release them again later.”
“Who’s Monument?” asked Matt.
The boy jerked, startled. “I don’t know.”
“Monument’s the one who took your heart. You don’t even know who that is?”
The boy shook his head, his features still wooden. “It’s the god of stone creatures, the god of shaped stone,” he whispered. “That’s all I know. Please. Give me my heart back.”
“Can’t,” said Matt. “Terry has it, and she’s not here. What’s the rush?”
“My master. My master will come for you soon.”
Lia leaned forward. “Do you think that’s wise?” she asked, her voice sharp and coppery.
The boy took a step back, staring at her. “What are you?” He almost sounded astonished.
“We’ve met before.” Lia smiled. Her eyes glowed orange.
The boy shook his head. “You should all leave. My master has been studying since last time we encountered you, and he’s made me study too. We have new strategies. Our house is full of strong creatures he has defeated and pressed into service, and some of them will fight for him too. Please give me my heart. I want to put it somewhere safe.”
Terry, Deirdre, and Suki came back. “Hey! Speak of the devil. Here he is!” Terry tapped the boy on the shoulder. The boy wheeled. “Hey, Galen,” Terry said.
“Please give me back my heart,” whispered the boy.
“Do you know how to open it? We’ve only been working on it a short time. All we know so far is that it opens in, but not out. What can you tell us?”
“He tells us his master is going to attack us again,” Lia said. “He wants to put his heart somewhere safer than here.”
Terry frowned. “What does your master want with us, anyway? We’re not hurting him. We’re not bothering anybody. We’re just having a little party. What’s going on?”
“Anytime there is a higher-than-normal concentration of powers and skills in one place,” the boy said, “my master—”
“Quiet.” The word came from nowhere. It was deep and dark and made the boy jerk as though he had been slapped.
The boy held out his hands. “My heart!”
Terry pulled the silk-wrapped crystal out of her purse, handed it to the boy.
Shadow swallowed him and his final “thank you.”
“What was that?” asked a woman at the next table. “Did that boy just disappear?”
“Hey. You over there with the harem. Your own private little Vegas nightclub act. What’s going on here?” yelled someone else from another table. “You staging some kind of magic show? Shouldn’t you let the management know beforehand?”
“Who the hell are you talking to?” Deirdre yelled back.
“The guy with six girls,” the man yelled.
Deirdre, Terry, Suki, Matt, Tasha, and Lia all looked at Edmund. He smiled and waggled his eyebrows at them.
“Hey, eat your heart out, bud,” Deirdre yelled at the man across the room. In a lower tone, she said, “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand.”
Matt gulped the rest of her coffee. Did they have instant coffee or caffeinated tea at the house? She wasn’t sure, and she had the feeling they would be up late tonight.
Suki picked up the check. Matt fell another pang of guilt. She had to get a job so she could take other people out to dinner for a change. But what the heck was she qualified to do?
Appliance repair. Car repair. Fortune-telling? Later.
As soon as they stepped over the threshold of the haunted house, Terry cast a spell that made the air glow green. “Wards are still up,” she said. “Maybe we should add more. We have enough different disciplines to do a bunch of stuff now, right? Air, Tasha: fire, Lia; Edmund, do you have a ruling element? I mostly work with water. Nathan? House? Galen says that demon guy is coming to attack us.”
Suki touched the wall. Lights switched on, and furniture in the living room, which had been more shadow than solid, returned to usable form. Nathan appeared before the fireplace. Everyone went into the living room and sat down.
“This isn’t what you called us here for, is it, House?” Edmund asked.
“No.”
“You’ve got it backward, Edmund,” Terry said. “Galen said that it’s the concentration of powers that makes the demon-guy attack.” Then she muttered, “Wish we’d asked Galen for the master’s name.” Then, louder, “Anyway, it’s because we all came here at the same time that the guy targets us. Let’s throw up some more armor and find out what House wants us to do. If we do it fast enough and leave, maybe we can get out without a fight.”
“What magic system did the demon-guy use, Nathan?” Edmund asked. “I didn’t know enough about it to figure it out when we were there before.”
“It was a mixture of different sorts of disciplines. Like you, he’s built his own craft out of bits of whatever he likes. Three different magical alphabets, basic chalk craft, invocations to gods and powers about which I know nothing.”
“Our armor worked last time,” Terry said.
“Galen said they have better strategies now,” said Lia.
“I don’t think I can do that kind of armor anymore,” said Tasha. “All my old skills are rusty. But I bet air and I can do other things.”
Edmund nodded. “My craft is different now, too.”
“Well, give us whatever you’ve got. Lia, you have a lot more on tap now, don’t you? Suki? Matt? Deirdre?” Terry looked at each of them in turn.
Deirdre shook her head. “I still got nothing,” she said.
“Not true,” said Tasha. “You have the coyote with you.”
“You said that before, and I still don’t get it. I’m a vet. Any animals get hurt, I’m there. Other than that, I can observe.�
�
“You can anchor,” Lia said.
“Okay, I can anchor, too, if the situation comes up.”
“I have this much magic,” said Suki, holding up her wrists and showing the gold bands, “and my connection with the house and Nathan.”
“I’ve got talking and watching.” Matt bit her bottom lip. “I don’t know how to attack anybody.”
“Defending is good, too,” Terry told her.
“And I have …” Lia said. “I have lots of firepower, and also …”
Terry turned to her.
Lia cleared her throat. “I have Harry.”
Terry’s eyebrows rose.
“Just a minute, I’ll go get him.” Lia turned to flame, then vanished.
“Harry?” said Deirdre.
“Somebody had to make new friends when we lost touch with each other,” Terry said. “I hope I’m the only one here who doesn’t know how.”
They looked at each other.
Suki smiled ruefully. Deirdre shrugged, also smiling. Nathan’s eyes danced. Edmund put his hand on top of Matt’s head.
Tasha frowned. “Should I go get Danny?”
“How useful would he be in a witch war?” Terry asked. “I mean, he’s great with humans, but we could really hurt him. and so could the other guys. Unless you think he has special skills that could help, I’d leave him out of this.”
Orange-and-yellow fire floated in the air, dancing, with a sound of wind chimes, and then a man emerged from the cloud, surrounded by flame. To Matt he looked like a statue, one of those idealized ones in pale stone that represented some concept like Civic Pride or Honest Work: tall, clean-cut, nicely built, strong-jawed. He wore the wrong clothes to be a statue like that, a gray long-sleeved shirt with a couple top buttons open, dark slacks, leather shoes, but he had the right pose and the right expression—calm, distant. For a second, anyway.
Then the flames vanished, replaced by Lia at his side, and he smiled down at her and turned into someone else, someone alive and laughing.
“This is Harry,” Lia said.
“Well, shit,” Deirdre said. “Light dawns.”
“Good,” said Lia in a dark voice. She told Harry everyone’s name and said, “Harry comes from a long line of witches, but he didn’t know about that until a while after we met. He’s been studying since he found out, and he has a lot of tools now. He says he’ll help.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Matt.
Harry smiled at her and at everyone. “Nice to meet all of you. Amazing to be here,” he said. “Lia doesn’t talk much about where she came from, but once in a while she lets something slip. This is like meeting legends. There’s a lot of strange energy around here. I feel like I’m in the middle of something big.” He looked up at the ceiling. “House?”
“Boy?” said the house.
Harry shivered. “Honored to meet you,” he said. He glanced at Nathan, who smiled.
“Well, we’re glad you’re here,” Terry said. “Welcome to our war conference. First thing we should do is cast some more protection, don’t you think, Nathan?”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Nathan said, “and it would give us a chance to see what we have to work with.”
Deirdre got up and grabbed Suki’s hand. “Let’s go to the kitchen and make a bunch of tea or something.”
“Don’t you want to watch?” Suki asked, without rising.
“It’ll just make me mad.”
Matt came to them. “I’ll help you,” she told Deirdre.
“You can make the stove work?”
“Bet I could,” said Matt.
“Let’s go.”
in the kitchen, Deirdre sat by the butcher block table in a chair she had taken from the dining room. Matt filled the kettle and set it on the stove, asked for heat from the past and got it, grabbed a second chair from the dining room and sat down facing Deirdre.
They left the door to the dining room open. They could hear everyone else having a discussion in the living room beyond. Terry’s voice predominated. The words weren’t clear; every once in a while a phrase rose above the rest.
“What am I doing here?” Deirdre asked.
“Do you want to leave?”
Deirdre held out her hands. “Here I am, back in the middle of all this magic, and I’m still completely normal. Edmund runs off, finds you, whatever you are. Julio runs off, finds this Harry boy, some kind of witch. Suki doesn’t even have to look, she just has to come home to Nathan. Twins run off. Well, I don’t know what came of that, except Tasha has some boy she maybe could bring into this, and Terry has this Galen boy walking up to her in bars and tide pools and restaurants and vanishing in midair. I run off and go to college for years and years, learn a lot, get married, get divorced, graduate, do an internship, start my practice. I know everybody in town and they know me, and except for an occasional bar story about strange doings in the desert, everything I run into is normal. Is there some kind of secret handshake?”
Wind howled around the house. Someone in the living room yelled, “Okay, that’s a touch too much, Tasha.” Wind quieted.
“You know the handshake. Here you are.”
Deirdre clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Okay. You’re right,” she said, exasperated, “and either way, I whine about it, huh?”
Matt got up and rummaged through the cupboards. In one she found a box of Mystic Mint cookies, in another a chipped, crockery plate to put them on. She brought the cookies to the table and set them near Deirdre, who sighed and took one.
“I woke up one day, and everything was different,” Matt said.
“You haven’t been doing whatever it is you do since birth, huh?”
“Nope. Seemed like it happened overnight. That was a while back. Ever since then …” Matt stared at distance, and smiled. “Everywhere I look, when I really look. Everything I talk to, long as it’s shaped by people somehow. I can’t talk to plants or most dirt, or the ocean or sand or mountains, all the stuff Edmund’s good at. But most of the stuff I see every day—” She touched the table, ran her thumb along the edge of the plate. “It’s all alive, Dee. Most of it’s not very wide awake, but it’s there.”
“Like Jonny Box.”
“Yeah.”
“It started with talking?”
“Talking and seeing.”
Deirdre ate her cookie and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. For a moment she was silent. Then she said, “Last week a coyote came right up to me out of the desert.”
“Coyote,” Matt repeated. Tasha had mentioned this twice.
“She had a wound on her front leg. I treated her, fed her, let her go. And then she spoke to me.”
“Talking,” said Matt, after a minute.
“Tasha said the coyote’s still here.”
“When Edmund did a seek spell to look for you, there was a coyote in it.”
“What do you mean?”
“He does this spell thing where he says some words over special dust, then holds it up and lets spirit move it some direction or other, and that tells us where to go. We used it to find Suki, and you. The dust flew up off his hand and turned into an animal. I thought it was a wolf.”
Deirdre looked back over her shoulder. The kitchen beyond her just looked like the kitchen.
Orange light flickered outside the kitchen window. Matt glanced toward it, wondered if the house were on fire. The air shimmered with sparks and darkened with smoke.
“Can you make it invisible?” someone said in the living room.
The net of orange sparks and smoke faded.
“Much better.”
“You talk about seeing, but I don’t know what you mean,” Deirdre said. “Can you see my coyote?”
Matt opened dream-eyes.
Deirdre’s mental landscape held a tall doll, in some kind of fancy pink-and-green Chinese outfit overlaid with gold net, edged with white fringe, heavily ornamented, and detailed in red and white. Its high headdress was studded with silver wires and pink-
and-white pom-poms. It wore a scabbarded sword at its waist, and banners at its back displayed golden dragons. In one graceful hand, the doll held a silver-headed spear. It held the other hand twisted above its head in a movement that might have come from dance or from martial arts or both. It was not a doll Matt remembered seeing in Deirdre’s collection. Matt wasn’t sure what the doll meant to Deirdre. Maybe it was a guardian?
The doll lowered its spear and glanced down and to the side, and Matt followed the direction of its gaze.
The coyote sat beside Deirdre’s chair, its tail curled around its front paws. It stared at Matt with glowing yellow eyes.
“Right there,” she whispered to Deirdre.
Deirdre looked down beside her, then up at Matt, her eyes sad.
Matt gripped Deirdre’s hand. —Look,—she thought. —See.—She stared at the coyote, who huffed a quick breath and studied Deirdre’s face. Deirdre’s eyes narrowed. She glanced down again.
—See,—Matt thought, then realized she had never been able to talk to another living human this way except Edmund. This was thing-speak. Edmund had a different form of thing-speak, but he and Matt could still communicate. Could Deirdre even hear Matt? Even if Deirdre heard, how could Matt get her to see something?
The only time Matt had been able to share her vision with anybody was when Nathan helped her, or borrowed magic did … or the house.
Deirdre shook her head. Frustration furrowed her brow.
Matt let go of Deirdre’s hand. “Got another idea.”
—Hey. Coyote. Okay with you if the house and I let Deirdre see you?—
—Whuff.—The mental sound was more a huffing of breath than a bark. The coyote lowered its head twice, peered up under its brows at her, shifted sideways.
—The house can make things visible,—Matt said.
—Fff.—
Matt slid off her chair and sat on the floor. She put her palms against the wood.—House?—
—Yes? I’m kind of distracted now. Sorry about your tea water. The witches are doing all kinds of things to me that tickle.—
—Do you know there’s a coyote here?—
Past the Size of Dreaming Page 23
