Out of This World (24 page)

“So isn't that where we should go?” I ask. “The place where it ends? Won't we find her there?”

“It doesn't work like that,” he says. “None of us are dead ends. Wherever we are, we're connected to where we've been and where we can go. It's a huge web of history and possibilities. But her thread doesn't go forward.”

I swallow hard, feeling like a piece of lead just dropped into my belly. “You're not … Are you saying …”

“I'm saying I don't know. I don't think she's dead, or at least I haven't seen or felt anything to make me think she is. But I can't find her, either.

“You see,” he goes on, standing up and wiping his hand on his jeans, “the otherworld is capricious, at best. You have to either be someone like me, who can figure out the patterns, or have a sense of direction that works in at least five dimensions. Past, present and future all take place at the same time here.
Dreams—hell, anything you can imagine, and a lot you can't— exist here somewhere. But not in any way you can map.

“Everything's on top or underneath, or a step sideways, and it shifts around so that just because you found your way once, doesn't mean you'll find it again. Or that you can see how to get out. And if you're a five-fingered being, you might be a whole somebody else when you do return to your own world.”

Great—thanks for the warning, I think.

“Is that what they mean about fairyland?” I ask. “You know how in the stories, if a mortal goes there, they come back either a poet or mad?”

“Maybe. But the more I live among you people, the more I believe that you're already all out of your minds. The things you do to each other.” He shakes his head.

“Oh yeah?” I tell him. “Dude, what about …”

I'm about to bring up how heavy Vincenzo was, but I let it go because he's right. We humans don't need psycho cousins to bring hurt down on us. We already do that to ourselves. And dude, that's a sobering thought.

“You were saying?” he asks when I trail off.

“Nothing. So what now?”

He shrugs. “We find her the hard way.”

I swallow again and try not to let my nervousness show. Whatever happens here, I tell myself, I'm doing it for Marina. She and Josh would do the same for me. I just hope I'm the same
me
when I get back.

“So, what?” I say. “You take a walk around inside my head and somehow that leads you to her?”

“Something like that. Just fill your mind with her. Think of
all the things she means to you—the good and the bad. Let the memories come and keep filling in details. I'll do the rest.”

“Dude, tell me first.
What
will you do?”

“It's a coyote thing,” Donalita says. “You know how you let a bloodhound smell a piece of clothing that belongs to the person you want him to track?”

“Sure, but—”

“This isn't any different, except you're giving him a taste of all the things that make Marina who she is. It's like you're laying down a scent trail, and that long nose of his will lead us to her.”

Cory nods. “That's a good way to put it. And it works best with someone who knows her really well.”

“So I just think about her.”

“More than that,” he says. “Close your eyes and try to make her real inside your head—so real that if you opened your eyes, you'd expect her to be standing right here in front of you.”

“Dude,” Donalita says, punching me lightly on the shoulder. “You can
so
do this.”

“I know.” Though honestly? I'm not so sure.

“You're not going to stab me are you?” I ask Cory, thinking of how I heard he did that to Chaingang.

Cory flashes that coyote grin of his, obviously aware of what I've been thinking.

“If I do, it'll only
feel
real,” he says.

Donalita kicks him in the shin.

“Ow!” he cries and steps out of range, almost falling into the water. “It was a joke,” he adds from a safer distance.

She glares at him and points a finger. “Well, don't be such a Big Stupid. How's Des supposed to know that?”

Girls. Didn't she just play the same kind of joke on me?

“Okay, okay.” He rubs his shin and looks at me. “Word of warning—don't ever get on the wrong side of a coati girl.”

I hold up my hands. “I'm not stupid, dude.”

Donalita laughs, then turns serious. “I'm going to make things easier for you,” she tells Cory. “You'll only have to worry about bringing Des along.”

“Wait,” I say. “You're not coming?”

“Did I say that?” she says. Then adds, “Catch!”

She jumps toward me, shifting into a pebble in mid-air. I'm so unprepared that my fingers only close around air. But hours of playing hacky sack with Josh pay off with an instinctive save. I tap the stone with my heel before it can hit the ground, and this time I catch it.

“Man,” Cory says, “would I like to figure out how she does that trick.”

“I thought it was something all you tricksters can do.”

Cory shakes his head. “I can look like someone else, but I can't actually
become
something else.”

I look down at the pebble in my hand and see Donalita curled up, superimposed on the pebble. I can only feel a pebble, but just like back at Sunny Hill, I can
see
them both.

“Don't drop her,” Cory says, “or who knows where she'll end up.”

I nod and stick the pebble in my pocket. “But what did she mean about making things easier for you?”

“Now I only have to concentrate on bringing you along.”

I shift from foot to foot. I have no clue how he's planning to bring me anywhere. “Okay, so what happens now?”

“Just stay still and fill your head with Marina.”

I feel totally out of my depth, but I nod. He steps up close and puts his palms on my temples.

“Just think of her,” he says. “Not only what she looks like, but what her skin feels like, how she smells, what she cares about— everything that makes her real to you.”

I close my eyes and start with how she looks—that's easy. But beyond that it gets complicated. She hid that she was a Wildling for six months, so how am I supposed to know what she thinks about or what she feels? She's been mooning after Josh for pretty much as long as I've known her, but suddenly, wham bam, she hooked up with Chaingang, who's not even remotely like any of the dudes she's ever dated.

I don't even want to get into the crush for her that I've carried for years.

“Man,” Cory says. “You guys are like a bad reality show.”

His voice seems to come from somewhere behind me, but I can still feel his hands on either side of my head. I open my eyes to look at him and then vertigo hits me.

We're standing on—dude, I don't know
what
we're standing on. It's like we're floating in nothingness and my stomach just won't stop doing flips.

“Wh—where are we?” I manage.

I feel like I might puke, so I start to pull away, but he holds my head more tightly.

“Don't break contact!” he says.

“Dude—what the hell is this place?”

Cory shrugs. “Hard to say. Feels like a piece of something you might have dreamed once.”

Like that makes any sense. But I'm feeling too nauseous to ask him to explain.

“You're doing good,” he says. “Close your eyes. Keep concentrating.”

I want to argue that I'm not doing good at all, but if I open my mouth again I'm pretty sure I might barf. So instead, I close my eyes.

And just like that, the queasy feeling goes away and I'm visualizing Marina again.

“Dude,” I say, keeping my eyes firmly closed. “That was weird.”

“Concentrate. Don't get distracted.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Focus.”

Yeah? On what?

I've got a thousand pictures in my head of Marina. She's surfing—on her own or with the school club. She's banging the drums, head keeping time, her hair flying. She's on a skateboard and laughing because she can't get her balance on wheels like she can on a wave. She's sitting across from me at a table in the lunchroom, trying not to smile at some stupid thing I said.

And then I remember the Sadie Hawkins Dance last year. She was gorgeous in that pink dress, hair all done up, but wearing a radical pair of high-tops that she'd painted a million colours in art class. Being a Sadie Hawkins Dance, I'd been sure that she was going to invite Josh, but instead she showed up with some loser whose name I can't even remember. I can't remember who asked Josh, or who I went with, either. All I remember is her watching Josh, and me watching her, and Josh being oblivious to it all, as usual.

“Got it!” Cory says.

I feel like we're falling—but it's a sensation that's only in my head. I still feel Cory's grip, and the ground underfoot. Then Cory lets me go and I stagger.

I open my eyes and all around us is a dead city. Like a big city, except it's been all bombed out or something, and there's trees and vines and crap growing over everything.

“Where are we?” I ask. “The end of the frigging world?”

But all he says is, “Fuck.”

I don't like the sound of that.

“What? What is it?”

“I need to talk to Donalita.”

“Dude, you're freaking me out.”

Instead of answering, he cocks his head.

“Fuck,” he says again. Then he turns to me. “Donalita. Now.”

I take the pebble out of my pocket and kneel down to tap it on the asphalt underfoot. A moment later Donalita's kneeling in front of me. We're nose to nose. She starts to grin, but then she frowns and shoots Cory a dirty look.

“Where did you bring us?” she asks, her voice sharp.

“She was here,” Cory says. “Maybe a half day ago.”

“But this is a
closed
world.”

“You think I don't know that?” he says. “And it gets worse. Hear that?”

Donalita cocks her head like he did.

“Hunting horns,” she says.

I still don't hear anything, but I already officially hate this place.

“Somebody want to tell me what's going on?” I say.

“Sometimes,” Cory says, “a cousin will carve out a little
pocket world. It might be no bigger than a room, or it might be like this—going on for who knows how far. But there's only one way in and one way out.”

“Yeah, so? Can't we just go back the way we came in?”

He shakes his head. “This one's set up differently. Anything can be funnelled in, but there's no way out, except through whoever set it up in the first place. They control the exit.”

“And these horns you're hearing?” I ask.

“I think this world is somebody's private hunting preserve,” he says. “Which means that either Marina stumbled onto it and is now stuck here—just like we are—or it could be Vincenzo's people chased her into this world.”

“So the horns …”

He nods. “Mean that the hunters have noted our arrival and are coming for us.”

I feel the blood drain from my face. I get up from the ground a little too quickly, and that strange feeling that comes just before you faint hits me. I lean over and brush off my pants, trying to tamp down my panic. I stand back up, more slowly this time.

“So what you're saying is, we're screwed.”

“I'd like to see someone try to hunt me,” Donalita says.

She flashes a mouthful of way too many sharp, pointy teeth, then they're gone again. She looks at my white face and wide eyes and laughs.

“Oh relax, dude!” she says. “This will be
fun
. I just wish Theo was here because he knows what to do to hunters.”

Cory bristles. “We're not killing anybody,” he tells her.

“Oh, pooh. What are you going to do? Sweet-talk them into letting us go on our way? Tra-la-la.”

“We don't know that anybody's trying to kill us.”

“We don't know that anybody's
not
, either.”

“Vincenzo was,” I say. “We know that. And now we know he's got some brothers running around—and some dude who's the boss of them.”

Cory shoots me a dirty look. “The dogs that treed you didn't try to kill you,” he says.

“Only because you called in a thousand crows,” Donalita says.

“There weren't a thousand—”

“Do you have some crows here to help us?”

“No, I—”

“Right,” Donalita says. “So you want to greet the kind hunters and have a nice little civilized chat with them because everybody knows that dogs don't run in packs and rev each other up.”

Cory closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

The horns sound again, closer. I know because now I can hear them.

“Look,” Cory says. “Somebody has put a binding on them. They don't
want
to do this.”

“Unless maybe they do,” Donalita says.

“Can we just—”

“You know, I smelled
you
on that roof,” she says to Cory.

“What—”

“Yeah, you do know,” she says wagging her chin smugly.

“The one across the street from where Josh's mother lives.”

“Wait a minute,” I say. “How could you know that? You were in my room with me all night.”

I really want to blow this popsicle stand—I don't need
another confrontation with these dogs, so the sooner we're out of here, the better—but what she's saying has me rooted to the spot. I look from her to Cory.

He's looking back and forth at us like he thinks we're an item or something.

“Dude, it's not like that.” I turn back to Donalita. “Are you telling me you went back to kill that guy anyway?”

“Of course not, silly. I promised you I wouldn't. Besides, he was already dead when I got there.”