Spiritwalk (29 page)

Esmeralda was also the one who’d seen to the transfer of the Library’s more pertinent texts into his memory banks. She spent long hours talking with him, playing chess or Go, sometimes just sitting in his study and reading, knowing that her company—her
awareness
of him and his particular needs—was more comforting than any verbal communication.

He appreciated the part Esmeralda had come to play in his life—appreciated it more than he could ever hope to convey to her. His only regret in their relationship—was that what defined humanity? he wondered sometimes; our apparent need for regrets and guilt?—was that it wasn’t Sara playing this role in his life. This didn’t in any way diminish his feelings for Esmeralda; he just missed Sara.

Before his death, it had always been he and Sara, paired against the world. But while she spent time with him whenever she returned to the House, he knew she was uncomfortable with their new relationship. It wasn’t real to her. No matter how much they could talk of old times, he knew that she still viewed him as a stranger; a familiar stranger, perhaps, like an old friend one hasn’t seen for a very long time, the distance of years lying between now and the familiar memories of then, but a stranger all the same.

She’d suffered the hardest with his death; but rather than coming to accept his ghostly return as Blue had, every time she was with him he could see a deep sorrow well in her eyes. Though she would never admit it, he was sure that it was her inability to come to terms with the present turn their relationship had taken that sent her into the Otherworld, more than any other reason.

Those who hadn’t known him before his death—or those like Esmeralda who’d been gone so long, or were so matter-of-fact when it came to what smacked so strongly of the supernatural—were nonplussed with his present state. But Sara...

It was because of her that he began to concentrate his studies on the Otherworld. He pored over all of its aspects, the myths and legends, the rumors he read, the facts that Esmeralda could share with him. He concentrated on how its borders related to this world. How one crossed over. How the journey could be made without a physical body.

It was the latter which proved to be his undoing.

He’d practiced reaching out from the House, stretching his spirit from where it was bound to the building, outward and inward, for the Otherworld lay in either direction, depending on one’s perception of it. And as he practiced, he realized it was possible. He
could
reach out, not just to view, but to step out, as it were, of the body that the House had become, like a spirit traveling beyond the confines of its flesh-and-bone body. It could be done.

But with success so close at hand, his father’s voice would reverberate in his mind.

It’s yours to guard now
,
James
.

And it was true. The House did need to be guarded. It was a center of power, a crossroads between the worlds. A place where magic lay deep in every stone and plank and tile of its making. And there were always those who yearned to breach its defenses, to take its power and invest it in themselves. Dissipating it upon their own concerns, rather than allowing it to continue its cyclic pattern of maintaining a community—building and residents, each fueling the other with solace and comfort, riddles and questions, understanding and always mystery.

It did need to be protected. Jamie saw how his father, and grandfather before him, had utilized their strange relationship with the building to keep it a haven of open-mindedness and learning. Those with destructive impulses could be turned away. Hermetic scholars following their left-handed paths might seek to tap into the lifespring of the House’s energy source—the garden, the ancient wood it hoarded in its memory—but such psychic assaults were rare and they, too, could be turned aside. The House had the strength; it only needed one such as Jamie or his ancestors for its focus.

It’s yours to guard now, James. Cherish the burden
.

Guard it he did, but it was a burden. For he wanted to reach out—to Sara. Wanted her to understand that for all the alienness of his present situation, he was still her uncle, still the Jamie she’d always known, and she was still his Sairey. It didn’t have to change. They’d been given a gift; he’d cheated death. What they could have between them would be different, but it would still be meaningful. The magic didn’t have to die.

If she could just understand that, then he would be content.

He would put away regrets and guilt.

He would do his best not to yearn for what he couldn’t have, but concentrate instead on what he did.

So he continued to reach for the Otherworld, to reach for her. And one day he stretched far enough so that all connections binding him to the House snapped and his spirit went sailing off into those uncharted realms.

It didn’t go at all as he’d expected.

The Otherworld was not one place, but a hundred thousand places and times, all overlapping, one over the other like the layers of an onion. From his present point of view, and with his inexperience, he found it impossible to focus on any one world, little say find Sara in it. His senses overloaded with a surfeit of images and impressions. He had no body, not even a center from which to define his focus as he could with Memoria in the House, so what came to him, came from every side and direction.

There was no up, no down. No east, no west. No past, no future. No left, no right. Here it was all now, and here, seething and roiling, a chaotic stew from which he found it impossible to extricate himself.

He realized two things at that moment: he was hopelessly lost, and he’d failed his charge by leaving the House unprotected. And worse, he could sense that someone... some
thing
was already taking advantage of his failure.

One small tenuous thread still connected him to Memoria. It was less a physical presence, more just a memory, or a hope of a memory. It wasn’t enough to show him how to return, to let him pull himself back. All he could do was send a warning back.

The message he sent was complex, a string of ideas and thoughts all bound together in what he’d learned, what he’d been, encapsulated as best he could in one brief flare of communication. But what reached the other end of the thread linking him to what he’d lost become distilled in its passage into—

The symbol upon the Weirdin disc of the Forest.

A ghostly cloak to carry a message of warning.

Then the apocalyptic stew in which he swirled and spun simply tugged his spirit apart and scattered the pieces into a hundred thousand Otherworlds.

6

Julianne wasn’t ready to become part of the crowd that was gathering in the ballroom. Not yet. She told Cal to go ahead, she’d catch up with him later, and while it was apparent that he didn’t want to leave her—because he honestly didn’t feel it was safe, she realized, rather than for his usual reasons for being with her—he did as she asked. Finally alone, she opened one of the House’s many front doors. Stepping outside, she let the night swallow her.

The paved width of an inner-city residential street should have been laid out before her. But O’Connor Street was gone, and with it the houses on its far side, the streetlights, the sound of traffic, the city itself....

There was only the forest—the primal forest that had thrust itself into the House with its giant trees that were no more than the tips of fingers when compared to the forest’s immense bulk as a whole. The trees were like redwoods—cathedral huge, enormous, stately and secret, resonant with mystery. They beckoned to her, almost audibly calling her name as they had from the first moment she’d looked out the window to find the city gone. Her body trembled. She ached to step away under their boughs, but then oddly enough she found herself thinking about Cal and the immediacy of the forest’s pull on her was diminished.

Something had happened to Cal when the forest entered the House. Not the same kind of something that she had experienced, but he’d sustained an epiphany as intense as her own sudden validation of the miraculous depths that lay behind the world. They’d each undergone a personal shift of perception that changed their world. For her, Mystery had been transformed from intuitive belief, secreted within herself, to tangible reality, while he...

When she considered how he’d looked at her in the hallway after they had left the Birkentree Room, how he’d spoken to her, she realized that his shift in perception had encompassed a simpler, though no less profound, change in how he viewed the world. He’d been looking at her as a person, first, rather than as a body he lusted after. He’d realized how their relationship had been colored by the game he’d been playing and he’d been... embarrassed. Perhaps even shamed.

Though she had no interest in him as sexual partner, she was not so hard-hearted as to be unable to empathize with what he was going through. She’d like to be friends with him. And they could be real friends, too, if he was able to put away his pretenses and simply be himself with her, if they could get past the understanding that their relationship could only be platonic.

She’d like that. If he could deal with it, she’d like it very much. Real friends were too important, too rare, to lose.

She gazed at the forest. Her longing to partake of its mystery, to walk under its cathedraling boughs and let its secrets fill her heart, thrummed like a drumbeat inside her. It called to her and she yearned to answer, but she turned away, back to the House to look for Cal. The door creaked as she opened it and she sensed something stir in the shadows nearby at the sharp sound. Peering more closely, she could just make out a figure standing in the dark, as still and silent as the trees of the forest that encircled the House.

“Who’s there?” she called.

The figure turned slowly in her direction, then stepped out to where the light from a window fell across her features. It was Emma, Julianne realized. Emma Fenn. Blue’s girlfriend.

It was hard to tell for certain in the poor light, but the first impression Julianne got was that Emma seemed only half present, as though her body was going through the motions of being animated, but her spirit had long since gone off rambling on its own. Julianne remembered some odd stories she’d heard about Emma from Ginny, something about how Emma’s spirit had been stolen once before....

She’s put it down to just the odd stories that tended to circulate in a place like Tamson House, such as other ones that said that Ohn was really an ancient bard who’d once been a member of some faerie court, but looking at Emma now, with the forest surrounding the House where the city should have been, that kind of a story didn’t seem odd at all. Worry stole its way inside her, leaving her feeling increasingly uneasy with each soft footstep it took.

“Emma,” she said. “Are you okay?”

For a long moment there was no answer, but then Emma smiled. Her eyes gleamed with sudden life, her features took on a radiance.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Julianne studied her for a long moment. There was no trace of the zombielike look about Emma that had first made her anxious, but the uneasiness that had lodged inside her didn’t fade.

“Would you do me a favor?” Emma asked before Julianne could speak. “Would you tell Blue where I’ve gone? I don’t want him to worry.”

“Gone?” Julianne repeated, “You mean that you’re out here?”

Emma shook her head and pointed away from the House.

“I’m going into the forest,” she said. “It’s calling me and I have to go.”

The forest.

As Emma spoke those simple words, Julianne’s own need to walk and experience its mysteries returned like a sharp ache. She yearned to just go. Close the door, and step away into the wonder that lay hidden beyond those first few trees, but she knew that Cal needed her more right now than she needed the forest. The spark of what she’d experienced, the glowing truth, was hoarded deep inside her and would never go away, while Cal’s shift in perspective could easily leave him embittered if she didn’t go to him now.

Still, she couldn’t escape a sudden stab of envy. Emma had Blue, and now she got the forest, too.... And Julianne couldn’t help but resent the fact that she was the one who’d chanced upon Emma and had to deliver a message to Blue that she knew he wasn’t going to like. They didn’t kill messengers anymore, not like they did in the old days, but who wanted to be the bearer of bad news? If anything happened to Emma... every time Blue looked at her, he’d remember who it was that had first told him....

She tried to put those feelings away before they could take root. They weren’t worthy and they made her feel not just uncomfortable—knowing that they were there in the first place—but unclean as well.

“It’s probably not such a good idea to go off exploring on your own,” she said.

Never mind that she’d been about to do the same thing herself. But there was a difference, she decided. People might think she was a little spacey sometimes, but Emma—Emma didn’t seem to be so much answering the call of the forest that Julianne had heard herself, as being driven to go out into the night. Under the trees. Into the unknown.

From that perspective, it seemed a dangerous, even foolhardy thing to be doing.

“We don’t know what’s out there,” she added, the words sounding lame as she spoke them.

Emma just looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, “You know.”

Julianne fell silent. She did know, didn’t she? She wanted to go, but she felt it was more important to go to Cal right now, to help him get through what was going to be a bad moment for him, to try to make it something he could look back on with wonder, rather than shame.

“What do you know about trees?” Emma asked suddenly.

Julianne gave her a puzzled look. “What do you want to know?”

“Well, you people—Wicca—you worship them, don’t you?”

“Hardly. We respect them.”

Julianne’s gaze traveled past Emma to the awesome forest that lay behind the House. The trees called to her still, a bittersweet air that once again sparked her longing to step under their sweeping boughs and partake of their Mystery.