Spiritwalk (4 page)

“What do you think, Joey?” Chance asked as he lit up. “Is that some place or what?”

He tossed the match onto the pathway in front of the bench and leaned back, smoke drifting from his nostrils. His hair was long and slicked back from a high forehead, his eyes a pale blue and close-set. He wore jeans, a tan cotton shirt open at the neck and a summer-weight sports jacket.

“It’s something all right,” Joey replied.

At six-foot-four and two hundred and sixty pounds, Joey Martin topped his partner by four inches and outweighed him by eighty pounds. He was dressed similarly, though on him the clothes were more serviceable than stylish. His hair was cropped short in a military style.

“Got to be two hundred rooms,” Chance said, shifting his weight so that he was leaning forward now. “I mean just
look
at the place.”

“When’re we gonna start breaking heads?” Joey wanted to know.

“Be cool, Joey. This is just a recon, nothing more. I just wanted to check the place out. We got a job to do and that comes first. Fact that Farley’s the local watchdog is just icing on the cake—now you remember that.”

“Yeah, but he owes you.”

“Course he owes me,” Chance said. “Everybody owes me something. I just choose my own time to collect it, that’s all. So don’t push me, Joey. I don’t like being pushed.”

Chance turned to face the bigger man. For all his size, Joey looked quickly away, hunching his neck into his shoulders.

“I didn’t mean nothing,” he mumbled.

Chance pushed him lightly on a meaty shoulder. “I know that, Joey. You just get excited.” He took a final drag on his cigarette and flicked it out onto the grass. “But you have to learn how to be patient. See, we’re businessmen now. We’re wearing our colors in here now”—he tapped his chest—“where only we can see them. We don’t just go wading into places and break heads anymore. We think things through. We’re looking for the profit, now. The percentages, Joey.”

“I don’t know about that kind of shit,” Joey said. “All I know’s breaking heads and partying, Chance. That’s all I know.”

“And that’s why you’ve got me,” Chance said.

Joey nodded happily. “So when’re we breaking some heads?”

Chance sighed. He let his gaze follow the length of Tamson House. “Soon enough,” he said. “But not right now.” He stood up and shook loose another cigarette. “Right now it’s time to see if this gizmo that Our Lady of the Night gave us can do its job.”

He took a small oval stone from his pocket and pointed it at the House, panning slowly along its length. When it was pointing near the O’Connor Street end, the stone began to glow softly. Chance looked down at the pale golden glimmer and smiled as he put it away.

“Bingo,” he said. “She’s there.”

“I don’t like working for these fags,” Joey said.

“They’re not fags, they’re Faerie,” Chance told him.

“Same difference—they’re all queer, right, Chance? I’d like to break their heads.”

You’re like a big dumb dog, Chance thought, looking at his partner. You don’t understand shit, all right, but I wouldn’t swap you for the world.

“Come on, Joey,” he said. “Let me buy you a doughnut.”

“A chocolate doughnut?”

Chance lit his cigarette, then led the way out of the park to where their car was parked on Bank Street. “Sure,” he said. “Any flavor you want, Joey.”

He looked back at the block-long structure that was Tamson House one more time before getting into the Mustang. That’s one fucking monster of a place, he thought. You could hide an army in there. It might be smart if he renegotiated their fee—upped it to where they could hire some more muscle without it having to come out of what they were already getting.

“Who do you know that’s looking for some work?” he asked Joey as he slid into the passenger’s seat.

Two

1

“Esmeralda,” Button said as she came into the kitchen.

Blue turned from the stove where he was frying up chopped vegetables for an omelet. The kitchen had a name, like most of the rooms in Tamson House. It was called the Silkwater Kitchen, but Blue never could remember why. It was a bright sunny room, with an old Coca-Cola clock over the door and a cassette player up on top of one of the cupboards. An Ian Tamblyn song was currently spilling from the pair of Braun speakers on either side of the tape machine.

“Esmeralda?” Blue asked. “What’s that—your name?”

Button shook her head. “I just woke up with it in my head. It’s someone I know... I think.”

“Does she live in town?”

“I seem to remember letters....”

Blue signed and turned to give the vegetables another stir. If it was a friend who lived in town, a first name wasn’t much to go on. And if it was a correspondent... well, the world was a big place.

“Don’t be mad,” Button said softly from the table in the nook. She was sitting with her feet up on a chair, hugging her knees.

“Mad?” Blue took the frying pan off the burner and came to sit with her at the table. “I’m not mad, Button. What makes you say that?”

She gave a little shrug. “I don’t know. You just seem mad.”

“Frustrated, yeah—but
for
you, not at you. I just want to figure out a way to find out who you are.”

“Me, too.”

Before he realized what he was doing, Blue covered one of her hands with his own. “I know, Button,” he said.

She clutched his hand tightly, a desperate look in her eyes. The intimacy of the moment stirred Blue’s own needs again. He wanted to fold her into his arms, but instead he gently disengaged their hands and stood up to return to the stove.

“So—are you hungry?” he asked in a voice that was a little too bright.

He scraped the vegetables into a bowl. Pouring a stirred egg, herbs and milk mixture into the frying pan, he waited until it was half-cooked, dumped the vegetables on top of it, then folded the omelet over. By the time he had their breakfast on the table, a steaming cup of coffee beside each plate, he had his own feelings under better control. When he looked at Button, something deep and warm lay waiting in her gaze for him, but she seemed to know enough to talk of other things.

“Do you live here all alone?” she asked. “Sort of like a caretaker?”

Blue shook his head. “I guess you could call me a caretaker, but I don’t live here alone. There’s just no one around this weekend. See, Tamson House is a strange sort of a place. It draws people to it—but only the right kind of people. They’re the kind of people who are a little different. They don’t always fit the norm, at least not in the outside world, and that can get a little hairy. Everybody needs a bit of a quiet space once in a while, a place they can just be themselves, and like Jamie always says, ’This is a place where difference is the norm,’ so nobody has to try and fit in here because everything fits in.”

“Jamie’s the man who owns the House?”

“No, he’s... “ Ever since he’d discovered that Jamie’s spirit was a part of the House still, that they could talk to each other through the computer, Blue couldn’t say the simple words “he’s dead.” He didn’t know what it was that Jamie was, but it wasn’t dead no matter what anybody—Jamie included—had to say about it.

“The House belongs to Sara Kendell,” Blue said finally. “She’s Jamie’s niece, see? Anyway, since she’s off traveling right now, I’m sort of looking after the place for her.” Off traveling. Right. Which was a very simple way of saying that she was in one of the Otherworlds with the Welsh bard Taliesin at the moment, undertaking her own bardic studies.

“What do you do when you’re not here?” Button asked around a mouthful of omelet. “I mean, what kind of a job do you have?”

“This is like a full-time job,” Blue said with a smile. “Or did you forget the size of this place?”

Button smiled back. “That’s right. I felt like I should have a map just to get down here for breakfast.”

“I’ll give you a tour later.”

“Great.”

They ate in silence then, until both their plates were clean. Button blotted up the last of her egg with a piece of toast, then leaned back in her chair.

“So do you have a, you know, a girlfriend or anything?” she asked offhandedly.

The question hit Blue with a flood of memories. For a moment he was back there at the end of that war between the druid Hengwr and his monstrous elf half. He could remember.... They were in the House, fighting off the enemy’s creatures, their own allies almost as strange. Norindian elves. The little manitou Pukwudji. A pair of wolves. Not to mention Tucker from the RCMP. Oh, they’d had it all—shaman magic and bardic magic and just plain guns and duking-it-out fisticuffs—but none of it had been enough. It had still taken Jamie’s life to end it.

Only Jamie wasn’t dead, Blue never stopped trying to tell himself. Not like dead was supposed to be. But things just weren’t the same anymore anyway. How could they be? Everything had changed. They’d been like a family, only after the casualties there wasn’t much of a family left. Fred had died. And Sam. And Jamie.

And when it was all over, Sara didn’t stay much in the House, so she left it to Blue to look after. And things didn’t work so well between him and Sally....

“It didn’t work out the way it was supposed to,” Blue said softly.

“I didn’t mean—” Button began.

“That’s okay,” Blue said. “I want to tell you. The last woman I was close to—her name was Sally. Sally Timmons. We went through some bad shit that wasn’t her fault or mine—we just got caught up in what was like a war. I used to ride with the Devil’s Dragon and I wasn’t much of a human being. Man, I had the colors and the bike and the Dragon was everything. But the Dragon turned on me and I was on a downward slide until I ran into Jamie.

“He pulled me up and brought me here and then he and Sara sort of showed me what it was like to be a real person—not just some animal cruising with a machine between his legs, see? Now, I’m not cutting down my bikes, Button—they’re like a lifeline for me, out there on the road. Sometimes they’re all that keeps me sane. But you can have the chopped-down Harley and not be an animal, you know?

“So I was doing good, here in the House, learning things about myself, learning about how the world works and how I could fit into it—like sliding through it, not smashing my way through. By the time I met Sally I was doing pretty good. But then this trouble came up and I... Christ, Button, I scared the shit out of myself.

“Now I know it was a time for that kind of thing—we had to fight or die, it was as simple as that—but by the time it was all over I just couldn’t handle the way I’d gone back so quickly to what I’d been. It was like the violence was always there inside me, just aching to get out. It’s like it’s always going to be sitting there inside me.

“When that war was over and we got ourselves back home, I had a lot of trouble handling that. I hid it pretty good from most people—Christ, there weren’t many left to hide it from except for Sara and she was caught up with her new beau—but I couldn’t hide it from Sally. You can’t hide that kind of thing from someone when you’re living with them.

“Sally tried helping me, but I just couldn’t take her concern. Things got real bad between us and she just had to split...”

Blue had been staring at the table while he talked, the words spilling out of him in an undammed flood. Suddenly he looked up, straight into Button’s gaze. What am I doing? he thought. What am I laying all this shit on her for?

“Look,” he said. “I guess you got a little more than you were asking for with that one simple question. I’m sorry. I don’t usually run on at the mouth like this.”

“That’s all right.”

She sat there, looking at him with those guileless greengray eyes until Blue stood up suddenly from the table.

“I’ve got to check a few things on my bike,” he said. “The carb’s acting up and...” His voice trailed off. All he wanted was to get away. Motormouth here needs the time to clear his head, he felt like he should tell her, but all he added was, “I won’t be that long.”

“I’ll do the dishes,” Button told him.

“Great. Okay.” He turned abruptly and left the kitchen.

Button stood there for a long moment, then set about washing up. When she was done, she wandered aimlessly down one of the long hallways. A doorbell rang just as she reached the rooms fronting O’Connor Street. She called for Blue, but when there was no answer, she stepped up to the door and opened it herself.

2

Chance and Joey parked the Mustang on O’Connor Street, near the corner of Clemow. They left it with its nose pointed north for a quick getaway. Construction on the Central Park bridge blocked the street going south.

“Now be cool,” Chance told his partner as they approached the nearest door of Tamson House. A few discreet questions in the right places had told him what he wanted to know. The girl was what they were after and there was only Farley living here at the moment. In other words, nothing was going to come up that he and Joey couldn’t handle by themselves. “If Farley or anybody else answers, I want them out of the way, fast. If it’s the girl, we snatch her and run. Got it?”

“Yeah, but Farley—”

“We’re not getting squat for Farley,” Chance said. “If he’s there, great, we got ourselves a bonus. If he’s not, we play it like I laid it out.
Got
it?”

“Sure, Chance,” Joey said, plainly unhappy, but unwilling to push the point.

Chance took the seeking stone out of his pocket and pointed it toward the House as they approached. It glimmered eerily in his hand, brightening as they neared the second doorway north of Clemow. The House loomed above them, three stories high here and continuing down the block in a facade that made it look like a row of houses tucked snugly one against the other, although it was in fact all one structure.

“We’re getting lucky,” Chance said.

He hit the bell, then tapped his foot impatiently as they waited for someone to come. Joey took up a position on the other side of the door, a tire iron held down beside his leg where it couldn’t be seen by anyone happening to look at them from across the street.

“Okay,” Chance murmured. “This is it.”

The door opened and he had one quick look at their quarry. She stood framed in the doorway, chestnut hair tied back in a messy French braid that looked like it had been slept on and wearing blue jeans and a dusty rose sweatshirt. The stone flared in his hand.