Spiritwalk (42 page)

Was that possible? Blue wondered. He could see that the woman sincerely believed it was. His own reservations withered when he thought about all the impossibilities he’d experienced in the past twenty-four hours.

“Go away,” the woman told him. “He’s not interested in you. Your friend has a certain... vitality that he can use, but he has no need for you.”

“Fuck you,” Blue said.

He moved the muzzle from her to the figure in the bed and fired from the hip. The bullet sparked just before reaching the man, ricocheting off to embed in a wall. The anise-like smell stung Blue’s nostrils. His ears rang from the loud report, but the woman appeared completely unfazed.

“I think it’s time for you to go,” she said.

Her voice seemed to come from a great distance. Blue worked another round into the firing chamber and swung the rifle back so that it covered her.

“Sit down,” he said.

She moved to a chair and sat. The weariness in her features was now touched with a mocking amusement. Blue looked around the room, spotted a handful of ties hanging from a tie rack on the closet door, and grabbed a couple.

“Tie your legs to the chair,” he told her, tossing the ties toward her.

“This isn’t going to prove anything.” She looked at the man on the bed. “As soon as he’s finished, he’ll—”

“Just do it.”

When she finished tying her legs to the chair, he took a few more ties over to where she sat and bound her arms behind her. After checking and tightening the bonds on her legs, he set the rifle aside and moved to the phone.

“I’ve told you. There isn’t anybody who can help—”

“Put a cork in it, lady.”

He dialed a number and waited impatiently for the con-

nection to be made. It took six rings before a sleepy voice

answered on the other end of the line.

“Tucker? Blue here.”

“Do you have any idea what—”

“I don’t give a shit what time it is. I need your help, John.”

“Why is it that the only time I ever hear from you it’s when you need a favor?”

“This is serious. It’s got to do with Sara.”

That was enough to get Tucker’s attention.

“Okay,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I’ve got a situation here that’s going to get real messy.”

“You’re at the House?”

“No,” Blue said. “We’re just across the street, on the south side of the building.” He gave the address.

“You want me there officially?” Tucker asked.

Tucker was a cop who usually tried to play by the rules. But he was also a friend.

“I don’t think that’d be such a good idea,” Blue said. “I just need you.”

“I’ll be right over,” Tucker told him.

7

Esmeralda had grossly miscalculated how long it would take Jamie to recover. He hadn’t exactly died so much as fragmented this time out, but his return to awareness followed a similar pattern. By the time Whiskey Jack had gathered all the lost parts of his soul into the vessel of the dead kingfisher, he was already dealing with his recovery.

It took him a little longer to get his bearings once Esmeralda returned him to the House. The spark of his being leapt immediately into Memoria’s electronic circuits; it was relating to the sheer size and scope that his spirit inhabited in its guardianship of the House that took the extra time. It was like putting on a familiar suit one hadn’t worn for a few years. You knew which sleeve went where, how the zipper and buttons functioned, but it just didn’t
feel
right at first. It seemed tighter across the shoulders, perhaps, and the trousers didn’t hang just right. Still, it only took wearing it for a short while until you adjusted to the fit.

As he did with the House.

But by the time he was back in control, Esmeralda and Ginny had already left the room and there was no one with whom he could communicate. He started to follow their progress, looking inward through the windows, listening to the hollow tread of their footsteps on the hardwood floors, the more muffled steps on carpets, but he soon withdrew back to his nerve center in Memoria.

There was a far more pressing concern at hand than speaking to his friends.

He’d sensed the drain on the House’s vitality as soon as he was lodged in the interlocking patternwork of its wood and glass and stone. He traced the origin of the siphoning back to the House’s homeworld, a process that gave him his first awareness that the building had followed him into the Otherworld.

In the matrices of Memoria’s memory banks he had long ago created a physical representation of himself and his study. It wasn’t a place anyone else could visit, for it existed solely in electronic impulses—an odd mingling of those that were native to the human mind with those that the computer required to function; it existed solely for him. The pretense of a physical body and surroundings helped him to focus more clearly on individual issues as well as allowing him a respite from the constant barrage of stimuli that the House fed him otherwise. As Tamson House was a haven to those who required a respite from the sometimes overwhelming concerns of the world beyond its walls, so this small block of electronic impulses in Memoria’s enormous memory banks was his.

It was to that place he retreated when the full enormity of the situation settled in him.

His first impulse on discovering the intruder had been to cut off the man’s access to the House’s magical essence. That had proved futile. The intruder was simply too strong, effortlessly blocking every one of Jamie’s attempts. What was worse, he was using the House’s own energy to do so. So Jamie withdrew to the privacy of his haven—even the intruder didn’t seem able to access it—but while he was safe from the man’s scrutiny, he was also at a loss as to how to proceed from here.

“God, but you’ve been a fool,” he told himself. “How can you stop him, when he controls more of the House than you do?”

“You have to go to him,” a disembodied voice said.

The shock of being addressed by someone in his most private of retreats was enough to make him momentarily lose control of the pretense of form he had given himself and the study. When he recovered enough to call them back into their semblances of reality, he was no longer alone in the room.

Sitting in the other club chair was a familiar figure whose presence made the hairs rise on the nape of Jamie’s neck. The newcomer looked like a fairy-tale gremlin—a tiny wizened figure with a floppy hat and a baggy overcoat. His nose was hooked; his beard, and what could be seen of his hair poking from under the hat, was grizzled. His eyes were startlingly bright and seemed to bulge birdlike from their sockets.

“You can’t be here,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re—”

“Dead?” His uninvited guest laughed. “And you’re not?”

It was a question that Jamie had pondered over a great deal in the years since he’d taken over guardianship of the House, but it wasn’t relevant here. With the man’s laugh he realized who his guest was. It wasn’t Thomas Hengwr sitting here with him—the same man who’d been indirectly responsible for all the odd occurrences that had troubled Tamson House and eventually resulted in Jamie’s own death so many years ago. No, this was Whiskey Jack in one of his thousand and one guises, following up on the results of his earlier handiwork with Esmeralda.

Jamie had seen him pass through the House often enough in the years of his guardianship to recognize him no matter what shape he wore.

“What do you want?” he asked the trickster.

“The same as you—a return to how things once were. Unfortunately, that won’t be entirely possible, but we can only do our best.”

Jamie nodded slowly.

“It’s up to you to stop him,” Whiskey Jack said. “Let me tell you what I know of him, little enough though it is.”

“Why don’t you stop him?”

“Because it’s your responsibility,” Whiskey Jack replied. “And because I can’t get near him.”

“And I can?”

Whiskey Jack nodded.

“I’ve already tried to stop him, but he’s too strong.”

“That’s why you have to
go
to him. You’re part of the House once more now—all you have to do is follow the trail of energy he’s stealing away.”

“And then?”

Whiskey Jack didn’t bother replying.

Jamie sighed. “All right. Tell me what you know.”

Whiskey Jack flickered out of existence when he’d finished speaking, vanishing like a hologram when the lights were turned off. Jamie took a moment to digest what he’d been told. He looked around the pretense of his study, looked down at his hands.

We never know when we’re well enough off, he thought. We’re given great gifts, but we never appreciate them for what they are. We keep wanting more and more, until one day our greed forces it all to be taken away.

Well, he had no one but himself to blame.

He rose from his chair and let the illusion of body and room disappear. His spirit hovered for a moment in Memoria’s electronic web; then he allowed the intruder to siphon him away with the vitality of the House that he was so busily stealing.

As he was drawn back to his homeworld, he drew the House and its inhabitants along with him.

8

John Tucker pulled his car up to the curb in front of the address that Blue had given him and killed the engine.

He was the head of security for a special branch of the RCMP that investigated the paranormal. The official name for the branch was Mindreach, named after a project in the early eighties dedicated to researching and documenting the viability of psychic resources; since then their mandate had been broadened to encompass the entire gray area of experiences that could be collected under the term paranormal. To the other horsemen, the men who worked that branch were known as the Spook Squad.

Tucker was in his mid-fifties and still in top physical condition. He was a big man, just topping six feet and weighing in at two hundred pounds. His hair and eyes were gray; his squared mustache almost white. He’d been with the force for thirty-six years—ten years of that time heading up the Spook Squad—but the weirdest thing he’d ever been involved in hadn’t been a part of his work, although it had started there. It had all gone down in that strange block-long building directly across the street from the address where he was now parked.

He’d been skeptical of Mindreach’s mandate until that time, but the events in Tamson House had changed all of that. Whenever talk came down of cutting the small branch’s budget, he was on the front line, cashing in favors to keep it viable. Tangible evidence was hard to come by, but he knew their work was important, because one day, somewhere out there, another Tom Hengwr was going to show up. The difference was, this time they’d be ready when the shit hit the fan.

His belief in Mindreach’s importance even overrode the guilt of what he’d had to do in the final cleanup after what had happened in the House. Hengwr hadn’t been the only threat at that time; J. Hugh Walters, a business magnate, had also been involved. He was too high up to take down, had too many connections in the local and federal government, so Tucker had dealt with him using the only option left.

That assassination, necessary though it had been, had him sitting at his desk more than once, typing up his resignation. Mindreach was what made him tear it up each time—Mindreach and his wife, Maggie. She’d been through the same shit; she’d helped him make the decision. And it was only because he knew that her respect for the law—she was a Crown attorney—was as great as his that he let her talk him out of it.

“We didn’t have a choice,” she’d tell him, always making it a collective deed, although he’d been the one to pull the trigger. “And if you walk out on Mindreach now, you’re throwing it all away. Because it’s going to happen again. We know now that it’s possible; next time we might not get so lucky. Next time it might not be contained the way it was with Thomas Hengwr. And if you’re not there...”

She didn’t have to finish. He kept working; he kept the branch alive. But some days he couldn’t help but wake up wondering if it wasn’t all a lie. Maybe the ends had justified the means—that time. But who was he to call the shot? He’d been right once; there were no guarantees he’d be right a second time. And solving the problem the way he had, how did that make him any different from the bad guys?

It was a circular argument, with no easy answers. Hearing from Blue, seeing Tamson House, brought it all back again.

He studied the long dark building now, then turned his attention to the house where Blue and Sara were waiting for him.

Everything looked normal, he thought. Maybe Blue was overreacting.

But then he noticed the owls.

The birds were everywhere—on the eaves of houses, on trees, streetlamps, telephone poles, even on the car parked in front of him.

“Shit,” he muttered.

He took his revolver from the seat beside him and got out of the car, clipping the holster to the back of his belt where his jacket would hide it. Blue had the front door open before he reached the porch.

“Thanks for coming,” Blue said, stepping aside to let him in.

“No problem, Farley.”

Tucker smiled at Blue’s pained expression. Glen Farley was the name on Blue’s birth certificate; there weren’t many people who could get away with razzing him about it. Only this time, Tucker didn’t get a rise out of him.

Tucker’s smile faded into a frown. Things were definitely serious.

“So what’s going down?” he asked as he stepped into the front hall.

Blue just pointed to the couch in the living room. Tucker took a few quick steps over to where Sara was lying and knelt down beside her. He put a pair of fingers up against her throat, then looked over his shoulder at Blue.

“Did you call an ambulance?” he asked.

Blue shook his head. “She needs magic, not medicine.”

Magic. Right. That shit again.

Tucker sighed. “Do you want to run the whole story by me?”

Blue pulled up the coffee table. Sitting on its edge, his gaze shifting from Sara’s still features to Tucker’s face, he filled Tucker in on all the details as he knew them. He finished his explanation upstairs where the residents of the house were. The old woman regarded them with amusement, for all that she was bound to a chair. Her companion lay on the bed as motionless as Sara did on the couch downstairs.