Spiritwalk (5 page)

“Grab her!” he cried.

Shoving the stone in his pocket, he snatched the tire iron from Joey’s hand and ran for the car. By the time he had it pulled up to the curb in front of the doorway, Joey was half-carrying the girl under one arm to join him. She struggled in Joey’s grip, but she might as well have fought a gorilla for all the good it was doing her. He had a big meaty hand clamped across her mouth to stop her from screaming.

Joey tossed her into the back of the Mustang. He slapped his seat back into place and got in as the car was already starting to roll. Chance grinned as he booted the gas. The Mustang burned rubber as it tore north on O’Connor and took a quick right at Patterson.

“Piece of fucking cake!” he cried as the car squealed around the corner.

Behind him, the girl lunged toward the front seat. Joey gave her a shove that sent her floundering back.

“Try that again and he’ll break your face,” Chance told her. He shook a cigarette free from its pack and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, eyeing her in the rearview mirror all the while. Beside him, Joey leaned over his own seat, watching her as well.

Button cowered under Joey’s baleful eye. “P-please,” she said. “What are you—what do you want with me?”

“We don’t want nothing, sweetheart,” Chance said. “But we got somebody who’s paying us a pretty penny to deliver you to her tonight. Let me give you a hint—she’s got skin so white you’d think she was dead, and hair so black it’s got to be dyed. Ring any bells?”

Button stared at his eyes in the rearview mirror, her mind flooding with an image of the hunters that had tracked her down last night before Blue had come to rescue her. She hadn’t mentioned them to Blue because, no matter what she didn’t know about herself, she knew enough to know that things like that didn’t exist in the real world. She had to have imagined them. But looking into Chance’s eyes, hearing something that was almost a whisper of awe in his voice, she knew that those creatures had been real. And whatever had sent them after her had sent these men as well.

“Please,” she tried again, but Chance only laughed.

“There’s nothing like hearing a woman beg, right, Joey?”

Joey nodded slowly, his gaze never leaving their captive. “’Cept maybe breaking her head,” he said.

Button pressed herself into the corner of the backseat on the driver’s side of the car, trying to get as far as she could from him.

“I don’t know about you,” Chance said to his partner. “You never like to just fuck a broad like an ordinary guy?”

Joey frowned. “Sure,” he said. “I just like to break ’em open when I’m finished, that’s all.”

“You don’t get asked back to a lot of parties with an attitude like that,” Chance told him. He slicked back his hair with a free hand and laughed again.

3

Blue entered the garage and flicked on the lights. Standing in the doorway, he looked at his bikes. The two vintage Harleys stood side by side. A third was in pieces on the far side of his workbench, cannibalized for parts. A rebuilt Norton, a BMW and a scooter he’d been fixing up for Sara were on their stands near the Harleys, while two trail bikes and a Yamaha he was working on for the guy who’d tracked down the third Harley for him stood in a line along the back wall.

Sighing, Blue closed the door behind him, then slumped in the car seat that was bolted to the floor across from his workbench. It had come out of the last car he’d owned—a ’67 Chevy that he’d sold for parts, minus the seat. There was a can of Budweiser on the floor by his boots. When he picked it up, it sloshed. Half-full. Leaning back, he downed the flat beer, then crushed the can, tossing the empty into the metal garbage barrel beside his workbench.

Nice going, he told himself. There he’d been, supposedly helping Button except instead of pumping her for information—like what the hell she was doing out on the parkway last night, and where she’d got the Weirdin bone, and how come she didn’t have a fucking shadow—instead of doing something to help her, he’d just dumped all his problems on her. Way to go, man.

It had to be her eyes. Every time he looked in them, he just got lost. He wanted to help her, but he saw something in those eyes that could help him and like some kid getting laid for the first time, he’d just shot his load, never stopping to think about her.

He wondered what the hell she’d thought of it all. She had to think he wasn’t playing with a full deck. She’d be having second thoughts about hanging in here where he could maybe help her—and he wanted to help her. But he wanted her, too, and that was the trouble, wasn’t it?

He leaned forward and stared at the concrete floor between his boots. Needed a cleaning. Just like his head. It wasn’t like him to dump his problems on somebody else, but maybe that was the other problem. The one thing he’d learned from Jamie and Sara was that you couldn’t go through life on your own. Give and take. And it had to balance out. It was just as important to take as to give. Sally had told him as much, just before the split.

Should have listened, man, he told himself. But he never seemed to learn. There were a lot of should-haves in his life.

Well, right now he had to try and dope out Button’s problem. He’d lived with his own for so long, a little longer sure wasn’t going to change anything. As he stood up from the car seat, a doorbell rang. Besides ringing by the door that they were set into, all the bells were wired to ring in certain parts of the House. The Postman’s Room. Sara’s Tower. The garage.... They were all tuned different, so he could tell that this was from one of the doors on O’Connor—the second-closest to Clemow.

He started for the door that led into the House proper, but before he could reach it, the lights in the garage began to flicker rhythmically. That was Jamie’s way of calling him.

Trouble.

Pushing through the door, he ran down the hall and spotted the open door right off, but by the time he reached it, all he could hear was the sound of squealing tires. There was nothing in sight. He ran back toward the Silkwater Kitchen, calling Button’s name. Something knotted in his stomach when he got no response. Wasting no more time, he headed for the Postman’s Room, taking the stairs two at a time. There was a message pulsing on the screen when he got there.

TWO MEN TOOK YOUR BUTTON RIGHT OFF OUR DOORSTEP, it said. Following that was a brief description of the men and their car, followed by a license-plate number. As Blue started for the door, the computer beeped loudly. Blue turned back to look at the screen. IT’S TOO LATE TO CHASE THEM, Jamie said. YOU’VE GOT TO TRACK DOWN THE CAR AND HOPE IT WASN’T STOLEN. The plate number was repeated under that, the green letters and numbers pulsing.

“You got any bright ideas as to how we’re going to do that?” Blue asked.

Jamie gave one name in reply. TUCKER.

Blue nodded. Right. The intrepid Horseman. “Have we got his number?” he asked.

When the digits flashed on the screen, Blue grabbed the phone from the desk beside the computer and dialed the number. He didn’t want to be doing this. He wanted to be out there, hunting down the suckers that’d snatched Button.

“Inspector Tucker,” a familiar voice said as the connection was made.

“Hey, John,” Blue said. “I need some help.”

“Glen Farley,” Tucker replied. He used Blue’s real name just to raz him. “How’s the bike biz?”

“I don’t have time for farting around,” Blue said. “I need a favor—fast.”

“Have you got trouble?” Tucker asked immediately.

Blue could tell by the tone of the inspector’s voice that he was remembering the same things that Button’s arrival had woken in Blue. Unspoken was “more of that weird shit.”

“Nothing like before,” Blue said. At least he hoped to Christ it wasn’t. “I’ve got a license number and I need a name to go with it—can you do it?”

“What’s it for, Blue?”

“Just something personal—guy ripped something off from my workshop and I want it back.”

“You start breaking heads, Blue, and I can’t help you.”

“It’s nothing like that, John.”

There was a moment’s silence. Come on, Blue thought. We owe each other, man. Finally Tucker sighed on the other end of the line.

“Shoot,” he said.

Blue read off the number.

“If it gets back to me that you fucked somebody over,” Tucker said, “I’ll come looking for you, Blue.”

“Yeah, I know. Wearing a nice red jacket and one of those funny flat hats. Is this going to take long?”

“Give me half an hour,” Tucker replied and hung up.

Blue cradled the receiver and rubbed his knuckles in his eyes.

YOU DID WHAT YOU COULD. Jamie’s words dropped form the cursor as it crossed the screen.

“If I’d done what I should’ve done in the first place,” Blue replied, “she never would’ve been snatched, period.” He paused, staring at the screen. No, he thought. He’d had to worry about his own problems instead. “Christ, Jamie,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Before Jamie could reply, another doorbell rang—one of the ones on Patterson Avenue.

YOU’D BETTER GET GOING, Jamie said.

“What do you see?” Blue asked.

YOUR BUTTON IS BACK.

Blue took off for the far side of the House as the doorbell rang again. By the time he reached the appropriate door and flung it open, a familiar figure was just turning away.

“Jesus!” Blue cried. “What happened to you, Button?” The face that turned back to look at him was familiar, too, but at the same time it was a stranger’s face. Button, but not Button. It was in the eyes again, Blue realized. These were flat, almost expressionless.

“What... what did you call me?” the woman said.

As she took a half step back, Blue noted that she didn’t cast a shadow.

“Button... ?” he said, no longer so sure. What the
hell
was going on here?

“You can’t...
how
can you know... ?” She shook her head slowly. “Only my dad ever called me...” She took another step away from him. “You couldn’t....” She clutched a cloth purse to her chest, confusion pain in her features, but her eyes still registered flat.

Blue stepped out onto the stoop. “Listen,” he began. “I don’t know what—”

“This is a mistake,” the woman said. “I should never have come here. I... I...” She turned and bolted.

For one long moment Blue watched her go; then he took off after her. Catching her was no problem. He didn’t like forcing her, didn’t like grabbing her shoulders, using enough force to keep her from slipping free, but he wasn’t going to let her go.

“We’ve got to talk,” he said as gently as he could.

He looked into those green-gray eyes, still flat, still expressionless, and a shiver went through him. They had to be twins. He held her for a long moment before the fight went out of her. He let her go then, ready to grab her if she bolted again, but not wanting to scare her.

“You... you know me, don’t you?” she said. Her voice, too, was flat. Button’s voice, but without her intonations, the way her words rose and fell.

“If I don’t know you, I know your twin,” Blue said.

“I don’t have any siblings.”

“We’ve really got to talk,” Blue told her. “Do you want to come inside?”

She nodded slowly and let him lead her inside.

Three

1

There was a Faerie holt at the northeast end of Gatineau Park’s Lac la Pêche, a small wood sacred to the native manitou that immigrating Faerie had named Rathbabh and taken for their own. It lay in the Borderlands between the Seelie Courts of Kinrowan and Dunlogan, what Faerie called Ottawa, and that part of the Gatineau Mountains still held by Dunlogan’s Laird.

Once a sainly place, blessed by the presence of the Good Folk who shaped their spells deasil rather than widdershins, it had been abandoned when Kinrowan and Dunlogan fell on hard times and drew their borders in closer to their Lairds’ keeps. Bogans and other unsainly creatures haunted it in the years that followed until the recent arrival of a new Mistress of the Night to the contingent that Faerie named Loimauch Og, the West Fields of the Young. Her name was Glamorgana and she took that holt for her own.

She sat now in the dun under Rathbabh’s central mound with her bard at her side and impatience in her heart. Faerie lights glimmered near the ceiling, glinting on mica embedded in the dirt walls. Furs lined the floor. Glamorgana sat on a fox’s pelt, fingering a spellbag of badger fur. Her bard sat on the hide of a spotted doe, a small wire-strung harp in his hands. He played an idle tune, a half-smile on his lips.

“I can’t ’bide waiting,” his mistress muttered, not for the first time that day.

“Your trouble,” her bard told her, “is that you count time by men’s reckoning.”

Glamorgana glared at him. “Take care, Taran,” she said. “With Durkan beyond my reach, I might well spill your guts in his place.”

The bard shrugged. “Durkan told you no lies,” he replied mildly. “Kinrowan
was
ready for the taking. It wasn’t his fault or mine that the sea led us astray.”

Their voyage across the Atlantic had taken twice the time it should have. When they arrived, expecting to find Kinrowan an easy replacement for the lands they had lost at home, they found instead a rallying Laird and a Court under the protection of a giant-killing Jack—no match for a woodwife accompanied only by her bard and a small pack of unsainly gnashers. Kinrowan’s strength was such now that they dared not even cross her borders, having to send human agents in their place.

“No,” Glamorgana agreed. “It wasn’t his fault—but I’d have his heart all the same, if he were here, and I might still have yours for speaking up for him.”

Taran hid a sigh. It was because of that sort of deed that they’d had to flee in the first place—and far this time. Not just from one county to another, across a loch or on the far side of a moor. No. This time their flight took them into exile straight across the sea to Loimauch Og.

The bard was not happy here. The secret resonances of which only a bard could be aware were too unfamiliar in these hills. He had no peers. No one to exchange news or tunes with. No one except for Glamorgana and her gnashers.

He gave the gnashers a glance. The creatures lay sleeping in various heaps along the far wall of the dun, all except for one. Smoor was the chief gnasher and he sat upright, fingering the ornaments on his staff and returning the bard’s glance with a glare. Oh, this was fine company for a bard, was it not? A curse on his mother and father for never blessing him, with water or with fire, so that the only folk to take him in were unsainly ones such as these.