“And how did you get sucked into it?”
“That’s a little different. I wasn’t an accident—I was just waiting for an opening. When someone like myself gets into this world, we gain some powers, ones we don’t ordinarily have. That’s why I like it here, and that’s why I intend to stay.”
“And the shape-shifters?”
“Same thing. In their world, nothing but mindless beasts. Here—well, you can see how clever they become.”
“So Lou wasn’t swallowed up and dissolved by the energy field?”
“No. He just went somewhere else, much like I came here.”
“Goddamn it,” I said. “I should have gone after him.” The Wendigo shook his head.
“If you had, you might well have ended up somewhere entirely different, and I doubt you’d ever have found your way back.”
“Why hasn’t Lou found his way back, though? That’s something he’s very good at, after all.”
“That I couldn’t say. Maybe the pool took him somewhere his tracking sense doesn’t work. Different places, different rules. Maybe he’s trapped by something and can’t get away.”
“And maybe he’s dead.”
“Maybe.”
“But if he’s alive, you could find him,” I said, making it into a statement. “And bring him back, like you did for Sherwood.”
“Possibly. I’d like to help, if I could.” That didn’t sound very believable.
“In return for what?” I asked bluntly.
“Maybe I just would like to help. Is that so hard to believe? Of course, if you wanted to show your appreciation . . .”
“By handing over the rest of the stones, for instance?”
“That would indeed be a handsome gesture.”
“And I’m supposed to trust that you’ll do your part?”
He smiled, but it wasn’t triumphant, or knowing, or smug. It actually seemed a bit sad.
“What choice do you have?”
And that was the truest thing he’d said since I’d met him.
“Deal,” I said, walking over to the trunk where I kept them. I pulled out the remaining stones, placed them on the kitchen table, and pushed them across toward him. I was breaking one of the cardinal rules of bargaining—never front the money. But he had the upper hand, and he knew it. Now that he had what he wanted, there was no reason for him to renege on the deal, though. If I tried to play hardball with him instead, he’d feel obligated to find a way to screw with me. At least, that was how I read him. He let them sit there, as if afraid I’d change my mind if he tried to pick them up.
“What now?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away and I thought he was thinking, but then noticed he had focused on a drawing on the wall over my computer, a sketch of me at a gig done by an artist friend. A Wendigo with ADD. How perfect. I rapped on the table, making him start.
“Sorry,” he said, pulling his attention back to the subject at hand. “Tell you what. I won’t try to track him down myself—that could be very difficult.”
“But you said you could do it.”
“I said it was
possible.
But not only would it be difficult; it could be dangerous. You never know what you’ll run into, or how the place you end up in may affect your powers. Remember that beast on the moor?
“So no, I won’t go there—I’m just getting used to it here. But what I will do is help you get there on your own, if you like. Getting back will be up to you, though.”
“That will do just fine,” I said.
“It’s got to be at night,” he said. “So I’ll come back this evening.”
He swept up the stones on the table with an exaggerated flourish and tucked them away in an inside pocket. “Again, a pleasure doing business with you.”
WHEN HE KNOCKED AT MY DOOR THAT EVENING, I was ready. I had a ham sandwich, matches, a heavy shirt, my old semiwaterproof leather jacket, my hiking boots, and of course, the Remington. If I ended up in some exotic city full of God knew who or what, I was going to feel rather foolish, but there are worse things than feeling foolish.
I also had my Buck knife, and Lou’s rawhide chew toy. Or rather, part of it. I’d sawed it in half, and part of it was now in the corner of the room, while I set the other half on the kitchen table. This was the most important thing I was taking—Lou might not have his full abilities, not enough to find his way home, but there’s nothing stronger than half of a once-undivided whole. They call to each other, magically speaking, and I had confidence Lou could use half his favorite toy to find his way to the other half. If not, we might spend the rest of our lives in a foreign dimension, amidst the alien corn.
I felt bad about not telling Eli about what I was doing, but he would have gone ballistic on me, at least as much as he ever does. He would have pointed out how stupid it was to go off half-cocked, and he would have been right. No doubt he would have tried to stop me. But Lou had vanished once before, and I had sat around feeling sorry for myself. If Campbell hadn’t been there to kick my ass in gear, I would have been too late to help him, and that wasn’t going to happen again.
When the Wendigo finally showed up, he looked at the half chew toy on the table and nodded approvingly.
“Very clever,” he said, getting it immediately. “It might even work.” He looked around and then shook his head as he spotted the shotgun. “Bad idea.”
“What is?”
“The shotgun.”
“I don’t see why. Talent may not work when I get to wherever Lou is. You already said his own abilities probably aren’t working right. It just might save my butt.”
“It might,” he said. “But it also might not. You’re not going into battle, after all. You’re not hunting anything. You’re on a rescue mission, and you want to get in there and out of there as quickly as you can. You don’t want to go in with guns blazing; you want to be invisible.”
“Sure,” I said. “But it never hurts to have a backup, just in case.”
“If you say so. But when a person has an option, most of the time they end up using it. No shotgun and you run. If you have it, you stand and fight, and that can be a fatal mistake. It’s your funeral, though.”
I hated taking advice from the Wendigo. For one thing, I didn’t trust him, and I never would. But when I thought about it, it made a certain sense. The problems I was going to run into weren’t going to be solved with a convenient blast from a shotgun.
I put my knife in one pocket and the chew toy in the other, crammed the ham sandwich in with it, and looked longingly at the Remington that was leaning against the wall.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m ready. What now?”
The Wendigo gave me a sardonic stare.
“Well, great, but I can’t just transport you out of here.”
“What, then?”
“Back to the energy pool. You’re going to have to go through it yourself. How else did you think you were going to get there?”
ROLF WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN WHEN WE GOT to the construction site under the bridge, so I had to clamber over the gate, barely avoiding cutting my hands on the barbed wire, even with my usual hardening spell for my hands. The Wendigo watched with amusement, then bounded over himself, skimming over the gate without so much as touching it, like a low-gravity moonwalker. I had got so used to him I’d forgotten he wasn’t human at all.
The faint glow of the energy pool, still going strong, was visible at the back of the site. We walked up to the edge, right where the shifting bands of color swirled and pulsed.
“What do I do now?” I asked.
“Go ahead,” the Wendigo said. “Just walk right into it.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Not at all. How else do you think you’re going to find him? I’ll provide the psychic push that will determine where you’ll go and make sure it’s the same place your Ifrit ended up.”
I took a step forward, then stopped. Talking about it was one thing, but plunging right in was not something I relished, any more than diving into a midwinter lake through a hole in the ice. I remembered Lou’s startled yelp as he was pulled into it, but it didn’t make me feel any more determined. The Wendigo came over and stood beside me.
“Changed your mind?” he said. I shook my head, and he smiled. “Well, let me give you a little push, then.”
He took a step back, placed his hand on the small of my back, and gave a powerful shove. The promised push turned out to be more than metaphorical. Instead of bravely stepping forward into the unknown, I was propelled, stumbling and flailing, into the center of the maelstrom.
SIXTEEN
IT FELT LIKE I WAS BEING TORN APART, AND FOR a long moment I feared I’d been tricked, murdered by the Wendigo for some obscure motive of his own. But then the world stabilized around me, and I found myself lying facedown in dirt.
It was cold. I had my leather jacket and a heavy shirt, but I felt the cold anyway, and the dirt beneath my hands was rock hard. I sat up and looked around. It was dark when I’d been pushed into the energy pool, but it was daylight now. No signs of civilization. Trees, stretching out for as far as I could see, scattered far enough apart to give a good idea of the landscape. Low-spreading conifers dominated, with only the occasional towering tree to break the pattern.
Lou was nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t expected I would just drop down in his lap, though. Things are never that easy. And there was still the possibility that the Wendigo had sent me on a wild-goose chase, for whatever reason.
My first priority was to find out whether talent operated here, wherever here was. I broke off a few twigs from a nearby tree branch, set them on the ground, and tried a basic ignition spell, the default operation I always use when I’m trying to assess the magical climate of a place. It worked, all too well. The twigs went up in flames, instantly alight as if they’d been wrapped in flash paper, and a few seconds later all that remained was ashes.
This was an unexpected and not unwelcome development. If this held up, I was suddenly a powerful talent, no longer dependent on cleverness and guile. With a wave of my hand, all opposition would wither before my awesome power. There was bound to be a catch, though. There always is.
But one thing was worrisome. If this place enhanced rather than blocked talent, why hadn’t Lou been able to find his way back? The more I thought about it, the more troubling it became. The chew toy I’d brought, which I thought so clever, now seemed irrelevant. Come to think of it, Lou should have been able to find his way back home based on his connection to me—we were more strongly bonded than any rawhide strip. Hopefully.
But as long as my power had been enhanced, I was going to take advantage of it. I’ve never been very good at locating people or things; that’s a specialized talent.
Still, if I had enhanced power, it was worth a try. I pulled out the rawhide toy, concentrated on it, and concentrated on Lou at the same time. Immediately I could feel something, partly like the heat of a campfire on your face when your eyes are closed, partly like a puff of wind blowing from the north, and partly like neither of those things. But it gave me a direction, and there was no doubt about it.
I started walking, always uphill, and as the elevation increased, spotty areas of snow sprang up around the bases of trees, like a late-spring thaw breaking through a winter landscape. Soon I found myself slipping and sliding on the now-unavoidable snow cover.
I was walking as quietly as I could, but there was nothing to be done about the snow crunching under my feet. But whatever sound I was making was soon drowned out by a commotion coming from just over a small ridge. I heard animal snarls, which is never good, and some loud thumping as if someone was beating on a drum. The pressure that indicated Lou’s presence was increased, which meant it was a good bet that whatever was happening up ahead had something to do with him.
I crested the ridge, almost running now, and emerged through the trees. Below, a small clearing opened out in the middle of tangled brush and trees. The impulse to rush down and see what was happening was strong, but I held back. It wouldn’t do either Lou or me any good to blindly charge ahead and blunder into something I wasn’t prepared for.
I slid behind the cover of a tree and peered around. At the far end of the clearing, I saw a large animal standing at the end of a huge log, two or three feet in diameter. For a moment I thought it was a bear, but when it turned sideways I saw a thin elongated muzzle with a familiar anteater profile. A shape-shifter.
The log it guarded must have been partially hollow, and from its actions it looked like something was trapped inside of it. I had a feeling I knew who it was. Wood splinters littered the ground nearby, and there were long score marks where the creature had tried unsuccessfully to rip open the log.
It prowled from one end of the log to the other, then pounced on one end, pounding and roaring. Then it ran around to the other end, waiting for the terrified prey to rush out the other end, like a cat trying to outwit a panicked mouse. Lou was no mouse, though, and though he was probably scared, he wasn’t one to panic. He hunched down farther back in the log, safe for the moment. He wasn’t going anywhere.