by Wen Spencer
Coincidence or did Winnie's grandmother know that Joshua was coming?
"Oh man!" Winnie cried. "Metallica?"
"Busted!" A male artist at the next station called out without lifting his head. His female client was lying face down in the chair as he inked a tribal crow with wings spread across the woman's shoulder blades.
"What did you do to piss her off?" The hummingbird girl laughed and held up a large hand mirror to her customer. "Do you like it? Is it a go?"
"She probably quit her job again," the male artist guessed accurately. "It was too boring."
"Mark!" Winnie stomped her foot. "It's not my fault! I'm meant to do one thing and I do it well. I just suck at everything else."
"What do you do?" the male customer asked as he examined the stencil marked on his shoulder.
There was a moment of stunned silence in the room as everyone stared at him. Then Mark started to giggle.
Winnie put her hands on her hips. "I'm a broadband communication specialist."
"What's that?" the client asked.
The hummingbird girl tapped the mirror, calling the client's attention back to the stencil on his arm. "Is it a go on your tattoo?"
"Yes, it's awesome!" the client said.
The hummingbird girl picked up a needle gun. "Great! Let's get started."
Winnie caught Joshua and pulled him through the long room to the spiral metal staircase.
* * *
The second floor of the studio was Sioux Zee's private sanctuary. It was the same basic design of polished dark oak floors and exposed brick walls. A lone tattoo station of adjustable chair and black enameled toolboxes sat next to the stairs. That area was stark and clean. The rest of the room was a wonderland of odd and unusual items that fought for Joshua's attention.
Most riveting were the skulls of fierce animals that Joshua couldn't identify. They were the size and shape of small dogs and large cats but with multiple rows of saw-blade teeth like sharks. Two had horns like sheep. One had what looked like a third eye-hole.
The second most riveting thing was the array of a dozen antique rifles and shotguns mounted on the wall. They had beautifully engraved stocks and well-oiled barrels. They put his father's small collection of hunting guns to shame. As he studied them longer, he realized that the engravings were weird and mystical-looking and set his neck hair on end.
The third most riveting thing was a large old fashioned safe standing open. There was no cash inside, but a dozen thick, leather-bound books and a collection of crocks wired shut and covered with odd runes. The jars were even more unsettling than the guns, although he couldn't tell why.
The fourth most riveting thing was Winnie's grandmother. Sioux Zee was a tall leggy woman with long stark white hair down to her knees, a choker of turquoise, silver and bone, a two-tone leather vest, skinny blue jeans and knee-high buckskin boots. She was leaning over a big, ugly, dangerous-looking man. Her tattoo gun buzzed as she carefully inked in an odd complicated set of runes on his right shoulder.
"Granny! Granny!" Winnie cried. "You're never going to guess---oh---well---you probably could guess---although this might surprise even you. Maybe."
"You quit your job," Sioux Zee stated coldly without looking up.
"T-t-that's the start of my news..." Winnie whined. "It gets better. Well---better then worse and then maybe totally horrible."
Her grandmother glanced hard at Winnie and then looked beyond her granddaughter to see Joshua for the first time. She jerked back with a gasp.
Which alerted the big, ugly, dangerous-looking man that something was wrong. He lurched off the table with a growl. "What's wrong, Sioux Zee?" He caught sight of Joshua. "Can't you read, shrimp? This is off-limits, you little..."
"Brutus!" Sioux Zee smacked the man hard on his bleeding shoulder where she'd just been working. "Look before you swing! Use that thick skull of yours for something other than breaking open walnuts."
Brutus squinted at Joshua and then his eyes widened. "Shit!" He took three giant steps backward. "Where did you find a wolf?"
Was "werewolf" printed on Joshua's forehead? He scrubbed at his brow.
"The supermarket," Winnie said. "Deli aisle, next to the cold cuts. He was lost."
"I'm was not lost! I was shopping!" Joshua held up his plastic shopping bags as proof. The last word came out more of a growl than he intended. Everyone took two steps back from him.
"I'm going now." Brutus edged around Joshua, keeping Winnie between them. "We can finish up my protection runes some other time."
Sioux Zee huffed as Brutus escaped. She followed him, calling, "I need to clean that and bandage you first! Brutus! Don't make me hit you again!"
"Sit! Sit!" Winnie pointed at a poker table in the far end of the room.
"Okay." The table was edged with leather. Eight brass cup holders were embedded into the surface between hardwood grooves to hold poker chips. "This is hard core."
"Granny loves poker. Don't ever play with her. She's a shark."
He'd been "outvoted" (read that as: tricked) into playing a card game with his cousins last Thanksgiving called Craits. (He thought they'd made up the game but later found the rules online.) He'd been hopelessly confused the entire afternoon. Tens reversed the order from clockwise to counterclockwise or back again. Eights were wild. Fives forced everyone else to draw a card. On and on and on. He suspected at the time, and later confirmed, if he'd been shown the rules first, he could have kept up. The gameplay wasn't as complex as chess; it was just that his cousins never explained any of the rules. The sheer number of special cards and speed of play made it impossible to keep the rules straight.
There was a thick leather-bound book open on the table. It smelt old. The pages were handmade linen paper. The handwritten words were in an elegant lettering that was either Arabic or Cyrillic or some other alphabet that Joshua didn't know. The large, carefully drawn, and footnoted rune matched the one that Sioux Zee had been inking onto Brutus' shoulder.
Joshua realized that light shimmered over the table, like a heat mirage off a hot parking lot. He couldn't tell what was causing the illusion; the area was cooler than the rest of the room. Gazing at the book while the empty eyes of the strange skulls watched him, Joshua felt like he was deep in the middle of a card game whose rules everyone else knew.
"What's this?" Joshua pointed at the book.
"That's Dorothy." Winnie carefully closed it and patted its gilded cover. "Everyone thinks that the universe is one big dollhouse; that we're nothing but Barbie dolls. Some of us get put in fancy outfits and set on the shelf and admired by all. Some end up naked with their hair hacked to pieces, covered with mud, but well-loved. Others are accidently tossed on the fire Christmas morning and end up one unhappy lump of wax. People act like we're taken out of a box, moved around only by forces we can't control, and end up back in the box. But that's not how the world works. That's not what we are. The universe is more like a box of tissues."
"Crank!" Ian slapped down a Two card. Wayne threw down an ace. "Two crank!" Julian quickly slapped down another Two. "Three cranks!" Joshua frowned at the cards on the table, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. Throw down a Three? His cousins started to laugh---again---at the fact that he had no clue what was going on.
Joshua took a deep breath. "What do you mean by box of tissues?"
"It's layer upon layer upon layer of realities. And we exist as some weirdness that we can't explain yet. We don't have the words. We're atoms, or electrons or quarks or something. We're part of the tissues but we're not. Heaven and hell, they're just one quantum state away, two or three tissues up or down, and we merely have to change particle state to move to that existence---to that tissue. Most people around us are only aware of the tissue, but a handful like Brutus and I can see a layer over. You've been changed to a higher state or something so that you live on two worlds at the same time. Earth and whatever universe your wolf exists in when it's not here. Dorothy and Fred, they're from another
world too, but they're also at a higher state than us, and can move around in our world too. And all those dead people that haven't moved on to heaven or hell? They're partially in our world or they're in Dorothy's and Fred's world or they're in some gray space between them."
"Okay," he said slowly, trying to wrap his mind around it. "Dorothy is a spirit guide like Fred?"
"Yup." Winnie carried the book to the safe. "She was my father's spirit guide. He copied these runes from a book that had been damaged when someone tried to steal it back before the Revolutionary War. Even though it was too damaged to read, it had been passed down through my family for safekeeping. My father teamed up with a friend that went to M.I.T. to use some kind of scanner to recover the information. Dorothy guards over it now that he's passed on."
Winnie carefully tucked the book between the other leather-bound tomes inside the safe. "Brutus is open enough to see what most people can't, which makes him valuable as an employee for certain businesses, but it also makes him vulnerable. The runes close him off to anything that could take him over."
"Couldn't you use these runes instead of drugs?"
"I don't want to close down for good. I just need a little time. A few months, then all will be golden again when the prince returns."
"Who's the prince?"
"Seth Tatterskein."
"Where is he and why has he been gone for so long? Doesn't he know that you need him?"
"He knows. It's just that he was only thirteen when his family was massacred and he inherited his father's power."
"Oh, wow." Joshua had been feeling sorry for himself because he had needed to leave his family. At least he had someone to go back to once the dust settled.
Winnie nodded. "Yeah, really, right? Seth needs to grow up before he can take on full responsibility for Boston. He's sixteen now. His birthday is around Christmas. The expectation is that he'll move back when he turns eighteen. Maybe. If the Wolf King lets him. But it's not like Boston has totally gone to hell; Seth is holding back the worst of it just by existing. I can feel him sometimes, late at night, checking to see if I'm still me and not something else. Something dangerous."
"That sounds---creepy."
"It's like when Granny comes in and checks under my bed when I'm sleeping. It was annoying until the night she found a growling hiding under it and shot it." Winnie pointed at one of the skulls with saw-blade teeth. "That one there."
"Holy shit! That was under your bed?"
"Yeah, during a new moon last fall. Most dangerous time in Boston is after the fall solstice as the year dies. I'm like an open door to things like that. So, no, the prince checking on me isn't creepy. I know that if things go horribly bad, it won't be just Granny trying to deal with the mess."
Sioux Zee came back up the steps, her boots ringing on the metal treads of the spiral staircase. "I swear, I boasted out loud, when I was either too young or too drunk to remember, that I couldn't be surprised. Something heard me and took it as a challenge. I suspect it was while I was drunk, because your father was like a rock. He was so predictable I always knew what he was going to do next, even get himself killed. Like a rock, you couldn't stop him once he got moving. You," Sioux Zee wagged her finger at Winnie. "I never know what impossible mess you're going to fall into next."
"Granny!" Winnie whined. "I didn't do anything except go to work!"
Sioux Zee sighed. "And that's the truly frightening part."
"I got paid." Winnie patted her various pockets until she found the lottery ticket and held it up as evidence. "Well, sort of. It's two birds with one stone kind of deal. It's a day's wage---and then some---and proof that I was fated to meet...meet...meet...." Winnie turned to Joshua. "You know, you never told me your name."
"His name is Joshua." Sioux Zee huffed and took the ticket to examine it closely. "If you bothered to watch the news, you'd know that. He disappeared from his home in Upstate New York yesterday after a wolf tore apart half the boys of his graduating class. There's an Amber Alert out for him. His parents were on the evening news begging for information on him."
"They were?" Joshua cried. "I left a note on the refrigerator." Not that it actually said where he was going. He claimed he was going to see an online friend and they shouldn't worry about him. He figured if he mentioned Jack's instructions to find the Prince of Boston, he'd only convince his parents that he was mentally unstable. (Personally Joshua thought he was a little crazy for picking Boston as a destination but Jack's command was the only thing he could think of while trying to decide where to go.) "I---I---I don't know what the hell is going on. Why is this happening to me? I had a normal boring life until yesterday. There has never been a real monster under my bed or anyone else's bed. No real vampires or ghosts or those things---whatever those are." He pointed at one of the skulls with horns. "Why didn't I ever hear about them before? Why is this happening to me?"
"The odds of encountering real magic or real monsters are the same as winning the top prize in the lottery." Sioux Zee waved the lottery ticket at him.
"Those odds are millions to one!" Joshua protested. "Since yesterday, I can't swing a cat and not hit something supernatural."
"You're no longer human. Normal odds don't apply to you; that's how you ended up with this ticket." Sioux Zee put the ticket in the massive safe. "And you're still a minor." She closed the safe and spun the lock. "You can't collect the winnings until you're eighteen."
"But-but-but-" Winnie started. "I can collect it. Or you can, Granny. And then we can share it."
"It's ten million dollars," Sioux Zee said. "The state officials are going to rake anyone who tries to collect it over the coals. The first thing they'll do is ask you where you bought the ticket. If you turn it in tomorrow, they'll pull the security tapes at the supermarket. And who actually pushed the button? A minor with an Amber Alert out on him; the sole survivor of a massacre who vanished without a trace. There's no way that's going to stay quiet. I'm guessing that he's got a world of trouble chasing after him. Winnie, child, you've fallen into a big pit of trouble, no need to pull a basket of rattlesnakes in with you."
"Oh pooh." Winnie deflated.
"I do have trouble chasing me," Joshua admitted reluctantly. "Or at least, I did. I'm hoping I lost it."
"Certain troubles you need to kill to stop," Sioux Zee said.
"Kind of did." Joshua explained meeting Decker and Elise and the fight with the huntsman.
Sioux Zee huffed at the news. "The heavy hitters are all in the game."
"Joshua came to me!" Winnie cried. "And it was Jack that sent him! I have a connection to Jack."
"In your mind." Sioux Zee moved to clean up her tattoo equipment. "Jack told Joshua to go to Seth, not you."
"This is fated!" Winnie cried. "You're refusing to admit it because you don't want to get me involved but I'm already involved. And I'll stay involved as long as I want. Jack was good to me and if something happened to a Thane, then we should know what's going on before everything blows up in our faces."
Sioux Zee crashed equipment together loudly for a minute before finally growling out, "Fine. We'll do a session. Minimum time, though. You need to keep tightly shuttered if there's heavy hitters stirring things up."
Winnie squealed and clapped her hands. "Fred! Fishing time!"
Fred washed over Joshua, an intense wave of cold and dark and the smell of fresh dirt.
"What the heck?" Joshua leaped back, growling. Fred had vanished. Maybe. Being that the spirit guide had been just a smell and a lack of light, Joshua had to peer about the room to be sure. "What do you mean: fishing? Why did he do that?"
"It's all just a crap shoot." Winnie motioned for him to help her lift the wood cover to the gaming table into place. "Tons of people die but only a few of them stick around to talk. Some because they have unfinished business. Others? No idea why they stay. Marie Antoinette? I have a theory that she thinks God's idea of fashion is scruffy men in loose robes and she wants none of that. She likes men in tight breach
es."
Sioux Zee lowered thick blinds and then drew heavy curtains. The fabric completely blocked out the sunshine. "Basically Fred goes out and finds someone whose psyche responds to yours."
"To me?" The photographs that the police had shown Joshua at the hospital flashed through his mind. "Oh, I don't think this is a good idea. Those kids didn't like me in the first place. They're probably are really pissed off at me now that they're dead."
Winnie waved off Joshua's objections. "It's unlikely Fred could get any freshly dead to travel this far."
"I have had a really boring life up to now," Joshua said. "The only other dead people that I would know are my Dad's parents, and they died when I was really little. I think the only thing they could tell you about me is my potty training."
Winnie lit a candle in the center of the table. "The dead have secrets that they're longing to tell."
Sioux Zee turned off the overhead lights. With a flare of a match in the dim room, she lit incense that smoldered next to the lone candle. "Given a chance to talk, the dead rarely say anything trivial."
Winnie took out her phone and started a music app playing a recording of ocean waves. The sound of restless water filled the room, waves crashing on some invisible shore and rushing back into the unseen sea. With the darkness closing in and the ocean waves filling the space, Joshua felt more disconnected from the real world than ever.
"Do we have to do this?" Joshua asked. "The lights and candles and everything?"
"Yes," Sioux Zee stated firmly.
"There's power in light," Winnie explained. "Life is drawn to it. Death flees it. A recently deceased spirit won't enter the light."
"And the incense?" Joshua wrinkled his nose against the scent. Normally he liked the smell but there was something different about this. It seemed as if he could smell darkness. Not the black of night but something darker and enclosed, like a cave.
"Certain scents lure spirits closer." Sioux Zee pulled the weight on what looked like miniature grandfather clock. There was a bronze bell at the top engraved with runes. The pendulum started to swing, ticking loudly. With each swing, the miniature hands of the small clock moved toward twelve. "Unfortunately it attracts everything. There's a window of opportunity, and after that, it gets too dangerous. The timer will shut everything down. It's a failsafe, one that human negligence and curiosity can't override."