“What do you mean, it won’t open?” Silicon Dad, at the limits of his patience, shouted at the guide. Not nice.
Trevarr stood full height again; he took a single step forward. It got Dad’s attention.
The guide, truly shaken for the first time, looked to Trevarr with gratitude — otherwise she might just have seen Dad Two, slipping along the outside wall in his effort to save the day.
“Here’s a door,” the man crowed, reaching for the knob of the crisply painted portal — not looking, particularly, at his destination so much as sharing his triumph with his family behind him. The guide only looked faintly annoyed — until the knob turned in the man’s hand. Then her expression flashed to the kind of horror even the ghosts hadn’t evoked from her — she reached out to him from across the little room, a futile gesture.
Drew, too, came to instant attention. Garrie hadn’t known he could move that fast, leaping across the intervening space to jam his lanky form between the dad and the door, the perfect hockey check.
Dad Two turned on him with a snarl. “I’ve had just about enough of you people —”
“Hey!” Garrie recoiled in offense... but Garrie held sway over spirits and ethereal storms and darkside creatures, not human kind. Lucia snagged Garrie’s arm with anxiety — still influenced by the spirits, her fingers wrapping tight.
Trevarr, of all of them, was the one to tip his head at the cluster of children and parents, his voice sensibly low. “You’re scaring the small ones.”
The man looked over at the children, and then away, frustrated and embarrassed.
In that moment, Drew turned the knob and pushed open the door and said, so seriously, “And you should watch where you’re going.”
The guide made a noise of dismay. “That door should be locked,” she said faintly.
For a moment, they all looked at the open floor beyond the door, and the long drop to the room below. Directly below the opening sat a large gleaming kitchen sink, complete with fixtures. “That’d hurt,” Drew said, mildly enough.
“You knew,” the guide said, looking dazed. She took a startled-sounding breath, passed her hands over her hair, straightened her glasses, and regained some of her equilibrium. “You must have seen the promotional DVD. Of course.”
Drew squinted at her, his own hair still in complete disarray, his too-snug striped polo shirt twisted. Lucia released Garrie to step smartly to him, tweaking his shirt and tugging his collar into place. She left the hair up to him. “The gift shop DVD,” she said. “You know.”
“Um,” Drew said. “Right. Way cool DVD.”
Smooth. That was Drew.
By then Trevarr had stepped back, suddenly unobtrusive — not that Garrie would have believed it possible; he scraped back windblown hair to reveal angled features somehow more pensive than before. Lucia dipped into her bag and pulled out an elastic hair band, matter-of-factly offered. He took it with a flicker of surprise.
“For your hair,” Garrie muttered at him as he gave it an experimental stretch and release. And she sent him a raised brow, but otherwise let the oddity pass. She couldn’t help but peer down into kitchen revealed by the open door, wondering about the clambering potential.
Lucia took hold of the door with the firm grip that meant she was going to close it. “Fine for us, maybe.”
But not so much for the guide. Garrie glanced over her shoulder. Yeah, be fair. The woman had held up remarkably well. She hadn’t done or said any of the denial-based things people usually did when confronted with Garrie’s world. And she hadn’t made things harder, either.
“I don’t know why the exit door won’t open,” the guide said. “But the next group will be along shortly, and they’ll find us.”
At that, the youngest child broke in a loud shriek of a wail, something verging on ultrasonic. Not the fear from moments earlier, but something more urgent yet.
Lucia put her hands over her ears, perfectly manicured nails flashing pearly against black hair. “Ayieeee, make it stop!”
Drew looked askance, muttering words Garrie knew only because she’d seen them on his lips before. Even Trevarr looked faintly horrified, glancing at her for guidance in a manner she might have found comical if her eardrums hadn’t been bleeding.
“Don’t tell me,” she said, and then didn’t have to finish, because the little dance performed by the screaming child — hands twisted in shirt at the level of his crotch, toe-stepping in place — made it perfectly clear she’d guessed right. “And here they were worried about you,” she told Trevarr.
He spread his hands in silent indication of himself and his perfectly satisfactory status.
Drew glared at Garrie as if somehow it was all her fault. “I am never having kids!” he shouted, and stalked over to the one of the double-door closets, pulling them open with a vigor that left the guide open-mouthed. Poor woman.
He indicated the closet with the impatient flair of a doorman, and when the families gaped at him — except for the dancing child, who had switched to a bounce move that Garrie thought unwise under the circumstances — Drew repeated the gesture with emphasis.
“But I haven’t gone that way for years!” the guide said, loud enough to make most of the words heard. “We’ll get lost!”
“No, we won’t.” Garrie grabbed Lucia’s hand, trusting in Drew — in his sense of history. Once she got closer she could easily see what Drew had known all along — a step up, a few steps through, and they’d exit into a different room. But after her initial impulse to lead the way, she hesitated... in spite of spiritual promises, she couldn’t presume their good behavior. She nudged Lucia on without her and stood back, watching as Drew led the way, as Lucia followed without hesitation.
The guide, clearly, also intended to hold back — a captain seeing to her sinking ship — so Garrie stabbed a decisive finger toward Wailing Boy. “Him,” she said. “Get him out of here.” With any luck, the next room was larger, and would absorb the sound better. Or Wailing Boy would be satisfied with their forward progress and hush. Or the act of climbing through the closet would make him wet his pants, and the urgency would be resolved.
Garrie was voting for either of the latter two.
Once the children headed for the closet, the parents quickly intermingled, guiding their families and resuming the reassuring tones that might have been more useful earlier in this adventure.
“You go ahead,” the guide said. “You don’t look all that well, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
Really? Huh. So that tingly numbness in her fingers and lips, that wasn’t just her imagination. But she said, “If you don’t mind... I’d better close the door behind us.”
The guide regarded her a long moment, disheveled but once again completely composed. Then she shook her head, once, firmly, and the words at the tip of her tongue disappeared forever when her carefully tinted lips pressed together. Not quite steadily, she entered the closet.
Trevarr should have been next — should have been ready to go. But when Garrie turned back to him, she found him with a cold metal disk in hand — the one the erstwhile pickpocket had been so unwise to lift at the airport. He held it like Garrie might have held a Geiger counter, glancing at it as he oriented from one corner to the other.
Ooh, she wanted.
“What is that?” she breathed, taking a step toward him, hand reaching of its own wistful accord.
He made no attempt to hide the thing — he might have smiled. Just a little, there, on the side of his mouth where the tiny scar resided, and his eyes... She wasn’t entirely sure if he’d actually shaken his head, or whether she just knew it anyway.
“Another time,” she allowed. Meant it, too. But not with the potty-dancing child waiting for them, and not when she wanted to get this door closed behind them. She gestured at their unusual egress.
He closed his hand around the disk — an abrupt, snatching-it-out-of-the-air motion — and tucked it away inside his duster. He stepped through the closet, ducki
ng and stepping up at the same time, and no longer with any hesitation; she certainly couldn’t attribute his stealthy grace to any assistance on her part. Whatever had happened — whatever she’d done to him when she’d wrangled the spirits into line — it was done and gone. Trevarr, back at full power.
She just wasn’t sure if it was a thing good, or a thing bad.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 11
Winchester House, a Dignified Retreat
On occasion, secrets abide.
— RRose
You won’t mind if I keep asking, though.
— Lisa McGarrity
“This part of the house isn’t on the DVD,” the guide said, a frown in her voice. “And even if it was, you’d have to be quite the remarkable young man to have memorized it out of context.”
“Oh, he’s quite the remarkable young man,” Lucia said. “Let me just share with you how —”
“Hey!” Drew said sharply, although he’d appeared to have been paying no attention at all — his head slightly cocked, his eyes half-closed. Not even looking, really, at the rooms through which he led them — all closed-up rooms with sheet-covered furniture. Some of it partially finished, some of it showing damage from the ’06 earthquake, all of it opulent and simply not spit-shined for the public eye.
“Who are you people?” the guide asked. “Please tell me you’re not a plant from the board. Not on my watch. Not today.”
Garrie had instant mercy. “Definitely not us.”
Drew hesitated at an oddly angled hallway, one hand lightly touching the wall. The jittery child had infected his brother; both commenced to whine at the delay. Without raising his voice, Drew said, “If I can’t concentrate, we don’t move.”
The whining stuttered away; the children looked up at their mother, seeking confirmation; she gave them a Look. The families clustered in the hallway, subtly yet perceptibly apart from Garrie and her reckoners.
Like the man on the airplane, they’d made some assumptions about her when this group had gathered. That she needed protection from Trevarr, for starters, or that she was his in the first place. That she was not a person of consequence — petite young woman dressed in her thin stretchy layers, a batik off-the-shoulder long-sleeved shirt over a tank top, crop cargos riding low and loose.
No one, she thought, should be assumed to be a person of no consequence. It didn’t matter what they didn’t know — that her wiry nature came from endless workouts as much as genetics, a side effect of trying to run her energy-washed body to ground. That the electric blue streaks in nut-brown hair, a tendency to go goth with eye makeup, and an idiosyncratic touch with her wardrobe didn’t mean there wasn’t more to her than any of it.
For all his oddities, Trevarr hadn’t made assumptions. He’d been respectful from the start. If... yeah. Oddly.
Drew lifted his head, letting out a deep breath. “Left, right, right,” he said. “That gets us right in front of the séance room again. Not that I think we should go in, but —”
“But I can take it from there,” the guide said. She struck off to lead the way, nothing casual or touristy about her pace. No, this was a forced march of rapid retreat.
By the time they reached the servants’ door, the guide lingered only long enough to see them clear and the Silicons were long gone — bolting across the little courtyard for the restrooms off the entry shops, parents sending wary looks back over their shoulders and children unabashedly holding their crotches in a universal signal that all but cleared the way for them.
Garrie wanted to be long gone, too. Oh, boy, did she. The faint buzzing in her lips had moved to her teeth; her fingers tingled nonstop. She wanted to ask Trevarr what he’d done to her. She wanted to drink three or four gallons of sarsaparilla soda. She wanted... she wanted...
Something.
But the entrance area remained crowded, and hardly any of them were tourists. Their guide, for one, looking harried. Lots of red-vest people, neat and groomed and worried, bearing walkie talkies. All of them converging on Garrie and her crew.
Right. Looking for answers. Some of which Garrie had, some of which she didn’t, but none of which she owed them. “I really need to sit down,” she told Lucia.
“You look it.” Lucia glanced at the official house people, pensive.
Their guide reached them first — an obvious first contact. “I think my supervisors would like to talk to you,” she said, apology in her tired features.
Really. Want. To. Sit.
“Talk to the Silicons.” Oops, she’d said that nickname out loud. She rubbed the tips of her fingers over her numbly tingling lips. “I need to take a breath.”
The guide might have persisted — a glance over her shoulder, a resigned expression — but she eyed Lucia’s battle mode and then eyed Trevarr. Not with any apparent concern or puffed-up importance, as the Silicon Dads had done. But thoughtfully, and with a little nod. By the time Garrie looked up at him, his neutral expression told her nothing.
The guide said, “I’ll get you some space,” and turned back to her red vest people.
Lucia tucked her tote over her shoulder, her back straight and elegant, expression determined... too formidable for casual opposition. “We’ll grab something at that café.”
Garrie let Lucia lead the way, formidable mode turned to high as they moved across the courtyard, back to the gift shop and café building. Trevarr warned off a persistent red vest with a pointed look, a new quality in his movement. Stalking. Hunter.
No one else tried to approach. She’d have stayed away from herself, too.
And then she lost all interest in boring, living Winchester House people, because halfway between the house and their little group, she found the person who still followed them. Bold and determined and frightened, extremely well-realized — not just any monochrome spirit, but full-color and detail.
“Yo,” Garrie said to her crew. “Looks like we didn’t leave everyone behind.”
Trevarr’s gaze sharpened; his hand went to his duster and she thought really don’t want to know what else you might have in there, except she did. The other two didn’t catch the gesture, too busy scanning for officialdom on feet.
“Post-living,” Garrie said. “Awfully skinny, but I think it’s reflective.” Of how she’d been when she died — as opposed to representative of her current state of mind. Get a ghost in a representative state, and things got a whole lot trickier all around. “A little older than me, and not recent.” They sure didn’t make bell bottoms like that anymore. “Flower child. She looks upset.”
Not to mention coming straight for them in a determined march. Although not actually making much progress, for all of that.
“She means no harm,” Lucia said, lifting her chin in the funny little way she had when she was tuning in. “She... she’s like all the others. She’s desperate about something.”
Garrie crossed her arms, waiting. The official House people looked back at her with frowns, thinking themselves the object of her interest.
The spirit suddenly began to look a little thin and fuzzy.
“Oh!” Lucia said, and took a step back. “Now that’s just panic. I don’t need to listen to that.”
The spirit glanced over her shoulder... and broke into a startling sprint. Her flared bell bottom pants flapped around her legs; her arms pumped. But she gained only a few more yards — and then, quite abruptly, she snapped away.
“Holy crap,” Garrie said, unable to hide her astonishment.
“She’s gone!” Lucia said, a startled half-question; she looked wildly around even though she wouldn’t see anything.
“Slingshotted right back into the house,” Garrie told her.
“Whoa,” Drew said. “That’s gotta hurt. Have we even seen that before?”
“We,” said Lucia, “have never seen it.” She didn’t like it when Drew made himself at home with their history, given his short tenure with them.
Garrie threaded an arm through hers — sil
ent communication. Let it be, Lu. He’s a dork, but he’s our dork. Out loud, she said, “Nothing quite like that, no. I’ve seen restricted spirits before, though. And you know what?” she added. “Food. Sitting down. Now.”
“The café,” Lucia repeated with assurance. “Now.”
The café. Burgers and fries and chili dogs and the smell of grease, riotously colorful menus above the counter and worn Formica tables lining the wall. As far as Garrie could tell, the assault of it took Trevarr back more than anything they’d encountered so far. He hesitated in the doorway with obvious second thoughts, and Garrie made so bold as to take his hand and tug him inside.
The contact startled him; he withdrew his hand with calm but distinct purpose and followed her in, joining a crowd comprised of people who were audibly complaining about their delayed tours, and aiming resentful eyes at both the reckoners and the Silicons.
The Silicons lingered by the bathrooms — children still subdued, parents a mix between wild-eyed and resentful. They cast no few looks at Garrie and Trevarr. “As if it’s my fault,” Garrie grumbled, throwing herself at a hard-seated chair while Drew went right to the fast-food style serving counter.
“Well, chicalet,” Lucia said gently, “unless you mean to say that the ghosts weren’t trying to get your attention... but color me a hard sell. I felt their desperation.” She plucked several napkins from the table dispenser and spread them on the table before setting her tote down. “If it hadn’t been us, it would have been some poor untrained sensitive, and soon.”
“I’m surprised you could deal with what they were putting out.” Garrie tugged the hair behind her ear, using the sensation to focus through the buzzing in her body. “Damned intense.”
Trevarr glanced at her. He hadn’t yet taken a seat, but assessed the room with a personal energy she could only call ready for...
The Reckoners Page 10