She glanced down without thinking... did a double-take. The tasteful carpet oozed a big blotchy spot of oily darkness. “Gross,” she said. “One of your customers left a calling card.”
“How’s that?” the sales associate said absently, engrossed in processing the sale while her partner created a smartly pleasing arrangement out of the shoe box, tissue paper, and the store’s slick designer shopping bag.
Lucia eased to the side of the dark blotch. “There’s a huge stain on the carpet.” She provided her electronic signature with a flourish and replaced the pen. “It’s nasty. Someone’s shoes could get ruined.”
That got their attention, all right, here in a store where the least expensive shoe cost several hundred dollars. Leaving the bag on the counter for Lucia, they came around to look at the spot — and to gasp.
“Actually,” Lucia said, frowning at it, “I think... it’s bigger than it was.”
“Just now?” one of the women responded, squinching her nose at this impossibility.
The dark, oily stain exhaled a bubble and briefly extruded a visible skim of liquid. All three women gasped, stepping back — and Lucia’s heel went squoodge and she froze, statue-like except for the merest turn and tip of her head to look down behind her.
“There’s... another one,” she said, and her voice somehow didn’t make it above a whisper. For while the other two women were still merely baffled, she knew too much — and simultaneously not enough.
She certainly knew enough to drop what defenses she had, to search for any feel of disgruntled spirits — but not, when she found nothing, to understand what was going on around her.
For there, several yards away, another dark spot bloomed. More quickly now, growing before her eyes — going from a damp darkness to a coruscating puddle of deepest, light-sucking black.
There might not be any disgruntled spirits hanging around to give her a clue, but Lucia had seen enough. “We need to get out of here,” she told the other two, reaching over the spreading stain to snatch up her bag.
“I’ll call security,” said the older of the two women, most decisively. She stretched to scoop up the counter phone. “This has got to be some sort of environmental problem.”
Oh, you must be kidding. “Right,” Lucia said, perfectly willing to go along with that. “And it’s probably toxic, don’t you think? I mean, just look at it —”
“Look,” the younger woman interrupted, pointing a trembling finger off to the side. “What does that?”
Lucia really didn’t want to look. She really, really didn’t want to. But she clutched her tote and her new purchase, and she slowly turned her head.
Fingers of oily darkness crept up a nearby display box. Not the way water might soak up into fabric, but gravity-defying fingers. Probing, searching fingers. And when they found a shoe, that shoe quivered, and it tumbled from its perch to splat down into the thick puddle.
“Oh!” gasped the younger woman, impulsively lurching forward to rescue the footwear.
Lucia just barely got a grip on the back of her blouse, pulling her up short — albeit not without a little ripping sound. “Don’t!” she said, her voice shooting straight to alarm. High alarm, because she’d seen what she’d seen and she knew what she knew, and while these women were still thinking in terms of distasteful and disgusting, Lucia thought of ghost poop gone atomic.
The older woman let the phone sag to give Lucia an incredulous look and younger woman turned back in offense, straightening her blouse — too bad about that button — and Lucia realized they had no idea, that they thought she’d gone hysterical.
She stabbed a finger at the shoe... or at what remained of it.
Which wasn’t a whole lot.
The darkness burbled happily around it, tiny little bubbles as though something had put it to low boil and left it to simmer, and the younger woman let out a little shriek and stumbled back into Lucia. Lucia steadied her. “Make your call from next door, yes?”
From the petite little Nanoo children’s store beside them, a scream pierced the air.
“Make your call from the pay phone on the corner!” Lucia said desperately.
The older woman fumbled to hang up the phone without looking — missed the cradle in her haste, and let the handset fall to the counter unchecked. She took her associate by the elbow. “Let’s go.”
“But my purse —”
The older woman shook her. “Leave it. We’ll come back for our things when we can.”
But Lucia was looking at the entry, gleaming glass doors beyond a wide moat of spreading blackness. “Or not...”
“Up on the counter!” the woman said, but that, too, was covered in streaming tendrils of black. From next door, a new spate of screaming erupted, and the younger woman suddenly clutched at them both, staring wildly all around them, because —
“Ay, caray!” Lucia muttered. Surrounded. Surrounded and losing ground to the viscous substance now moving vigorously enough so she could hear it, swampy sucking noises and gloppy plopping and even the ooze made a sound, creeping over conquered surfaces...
Hiss-spit! and Sklayne tore free of immersion in the Lucia person, no time for finesse or niceties.
Hiss-spit! and here he was, trapped in the back corner behind empty boxes melting into the eatsll, blackness coming up to nibble at his toes, farking too late, should have looked sooner —
But unlike the Lucia person, unlike the other women, Sklayne had seen it before. And Sklayne knew how to deal with it.
The problem was whether the women could deal with him.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 17
Kehar: A Less Long Time Ago...
“They’re coming.”
Nevahn spoke aloud to Solchran’s central arch, as if doing so — here, beside the prayer stone that enclosed their relics — would help him face what was to come.
He’d dreaded this day and these words. Had known them inevitable.
So had Trevarr. Still not quite grown, but closer to it — rangy, with the promise of breadth in his shoulders. Taller than anyone in the village, where coltish children grew up to stout adults with barrel chests like Nevahn’s own. Taller than anyone in the surrounding villages, where he’d spent time, on and off, these past years. His features had started out sharp and grown into strong angles, more length than breadth to them, his moderate coloring always a profound contrast to his changeable eyes. A handsome boy, reflecting his natural father’s mutable forms. A good son.
Finding willing partners to suit his maturing form hadn’t particularly attracted anyone’s attention; he’d mixed freely if quietly at gathering places.
His reaction to those who would have offered him insult and injustice...
That had been a problem.
Not very many times, once word got around. But enough so Ghehera had finally tracked him down. And once they’d seen him...
Of course they’d known.
And now they were finally coming for him. Nevahn’s boy, strong of body and soul but still far too young for Ghehera. Solchran’s best hunter and, whether the community wanted to admit it or not, their best protector.
Ardac leaned on Solchran’s central arch with arms crossed and a certain satisfaction on a face that had grown into a long jaw and scowling brow. “It’s his own fault. If he hadn’t messed with that Krevata brat —”
“Then it would have been one of us.” Nevahn spoke with heavy certainty. “Except none of us would have been as effective.”
“Exactly. The Krevata weren’t expecting it. They considered it a challenge.” Ardac tossed the words off with scorn.
Nevahn made a cutting gesture of denial. “Did you think the Krevata failed to covet our fields before that day? They breed like vermin; the child wouldn’t have been here had they not already been pushing our land.”
Ardac’s shrug held little respect. “We’ll never know the truth of it.”
Nevahn snapped into rare temper. “I was there that day, stripling
— and I protected this village for years before your feet ever hit the ground. Or are you now entitled to school your elders?”
It was a potent scold. Ardac, once slated to become Nevahn’s apprentice, had slipped away into less demanding roles — not community hunter or protector, but a preparer of food. An excellent preparer of food at that, with a special skill for preservation and subtle seasonings both. But it left him ill-suited to make pronouncements about Krevata activity, then or now.
And no stripling carried the right to scold an elder.
Nevahn looked at the sprinkle of wiry grey hairs over his forearms, thought of the spot in his lower back that so often ached. Somewhere along the line, he’d become an elder indeed.
Kriskha approached over the hard-packed dirt of the central square, dust puffing up at her steps. Fall was always this way, with sullen, damp heat retreating into a brief period of dry heat, the firs looking shrunken and the undergrowth retreating into a rising tide of dark morning fog.
If Nevahn could figure a way to hide Trevarr with glyphs, he would. Klysar knew he’d tried. But not even the uneasy energies of fall could hide what the boy had become. His strength, his struggle to keep his other half in check. Krevata manipulations be damned... they’d been lucky to hide Trevarr from Ghehera for as long as they had regardless.
Kriskha asked, “Is it true?”
“It is.” Nevahn cast a glance at Ardac, daring him to spew more of his ugliness. The young man remained silent. “If you would be so good as to ring the bell, Kriskha. Gather the rest of us. I don’t have the heart for it.”
Without comment, Kriskha lifted the padded wood striker to hit the village gong — the perfect blow, sending its tones through the village with ringing clarity.
It would bring them all, a steady trickle of villagers leaving their community tasks — the laundry, the food preparation, the structural repairs. They’d wind their way through homes and shops, away from their tanning, their grindstones, and from the terraced garden slopes carved out of the forest.
It would bring Trevarr from the hills where he hunted, and where he would hear the call to gather over distances the villagers had once considered unfathomable.
By then, Ghehera would be here.
Kriskha replaced the striker in its holder with care. “I grieve with you, Nevahn,” she said. “All of us know the boy’s human nature is sound. But the rest of him... there’s no telling what that part of him might become. Only Ghehera has the means to deal with it — to harness it as necessary.”
Nevahn thought there to be no necessity at all. Only what people imagined, because it made them more comfortable. Gave them the illusion of control.
Ardac couldn’t resist a final comment, couched in subdued tones though it was. “Everyone told you he’d be more trouble than he was worth.”
Nevahn gave him the most scathing look he could muster through a broken heart, but Kriskha was the one to respond. “Did they?” she asked, giving the young man a pointed look. “And what, I wonder, is any of us worth?”
“No one of us more than any other,” Nevahn murmured, looking up into the mountain from which Trevarr would descend. One last hunt for Solchran before Ghehera pressed him into what could only be called slavery. “And... no less.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 18
A Hotel Gathering
That way lies madness.
— Rhonda Rose
Stay on your own side of the car.
— Lisa McGarrity
Garrie knew she wasn’t alone long before she opened her eyes.
Never mind the wood smoke scent of the place; she’d fallen asleep to that, bolstered by the pillow. No, it was the slight dip to the bed and the simple but profound presence pressing against her skin.
She opened her eyes, and yeah.
Right there on the bed beside her, one hand stretched toward her head, almost touching it. The rest of him sprawly, loose-limbed and lost in sleep. Astonishingly just like anyone else.
How had that happened, again?
She closed her eyes, searching out murky hints of nightmares that hadn’t tasted like nightmares at all. More like memories that hadn’t truly been hers.
One way or another, Winchester House — or Trevarr? — had gotten to her.
That had been one of her first lessons, the most important one — that difference between what she owned, and what was thrust upon her. What was hers, she had to work through just like anyone.
But what came from without... that needed boundaries. She had to be ever careful not to absorb or own it. Rhonda Rose had been clear enough about the matter. “That way lies madness.”
Garrie shoved away the lingering intrusiveness of those nightmares, scowling at them from inside herself. Stay on your own side of the car, will you? She focused instead on the buffered peacefulness clouding around her... the sense that she hadn’t been left to it alone.
But how had he even known? And more importantly, how was she now going to slink away from this moment of unguarded familiarity? If she was quiet enough, smooth enough, could she slide right off this bed and into the other room, where air conditioning would cool the sudden flush over her neck and arms and cheeks?
Probably not.
She watched him, then, waiting for signs that he was waking. A flicker of eyelid, a change of tension... she realized, suddenly, she hadn’t ever seen his mouth fully relaxed before now.
At that thought, he did indeed open his eyes.
But when she moved to slip off the bed, something in his expression stopped her. An instant of baffled, waking vulnerability. She could all but see the thought balloon over his head: Wha..?
Just for an instant. And then there he was. Fully Trevarr. He rolled smoothly off the other side of the bed and onto his feet before she so much as opened her mouth, and one look at his face told her he wasn’t going to talk about this moment — not now, possibly not ever.
Not the waking up in bed with her. A man like that... she thought he’d shared his bed with plenty of willing women.
No, it was the being vulnerable... never mind being caught at it.
She slipped off the bed in a more leisurely fashion, stretching — and grabbed a look at the garish red numbers of the hotel alarm clock, instantly losing a grip on her more contemplative thoughts to make a strangled noise. “What happened to room service?”
“I postponed it.” Trevarr’s shirt lacings had loosened so the garment hung askew on his shoulders, and his hair was as rumpled as the shirt.
Very... nicely... rumpled.
“Did you?” Garrie asked, and thought she sounded just a little bit like Minnie Mouse. Get a grip. And then, No, get a farking grip.
That helped. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call them back.”
But she was utterly unprepared when the call turned into verbal wrangling over the cat in her room. “I think,” she told the manager, so surprised at such an accusation that she floundered for composure, “that I would know if I’d brought a cat. On the plane. From my house where there is no cat.”
Trevarr came to attention, losing half of his hair from his grip as he applied the band Lucia had given him. Garrie made a face at the phone for his benefit.
“Well, look,” she said to the woman’s patent disbelief. “There is no cat; you can come up here right now and see for yourself. You know, I figured housekeeping replaced the bedspread and didn’t realize the new one had been damaged in the wash, but if you’re saying there’s no way... then that means someone was in my room, and there should be an investigation into that, don’t you think?”
Uh-huh. She thought not. They exchanged a few more frosty niceties, and Garrie had no doubt that the room service waiter would be instructed to check the room for signs of a cat, but in the end...
“Dinner’s coming,” she said, hanging up the phone. She bounced up on the bed and took Trevarr by the shoulders, ignoring his startled expression as she pulled the misapplied band from his hair.
&nb
sp; “Like this,” she told him, and had enough experience with Lucia and her younger sisters to efficiently finger-comb his hair — thick, strong, and yes, there were little braids hidden throughout — and wind the band around it in three quick flips. She resisted the urge to twitch his shirt straight — just leave it alone — and bounced back off the bed. “They decided the bedspread must have been laundry damage after all. Still...”
She slanted a questioning look at him, thinking of the cat in Albuquerque. He returned it evenly; said nothing.
She gave up. “Okay, then, I’m gonna wash the sleep off my face before the food gets here. And Lucia and Drew ought to be back any time now.” Oh please.
She slipped into the artificial coolness of her own room, noticed the bed had indeed been remade, and headed for the sink with its fancy stone counter and gleaming fixtures and where was her soap?
Gone, that’s what. Totally gone. What, housekeeping had a hankering for hand-made coconut-almond? Retribution for the bedspread? As if they could know which soap was hers in the first place...
“Serves you right for packing it,” she told herself, and unwrapped a new little hotel soap, making do. She ran a wet fine-toothed comb through her hair, then scrunched it up to make it more interesting. Those blue streaks would need touch-up soon... nothing more pathetic than fading punk.
She heard their voices before they reached the door — Lucia and Drew, tumbling out of the elevator and down the hall, talking over one another and bubbling in a faintly manic way. They burst into the room after only the briefest hesitation at the door, a subtle snick of the key card and here they came, only belatedly realizing, “Oh, wait — Garrie — nap —” though she couldn’t have said just who burbled what.
She waved at them, there in front of the mirror at the exterior sink. “Yo,” she said. “Not napping. Lucky for you, I might add.”
“Garrie!” Lucia cried. “You’ll never believe —” She dumped her upscale shopping bag on the bed and then upended her silk mini-tote, spilling its contents everywhere before promptly then turning her back on it all as she headed straight for the big television stand/dresser.
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