The Reckoners

by Doranna Durgin

  His toes slipped; he got them back.

  Needed distraction.

  Sklayne went hunting the Drew person, out in the halls of the angry house. The Drew person couldn’t get lost; he should be back with the others by now. But he wasn’t. His tug came from nowhere near the ballroom.

  Sklayne dipped into the Drew person awareness and found himself not far from the cellar door. Tucked into a corner, such a small fetal ball for a tall person of lanky arms and legs. Ghosts beset him, and if the Drew person couldn’t see them, he still knew of them. Whipped into a kinetic frenzy, they lashed his skin with heat welts; they released snapping blows against his exposed shoulder and sides.

  “You guys are in so much trouble!” the Drew person cried at the ghosts — but he did it without lifting his head. The house rumbled around him with such vigor that the ceiling overhead sprouted a thick crack, but he didn’t so much as dare a glance. His voice came thinner than usual, higher than usual. Fear rolled around the hallway, inciting the ghosts to greater effort.

  They’d learned from the Krevata, it seemed. Semi-ethereal, skilled in applying the effects of one plane against the creatures of another.

  The Krevata had to go.

  Sklayne wanted to tell the Drew person that the Garrie had done well, but he had no idea if it was true. Trevarr had used the oskhila, he knew that. But no more.

  They were gone from his awareness. Altogether gone. Leaving Sklayne alone in this room. On this world.

  But not fearful. Not fighting to stay hidden, the only chance of survival. Not bereft and alone. Not helpless to do anything for the Drew person. Not.

  Sklayne left the Drew person muttering imprecations and threats of dissolution upon Garrie’s return, and went looking for the Lucia person. She might have calmed the ghosts; she had the medium. Between them, if they’d talked their way out —

  But the Lucia person was still in the ballroom. The Lucia person threw herself against those walls, bloodying her fingers, clawing at that buffed and gleaming wood, howling in rage — unable to resist what the ghosts threw at her. The next moment she sobbed with their frustration, screamed with their fear...

  Only the Beth person tried to help her, pleading with her, pleading with the ghosts. The imperious medium seemed dazed. Or comatose. Or simply hiding behind her closed eyes and murmuring lips while the Lucia person slammed her own head against the wall, so unexpected and fast that the Beth person shrieked in dismay and leaped for her, grappling with her to stop it from happening again. And Sklayne watched in dismay, unable to do anything for her.

  Still alone in the basement.

  But not fearful. Not fighting to stay hidden, the only chance of survival. Not bereft and alone. Not helpless to do anything for the Lucia person. Not.

  Scimitars. Slashing through ethereal and corporeal. Slashing through Krevata. Sklayne closed his eyes tightly and imagined them while the ground shook beneath him and the city cried out around him and chakha broke through into the streets and raged unopposed.

  The Krevata had to go.

  Oh, soon.

  Very soon.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 31

  Changing Dimensions

  “....”

  — Rhonda Rose

  Rhonda Rose, you got some ’splainin’ to do.

  — Lisa McGarrity

  “But,” Garrie said, reflexively extending her hand to meet Trevarr’s and then changing her mind. “But.”

  He snagged her hand anyway, a quicker-than-Garrie movement that made her blink. He produced the stone she’d seen in his satchel, all blooming colors that shouldn’t even be in rock.

  “And what is that thing, anyway?” she demanded, following his tug to move in close — recognizing it not as desire, but directive. “What kind of stone — ?”

  “It isn’t.” He snugged her back against his chest, securing his arm across her shoulders with a touch that felt comfortable, as if it was only right. But boy, there was not a damned thing right about that way that stone spewed a sudden explosion of colors.

  Garrie stiffened as color expanded into a giant bubble of light and silence, her hands gripping the hard muscle of Trevarr’s steadying forearm.

  “Sha,” he murmured, and then whatever else he said only vibrated between them, the actual sound swallowed up by engulfing silence.

  Probably just as well, because when starbursts of black spattered across the color field and instantly expanded to a swift blanket of nothingness, Garrie clapped her hands over her eyes and made what would have been a muted sound of fear, endless long moments of imposed and unnatural silence during which something jerked unhappily around inside her.

  And then the silence cut out and the sound cut in, and she snatched her hands from her eyes to slap over her mouth, daring to open her eyes... finding darkness.

  Darkness, and the faint scent of damp rock. The uncomfortably warm air carried an overlying scent of spicy green; it made her think of wintergreen and tickled her nose, a stronger version of that very faint scent she’d found on her nightshirt the evening before. And a fainter version of that very strong scent she’d found in her waking dreams and nightmares since arriving in San Jose.

  Okay. She’d entered the sucks-life from its connection to the Winchester House basement. Maybe he’d simply exited it through a different connection. Although if it had been that easy, why had he needed her at all?

  It didn’t make sense. Even in a life that so often stretched the limits of reality.

  “Where,” she asked, full of sudden trepidation, “are we?”

  “Look and see.” His hands dropped to her shoulders, reassuring in their weight. “This is a safe place.”

  “I doubt that,” Garrie said under her breath. “I don’t think there’s anything safe about you. Ever.”

  Trevarr stepped away, his steps as confident in the darkness as his following movements — the creak of hinges, the tiny noises of objects being moved. He worked swiftly even as Garrie’s eyes adjusted enough to identify dim soaring overhead outlines and a vague light source from the side.

  Cave?

  But where and how and why...

  A sharp noise and sudden harsh light bloomed; in another instant he covered and adjusted it to cast a cool silver-blue spectrum.

  Not just any cave. A cave of furniture, a cot niche with furs, an off-center rug... a trunk with the same flat twisted knot he wore on his belt. A cave of homey comforts and culturally unfamiliar details, scented with spice and suffused with warmth.

  “No, no no,” Garrie said. “This was a dream.” A freakishly realistic dream, now surrounding her with the physical weight of reality. “Just no.”

  “Atreya —”

  She turned on him with a ferocity that welled up entirely unexpected. “No! You don’t get to do this to me without explaining! Without asking!” She turned to that vague light source, already knowing it for the long, narrow passage of the exit — running by the time she reached it, ignoring Trevarr’s curse behind her. Thinking about the way Trevarr had said your world and not explained it, about the way Sklayne had said the same, about the way neither of them were truly explicable even if they’d been a different sort of reckoning team with a different sort of energy.

  About the way the Krevata weren’t explicable at all.

  Trevarr followed with enough haste to scrape against the passage walls while she slipped on through, bolting for the patch of diffuse light and the drifting fingers of dark fog that settled along the floor. Dark fog. Strange wild places and feet walking ground unlike any ever touched before and not-quite-human at her side and air she’d never been meant to breathe —

  She coughed, coming out into hot, open air and stopping short, staring out over the landscape from her dreams. The cave emerged from steep rock, leaving only a modest landing pad from which to look out at the world falling away below it. She teetered there a moment, nowhere near the actual edge, and took a step back just because.

  Strange wild
places and feet walking ground unlike any ever touched before and not-quite-human at her side and air she’d never been meant to breathe —

  Not her world. Not her world at all.

  Sunlight barely penetrated thick evergreens with lumpy, unfamiliar outlines and interlacing branches, their oval seed pods drooping to the lower reaches where black fog eased along the forest floor. The terrain itself looked as though rock and earth had argued, winner undecided, and it spewed jutting, granite-like outcrops and dark earth scattered with damp growth and fungal patches. The tree branches shuddered as forest denizens moved through them, and a loud chittering suggested an encounter on the ground.

  The black fog...

  It called to her, both threatening and beguiling, luring her with faint familiarity. Garrie thought of Trevarr’s energy, still lingering within her.

  Maybe forever lingering within her, for all she knew, changing what she had been into something she hadn’t yet figured out.

  She went looking for more.

  Trevarr snagged her from behind, pulling her back into the passage with a hard grip. “Do not!” He blocked the exit and most of the light, hemming her in with his body.

  “No!” she told him, shoving him hard with no apparent impact. “You aren’t the boss of me! You don’t get to play with my life like I’m some sort of game piece!”

  He loomed over her, sudden and close and fierce, and Garrie felt the impulse to quail back. She made herself stand her ground, fiercing right back up at him with words. “Your energy is not of this place! Inside is safe; the nature of the stone shields it. Outside, they will come to you.”

  He didn’t define they. For the moment, she didn’t ask him to — too furious, just barely sensible enough to absorb the import of his words. She shoved him again, hard — knowing, this time, that it would have no effect. “You sonofabitch,” she said. “You made me care! You touched me! And all the time you were holding this back from me. I deserved to know, Trevarr! I deserved better!” She turned from him, jerking her shoulder away from his touch and then stopping short when he caught her arm, just that fast.

  Not that she turned around. She wouldn’t give him that, and she wouldn’t give him the heat of emotion on her face or the sting of tears in her eyes.

  But his voice sounded as rough as hers. “You did,” he said, making no attempt to turn her with that solid grip of his. “From that first, you did.”

  She stilled. She waited. She heard the tightness in his throat when he finally found words again.

  “The Krevata...” He released a breath. “I could not expose you to them. Of all of us here, they excel in gathering energies. And what are you but a morsel of unique energies on a world where they expect to find no such thing?”

  They’d wanted her, all right.

  “You should have told me,” she said, more thickly than she wanted. She pulled her wrist from his grip. “You should have. I can make my own choices!”

  He let her go, but not without moving up behind her. “Atreya,” he said. “I hunt runaways and lawbreakers, and I bring them back across worlds for containment. I have no skill with words.”

  Garrie buffed her arms, as if she would ever truly be cold in this sultry world. “And atreya means..?”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and this time she let him turn her around, and even let him gently tug her hand free of her defiant posture so he could press her palm flat over his heart.

  “Heart-bond person,” he said. “More or less.”

  When she startled, he held her there. “It is not an obligation. It is my own expression. Do you follow?”

  She gave him a patently skeptical look, finding it hard to reconcile those words with the other revelations of the moment — or to accept them, when she still felt the sharp sting of understanding just how little he’d told her after all. How he’d used her.

  Regret flickered across his features. “I will not say it, then.”

  “No! I mean...” Garrie released a huff of exasperation. “I guess that’s okay. If that’s what comes to mind. I mean. Right.”

  He looked like he might smile again — so subtle, there at the corners of his mouth and the corners of yes, still silvered cat eyes.

  She narrowed hers. “But it doesn’t change anything. It’s time for you to find some words, Trevarr. Talk to me.”

  “Come, then.” There was hardly room for him to ease around her and take the lead, but he did it — leaving her at least this one choice. Follow, or go back out into his world where she was vulnerable to discovery.

  She followed. The answers she wanted were inside, where an oddly organic lamp shone its quiet cerulean light on the place he most certainly called home. There was no chair, but she found a thick leather-bound pad and sat on that, crossing her legs.

  He sat on the cot across from her. It was low for him; his knees jutted out. But he looked perfectly at home there. In fact, he looked more at home in this place altogether, more relaxed than she’d ever seen him and yet somehow still more... intense.

  Chafing at the bit. Ready.

  “You live in a cave,” she said flatly. “And you get here with a rock. And this is not my world. But somehow you came looking for me. Not for any old reckoner, such as they are. But me.”

  “Rhonda Rose took shelter here,” he said, as if he wasn’t sure where to start. “I was... recuperating. We had time together. She taught me of your world, among others. Your language.” He eyed her, gauging her reaction. “You.”

  Rhonda Rose. Garrie wanted to cry — a strange, bittersweet joy, and grief all over again. Rhonda Rose hadn’t released herself beyond; she’d traveled. Here. “Is she still here somewhere? On this world?”

  He winced, just the faintest furrow of his brow. “She is not.”

  She bit back her anger. “Is that the truth?”

  He stilled, catching her gaze — holding it. “There are things I have kept from you. But none of my words to you have been untrue.” Emotion lived in that stillness of his, capturing her while he watched to see that she understood. “None of them.”

  He wasn’t talking about Rhonda Rose, or Krevata, or Sklayne. Not with that look on his face.

  Heart-bond.

  “Could you,” she started, and swallowed hard. “Could you maybe just tell me? Could you just stop protecting me now? So we can get back to do what needs to be done?”

  He rested his elbows on his knees; one thumb massaged the other hand’s palm. For a long moment, she thought he wouldn’t bring himself to do it. All those words. All those risks.

  “Listen well,” he finally told her. “I will try.”

  Garrie sat straighter, briefly holding her breath.

  “This world is known as Kehar,” Trevarr told her, holding himself still as if the telling was an effort. “It is a hard world, and it is controlled by the Tribunal of Ghehera.”

  Ghehera, Garrie repeated silently, mouth forming the word. Trying to listen well.

  “You saw the Krevata?”

  She nodded. Boy, had she seen the Krevata.

  “They are conniving creatures who cause nothing but trouble. Ghehera would likely have eradicated them by now, if it was not for their innate skill with gathering energies.”

  “That’s what they’re doing at the house,” Garrie whispered, trying to not interrupt and doing it anyway.

  “They harvest the energies of the house to fuel a forbidden portal for harvest. But such portals are forbidden for a reason.”

  “Sklayne said the world was...” She hesitated, finding it hard to say out loud. “Warping.”

  “It has created places where our worlds overlap.” His voice was as dark as she’d ever heard it.

  Worlds overlap.

  Allowing entities to cross. Allowing Keharian energies to sift into her dreams, following the path of the man from this world who’d grown close to her.

  A man with flaring silver eyes and patterned skin and a natural hint of spice and wood smoke.

  “And wha
t,” she asked, “is with your eyes?”

  He closed them, as though he might obscure them — or perhaps just in resignation.

  “And those marks on your sides and up your chest. Not old tattoos, are they?”

  He shifted abruptly, as if he’d reached the limit of his stillness and now fought the need to explode into movement.

  That he didn’t — that he sat there and let her crowd him with words, only betraying himself through the tension in his arms and the twitch in his hands... it touched something within her.

  It bought him time, and maybe a little something more.

  His next words came with difficulty. “On my world, we have a variety of beings. We don’t generally intermingle. But sometimes —”

  And there it was again. All the previous hints and tidbits and indications, leaping out to ambush her. His eyes might have been a final clue, but there had been others. His strength, his recovery from injury, his truly impossible need for food. His reaction to the knife, nothing but a silver butter knife. Tattoos that weren’t, a cat companion who wasn’t...

  “You’re not human,” she blurted. She said it without thinking, with nothing but startled wonder behind it.

  He stiffened. “Not,” he said, “entirely.”

  “That medium — there’s one trapped in the house with a whole batch of tourists and now Drew and Lucia and Beth...” She stopped, shook her shoulders loose. Made herself breathe. “She said Sklayne was a demon.”

  Tense or not, distressed or not... Trevarr’s mouth twisted slightly in wry amusement. “Sklayne would have liked that.”

  “But —”

  “No,” Trevarr said. “Or maybe yes. It depends on whether you think it valid for the people of your world to define the peoples of Kehar, or whether we may define ourselves.” He drew his gaze back to hers with obvious effort. “Maybe yes, for some.”

  She should have been shocked. Frightened, maybe. Or in complete denial. But instead she could only think of what it seemed to mean in this place, to be intermingled. How hard he’d tried to control that other part of himself. “Is mixed blood an okay thing?” she asked. “Here on Kehar?”