The Mortal Sleep (Hollow Folk Book 4)

by Gregory Ashe

  “Huh?”

  “Because I keep hearing you inside my head. And outside my head. And it’s like somebody just shoved the trombones down the chute. So do us all a favor and shut up, all right?”

  “Oh.” I glanced at Austin. He nodded. I glanced at Becca. She nodded. Hard. I glanced at Jim, but he still wouldn’t look at me, and Sharrika was whispering something in his ear. “Yeah.”

  “Like, right now, tweaker? Shut up right now.”

  I opened my mouth. Then I nodded.

  “Jesus Christ. Can you think a little quieter?”

  I visualized that bank vault. I expanded it. I rolled up those connections and shoved them through the door—leaving it open the tiniest crack.

  Emmett sighed and nodded. Then, to my surprise, he ran his hands under his eyes, and his fingers came away wet. When he caught me staring, he said, “You’re like an icepick digging into a migraine. You might want to work on that.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Austin said. “It wasn’t that bad. And it’s better now. You’re just like a . . . like a dot right here.” He tapped the side of his head.

  “If we’re going to do this, we need to do it fast,” Becca said, her phone in her lap as she scrolled through screens. “I’ve been looking at old land surveys—”

  “Chapee.”

  She looked at me, her expression so ferociously intense that I wanted to take a step back. Then she started tapping at her phone. With a cry, she stretched out her phone like a trophy.

  “You found it?”

  “I think I found it.”

  “I just—I mean, Becca, I barely told you—”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been reading county records for the last four months, Vie, trying to figure out where they were hiding, and I’ve been thinking about them when I wasn’t reading them. It sounded familiar, and I think—” Her fingers paused, and the screen scrolled to a stop. She pinched, zooming in, and breathed out hard. “Here. It’s from the turn of the century, and it showed up in the city library when Donovan Metals and Minerals shuttered in the 1950s.” Her eyes flicked to me. “That was the mining operation before Shetland Multinational, the ones who are here now. I kept this one on my phone because it was strange, and I remembered the name when I heard it.”

  “And?”

  “And they were prospecting various sections of the Bighorns, trying to find good places to expand their operation. According to this, the surveyor thought it would have been an excellent place to open another mine. But at the bottom—” She turned the phone so we could see it, and she pinched the screen again. It showed a scanned document, the paper yellow with age and hatched with rows listing various technical specifications for an area marked Chapee. Climbing the page at a diagonal in a looping script were three words: Unsuitable - locals hostile. And then, cutting across those words in a second hand—a tight, angular hand—two more words: Superstitious nonsense.

  “It’ll take me a little while to figure out where it is. They didn’t have the same forest service roads, and they didn’t use GPS coordinates, but I think we can narrow it down.”

  “Austin can help you.”

  Austin blinked at my words, but he nodded.

  “I want to thank you,” I said, “all of you, for what you did for me. Not just today. But something needs to be clear: I’m going up there alone. You’ve given me a chance to succeed; I won’t let you risk more than that.”

  “Then you’ll die.” Sharrika’s voice was clear and dry, and her dark eyes flitted across my face, calculating.

  “Maybe. But nobody can stop Kyle, and Leo’s almost as dangerous, and that Crow kid was able to get through even Emmett’s barriers, so he could reach any of you, and—”

  “Vie,” Jim said, “we’ve got a plan.”

  “What?”

  “We’re not idiots. We haven’t just been sitting around waiting for our fearless leader to tell us what to do.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “Sharrika has been working on Kyle ever since he showed up in town—well, technically, ever since Becca dug up his history. That’s why she wasn’t at the hospital when he attacked; she was out running a field test. She and I are going to handle him.”

  “Handle him?” I said. “Fire can’t touch him. Dropping a prison on top of him didn’t slow him. He can—”

  “Vie. We’ve got a plan. But we need Kaden.”

  “Me?” Kaden looked ready to swallow his tongue.

  Jim nodded, and after a moment, Kaden nodded back.

  “And Temple Mae and I are going to handle Leo.” Jake’s voice was steady, but his fingers were white around his belt buckle again. “Anything he tosses at us, she can toss it back harder.”

  Temple Mae nodded. I could feel her hatred seething along the bond between us, but it was only partially for me. It was only because I’d brought this back into her life, opened this door, made her face it.

  I opened my mouth, but before I could speak, Emmett said, “And I’ve been thinking about the Crow kid. The one you’ve been calling the Old Man. I was staring right at him, and he was safely on the other side of the barrier. He was still right there when he almost put a knife through me—there were two of them.”

  “That’s what I saw,” I said. “At the hospital. I couldn’t even touch him, not until he was so close he almost got me. It was like I was grabbing air.”

  “I think I can handle him, but I’ll need Becca.” Emmett’s voice didn’t change, but his eyes suddenly found something on the wall behind me. “And Austin.”

  Austin had to clear his throat. I didn’t have to see his face to know that, in his mind at least, he was seeing Emmett’s rumpled clothes, was smelling the motel soap, was imagining everything that had happened with me. I didn’t even recognize his voice when he nodded and said, “Yeah.”

  “That leaves the Lady and Urho for you,” Jim said. “That’s the best we can do, so tell me you’ve got a plan of your own. Tell me you’ve figured out how to handle them.”

  “I know how to handle them.”

  That was bullshit, but I was working on it. I had one last shot at figuring out how I might be able to get to them, so I looked past Jim and Sharrika at the bathroom door and said, “First, I need to talk to Ginny.”

  GINNY SAT IN THE bathtub. She was too big for it; her shoulders spilled out over the top. When she had come to my house, I had been too busy avoiding a bullet to notice what she was wearing, but it was hard not to notice now. The pantsuit jacket mountained up behind her neck, exposing part of a label stitched with the word Uptown, and her black blouse had been snipped away so that someone—Becca, I was guessing—could bandage the wound on Ginny’s side. She held a watery icepack on the bandage. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her mouth drew into a sneer when she saw me.

  “Hi, Ginny.”

  “I’m not telling you anything.”

  I nodded and perched on the edge of the toilet. With the power of my circle of friends running through me, I didn’t even have to flick open my second sight; it was open constantly, like a pair of glasses I just had to slide down. And when I looked at her, at the psychic chaos that trailed behind Ginny, I still couldn’t find what I was looking for: any sign of her coyote.

  “He’s going to kill you. You don’t have any idea what you’re going up against. He’s hundreds of years old. Hundreds.” She shifted and winced and the icepack sloshed inside its plastic bag. “He’s killed more people than you’ve met. He knows the other side as well as he knows the buffalo grass. Kattie Shakespeare and Elli of New York and the boy Runs Ahead faced Urho Rattling Tent, War Chief of the Tribe That Walks Apart. They defeated him and cut his body into twelve pieces, and he didn’t die. He lived on. He’s stronger than anyone. And he has Babria, Lady Buckhardt, at his side.”

  I wanted to ask about what she meant—and how she knew it—but instead I said, “I know where Urho and the Lady are. I know about Chapee. I know how they’re planning on u
sing Hannah and Tyler, and I know that you helped the Lady—”

  Ginny moaned and shook her head.

  “I know all of it, Ginny. They’re not going to win. Urho’s not coming back, and we’re going to put the rest of them in the ground to make sure. Do you understand me?”

  She laughed; the shrill sound sheared away at the end. “You don’t get it. He can do things nobody else can do. Whatever you’re planning, he’s already figured it out, he’s already prepared for it, and you’re going to walk into a trap that you can’t get out of.”

  “This is your chance to help. Help, and you can walk away. You can’t stay here; there’s no place for you here, not after what you’ve done. But you can live. You can go somewhere else and live.”

  She shook her head again, hunching now, looking smaller as she fumbled with the icepack.

  “Ginny, he took your coyote—”

  “He killed it!” The scream ripped from her throat, and she threw her head back, meeting my eyes for the first time. That was when I remembered Ginny wasn’t a small woman, no matter how much she hunched or shrank or shook her head. She was about the size of a bulldozer, and for a moment, she looked like she was coming at me.

  The door opened, and Austin tumbled into the tiny bathroom, looking at me and then at Ginny, a revolver in his hand.

  I shook my head and waved at the door.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Austin looked at me one last time and slipped out of the room.

  I leaned back, and the porcelain lid wobbled on the tank, and water gurgled somewhere in the pipes.

  “He killed it.” Ginny’s head dropped, her long, dark hair falling the way rain had been falling for the last three days. “I was walking a dream, and then Urho was there, and he killed it. He ripped my coyote into pieces, right there in the dream. It was part of me, and he killed it—” She shuddered, and the next words slipped out in stuttered horror. “He killed it with his teeth.” Then her voice picked up speed. “That’s not possible. It’s not. But he did it, and I ran, I ran from the dream, but they were already there. Men. Men inside my house, inside the bedroom, with ropes and guns and—” She shook her head, and her hair whispered like the rain. “And I’m not a warrior. I told you that. From the very beginning. And they took me. And they made me help them.”

  “Your last chance, Ginny: help me. Tell me how I can stop Urho. Tell me how I can come face to face with him. Do that much, and I’ll do the rest.”

  “You’re not strong enough.”

  “You don’t know everything.”

  “That little trick? Those threads you’ve tied back to your friends? I’m not blind, little boy. I haven’t lost my abilities. I can see it—you’ve tangled yourselves together, and you think that makes you stronger.”

  “I am stronger.”

  “You’ve put all your chips in a pile, that’s what you’ve done. All that power runs on love. And love isn’t a weapon, little boy. Love isn’t a knife you can bury in Urho’s throat. You need darker emotions. You need what you felt when you tore Mr. Big Empty to shreds.”

  That night. I remembered that night, what I had felt that night. My fury at what Luke had done to other people. Fury at what he had done to me. The need to destroy him so that he never hurt anyone else again. And then, more recently, the incandescent anger that I had felt when I thought Krystal had killed Austin. It had burned through me like wildfire and left nothing but open vistas of ash inside me. In that numb clarity, I had left my body and popped every stitch running through her soul and dragged her between worlds. That had been anger, a kind of solar-flare anger that had left me free of remorse or compassion—or love.

  Doubt slipped through my gut.

  “The minute you try to attack,” Ginny said, “the minute you let anger and hate and fear sharpen your mind, become your weapons, that precious lacework is going to burn away, and it’ll be you facing Urho alone. No friends. No love. No power.”

  “That’s it, then?” I stood and swiped at my jeans. “You won’t help me?”

  “Nobody can help you.”

  “Goodbye, Ginny.”

  As I stepped out of the bathroom, her voice followed me.

  “You can’t hurt them or stop them or break them. You can only break yourself trying.”

  I shut the door.

  The motel room had emptied except for Becca, and she studied me now with an unlit cigarette between her lips.

  “That didn’t sound good.”

  I shook my head.

  “We can’t leave her here, Vie.”

  Taking Becca’s arm, I hustled her toward the door.

  “Someone’s going to find her.”

  “Fine.”

  “She might call the cops.”

  “We’re going, Becca.”

  “She might warn Urho.”

  And then we emerged into the April evening. The clouds had thickened to a gray roil, and snowflakes dusted the air and smoked away on the ground. To the east, like the edge of the world, the Bighorns spiked up into the clouds.

  “Did you find a way to get to Chapee?”

  She nodded, biting the cigarette so hard that it bent and drooped between her teeth.

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Vie—”

  “He knows we’re coming. Let’s not keep him waiting.”

  I RODE WITH EMMETT on the Ducati, and nobody liked this, least of all Austin. The last I saw, as Emmett pulled out onto the highway, was Austin denting the Charger’s side panel with one hell of a punch, and I hoped he hadn’t broken his hand.

  That was the last thought I could spare for him though. We drove fast into the dark and the snow, and the dry, powdery smell mixed with the leather of Emmett’s jacket. Then there were the neon palisades of Vehpese—the glare of the signs hemming either side of the state highway—and a whiff of the late-night donuts at the Big Swirl, and then the mud and water of the river, and snow beaded and glinted like silver on the bridge’s stone railings where I had sat one afternoon before I jumped. And then the mountains, and the lodgepole pines, the smell of their pitch and sap filling my nose, and aspens weaving a net of gold and silver as their leaves quivered in our passage. Behind us came the Impala, the Charger, and Jake’s big, old truck. We were carpooling to save the environment, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.

  When we finally left the state highway, the forestry service road was gravel, and so slick that Emmett had to slow down. That probably saved our lives; the rear wheel of the Ducati kicked out on a turn, and Emmett managed to catch us, but not without both of us taking a dip to the right. At the same moment, a muzzle flashed off to our right, and the trunk of a massive ponderosa pine exploded with splinters of bark and yellow-white pulp.

  “Shit,” Emmett muttered, and then he grunted. The next shot pinged off one of his barriers; I watched sparks light up the spot where the round had struck. “Help me get the bike up.”

  Emmett eased the bike onto the service road’s muddy shoulder.

  “What are you doing?”

  The Impala creaked past us; Sharrika was driving, and Jim leaned over the dash.

  “Jim told you we had a plan,” Emmett said.

  As though that had been a cue, the entire mountain seemed to catch fire. It wasn’t a white-hot blaze, not the hottest fire Jim had ever produced, but it was enormous. It stretched as far as I could see, flames dripping from branches, smoldering in the wet brush, crawling up the next slope. I thought I heard screaming off in the distance, and my stomach flipped.

  The Impala rolled forward, and we trailed after it. The fire pushed out ahead of us like a vanguard, swallowing miles of forest, chewing along wet tree limbs as though they were soaked in kerosene. The whole effect was terrifying and, in an uncomfortable way, pleasant: the blaze warmed the air and smelled like a campfire. I doubted the men who had been roasted alive felt the same way, and that made my stomach flip again.

  “How
long can he keep this up?” I asked as we drove another mile.

  Emmett didn’t answer.

  The fire spun out ahead of us, snaking through the darkness, lighting our way. Another mile. And then another. And then another, all of them achingly slow on the bad roads. But no more shots sparked against Emmett’s barrier.

  And then I heard water. The crackle of the fire was almost too loud, but the water was making a lot of noise—and around the next bend, I saw it jumping out in a short, broad waterfall and then racing down a rocky vee of the mountainside.

  We came over the next slope, and I saw it: the valley, the bent heads of buffalo grass, the crooked cottonwoods along the water, the lake, and there, on a shelf overlooking the valley, the massive cabin. Chapee.

  That was when the earthquake hit us. The ground slewed to the left, toward the water, collapsing into a slide of dirt and gravel. The Ducati pitched under us, and we fell, tumbling toward the river and the precipice of the waterfall. Ahead of us, the Impala dipped, its rear tires spinning empty air, and then more ground crumbled away, and the car tilted back onto its bumper, balancing for a moment like a seal on its nose, and then—

  And then the ground kept shaking, and gravel and earth and a small juniper bush slid below me, but Emmett and I weren’t falling. The Ducati wasn’t falling. The Impala actually bumped up a few inches, floating in the air, and then slowly tipped forward, righting itself.

  “Temple Mae?” Emmett asked, his voice bubbly with what sounded like relief.

  “Kaden,” I breathed. “That motherfucker might actually be worth something.”

  The bike drifted uphill until it reached a rocky shelf that marked the edge of the new precipice. The Impala glided after us. It had to be Kaden doing this. I could tell by how hard the Ducati landed, by how the Impala groaned when it hit solid ground, bouncing on its suspension. Temple Mae had finesse; Kaden was like a toddler kicking his way through Tiny Town.

  I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the Charger skidding into a patch of wild onions, the tires snapping the delicate stalks and releasing their scent into the mixture of dust and fresh-turned earth and hot metal. Behind Austin, Jake’s truck settled onto a soft patch of sod—like a baby rocking in its cradle. That was Temple Mae’s work.