Inside Straight

by Mark Henwick

  Abandoned mines.

  We’d gone down a mine which had been kept open as a tourist attraction.

  We’d visited ghost towns.

  Ghost towns.

  There were towns that had sprung up like mushrooms in the 1880s when people had been lured out here with the tales of gold and silver. They’d found their metals, but this was a harsh, high land with dozens of 14,000-foot peaks, and there wasn’t enough wealth of minerals to justify the difficulties in the long term. The towns had died.

  But not all the buildings were gone.

  Where had Dad and I looked?

  Names passed before my eyes: Howardsville, Buffalo Boy, Old Hundred, Highland Mary. Although the chance of those being visited in the winter was remote, some of them were too close to jeep tracks.

  But there were others. Some whose names had been forgotten. Some just a derelict mill on a creek. Off the tracks.

  I tried to visualize the pattern of them in the land below, overlaid with the Continental Divide Trail.

  The three of us sank lower.

  The snow made it difficult to see the way the land rose and fell. Smaller lakes and trails and entire ghost towns were hidden.

  Yes. Somewhere up in the San Juan, off the main trails, you could stay invisible until the spring thaws, provided you had supplies.

  Find an abandoned building, covered in snow and ice. Seal off part of it. Make a working to shield yourself. Become a ghost.

  Tara and Tullah were here. Not far away.

  The raven croaked in my ear. “We’re making a lot of disturbance in the spirit world. We can’t keep doing this. Others are sensing us already.”

  “Nearly there,” I said.

  But where? It was no good saying somewhere in the San Juan. We could come back here physically and spend the rest of the winter without finding them.

  Yet Flint was right. My spirit eyes could see the majestic, stately sweep of snowstorms brushing the tops of the mountains and tumbling softly into the valleys. But overlaid on that was another movement: a deepness of the night, a twisting and swirling that had nothing to do with winds or the shape of the ground.

  It came from every direction. Creeping along the spine of the Rockies, rushing over the foothills. Probing and darting. Spirit snake tongues testing the airs. Blind monsters seeking us out. Trying to catch us by feeling their way through the high ranges.

  Just a few moments more.

  “Amber! We have to go!”

  I felt Flint pulling us back.

  So close.

  Tara is here.

  I have to find her. My oath binds me.

  I reached. Without Flint. Without Kane. I reached for the darkness inside me with the word it had given me.

  Ash.

  I called and it came.

  There was a huge flash of lightning that tore us apart, tore the whole sky in two, and seared the image of the ground into my eyes.

  And then I was falling, screaming, my body on fire.

  Chapter 53

  “I know where they are.”

  I’d been hauled out of the sauna when Bian decided that the spirit walk was over, based on the screaming.

  Fair enough.

  The flames had been an illusion, gone as quickly as they had arrived with the flash of lightning, and I should have laid there quietly while everyone else got over it.

  I couldn’t. I knew where Tullah was. Our enemies were hunting for her and we had to get out there and pick her up before anyone else did. I’d got an indication of where she was, despite her magical concealment, so I had to assume others could too, especially as we’d led them to the area.

  “I know where they are,” I repeated.

  Alice was giving me the kind of look that says of course you do, dear.

  After they’d gotten us out of the sauna, we’d been taken back down to the dungeon and laid out on the carpet.

  It was quiet and cool. The room didn’t move and there weren’t glowing figures crawling up the walls. Although Kaothos remained unseen, I could sense her urgent presence.

  Diana was worried, and that made me feel bad, but I couldn’t stop.

  “We need to call the Hecate,” I said. “Her Adepts need to prepare a substantiation big enough to get to the San Juan and bring Tullah and the others back here.”

  Yelena was listening to me. She had my cell. She nodded and left to go upstairs and call Gwen.

  Bian wasn’t convinced.

  “If all you know is she’s hiding in the San Juan, the last thing we want to do is call attention to the area. Weaver’s watching.”

  “More than watching,” Flint said. “He’s looking, and now he knows where to look.”

  “And she’s well hidden, so he’ll take a long time to find her,” I said. “He can’t look all the time. We’ll have to sneak past.”

  “The League are the experts, but I think that might be difficult with a substantiation. And anyway, we’d have to look around too. Even if you’re right and she’s in the area, we don’t know where she is exactly,” Flint said.

  “I do.”

  “How can you, if she’s so well hidden?” Alice countered. “The Empire’s best Adepts looked and they couldn’t find her.”

  “Because she didn’t want them to find her, and they had the whole continent to search.”

  “Amber, you don’t even know that she’s in the San Juan. Most of this spirit walk was no more than a drug-induced trip.” Alice raised her hands as if appealing to the others. “Glowing men, lizards, old churchyards, seeing yourself in the sky?”

  I felt Ash stir within me, whispering I could do it all without them. Or I could make them believe. The power seethed quietly inside me.

  I shivered.

  “I know it looked that way,” I said. I spoke slowly, desperate to make myself clearer. “That image in the sky was my twin sister, Tara. She’s there, with Tullah. That’s the whole thing. Tullah wants to be found, but only by me, while she’s hidden from everyone else. So she asked Tara where she should hide. Don’t you see? Tara would have given the same answer I would. She would have known that. We have to go back and get them. I know where they are, because I know where Tara would have said to hide.”

  “Hush,” Alice said, one hand stroking my hair. “You tried. No one could do more. You tried, but it didn’t work. Your spirits traveled a tremendous distance, but you couldn’t focus on the search with the effect of the drug flooding through your auras. Certainly not after everything that’s happened to you. Goodness, Amber! You’re still recovering from Weaver’s attack on your mind, let alone taking your first spirit walk with the Northern Adept League.”

  “What if it’s like the Hecate said after you got back from Erie?” Bian said. “Your brain takes clues and builds it all up into something you feel is consistent, but Weaver’s house isn’t translucent as a veil. In the same way, did you see Tara because you wanted to?”

  She shrugged. “And you all say there were other spirit walkers attracted to the area. But how do we know it wasn’t you all sharing drug-induced paranoia?”

  Over her shoulder, Anubis was whispering in the shadows. Keep well away from magic.

  Kaothos stirred, but she didn’t speak, to my hearing.

  “It could be drug-induced paranoia,” I said, pushing Alice back and getting up. “Or it could be Weaver. We can’t take the risk.”

  “No one is getting into the San Juan in a hurry,” Bian said. “There have been snowstorms all night down the length of the Rockies.”

  On a clear day, you could make it down to San Juan from Denver in six or seven hours. I-70 would get you to Grand Junction. Even with snow, they’d have cleared that by morning. But the highway south after that...

  Or you could go south on I-25, keeping out of the high passes, then head east. That’d take eight or nine hours. On a clear day.

  But every way, in the middle of winter, with fresh snow on the mountain roads, it’d take much longer. Even in the Hill Bitch.

&n
bsp; Too long. We need the Northern Adept League’s magic. We need to go there using magic.

  The elevator returned. Yelena was back, her face as blank and bleak as I’d ever seen it.

  “Yelena! What’s wrong?”

  “No answer from Hecate,” she said. “The others there say Hecate is missing. Few minutes ago, walked out of the apartment and disappeared. Spoke to no one.”

  There was a shocked silence, broken by Alice. “Weaver’s taken her,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Bian said. “I thought she was stronger than Weaver. What if they’ve been working together all the time?”

  Working with Weaver didn’t make sense to me, any more than Weaver being strong enough to take her by surprise. But that was all overshadowed. Without the Hecate, there wouldn’t be a magical way to spirit Tullah out of the San Juan and back to safety in Denver.

  Maybe she’d come back. Maybe she’d help. But we couldn’t count on it. We were going to have to set out to do it the hard way, snow or not.

  How?

  I’d lay a bet that Ops 4-10 would have some kind of off-road vehicles.

  All I needed to do was convince the others.

  “It’s no coincidence,” I said. “The moment we find Tullah, the Hecate goes missing. One way or the other, this means that others know and they’re looking for her down in San Juan.”

  “We haven’t actually agreed you’ve found her,” Alice said.

  Diana stopped us.

  “Kaothos says we must try to get Tullah back. She believes Amber.”

  Chapter 54

  It was still hours to dawn. The Colonel wasn’t at Haven; he was sleeping soundly at Manassah.

  I called him on the secure landline. He was immediately alert as I explained the situation.

  It turned out he had what was probably needed: he’d managed to ‘acquire’ a couple of ATVs developed for the US in the Middle East. The things looked like they’d escaped from a Mad Max film, but if they could handle sand, they were probably good to go on snow.

  Even with them, by the time we got into the San Juan, it would be dark again, but that couldn’t be helped.

  He started to wrap up and hesitated.

  “You know, there’s a helicopter, if you can find a pilot. What about Victor?”

  “I’d thought about Vic right away, but he wouldn’t fly into the Rockies in this weather,” I said. “And Jen’s helicopter isn’t designed for this kind of thing.”

  I didn’t know any other helicopter pilots. And certainly none that were borderline insane.

  “No. I mean Ops 4-10 has a helicopter,” the colonel said. “It’s an evaluation model from the ARH program. The Arapaho. It’s stored in the barn, down in the lower field behind Haven.”

  I knew of the ARH program and the helicopter. Back in 2005, the US Army had put out a tender for a new Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter. The Arapaho didn’t make the cut, but it’d impressed someone on the Ops 4-10 review team. It seemed, in the usual style of Ops 4-10, we got our prototype before the DoD closed the project down.

  From what I remembered, it was rugged, and it could carry six in addition to the crew.

  But who’d fly it into the Rockies today?

  Victor Gayle was my go-to pilot, but his insanity had limits.

  “No pilot,” I said.

  Flint cleared his throat behind me. “There is.”

  “You?”

  He shook his head and nodded to where Kane was still sprawled. “Get him down off the peyote, and he can fly us. He’s the best.”

  Kane grinned and waved. He hadn’t managed to get dressed yet.

  “You do know that the storms haven’t actually cleared the Rockies?” Bian said. “You’d be flying right into them.”

  Flint pursed his mouth.

  “Kane does a kind of spirit walk when he flies. He can sense things like air currents and obstructions.”

  “And that works all the time?”

  Flint cleared his throat again. “Most of the time.”

  “We walked away from every single landing,” Kane called out. “Every single one.”

  I’d heard enough. The oath flared in my Blood. Whatever it took, I’d get them back.

  “Colonel, please ask your team to prep the Arapaho,” I said. “Put Annie in charge of the ATVs and send them out as backup, but I’m going to try flying with Kane and Flint, as soon as Kane’s ready.”

  “One hour for the ATV team to get going,” Colonel Laine said. “Two hours for the helicopter prep, and an hour after that for your pilot to get basic familiarity.”

  I hated the delay, but he was talking sense. The helicopter would still be hours quicker than the ATVs. It was about 200 miles down to the San Juan in a straight line, and we’d fly that in ninety minutes.

  Weather permitting.

  Seeing where you were going was only one major issue. Controlling the aircraft was another matter entirely. An unfamiliar aircraft. An hour wasn’t nearly enough.

  Getting back would take us longer, because we’d need to refuel. I could anticipate trouble finding an airfield willing to provide fuel on a day when helicopters shouldn’t be flying. But we’d have Tullah back with us. And Tara. And Hana.

  “Diana can nullify the remnants of the drug,” Bian said cautiously.

  “Gonna get bitten by the dungeon queen,” Kane crooned.

  Diana’s face was pale and taut. “I can remove the chemicals,” she said. “The mental effects will last longer, and there’s no quick fix for them. All three of you are going to remain affected.”

  She hadn’t said no. I focused on that and started work.

  There was a computer with internet access in the dungeon. I pulled up maps of the San Juan and located the place that was still burned into my retinas by the lightning flash.

  “There,” I said, pointing to a distinctive string of three small lakes that had taken my dad and me a day to get up to and hike around. “There’s the remains of an old ore-processing mill on the creek running out of the lowest one. That’s where she’ll be hiding.”

  I ignored the skeptical glances.

  “Yelena and I will go in the Arapaho. That’ll leave us four spaces for Tullah and anyone else with her.”

  “If there are more than that?”

  “Annie and Ops 4-10 can bring them back. Once we’ve got Tullah, Weaver will be chasing us, not them.”

  “Can we send Alice with the Ops 4-10 team?” Bian asked. “To give them some magical backup.”

  “Good idea.”

  Alice shrugged and accepted.

  “That’s as much as can be done by you,” Diana said. She turned to Yelena. “These two are yours.” She indicated Flint and me. “I want them to rest for three hours.”

  Yelena nodded.

  Bian shepherded us into the elevator. Her bedroom was on the top floor and, as described to me before, her bed was covered in black silk and the size of half a football field.

  Not how I expected to come here for the first time.

  Bian knew exactly what I was thinking, and almost smiled. She waited, arms folded, until Flint and I were snuggled on either side of Yelena and mainlining her pacifics before she would leave.

  Thoughts chased each other around my head as I sank into sleep.

  Diana was acting strangely. Was it going to be too late to get Kaothos back to Tullah?

  Could Kane really fly a helicopter in a storm, or were we going to end up stuck on a hillside somewhere, waiting for rescue while everything else went to hell?

  Ash? The Irish soultree. Was that power I could use?

  Power from a curse. A curse that had reached all the way from Ireland and killed every first-born child of great-grandfather Padraig Farrell’s family. If that wasn’t evil, I didn’t know what was.

  But my Blood oath didn’t care.

  I’d use whatever I could, and face the consequences.

  Chapter 55

  For a supposed ‘light reconnaissance’ helicopter, the Arapaho w
as huge and noisy. The racket it was making, it was a good thing that Altau owned all the houses up on this ridge.

  The helicopter had been painted matte black. The Gatling gun and the missile launch tubes had been removed, leaving a body that tried hard to be sleek. The effect was ruined by two ugly bulges: the overhead one that had been needed to accommodate the thousand horses of engine, and the forward pointing pod of the sensor suite.

  There was no time to appreciate its looks, and anyway, my view of helicopters was they were ugly and useful in about equal amounts. Yelena and I got on board, stowed gear and strapped in. I was carrying a standard Ops 4-10 recon pack. Yelena had a cut-down version of it, picking the weapons she was most familiar with.

  There were headsets, but the chatter of pilot to ATC was missing. We weren’t going to try talking to anyone until we needed fuel.

  We lurched off the ground. The tail swung around jerkily. The nose dipped. We started to chase our shadow westwards, picking up speed as the ground fell away.

  The cabin had been stripped to essentials. Yelena and I were sitting on a frame bolted to the floor and we were looking right over Kane’s shoulder.

  He wasn’t giggling, so I guess he’d had the peyote removed from his Blood.

  I had a TacNet node connected to my headset, so I was getting updates from the colonel about Annie’s progress along the roads. Atmospherics were making the connection poor, and I knew I’d lose it in the mountains, but it was good to hear.

  Annie had chosen the southern route and I-25 was clear so far. She was making good progress as Kane flew us between Mount Evans and Mount Logan.

  The view was spectacular. Tourists would pay for this trip, at least until we got to the part where the turbulence had the helicopter heaving and twisting.

  I picked out 285 beneath us, the highway heading up past Bitter Hooks and Kenosha Pass.

  It’d been clear air so far, but the clouds were boiling up against the mountains.

  The helicopter fell like a fairground ride.