by P. R. Frost
I’d lost the weight and kept it off for three years. Grief will do that to you. That and the rigorous martial arts training of the Sisterhood of the Celestial Blade Warriors.
For my newly fit and trim figure I really had to thank the otherworldly infection that had laid me low with delirium for weeks on end. The fever had opened new pathways in my brain that allowed me to bond with Scrap. I’d been with the imp nine times longer than I had been married to Dill.
“As much as I love you, Dill, you are dead. Isn’t it time we both moved on?” Did I really want him gone?
“Can’t do that, lovey. You and I were meant to be together. Forever. So you can’t move on without me.” His skin was smooth, nicely tanned, and free of the charring from the fatal fire.
The fact that his ghost showed no signs of his painful death always made me suspicious. Was this specter truly my husband or a demon wearing his face and form? Either way, he asked the impossible.
“Accept it, Dill, you are dead. I have.”
“Have you, lovey?” He quirked an eyebrow at me just like he used to. “I’ve tried to pass over, Tess. Really tried. But the Powers That Be have decreed I can’t completely die without your help. But I can come back to life if you just get rid of the imp.”
“Not on your life! Or death. Or whatever. People don’t come back to life, Dill. There are no ‘get out of jail free’ cards for dead people.” I shuddered with more than just the cold. “Besides, if you were serious about replacing Scrap, you’d have come to my aid last night and we could have slain that Windago.”
“How do you know people can’t come back to life?”
He ignored my second statement. He’d had a bad habit of bypassing what he didn’t like or didn’t want to deal with when he was alive. I guess bad habits don’t die.
Instead of replying I gunned the engine and shot onto the main road.
“It’s the scar that keeps us apart, Tess. It’s an interdimensional reminder of imp flu. If you hadn’t gotten sick and had to have the infection cut out of your face, you couldn’t see the imp. Go to a plastic surgeon and have it removed,” Dill pleaded. He traced a ghostly finger from my temple to my jaw.
The scar burned beneath his ephemeral touch.
“A little hard when the scar isn’t visible to mundane humans,” I snapped.
Flashing blue-and-red lights atop Allie’s monster white four by four with blue Police lettering came into view less than a block away. The front end teetered in a roadside ditch. A venerable maple as wide as the cruiser pressed deeply into the radiator. Steam hissed, froze, and fell back onto the hood as snow.
I slowed and skidded to a halt. I let loose a string of curses as the rear end fishtailed.
A dozen or more little beings in overbright clothing and mouths over-full of sharp teeth paced around and around the vehicle. A hideous replica of “ring around the rosie.”
“Language, Tess. Watch your language,” Dill chuckled, reminding me I had just reprimanded him for doing the same thing. “Your vocabulary has deteriorated drastically since I died. You’d think a writer would be more inventive.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
You talking to me, babe? Scrap popped into view, his translucent gray-green body already turning vermilion and elongating into a solid shaft.
Dill popped out of view. “You don’t need me for this fight, lovey.” He sounded hurt and . . . and lonely.
“Glad to have you back, buddy. I was afraid you were trapped in the chat room.”
Your call is stronger than the bad breath of six Windago.
I didn’t like his metaphor.
No time to think. No time to mourn Dill. A gnome was gnawing away at the tailgate of Allie’s cruiser. An industrial-strength can opener on the move.
“Scrap, now.” I held out my palm for him while I released the seat belt and opened the door.
By the time my feet hit the ground, Scrap had thinned to a four-foot shaft with twin curved blades extruding from each end. Dozens of razor-sharp spikes flowed away from the outside curve of each blade.
I twirled him about like a baton around my knees. The swarm of bad guys backed off. Except for the one chewing through metal.
Nasty bastard, Scrap growled. His reflected eyes blinked in the right-hand blade.
An easy wipe separated the beastie from the cruiser. Dark, dark blood, almost black, spurted from where his pointed nose should have been. It steamed when it hit the ice. The rear lock of the vehicle filled the gnome’s mouth. Still he smiled around it, showing acres more teeth.
As he bounced across the road to the embankment where his cohorts huddled, the blood ceased spurting. His nose grew back, longer and pointier than before. It almost reached his long chin.
My scar throbbed. I only hoped it remained invisible. Allie was watching me too closely from the inside of her cruiser.
I stood guard over the SUV with my constantly moving blade. “Get over to my car now!” I yelled to Allie and the figure huddled in the back seat.
“Tess, what’s going on here?” Allie asked, opening her door.
Her passenger remained inside.
“Shut the fuck up and get your girl over to my car. Now.”
“I beg your pardon!” Allie said, blinking in startlement.
“You heard me. Do it. I can’t hold them off much longer.” Even as I spoke, the gnomes edged closer. Only one lane of blacktop separated them from me and my blade. Their jester-styled shoes with the upturned toes didn’t slip on the ice.
My boots had problems with traction.
Allie’s hands trembled inside her heavy leather gloves as she fumbled with the door. She wore a dark blue down uniform parka over her blue shirt, sweater, and Kevlar. I spotted the telltale ribbed neckline of silk long underwear at her throat. And she still looked long, slim, and feminine.
I could never carry off that look. Being vertically challenged and short of leg always made me look broader at the shoulder and hip than I really was.
Underneath the uniform, her height, her butch short hair, and her bravado, Allie was a shy little girl.
I made sure I stood between her and the bad guys. They grew braver and crossed the yellow line.
Allie grabbed at a lumpy figure huddled beneath a blanket in the backseat of her cruiser. They hesitated as two long, slim legs extended from the blanket. She stopped moving with just inches between bare feet and icy road.
“She’ll be fine for ten steps,” I reassured my friend.
They ran for my car. I sidestepped along with them. The gnomes respected my blade. But they followed our movements, staying just outside my reach.
Three gnomes took two steps closer.
I slashed right and left. Two tiny backbones severed. The top half of each gnome plopped sideways. Black blood shot up and out. The feet kept coming forward.
“Svargit! What does it take to kill these guys?” I cursed everything in sight, and a few things that weren’t, in Sasquatch. That was the only word of Sasquatch I’d learned. It fit everything.
With one last vicious swipe, I leaped into my car and slapped the locks closed. Scrap shrank to normal size and disappeared in the blink of an eye.
I threw my jacket to Allie, adding it to the scant protection the blanket offered the shivering blonde woman. Woman? Girl? She couldn’t be more than eighteen.
“Here. Use this if you need to. More effective than bullets against these guys.” I hauled the broadsword free and handed it to her grip first. “This is the only blade you saw me use,” I added, capturing her gaze with mine.
She nodded and gulped, standing the sword between her legs, point down.
“Where did she come from?” Allie asked after a long moment while I coaxed the engine to life. “I looked. No one was in the street. She just appeared out of nowhere. Out of nowhere. I looked. I swear I did,” She shook her head as she peered over her shoulder at her precious wounded vehicle, guilt and pain shrouding her eyes.
“And then those gnomes
walked out of the woods as if they owned the road.” She kept blinking as if to clear her vision of the memory.
Then I realized she was looking at the center of the street, not her car or the troop following us. Was she hoping to see a doorway into Neverland?
“This isn’t your fault,” I reassured her as my heart raced and heat flooded my face. Bodies coming out of nowhere shouldn’t surprise me. Garden gnomes with teeth shouldn’t surprise me. I wrote weirder stuff every day. I considered an imp my soulmate. My husband’s ghost haunted me for weeks on end. A bereaved Windago stalked me.
But it did surprise me.
“She came out of nowhere,” Allie insisted.
Or another dimension.
Did she have to go through the chat room to get from one dimension to another? If she had, maybe Scrap knew something. No access to him for a while until he’d recovered from our battle. Nothing a full dose of mold wouldn’t cure.
Rogue portals existed. Direct transport that bypassed the guarded chat room. They were rare. I’d closed one last autumn.
“Now you’re in a dilly of a pickle!” Dill chortled from the backseat.
“Here we go again,” I groaned.
The young woman crumpled in a faint. Bright blonde hair draped about her shoulders like a living curtain.
One look at her sweet face and I knew she wasn’t Lilia David, the human persona of the widowed Windago.
(What a wonderful title. The Widowed Windago. I filed that away in the writer portion of my brain before the ideas could start tumbling around and blot out reality for me.)
“Where the hell did you come from?” I asked. “And why the fuck are those guys chasing you?”
“Tsk, tsk, language, lovey,” Dill said, only half joking.
“Cold. So cold. Where did all the pretty flowers go?” the woman whispered.
“What?”
“I’ll call ahead to the emergency room,” Allie said. “I don’t dare go through Dispatch. I’m going to have enough trouble explaining the car.” She fumbled for her cell phone.
“Trippin’ car,” the stranger murmured, without opening her eyes. “Boss ghost.”
“Haven’t heard that word in a while,” Dill said peering at our guest. “Oh, dear. She’s an interdimensional refugee. I can’t be here right now.”
Dill vanished. Did he imply that he, too, was an interdimensional refugee? As good a description of a ghost as any.
Or was there more?
Chapter 4
The March full moon is sometimes called the Crow Moon because the cawing of crows signals the end of winter. It is also called the Crust Moon because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night.
"WHAT ARE WE DEALING with, Tess? Do you think MoonFeather will have any answers?” Allie asked, her voice more gravelly than usual. She shifted her utility belt, a habitual gesture of domination, piercing me with her tough-broad glare.
“You tell me what you saw. Every last detail.” I put the car in gear and eased off the shoulder onto the street, without bothering strapping the girl in. The emergency room was only a half mile up 6A, the official name for Old King Highway. Nothing is very far away on Cape Cod.
“The street was clear. I swear it. It was six AM. Rush hour not started yet. Anyone who doesn’t have to be out in this cold isn’t. Then she just appeared,” Allie insisted.
“Just appeared? Any misting or morphing?” I knew how I would write the scene. That didn’t make my description correct.
I ransacked my memory for a clue, a hint of what she might be. Besides human. Demons could assume human shape in this dimension, but only if they had some human blood in them. Kajiri, they called the mixed-bloods. More dangerous than full-bloods because the human half gave them the ability to think and hold a grudge.
Like my Windago stalker.
“Maybe the light shifted. Like a halo. You’d call it an aura,” Allie said. She tugged on her earlobe while she thought. “Sort of like a door opening from a dark room into a darker room. Not a change so much as a shift. And then she was there. Running, looking over her shoulder. Then she froze in place. A naked and unprotected living statue.”
Scrap, if you are anywhere near, I need you! I called with my mind. Fat chance of that happening any time soon. I knew he needed downtime after transforming and fighting.
“Sounds like the lady dashed out of the chat room in fear for her life. Or her immortal soul,” Dill said. He lounged in the backseat again. Had he dashed off to consult with his Powers That Be?
I was about to say the same thing, but Allie wouldn’t understand what I meant. I’d never consciously been in the chat room, the empty space between dimensional portals, and couldn’t say for sure what it looked like. My nightmare visits there while in the throes of a horrible fever didn’t count.
“And the gnomes?”
“They showed up about a minute, maybe a minute and a half later. Just walked out of the woods.”
“They didn’t come from the same portal as the girl?”
“Maybe. I dunno. I was busy getting a blanket around her and hustling her into my vehicle. Warmer there even if the engine didn’t run. My poor car. The chief’s going to kill me for wrecking my car.”
Did I say that Allie loved her cruiser like a pet dog?
“Tess, this is like something out of one of your books. What’s going on?” Allie looked worried.
“I want to go back to the faeries and the flowers. It’s warm there. And pretty,” little-miss-drowsy-and-half-naked mumbled. Her head nodded forward. She threatened to tilt into the space between the front seats.
Shit. I knew I should have taken the half second to strap her in.
“We’ll talk later, Allie,” I stalled, negotiating the ruts and snow drifts as rapidly as I dared.
“Promise?”
“Promise.” I hid my crossed fingers inside my clenched fist on the steering wheel.
Allie grabbed my hand and opened my fingers. “Promise?” She knew me too well.
“Promise,” I sighed. Then I turned to our mystery woman. “What’s your name, honey?”
“Names are like dandelion fluff. They scatter in the wind and only take root in places that give them meaning. ” She drifted off again.
"Sheesh, she sounds just like MoonFeather,” Allie sighed.
A flicker of movement in my peripheral vision froze my thoughts.
Off to the left a flash of impossibly bright green against the dirty snowbank. The fine hairs at the base of my spine stood on end. Alarm spread across my back.
You anywhere close, Scrap? I called into the ether.
No answer.
“Of course you aren’t around. I need some answers, so you take off,” I muttered low enough Allie couldn’t hear me. She was busy trying to keep our nodding guest in her own seat while holding on tight to the sword. As if her life depended upon it.
It might.
Motion on my right. I got the impression of vivid red.