by P. R. Frost
Chapter 37
THE DAY DRAGGED on and on. Mom slept. MoonFeather pretended to sleep rather than answer questions. Gollum holed up in his apartment with the telephone and the Internet.
Sunday quiet ruled.
Donovan stayed away. The police came and went from the cottage. They strung their bright yellow crime scene tape and they ignored me. The bugaboo of a false arrest lawsuit hung over them. One more wrong step would land all of their butts in deep trouble.
I hated that Allie would be caught in the aftermath of this. She’d only been trying to help, keeping me from my scheduled battle with King Scazzy and his minions.
She’d saved my life, but she’d probably cost WindScribe hers.
I sat at my desk staring at the computer screen and the bright wedding announcement I’d created. Was it just yesterday? Or the day before? I couldn’t remember. Events merged and splashed into each other in my memory.
With a flick of the mouse I deleted the invite and began a new announcement. How did I word the death of a man I barely knew, who’d been married to my mother for barely thirty-six hours before his murder? Did I need to send it to the entire list of people Mom wanted to come to the wedding?
I should be doing something. Talking to Father Sheridan, making funeral arrangements, writing an obituary, consulting Dad. Calling a lawyer.
Instead, I finally finished those last four chapters and e-mailed them. That took hardly any time at all.
Twilight lingered as long as the day, stretching into nothingness. I wandered about the house I’d so lovingly decorated together with my own husband. Our marriage had lasted longer than Mom’s. An entire three months before Dill died horribly in a fire.
I’d escaped by the skin of my teeth. Dill hadn’t been so lucky.
Donovan owned the hotel that had blossomed from the ashes of the place where Dill died. A much bigger and classier lodge than the original generic and cheap motel. The place had been overinsured, and he profited well. I’d heard rumors that the fire was arson. Murder.
Darren had suggested that he’d started the fire just to kill Dill.
Too many parallels in names, in physical appearance. In whirlwind romances.
In death.
“About time you started making connections between me and Darren Estevez and his clan,” Dill said. I couldn’t see him among the shadows of the library, one of the three rooms on the ground floor of the original house that shared a chimney.
The house suddenly seemed darker. Full night had descended outside. And in my heart.
The moon had not yet risen. Would it shine through the clouds in the sky and in my life?
Half of me sighed with relief that Dill hadn’t disappeared completely from my life. The other half screamed in frustration at the questions he forced me to raise.
“Were you a half-blood Damiri demon?” I finally asked the question that had plagued me for months. I’d never had the courage to face the issue.
Never dared wonder if our love had been merely the reflection of demon magic on my emotions.
“You know I can’t answer that question,” he said, still not showing himself. “You aren’t smart enough to deal with the truth.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I’d had this conversation before. With King Scazzy. With Donovan.
Silence.
I slammed my fist against the mirror that hung over the fireplace. The glass tilted, swinging on its wire support. Moonlight shimmered across the silvered glass.
A full moon rose outside. Reflected in the mirror, I saw it as clearly as if I was standing by Miller’s Pond.
A full moon. The time when a demon or a troll or a ghost, any otherworldly being was at his weakest. I could hear Dill, but I couldn’t see him because of the timing.
Gollum had selected today for the battle with the Orculli trolls for WindScribe’s body and soul because they were vulnerable near the full moon.
The Windago would be just as vulnerable. Perhaps more so, since they consisted primarily of wind and shadow.
“Gollum!” I cried running down to his apartment. “How do I find the Windago? Scrap, get your sorry ass away from stalking the cat. Time to go to work!”
I skidded to a halt in Gollum’s living room. He sat in the armchair, feet on the coffee table, surrounded by a bevy of beautiful women, all draped in bedsheets, blankets, and towels and nothing else.
“Nine, ten, eleven,” I counted the half-naked bodies. An occasional leg or breast kept peeking out from the casual covers.
Gollum had a goofy grin on his face and for once kept his mouth shut.
“No. Oh, no. I can’t take these women in. I’m not running a frigging boarding house for refugees from Faery!” I wailed. They could only be the missing coven. Why were they here? Why had they come back now?
WindScribe. It all came down to WindScribe. Somehow everything that had happened this weird weekend came down to WindScribe.
“Windago?” A tall brunette with skin the color of moonlight asked. She seemed to be the oldest of the missing coven, not more than twenty-four. Probably their priestess or whatever title a leader of a Wicca coven took. She had a classic beauty with a tall forehead, long face, and slender nose.
“Ooh, you don’t want to mess with Windago. They are so mean,” whispered a stout blonde in a pouting little girl voice. Her hair was as vague in color as her voice.
“What do they look like?” a third young woman asked. Her hair and eyes were a medium brown, medium height, a little pudgy. The sparkle of curiosity that lit her face and posture changed her from utterly forgettable to quite attractive.
“Dangerous is the word,” the brunette added, frowning at Little Miss Curiosity.
“I have to deal with the Windago. They kidnapped WindScribe,” I insisted. I didn’t want to face them. Again. I wanted to hide in hot and sunny Mexico. But I couldn’t. I owed it to WindScribe to bring her back.
Hell, I owed it to humanity to reset the balance of demons in this dimension.
I heard the clump, clump of MoonFeather’s crutches coming down the hall from the main house. The sound stopped abruptly at the doorway.
“Oh, my,” she gasped. One crutch clattered to the floor.
Gollum ducked and dashed to help her. He looked almost grateful to free himself from the press of lovely pulchritude.
As one, the coven turned to face my aunt. Some of them weren’t exactly careful about keeping their drapes secure. Gollum blushed.
I was beyond being embarrassed by them.
“MoonFeather?” the tall brunette asked. “What happened to you? You look so . . . old.”
“Because I am old, FireHind. You’ve been gone for twenty-eight years.” MoonFeather made her cautious way into the little room. Gollum trailed in her wake.
“I’ve never known you to lie, MoonFeather,” FireHind replied indignantly.
“I still don’t. You’ve been gone for twenty-eight years. Time runs differently in Faery. Everyone knows that.”
“Twenty years.” FireHind sank onto the sofa, her sheet billowing around her.
“Twenty-eight years?” Miss Curiosity bounced. Her ample breasts, belly, and upper arms wobbled with her excitement. This one looked more solid than the other. More alive and less . . . wispy. “Have we entered into a true Age of Aquarius? The world should be at peace and plenty now.” She clapped her hands and nearly dropped her beach towel. The terry cloth would have wrapped around me twice but barely covered her once.
“I’m Larch, by the way.” She held out a hand to me.
I shook her hand, trying not to snort at her comment. In answer, I flicked on the TV with the remote. CNN came up automatically with their headline story of the latest terrorist bombing in Iraq followed by an in-depth report on the ongoing civil war-induced famines in Africa.
“Peace and plenty are still elusive, ladies. Politics are dirtier, drugs more pervasive, and crime more rampant than ever. You missed a lot.”
Gollum grabbed the remote an
d turned off the blaring ugliness of our lives.
“Get rid of these chicks,” I told Gollum, not bothering to lower my voice. “It’s the night of the full moon. This is our one and only chance to get WindScribe back from the Windago.”
"Oh, you mustn’t confront the Windago,” FireHind said. She seemed to have recovered from the shock of the time difference a little faster than the others.
"They have WindScribe, one of your own!”
Silence.
"WindScribe has chosen her own path,” a small voice whispered from the rear.
“No one chooses to be kidnapped by the Windago,” Gollum nearly shouted. “Do you know what the Windago will do to her?” he asked peering over the tops of his glasses.
Silence again.
“They will drag her by the hair, making her dance faster and ever faster until her heels strike sparks from the Earth. They will dance her through the heavens until she literally dies of exhaustion,” he explained, straining to retain something of his calm teacher demeanor and failing.
“Even so. Violent confrontation is never justified,” the dark-haired leader pronounced. She sat back as if uttering an imperial edict from a jeweled throne.
“After what she did in Faery, I’m not surprised,” Larch whispered.
FireHind glared at her fiercely. “Shut up, Larch.”
What did she do in Faery? No time to pursue that snippet of information.
“I don’t intend to confront them. I intended to kill them,” I snarled.
“Violence is never the answer, dear,” FireHind admonished me as if I were a child. Looking at her, and hearing her, she seemed much more the child than I.
“Nearly thirty years in Faery, and you still haven’t grown up,” MoonFeather huffed.
“I beg your pardon! I am an adult.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Yes, she is right,” the blowsy blonde replied. “She is our leader and much older than the rest of us.”
MoonFeather and I rolled our eyes. “She chose her name correctly. MilkweedFluff,” my aunt whispered.
“If the Windago have kidnapped WindScribe, then we must perform a ritual. We must bring balance and harmony back into their lives so that they will release her,” FireHind said decisively.
This time, Larch rolled her eyes in concert with MoonFeather.
As one (Larch a little belatedly but not much), the women shifted into a lopsided circle facing inward. They raised their hands, palms out to shoulder level, keeping their elbows bent. A solemn hum wove out of their throats.
“I have learned that I can bring harmony and balance into my own life. I can teach others who want to learn to do the same. But no one, no one, can impose their beliefs or their lifestyle on another. We do not have that right, even with demons.” MoonFeather thrust her right crutch at me, thus freeing her hand. Which she used to swat FireHind’s hands down.
“What has happened to you, MoonFeather? You’ve grown hard as well as old.” Tears appeared in FireHind’s eyes.
“I’ve grounded my hippy ideals in reality rather than a cloud of marijuana smoke,” MoonFeather replied. “And I’ve learned that some things we can work to change, others we can only pray about. Knowing the difference is the true source of wisdom.”
“Demons know nothing of wisdom, nothing of peace or harmony or balance,” I added. “They know only how to breed and how to feed themselves. Part of their dietary needs are to torment their prey on the way to their stomachs.”
Gollum nodded at that. “Kajiri demons—those of mixed blood with humans—have some reasoning ability. They have to in order to blend in with us. Midori demons—full bloods—act only on instinct.” He was back into his professor mode, his comfort zone.
I had the bad feeling that the Windago who had captured WindScribe were Midori, enlisted by Lilia David. They’d respond to the instinctive need for revenge for a lost mate. Respond with violence against any target she directed them to.
I had the fight of my life ahead of me, and I was running out of time.
“Deal with them, Gollum. I’ll find the Windago myself. ”
“You don’t find them, Tess. They find you. All you have to do is step into the woods on a windy night,” he said. A note of warning and worry crept into his voice.
"I’ll deal with the ladies, Tess,” MoonFeather said. “I’ll send them back to Faery so fast, they won’t have time to be missed. They have no place here anymore.” With that, my beloved aunt rounded on the eleven women, a steely glint in her eyes.
What if Faery won’t have them? Can I give them to the cat as toys? Scrap giggled. Ooooo, this is getting fun.
Chapter 38
The Inuit moon spirit, Tarqeq, a mighty hunter, has been given the difficult task of watching over human behavior. When Tarqeq sleeps during the dark of the moon, humankind can exceed their bounds of propriety and misbehave, often in disgusting ways.
COPS OUT FRONT. Cops out back. Someone watched every exit from my home. I really didn’t want them following me, asking questions and seeing things they couldn’t understand. Otherwordly things they must discount.
I couldn’t ask Allie for help. She was in enough trouble as it was.
Backup from the Warriors of the Celestial Blade hadn’t shown up yet.
I had to do this. And it looked like I would have to take on a tribe of Windago by myself. I shivered with preternatural cold even before they touched me.
“You’re going to need help,” Gollum said, following me from window to window.
“You volunteering?” I almost wished that he would. But I also wanted him left behind, safe. Guarding Mom and MoonFeather and the errant coven if things went terribly wrong.
“No. I was thinking you should call Donovan. He has some experience in this field. And I believe he needs a distraction. He blames himself for WindScribe being taken.” Gollum closed the curtains behind me as I moved to the next window.
He picked up the walk-around phone from my office so that he could continue following me. “We need to talk,” Gollum said into the telephone. If the line was tapped, we didn’t want the cops to think I was doing something untoward. “Come over now.”
I listened in on the kitchen extension.
Donovan grunted something.
“It involves your girlfriend.”
“Which one?” Donovan still sounded disgruntled and reluctant.
“Take your pick. Just get over here.”
Within five minutes, I heard his car on the main road. He walked up the long lane to the front door from the street rather than drive past the cottage and into the gravel parking area by the kitchen.
I met him at the front door—hastily unsealed for the purpose. In his black leather jacket, black jeans, and a black turtleneck, with his hair a little rumpled, the wings of silver hair at his temples glistening in the porch light, he looked good enough to eat.
I’d never know if the chemistry between us was natural or a product of his demon upbringing and sympathies. Teenagers absorb information like sponges—even when they want you to think they aren’t listening. Who knew what skills he’d learned from Darren.