Blightmare (The Marnie Baranuik Files Book 5)

by A. J. Aalto

  “Getting lost in the mountains is no excuse for missing this funeral, got it?” She slid on her aviator glasses and looked super-cool doing it. “I have access to a search helicopter. Don’t make me use it.”

  I waited for her to get into her SUV before grumbling to Umayma, “I could have a search helicopter if I wanted one.”

  Maim gave me two thumbs up, but her expression was eloquently dubious.

  “All right, all right,” I said. “Do you wanna come with?”

  She nodded and held up one finger to indicate I should wait a second and ran to her office to collect her giant, lime green purse and one of the protein shakes she brought for lunch. I put the trumpet back in its case and went outside. When Maim appeared, she had her keys; she preferred to drive. I locked up the office for the day and followed to her car, taking shotgun, and tucking the trumpet case behind my seat. My phone booped at me from my pocket.

  Chapel: De Cabrera is running names.

  I shot him a quick thank you and then I texted Harry, to let him know where I was going in case I wasn't at the house when he woke. I felt the urge to give Hood a heads up, and that urge took me aback for a moment. Since when was I informing the sheriff every time I went somewhere? If something went wrong, both Golden and Harry knew where I was headed, so I put my phone away. If Batten had told them to keep an eye on me, and that pissed me off so damn much, why should I make things easier for the Ghost of Jerkface?

  The drive was quiet; I didn’t feel much like talking, and Umayma’s hands were firmly on the steering wheel, so there wasn’t sign language chatter to respond to. Our silence was companionable by now; if it bothered her at all, the Blue Sense didn’t inform me.

  The trip led us north out of Ten Springs and then east through a series of roads badly in need of repair, roads that I never would have otherwise ventured down. They had a private, abandoned look about them, more like home-cut tracks for hunting lodges and fishing spots than actual public byways. We did pass a few mailboxes, but they seemed unattached to any actual dwellings that were visible from where we were, and they had the dilapidated, weathered look of long disuse and nonexistent maintenance, the names and numbers almost entirely worn and flaked away. There were few crossroads, and those we passed looked like they hadn’t been much traveled, either. Winding up and up, hooking back down, cruising down into narrower and narrower roads, we found ourselves crossing a bridge shaded by a full evergreen canopy above. Then we hit gravel, losing the asphalt altogether.

  After a while, the GPS politely asked us to “proceed to destination” as it lost the road, showing us nothing but our car as a wee blue arrow in a giant swath of green with a red pinpoint directly ahead. We kept driving toward it; by now, I wasn’t sure we had room to turn the car around on the thin strip of gravel if it came to a dead end. Maybe we could do a three-point turn between the trees, assuming we didn't get mired in the slushy mud.

  Half a mile further, it did just that, though it had been widened into enough of a cul-de-sac that Umayma could execute a brief U-turn around and aim back the way we came. She turned off the car and got out to look around. I joined her, taking out my phone to take some pictures. The wind rustled a few branches and the car made soft, cooling noises.

  At the end of the road, there was a dented, rusty guardrail, and beyond that, some flat grass that perhaps people drove ATVs over. There was a beer bottle cap in the dirt, flattened and pressed in, and a long, aluminum tent peg. I was about to announce that this was a huge waste of time when I spotted a plastic spoon. It had a brown smear on the bowl of it. I stepped closer, squinting. Peanut butter. Beau.

  “Aha!” I yelled, startling several small birds out of a nearby tree. Umayma ran over to see my discovery. I pointed it out. “Beau has been here.”

  She nodded, miming his incessant scooping.

  “Maybe he just had the same thought as we did about the numbers on the trumpet,” I said, looking around for further clues, kicking the toe of my boot in the gravel here and there. “Does this place feel weird to you?” I asked. “Expectant? Hostile?”

  Umayma cupped her ear at me and I shook my head.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I said, but that wasn’t entirely true. Normal winter forest sounds were all around us – occasional bird activity, leaves fluttering against one another, a small animal creeping through the frozen underbrush. The cool, spring wind sighed through the upper boughs, making them sway against a cloudy sky. Then a tinkle. And a faraway metallic tong on the breeze, soft enough that I could have convinced myself that I’d imagined it. Except that Maim heard it, too, and nodded rapidly at me while gesturing into the woods. Another ting-tong and a tang. Barely audible notes. I waited for the ting-tang-walla-walla-bing-bang, but that never came.

  “Wind chimes?” I wondered aloud.

  Maim had stopped in a bare patch where the sun filtered through, and stared into the woods like she considered going on a hike, when she suddenly doubled back to the car in a hurry. She grabbed the trumpet case from behind my seat, marched back, and shoved it at me.

  She signed, Blow.

  “Easy there, lady,” I said. “Playing awfully fast and loose with my lips, aren’t you?” I opened the case and looked warily down at the trumpet. Had Beau been out here blowing it? I sniffed the mouthpiece for the tell-tale scent of peanut butter and found exactly that. It didn’t mean he’d been out here playing it, but it did hint strongly that he’d played it at some point, assuming that Solmes or Footer had cleaned it when they'd taken it into inventory. And he, or some other peanut butter-licking fiend, had been out here dropping spoons. So, on top of being a creep, and probably a liar, he was a litterbug. I really needed to find a better class of client.

  The clouds trundled across the sun, casting us in cool shadow. I pulled the trumpet out, and Umayma took the case from my gloved hand. I used my glove to wipe the mouthpiece, wishing I could clean it properly. I didn't even have any napkins in a take-out bag in the car, since Harry had taken it upon himself to clean it one night, citing such ridiculous concerns as, “Great bodkins, you'll be trapped in an avalanche within, buried by scores of desiccated coffee cups and swizzle sticks, ducky.” Tentatively setting it to my lips, I took a deep breath, then paused. “If this should — heh heh — actually open a gateway to Hell or summon a demon horse or somehow leads to my untimely death, please tell Harry I’m sorry, and sign a big fuck-you at Beau.”

  She nodded and mimed that she’d either bludgeon Beau to death, or maybe hack him to pieces with an axe. Both were fine by me. I nodded back, took in a lungful of chilly air, and blew.

  At first, it was more like a lame, breathless toot-toooophlpl. “Weak cheeks and too much tongue,” I diagnosed. “The Marnie Baranuik story.” I tried again, wondering if it mattered whether or not I toodled the trumpet’s valves. Trying to get some Dizzy Gillespie puff going on, I let fly with the biggest, lip-buzziest raspberry I could manage.

  I'd love to say I blared forth a clarion call to be heard across the ages, sounding the charge or triumph of a battalion or the judgment of one of the seven seals opening, but what came out sounded like a pissed-off goose getting run over by a golf cart.

  It was apparently enough, because the undergrowth parted ahead of us and out sauntered a large, male centaur.

  Chapter 18

  I dropped the trumpet from my mouth, stunned. “Well, whaddaya know. A centaur.” Because my witty remarks had abandoned me in a flurry of shock, I clucked my tongue and waited for other words to come. Then, to Maim, I muttered, “Did you expect a centaur? Because I didn’t expect a centaur.” Only Umayma’s eyes moved, cutting sideways at me briefly. The Blue Sense reported that she was as surprised as I was.

  The horsey portion of his body was mostly tan, a dappled bay roan appaloosa-style with darker spots. He strode forward in a businesslike manner, the foliage around him bending out of his way like they’d worked out an arrangement for his unhindered passage. Wearing only a leather harness crisscrossed across a
sculpted and bronzed human torso, he closed the distance between us until he stood just out of reach upwind; he smelled of horse hair and coconut oil and leather. I might have once commented on his rippling abs and wondered how he'd kept his tan all winter, but I had people skills now. I tried not to glance down to see if I could see his dangly bits, but I hadn’t changed that much. To my chagrin, that only revealed that his body recognized that it was chilly out.

  He observed us skeptically, and I really wished Chapel was around, because he would know the exact right thing to say. I ran through options in my head — hiya, hello, greetings, hail mighty centaur, 'sup zebro — but nothing seemed appropriate to the situation. I decided to wait and let him talk first, hoping we’d speak the same language.

  Finally, once we’d passed some visual inspection, he asked, “One or both?”

  My gaze traveled from his massive shoulder down the length of his muscular arms to his tight fists and had a split-second cowardly urge to point at Umayma and croak, “her first!” Instead, I held up two gloved fingers for him. He turned to go back into the woods and I was both relieved and disappointed. I considered re-tooting the trumpet, but he returned hauling something chariot-like hooked to his harness.

  Maim signed, “In?” at me.

  I cleared by throat, “Um, good sir centaur? Where does this chariot go?”

  He looked at me with profound disappointment, like my skull-hive might not have any bees left. “All the way there.”

  Helpful. “See, Maim? I told you it goes all the way there,” I said, “and if we're good little Hobbitses, back again.” We came around his impressive flank to climb up into the chariot. It had a wooden bench seat and no seat belts. I very much wanted a seat belt. And my motorcycle helmet.

  What happened next should have been musically accompanied by an orchestra for an animated blockbuster, or, at the very least, two or three rounds of Yakety Sax. The chariot blasted forward under centaur power. My hair flew back, and I was pretty sure my cheeks were flapping like a basset hound's in an interstate-cruising convertible. Leaves and branches flew out of our way, which was good, because they’d have made a wicked green face-spanking machine otherwise.

  We lifted off the ground with a stomach-lurching jerk, but only reached a cruising altitude of three or four feet. I clutched the bench with both hands, but there wasn't much to hold onto. The canopy of tree limbs still hid our passage, and we left no tracks on the ground below. Birds scattered noisily as we rushed through their space. We emerged abruptly above a small lake, but before I could take it in, we were rising, swooping into a perfectly vertical path. Our butts slipped as gravity dragged us back in our seats. Then we were turning upside down, like a jet doing tricks at an air show without any spectators. I was slammed into the bench as the the competing pulls of centripetal force and gravity fought to own my ass, even as my brain shrieked, you’re gonna fall, you’re gonna fall, this is way stupider than the way Batten died. You're gonna be sleighed.

  I refused to become both a statistic and a terrible, pun-laden headline, and gripped the seat even more tightly. I spared a quick glance out of the corner of my eye and saw that Umayma was doing the same, her lips moving silently. I wasn't much of a lip-reader or church-goer, but I was pretty sure that Hail Marys and Our Fathers didn't feature the words “oh, fuck” quite that much.

  The centaur proved our visions of impending death wrong by spiraling in midair, and I had a moment of floating weightlessly as he dropped like a stone, pulling us with him. We plunged into the cold lake, deeper and deeper, relentlessly spinning around and around, swallowed fast. I couldn’t close my eyes, but I did hold my breath. It got darker and darker as my lungs screamed, and then we lost the sun altogether. Seconds later, we hit the mud at the bottom of the lake.

  And slid right through it.

  In the miasma of uncertain darkness, I allowed my lungs to sip for breath tentatively, and they easily drew in sweet, fresh air. I could hear Umayma panting beside me in the perfect blackness, and reached over to find her hand, patting until I got hold of it. She squeezed mine gratefully. We pushed onward through the nothingness or somethingness; whatever it was, I felt the centaur struggling to do it, like a horse pulling a cart up a steep, muddy hill in stops and starts. We were, as far as I could tell, still going straight down. We’d had a running start at it, but he was meeting resistance.

  Just when I started to wonder if this was just a particularly weird dream borne of my recent clients and a sketchy bottle of wine, we broke free into sunshine and noise and wind and scents all cluttered together in a sensory ambush.

  The chariot jerked to a stop, and we spilled out. Blinded by the sun, I threw myself across the ground, spread-eagle and face down on a patch of stamped-flat grass. Maim was a flurry of shaking limbs as she landed beside me. I lay catching my breath for a minute, listening to the centaur unhook the chariot clips while he stamped to dislodge lake-bottom mud from his hooves. I could smell it next to me, that funk of underwater mud full of both aquatic life and decay. He was otherwise un-muddied, and neither Maim nor I were more than a bit damp.

  Our chariot driver asked, “Do you need me to fetch someone?”

  I rolled onto my back to rest and looked up at him. My heart was still thundering madly in my chest, and my breath was unsteady, but I managed to speak. “Would it be okay to wander around on our own? I’m not sure what centaur carnival etiquette demands.”

  That got half a smile out of him. His eyes remained stern and unimpressed. “You know how to find me.”

  I do? “Oh, the trumpet. Right. Thanks. I’ll tootle.”

  I watched him stride off, his four powerful legs rippling in the sun, his tail swishing. I realized I was staring with fascination at a horse rump and shook myself out of it. Pushing myself to an upright position, I sat cross legged and waited for the world to stop spinning. “You okay, Maim?”

  Umayma turned her head against the ground to look at me and nodded. She flashed five fingers; gimme five minutes.

  “Sure. No problem. Take all the time you need.” I’d need at least that much time to wrap my head around our surroundings. I set the trumpet on my lap and settled in to check out the tents and rides. We went under the lake, I thought, incredulous. And now we’re where, exactly? The sun still shone, the wind still blew, there were trees and clouds and… I lifted my head to the sound of a calliope. Ting-tong-tinkle. Tents. Flags rippling in a rainbow of colors and shades. Trailers baking in the spring afternoon sun. Chip trucks steaming. A cotton candy stand with popcorn and roasted peanuts and caramel apples bristling with pastel sprinkles. Hot dogs and sausages on a grill. A big top, its striped canvas drumming noisily in the wind. Hay strewn all over the beaten ground to keep down the dust.

  And there were centaurs. Hundreds of them. Milling. Laughing. Eating cotton candy. Playing carnival games. Toting their prizes. Little ones trotting between the legs of the adults.

  Centaurs were not a well-studied species; native to small islands in both the Mediterranean and the South Pacific, they were fairly strict about living apart from humans, and were generally irritated when they were re-discovered by snooping Greek scientists on a hunt every decade or so. I’d never run into a centaur in North America, and hadn’t expected to. Frankly, as a gal who spent an inordinate amount of time with demons, Beau’s Horseman of the Apocalypse seemed more plausible than centaurs. But here they were, wherever “here” was.

  Their horse-bodies varied widely, from massive Clydesdale hulks to lean, sleek Arabians. They were all bare-chested, regardless of gender. Some had great manes running all the way from their head down to their equine torso. Others had shorn theirs short, or wore it in a human style. Their skin color ran, as far as I could tell at first glance, from warm brown to deepest black. The littlest of them wore their manes long and tidily braided, boys and girls – or fillies and colts; I wasn't sure if they preferred human or equine nomenclature – alike.

  “So, Elyse is a lady centaur, probably. Not Horse
man of the Apocalypse. How am I going to find her? I blew the trumpet and he appeared. I probably should have asked if our chariot driver knows her.” I ruminated on that and chewed the inside of my cheek. “So why does Beau want her in the trumpet? She clearly didn't come out of it. How did he really meet her? Did she actually appear to him in a dream?” It seemed unlikely, given centaurs' preference for privacy, for one to engage in any kind of dream projection. “At least we have her name. We can ask around, maybe?”

  Solmes had said she’d sold the trumpet to him, that she’d looked scared and sickly. Beau had bought the trumpet after she’d been to the pawn shop. She wasn’t trying to find Beau, despite his claims. She was trying to ditch it, and him. I didn’t know anything, except that I was looking for a centaur lady and there were, literally, tons of them here. Why ditch a trumpet at a pawn shop when she could have just kept it here? Beau wouldn't be able to get here without it, would he? None of that made sense yet. I was still missing information, not that that was anything new; I spent half my life not knowing what the fuck was going on. Chances were good that I was actually in the right place to find some answers for the second time in two days. Well, there's a first time for everything.

  I checked to see if my bandages on my arm and neck were okay; they weren’t even wet. Neither were my clothes. I felt my hair. Barely damp. The sun felt good; whether or not it was real, I didn’t know or care in that moment. I was relieved to be alive in this strangely wonderful place.

  And yet, I didn’t feel entirely wanted here. There was an undercurrent of wariness, bordering on hostility, that the Blue Sense picked up easily.

  “Where did you find that?” a lady centaur asked, startling me. Maim was looking the other direction, apparently working some kinks out of her back with a couple of fancy stretches.

  I glanced up at the centaur, and then back at the trumpet still clutched in my gloved hand. “Are you Elyse?”

  “No, I’m Tari. Answer my question. You shouldn’t have that.” She glared hotly. “You shouldn’t be here.”