Hounding The Moon: A Tess Noncoire Adventure

by P. R. Frost

  Raves for Hounding the Moon:

  “Readers who crave the fantasy equivalent of a summer movie will welcome Frost’s debut, which introduces Tess Noncoiré.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Frost’s fantasy debut series introduces a charming protagonist, both strong and vulnerable, and her cheeky companion. An intriguing plot and a well-developed warrior sisterhood make this a good choice for fans of the urban fantasy of Tanya Huff, Jim Butcher, and Charles deLint.” —Library Journal

  “Featuring a courageous, witty, and downright endearing female protagonist reminiscent of Laurel1 K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse, this is a fast-paced supernaturalpowered thriller that blends Native American mythology, paranormal romance, and dark fantasy with the oftentimes wildly eccentric culture of science fiction/fantasy fandom.” —The Barnes & Noble Review

  “This is a fun, fannish romp full of sarcastic quips and supernatural action.” —Locus

  Hounding the Moon

  P. R. FROST’S

  novels of Tess Noncoiré

  now available from DAW Books:

  HOUNDING THE MOON

  MOON IN THE MIRROR

  Copyright © 2006 by P. R. Frost.

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1-4362-4731-4

  DAW Books Collectors No. 1375.

  Book designed by Elizabeth Glover.

  DAW Books are distributed by the Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  To my agent

  Carol McCleary of the Wilshire Literary Agency,

  and to my editor

  Sheila Gilbert of DAW Books,

  both of whom I cherish.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Maya Kaatherine Bonhoff and Jeff Bonhoff for their awesome music and hilarious filk. They have inspired many wonderful images.

  My thanks also to Lea Day, Deborah Dixon, Bob Brown, and Maya Bonhoff for their patient reading and wonderful suggestions as well as pointing out my flaws to make this a better book. Appreciation also to the joysofresearch@yahoogroups.com and SF-FFWs@yahoogroups.com for keeping me going when I stalled. Any errors are mine not theirs.

  Hounding the Moon

  Prologue

  “WHAT YOUS THINK yous doin’ here, imp?” the head Kajiri Sasquatch demanded. Three of his comrades bore down on me with fangs bared and paws clenched to hammer me back into my own dimension. Two brown and one red. All of them ugly as a twenty-year drought and twice as mean.

  “Just passing through,” I quipped, keeping my eyes on those sledgehammer fists.

  I edged around the chat room, keeping my back to the barriers and the myriad doors that opened up from here. Each door led to another dimension. All of them warmer and more comfortable than my own. But I had other reasons for trying to escape my home. First I had to get by the Sasquatch.

  You’d think I could pick a better day when something smaller and less excitable than a Sasquatch had guard duty. And Kajiri are the worst of any species: half-breeds out to prove themselves better than both species that spawned them.

  The lead guard had more smarts than his three cohorts combined. He (very obviously and blatantly male) turned his big black body to keep me in sight. He couldn’t swivel his neck, so he had to move his entire skeleton. His buddies, one of them female with pendulous breasts covered in matted red fur, took a few minutes to figure out that I had moved.

  I fluttered my little wings as if I expected them to support me in flight. Fat chance of that. My wings are as stunted as the rest of me. My bat-wing ears might do a better job, come to think of it.

  Big Black lunged for me. I hopped to the left. He sprawled on the stone floor with a roar.

  The three dimwits finally turned in the right direction. I feinted into a fairyland filled with inviting floral perfumes and pretty little beings who giggled a lot.

  Big Red reached for me with a fist the size of a turkey platter.

  She was faster than I expected. My tail crimped in her grip.

  “Yeaow! That hurts, lady,” I protested, trying to yank my appendage free.

  “No imps in fairyland,” Big Black said.

  Red hauled me out of the fairyland door way and flung me against the portal back to impland. The freezing temperature of home nearly burned my belly and my nose when I thumped against the doorway. Mum had firmly closed it against me.

  Blood oozed out of my nose and from scrapes on my tail. I groaned. If my wings had been big enough to support me, I could have eased my landing. Not a proper imp at all. Not even any warts to make me cute.

  “Need some help opening the door, imp?” Big Black lumbered over.

  “Jus aw ’ittle,” I said, trying to breathe through my mouth and talk at the same time.

  “You talk funny for an imp,” Big Red said, arms akimbo.

  “Ya’ boke my nothse.”

  “Well, that’s what you get for trying to sneak out of your home dimension, imp. No trespassing. That’s what we’re here for, to keep unauthorized personnel from moving between dimensions.”

  Big Black pronounced each word carefully as if he’d memorized his mission statement.

  “I can see that.”

  “When we’ve served enough guard time, we’ll get twenty hours’ home time in the dimension of our choice.”

  And if you believe that, I’ve got some sunshine in the rain clouds of Oregonia I can sell you. Duping demons to doing guard duty is the primary entertainment of the powers that be in most dimensions. Fulfilling the promised free time never happens. Can’t have demons roaming freely. Have to keep them in their ghettos so they don’t contaminate the rest of the universe.

  No being in their right mind would let a bloodthirsty demon run free. We keep them in the worst corners of the bleakest dimension for a reason. Like maybe they’ll die off.

  Big Black bent down to pull aside the leather flap that marked the portal to impland.

  I darted between his legs and slid through the nearest doorway, right into Earth, the land of humans. This time I kept my tail tucked between my legs so Red couldn’t grab it.

  I just hoped they wouldn’t track the trail of blood I left behind.

  Or, worse, let Mum know where I’d gone.

  My day had begun just as weird as it ended.

  “Out!” Mum had screamed at me for the umpteenth time that day. That week, that decade. “Look at you. Fully two hundred years old and no bigger than a twenty-year-old. You’re just a scrap of an imp and will never amount to anything.”

  Hence my name. Scrap. She’d named me something else at birth, but no one remembered what it was. Likely she’d recycled the name to one of my one hundred two siblings. Most of them still lived, much to my torment and dismay.

  Her tirade went on for a few hours as she swatted me with her broom. She only uses her broom to discipline her multitude of offspring, never to clean anything. Not my mum. She’s a proper imp who likes living in a refuse heap.

  I hopped ahead of her from couch to corner to dining table.

  But fin
ally she managed to herd me out the door. All the while my siblings laughed hilariously at me.

  Of course, if I’d had enough of a wingspan to properly fly, I might have eluded her. But then, if I had a proper wingspan, she wouldn’t be kicking me out of the old garbage dump—I mean homestead. The fact that it was a dimensional garbage dump piled high with the detritus of a dozen different realms doesn’t mean I need to insult Mum’s cozy home.

  I kind of liked growing up playing amid broken refrigerators, some skeletons dragons had discarded, and a few hidden demon artifacts. I spent many happy hours every day arranging them in some kind of order. Only my sibs took equal delight in messing things up again.

  Most imps can’t abide tidiness.

  “We only have respectable imps in my family. All a proper size, of course! Fit warrior companions by their first century,” dear old Mum called after me. Her angry skin, nicely blotched with warts, shifted from normal gray green to an ominous vermilion.

  In a minute she’d transform into something ugly.

  Uh-oh, I was in real trouble now. I tried to hide by going transparent. But I can’t do that in my own dimension, and Mum can always find one of her one hundred three offspring, no matter what color or shape they are. Just so long as they live, she can find them.

  So that left me out in the cold and having to make my own way across the dimensions. When I say cold, I mean cold.

  When-hell-freezes-over cold. Nothing-ever-decays-here-so-let’s-dump-anything-that-might-prove-useful-later cold. Hence impland is also the garbage dump of the universe.

  We got stuck there because the same internal combustion engine that allows us to change color at will also generates heat.

  We can generate enough body heat to cultivate vast quantities of mold in our otherwise cold and damp home. Mum cultivates it. I eat it, cleaning her walls on a regular basis. Mold is quite a delicacy. My family eats it because they have to. Fuel for their bodies, you know. Not a lot of energy left over to go out across the dimensions and find ourselves a warrior to meld with. So a lot of us get kind of trapped there.

  Not me. Free from Mum’s tyranny so I didn’t have to obey the rule that says you have to be at least four feet tall and have a wingspan twice as wide before you can survive a portal transfer, I took off for parts unknown.

  That’s when I first saw Tess. Teresa Noncoiré to those who haven’t met her. She’s absolutely gorgeous, and strong, and intelligent, and all the things a heroine is supposed to be.

  But that’s now. And she still doesn’t know this about herself.

  She was dissolving into a puddle of tears, forty pounds overweight, and wearing her emotions on her sleeve the first time I saw her. In the Pacific Northwest where they grow great mold.

  And I couldn’t do anything to help her. She hadn’t been infected with the imp virus yet. I wasn’t big enough to transmit the disease to her.

  But I knew in that first moment, as she walked away from her husband’s wake, held in a rustic bar in a timber town on a mountain, that I loved her. I knew in that instant that she was going to make a formidable Warrior of the Celestial Blade.

  She was going to kick some demon ass and knock the uppity Sisterhoods on their ignoble butts.

  But that’s a long story. Let’s cut to the chase. She managed to stumble into the infection, survived it, and emerged… well, she and I both emerged.

  Outcasts.

  Not exactly ready to confront anything the dimensions could throw at us. But we were stuck together like glue.

  That’s when life started to get interesting.

  Chapter 1

  Bats do not tangle in people’s hair; if they can locate a mosquito to eat in a dark night, they can certainly avoid human heads.

  “I MISS YOU SO MUCH, Dilly, my teeth ache,” I cried. “I miss you so much I can’t believe in anything but my memories of you.”

  I traced the letters on the tombstone.

  DILLWYN BAILEY COOPER

  REST IN PEACE

  BELOVED SON AND FRIEND

  And the dates of his life, cut short two years ago.

  He had been so much more than just a friend to me.

  I choked back a sob. Dill’s parents, two more D. B.

  Coopers, hadn’t allowed me to put the precious word “Husband” on the grave marker. We hadn’t been married long enough for that, they said.

  When I had control of my voice again, I said aloud, “Dill, I’m sorry I couldn’t visit you sooner. I got sort of lost. You are probably the only person I know who would believe my tale. It’s more unbelievable than the stuff I write. I got very sick. Then a Sisterhood adopted me and nursed me back to health—not a convent as we know it, more a sorority of warriors. We battle…

  “Come to think of it, maybe you wouldn’t believe my story.” The fantasy fiction in my novels was more believable.

  Out of the corner of my eye I spotted movement. An adolescent girl with the dark hair and copper skin of a Native American stooped to pick some flowers on the verge of the cemetery. Queen Anne’s lace, chicory, and dandelion blooms filled her hands. One by one she scattered them around the graves.

  I smiled at the image of innocence. My grief had no place in her young life. I should have outgrown it by now. But then I had gotten sidetracked and never found an opportunity to visit Dill’s grave until now. I was still having trouble letting go of the man I loved so intensely.

  The girl looked up and smiled back. Then she ambled over and offered me one of the white filigree blooms.

  “Here. You didn’t bring any flowers. You look like you need one.”

  “Thank you,” I choked out. After a moment, when I’d regained control over my voice, I added, “Do you have someone special here?” I couldn’t say the word “dead,” or “buried.” That would make the wound of Dillwyn’s absence from my life too raw. Again.

  “Not here. Back home on the Colville reservation.”

  She turned and looked wistfully to the north. “I can’t give them flowers, so I spread them here, on graves that look lonely.”

  A moment of comfortable silence passed between us.

  “Thank you again for the flower. I’m Tess.” I held out my hand to the girl.

  She shook my hand with all of the solemnity of an almost adult. “Cynthia. Cynthia Stalking Moon.”

  “Hey, Cindy!” a boy called from the nearby skate park. “Come show us that twisty thing you do.”

  “Gotta go.” Cynthia waved and ran off to join her friends. She scattered her flowers randomly as she ran.

  Nice kid, Scrap said. He reclined against Dill’s headstone, a translucent pudgy shape without much definition.

  Except for his stinking cigar, a black cherry cheroot.

  He remained his usual tranquil gray.

  My imp companion didn’t truly live in this dimension.

  I sometimes wondered if I did. His ubiquitous cigar appeared all too real and noxious. But then tobacco comes from here and now.

  Other than Scrap, I had this Alder Hill, Oregon, pioneer cemetery to myself once more. The traffic roaring up Highway 26 toward Mount Hood gave me the sense of privacy and isolation I craved while I mourned Dill.

  I heard an indelicate snort from Scrap near my left shoulder, but I ignored it. Scrap liked to perch there. He was so insubstantial I couldn’t feel his weight. But I always “sensed” him there.

  “Even your weird sense of humor, Dill, can’t explain Scrap.” I laid the long-stemmed flower at the base of the tombstone. “He’s an imp from another dimension. A scrap of an imp. Not fully grown and not fully functional yet. We’re supposed to grow together as we work our way up through the ranks of the Sisterhood of the Celestial Blade Warriors. You’d like Scrap. The two of you could trade sarcastic and irreverent comments on life and compete for the most outrageous puns.”

  Dill had embodied everything I enjoyed in life. He was my hero, cut down in the prime of his life. He had saved my life at the cost of his own.

  I chuckled t
hrough another closing of my throat. “I told your favorite joke at your funeral, Dill. Your folks disapproved, of course. Afterward, they went back to the house for a formal reception.”

  I looked up toward the white house with gray stone facing and gray trim that squatted on the hill above the cemetery. No signs of life there. Dill’s parents were probably at work in the family furniture store in Gresham, the closest city to Alder Hill.

  I continued to tell Dill about his final send-off. “Your friends and I, the ones who truly knew you, retired to a bar after the service. We all lifted a glass in your honor and then we sang all of your favorite filk songs, you know, the parodies full of puns, and recounted every hideous joke you ever told, over and over. We laughed until we cried. That’s the only kind of tears you approved of. We left your wake with many fond memories of you. Just the way you wanted us to.”

  Would I ever be happy again without Dillwyn Bailey Cooper?

  One lonely tear dripped down my cheek. I swallowed and swallowed again, trying to force the useless emotion back into its dungeon behind my heart.

  “Jokes won’t dull the pain and loneliness, Dill.”

  A whiff of cigar smoke and an itching tingle along my spine jolted me back into reality. Scrap.

  Can the waterworks, Tess, dahling. We have work to do.

  “Scrap, you know you are not supposed to smoke those foul things where someone might smell them,” I snapped at my companion. Bad enough that the gaseous emissions from his lactose intolerance brought dogs sniffing at my heels from miles around. I didn’t need the reek of tobacco clinging to my clothes and hair as well.

  The imp pulled my hair and jumped off my shoulder.

  His chubby body with bandy legs, pot belly, vestigial wings, bat-wing ears, (ugh, I hate bats, but that’s the only description that fits his huge, jagged ears), and snub nose became almost visible to my sharpened eyesight. His spike tail beat an arrhythmical tattoo against Dill’s tombstone.