by P. R. Frost
He looked very handsome in the morning. His eyes held concern. A new spate of tears threatened.
I let the anger overwhelm them.
Donovan snapped his fingers behind his back. The kids retreated down the hall and around the corner.
“I have to explain. The kids saw the dog going for Cynthia. They were trying to protect the girl. But Bob got in the way of both of them. The police have ruled it an accident. No blame on the kids,” he said all on one breath. His gaze was riveted on mine.
I gulped. The thought that Scrap might be right warred with my grief and anger.
“So? You’ve delivered your message.” We stared at each other. Longing and disappointment poured out of both of us.
“I thought I might offer to buy you breakfast, but it seems you already have company.” Donovan sneered with disapproval. He turned his back on me, his shoulders drooped a little. Not enough.
“Sorry; you lost your chance yesterday. Where were you, by the way, when a rabid dog mauled my best friend and the police interviewed me for over two hours?” He’d comforted me for an extremely short period of time, then deserted me for business reasons.
Demons take his business, Scrap hissed from the other room. He sounded peckish. He needed food. And so did I.
I pushed past Donovan, not giving him a chance to answer.
Gollum pointedly checked the door to make certain it was locked, then politely took my arm and led me to the elevator.
Over a double order of strawberry waffles with whipped cream, eggs, and bacon I related as much of the story Gollum had recited as I could remember. It filled in a few of the blanks in Cynthia’s rambling version.
Scrap slurped at the orange juice and beer I had ordered for him. I might be mad at him, but I couldn’t neglect him. The waitress didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the order. This was a con weekend, after all.
Gollum eyed the level of the beverages as they slowly lowered without me taking a drink.
“The name of the dog?” he queried, making notes in his palm pilot.
“Shanka something.”
“That doesn’t sound right. No language I can pinpoint.”
I watched Donovan and his friends, sans masks, come into the coffee garden and take seats at the opposite end from us. They seemed remarkably subdued.
“Just how many languages do you know?”
“English, French, German, and Latin; a smattering of Greek and Aramaic. I read Sanskrit and Sumerian.”
“Is that all?” I asked dubiously.
“For now. I’ve never had occasion to learn any Native American tongues. Until now. I wonder if Leonard Stalking Moon could point me to a Sinkiuse tutor.”
“How long will that take? In case you haven’t noticed, the dog attacks are getting more frequent and more vicious.”
“Two to three weeks to get a basic vocabulary and grammar. Another month, maybe two, to truly master it.” Gollum seemed preoccupied with pouring huckleberry syrup on his pancakes.
“Is that all? Two or three months? Most people need years to master a foreign language.”
Gollum shrugged. “When I hear the tape, I’ll have a better idea of what we are dealing with.”
“What were you doing with the map?”
“Tracking the dog. Are you finished? I’m anxious to hear the tape.”
I sighed and signed the check. But I made sure I finished the last of the carafe of coffee. Stars only knew when Gollum would come up for air long enough to think about eating again.
“You listen while I pack. The con only pays for my room until noon today. I have to decide where I’m going next,” I said as I opened my suite door. “After the funeral on Wednesday.”
I froze in the doorway. Inside, all the cushions lay tossed about the room, furniture rested upside down and askew.
“I’ve been robbed!”
Interlude
“GET OFF HIM, SAGE!” Before the last word left Tess’ mouth, she used her imitation Celestial Blade to sweep the much larger and more aggressive imp off my back. The fricking bully landed in the dust beside the training ground with a whomp and a gush of air.
I immediately jumped to my feet and snarled at the dominant imp.
Sage flew up to eye level with Tess, teeth and talons bared.
“Enough, Tess,” Sister Gert commanded.
“She’s a bully,” Tess defended her actions. “Where I come from, we do not tolerate bullies.” She did not add that Sister Jemmie, the companion of Sage, was also a bully who cheated by sharpening her training blade. She liked hurting others but could not tolerate a single blow to herself.
I crawled across the sand of the training ground to sit at Tess’ heel and nurse the bite wound on my forearm and the tear in my stubby wing tip. I’d had worse injuries from my fellow imps.
They didn’t like it that I, a runt, had invaded their turf. This was the first time Tess had witnessed them in action, though.
“This is not where you come from, Tess,” Sister Gert reminded her. “We train for war.”
“Since when are imps the targets of each other in our war against demons?” Tess rubbed at the welt rising on her left thigh where Sister Jemmie had slashed at her with the sharpened blade.
I liked that Tess defended me, rather than herself. I needed a few moments to recover. Imps can push toxins into their saliva—the better to slay demons with. Or we can make them antibiotic specific to healing our companions. If I wasn’t careful, the open wound on my arm might fester and I’d lose the use of it.
Precisely what Sage and her ilk intended.
They’d do anything, including crippling a Sister to send me back where we came from.
“The imps have a social order we do not understand. They have to work it out for themselves,” Sister Gert dismissed the problem. “Now get back to work. We can’t afford to tolerate sissies in our order.”
“Then why don’t I see any other imps attacking each other?” Tess muttered under her breath.
Because I’m a runt and should have died from the cold back home a century ago. But the Sisters will never know that if I can help it. The other imps won’t talk about it because they are embarrassed that a mere scrap of an imp survived the portal and managed to meld. I make them look weak in comparison.
I took the opportunity to hop over to one of the irrigation springs and wash the wound.
“Sage is not only a bully, she’s ugly, too,” Tess continued.
“Covered in green warts.”
Tess had yet to learn that we imps consider warts the most beautiful and seductive part of us. I wanted more than my mere three. Tess could use one on the end of her nose, but humans might object to that.
She took one step to the side and swung her blade at Sister Gert, shouting “En garde.” In one smooth move she hooked the leader’s blade out of her hand and pinned the woman across the throat with the staff.
“We train for war, Sister Gert. Always be on your guard.”
“You will regret your insolence, Tess. You are not a Sister yet.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if I want to be.”
“Hidebound, pretentious, cliquish, bullheaded… bullies!” I exhausted my vocabulary of maledictions against the Sisterhood. Midnight, huddled in the gatehouse while the wind howled and dry lightning raged outside the Citadel was not my favorite time. But it was the only time I had any privacy from the Sisters. That night I needed privacy to rant and rave and pound my fists against the walls.
I no longer counted Scrap as an intrusion. In just a few short weeks he had become so much a part of me, almost like my conscience, that I felt incomplete the few times he slipped off on his own business.
I presumed that on this stormy night he returned to whatever dimension speeded his healing.
When I stopped for breath, I heard a different pounding, weak and rhythmical. Not like a tree branch scraping.
There weren’t any trees outside the citadel. This was the high desert of the Columbia Coulee i
n Eastern Washington. Tumbleweed, sage, and stunted juniper were about all that grew naturally here. Maybe a few grasses if you looked hard enough.
I braced myself for the blast of wind and opened the gatehouse door. The feeble light of a shielded lantern revealed no untoward shadows on the inside of the gate.
I stepped the two yards to the spy hole in the middle of the double doors, ten feet high and six wide apiece.
A lone figure slumped against the door, pounding weakly with a loose fist. “Let me in. Please let me in,” she wailed.
Red suppurating sores on her face told me more than her own words ever could.
I heaved at the crossbar that sealed the door against the elements as well as enemies.
“What are you doing?” Sister Gert hissed in my ear.
She leaned on the crossbar, keeping me from lifting it.
“There’s a woman out there. She’s sick.”
Sister Gert peered through the spy hole. “She’s not one of ours.” She kept a heavy hand on the barrier.
“She’s infected. Just like I was. We have to let her in.” I tried to open the door anyway. I didn’t have the strength to overcome her pressure added to the bar’s weight.
“The infirmary is full. Three of our daughters returned from the outside, and three more who haven’t had the chance to go to school. We can’t take in another.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe this recent epidemic is the Goddess telling us that we need more warriors? That maybe the demons are gearing up for a major push and we need every woman who can be infected?”
At least that was how I’d write the current scenario.
I had yet to see a demon or the supposed portal and was more than a bit iffy on the belief business.
What kind of God or Goddess would allow my beloved husband to die after he’d gotten me to safety from that horrible fire?
Sister Gert and I stared at each other, neither willing to move.
“You know nothing about it.”
“I know that I can’t leave her out there. She’ll die.”
“She’ll die if we let her in. We don’t have enough medicine and caretakers to treat our own.”
“I’ll take care of her. I’ll venture into the nearest town for antibiotics. But we can’t let her die out there alone.”
“Are you willing to give up your place here to make room for her?” There was more to that question than I wanted to think about right then.
“I’ll move into the gatehouse. I’ll tend her fever there if there are no beds in the infirmary.”
“Think on this, Tess Noncoiré.”
“I don’t need to think. I need to help a Sister in trouble.”
Sister Gert stepped away from the gate.
I shoved the crossbar out of the way with a bang and flung the gate open.
A woman about my own age with silvery-blond hair and fifty or sixty too many pounds on her fell into my arms. She was sopping wet and smelled of the heavy mineral salts in the string of lakes that used to be the riverbed of the ancient Columbia. I staggered beneath her weight as I dragged her into the gatehouse. Getting her onto the cot took more effort. Sister Gert watched but did nothing to help.
I knew nothing about medicine, only that I needed to get her fever down. Her polyester shorts and tunic would not tear. I resorted to a knife to cut away her soaked clothing. Then I wrapped her in the rough blanket and rubbed her skin dry.
Sister Serena appeared at my elbow. She still wore a sling on her right arm from the demon battle five months ago. “She’s in bad shape, Tess. I can’t lance those festers. You’ll have to do it.”
I gulped back bile. No matter how much gore I wrote into my books, when it came to the real thing, I was very squeamish.
“It’s not nearly as bad as demon gore, Tess. You have to do it.” She opened a sterile pack and began swabbing the woman’s face and a spot under her breast with the orange stuff they use in hospitals. It smelled like a hospital at least. Then she opened a second pack containing a scalpel.
“Shouldn’t I scrub or something first?”
“No time. If we don’t lance it now, the infection will go inside and she’ll die horribly within a few hours. Put on some gloves.”
That might help. At least I wouldn’t have to touch the foul-smelling goo with my hands.
“Where are your nurses? Your trained helpers?”
“In the infirmary, doing this same chore for another Sister. They have their hands full and then some. It’s just you and me, Tess, for this outsider.”
I gulped, tried not to look too closely at what I was doing as I followed Sister Serena’s instructions. A neat slice along the outside of the fester that ran from her temple to the jaw.
“Have you noticed that your scar is longer and more jagged than any other Sister’s?” Sister S commented.
“Women who come to us from the outside wait too long. They don’t know what they are dealing with. By the time they get to us, the infection is deeply embedded, the fever so high, they are on the brink of going mad.” She kept up a detailed conversation as I worked, trying to keep my mind off the grisly nature of the chore.
“Outsiders are harder to treat; they have a longer recovery because they do wait too long. But it makes them better warriors in the end. The changes in their bodies and their minds are more profound.”
“I was nearly mad with grief before the fever hit.”
“The grief made you vulnerable to the infection.” Sister S directed me to sit before my knees gave out. Then she deftly produced sterile pads to soak up the smelly residue that oozed out of the wound. She might have trouble using her right arm again, but she was getting good with the left.
“Are we all mad here?” A question I’d long wanted to ask. A psychiatrist would have a field day with every woman in the citadel as well as their stated purpose in life.
“A good question.”
“Sister Gert doesn’t like questions. She doesn’t like me.”
“Sister Gert is under a lot of stress. Not much has changed here in almost three hundred years. We don’t get a lot of outsiders. Since I finished my residency in trauma surgery and returned here we haven’t had many cases of infection. Rarely more than one at a time. Rarely more than one a year.”
“Three hundred years? There were only Indians here then.”
“You’ll have to do the stitches, Tess.” She handed me a curved needle already threaded from another sterile pack.
I got to my knees shakily. Stitches I could do. Just like fancy embroidery, or mending a difficult rip in upholstery or curtains. I’d done those chores often enough under Mom’s direction.
“In the beginning our warriors were of native stock, women who needed to be warriors but were excluded from that occupation by their society. Later came the native widows of fur traders, their half-breed daughters, then some missionary women who did go mad on the frontier. Now we’re a thorough racial mix.”
I had noticed some African and Asian features among the women.
While Sister S filled me in, I set fifteen neat stitches down our patient’s face and another five beneath her right breast.
“No matter what Sister Gert says, you were sent to us for a reason, Tess. The Goddess chooses wisely.”
“Sometimes I think I was sent here just to shake things up.”
“Change does not come easily to us.”
“I’ve noticed.” Did I accept change any more easily than the Sisters? I just wanted to go home.
Without Dill, did I even have a home?
“Change is what drives the world, Tess. Change is part of the human condition. People change. Lives change. Lives come and go. The only constant in life is change. Without change, we do not grow, we do not evolve. The demons are evolving, and so must we. Do not allow Sister Gert to drive you away.”
Chapter 18
“MY MAP!” GOLLUM CRIED as he dashed into the room.
“My book!” I headed for the bedroom and my laptop.
“Intact,” we both said when we met in the middle.
“What’s missing?” he asked, pushing up his glasses and peering about.
“I’ll check. You call security.”
I didn’t dare touch anything in case I disturbed evidence.
The laptop seemed intact, the flash drive was in my purse, and I’d e-mailed my latest work to myself this morning. An old habit. I backed up everything, not taking a chance on losing my livelihood. Anything else could be replaced.
But nothing seemed missing.
“Did you ever find your dictation recorder or the tape?” Gollum asked. He braced himself on both sides of the doorjamb to the bedroom and leaned forward.
“No, we were going to listen to it when we came back.”
“Where did you leave it?”
“On the coffee table. Did you look under all the chairs and the sofa?”
“Yes. They’ve been overturned, the carpet is dusty under where they sat. Except for a rectangle about two inches by three that’s been disturbed.”
I gulped. “Who would want my note dictation?”
“An aspiring writer out to steal your ideas and publish before you?”
“If that were the case, they’d take the laptop with the full manuscript on it.”
A knock on the open door to the suite interrupted my next thought. A man in a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and blue-and-green paisley tie entered. He took one look at the chaos and pulled his cell phone from a belt clip. “I have to call this in to the police, ma’am,” he said and autodialed a number.
The next two hours evaporated under a barrage of questions and paperwork with the same city policeman I’d talked to the day before.
“Seems like trouble follows you, Ms. Noncoiré,” Police Sergeant Wilkins said. He wrote copious notes on a tiny tablet.
“A string of bad luck.” I smiled sweetly at him.
The hotel manager stood by, wringing his hands as another officer made a bigger mess searching through the debris for evidence. He dusted everything with a fine black or silver powder hoping to reveal fingerprints on light and dark surfaces. A useless task. I’d hosted a writers workshop in here Saturday morning and I doubted the place had been properly cleaned since.