Hounding The Moon: A Tess Noncoire Adventure

by P. R. Frost

  “Someone else heard the story,” he said.

  “Someone who has something to gain, or lose big time, by us investigating the dog and the blanket.”

  “Your friend Donovan has the blanket.”

  “So where is he hiding Cynthia and the dog?”

  “I don’t think he has them.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He’s still trying to keep the blanket a secret. He wants the dog to bring Cynthia to him.”

  “What if he wants to keep the blanket away from Cynthia and the dog?” Where did that thought come from? Dill had called Donovan a traitor and tainted. If Donovan wanted the blanket to remain stagnant, then he wanted humanity to stagnate as well.

  I shivered.

  “Scrap!”

  No answer. Where had the imp gotten to?

  “Scrap?” I called again.“Scrap, please come back to me.”

  He popped into this dimension, hovering on extended wings between Gollum and me.

  What do you need, babe? He removed his cigar from his mouth and blew visible smoke rings into my face.

  I coughed.

  “Why can’t I see him?” Gollum asked, coming around Scrap to stand beside me. He peered into the air with and without his glasses.

  “You haven’t been infected with the same fever I had.” I touched my scar tentatively. I barely remembered the lancing pain from having the infection cut out. I had full gagging memories of doing the same for Gayla, the woman I’d let into the citadel under protest from Sister Gert. Only the monsters I fought in my delirium remained real to me.

  Or maybe they were real monsters. The fortress of the Sisterhood guarded a dimensional portal. I might have fought real demons trying to slip past their vigilance.

  “Scrap, where did you find the tape?” I asked as pleasantly as I could. I didn’t want him running away again.

  Don’t ask, babe. You won’t like the answer. He paled and shrank in size until his wings would no longer support him in flight. He dropped to the table beside the laptop. But he did not flee.

  “I need to know, Scrap.”

  One of the demon kids from the con had it. Scrap almost became invisible. He wouldn’t look into my eyes.

  I smelled his cigar as the only evidence that he remained with me.

  I repeated Scrap’s words for Gollum.

  “If one of those brats knew Donovan had the blanket and overheard me reciting the legend, then he, or she, took the tape to protect Donovan,” Gollum mused.

  “Possible. But that doesn’t tell us why the demon child sneaked into my room at the crack of dawn in the first place.”

  “Jealousy?” Gollum asked. One of his endearing smiles flashed across his face.

  I snorted. But I blushed at the same time. Donovan was one sexy man. The girls in his con entourage could very well have a crush on him and want to pull some prank on me to discourage our budding romance.

  A romance I seriously doubted could continue without a lot more communication between us.

  Be careful, Tess. Not everything is as simple or as obvious as it seems. Scrap turned bright pink then winked out.

  I took that as my cue to send Gollum on his way, and I went to bed.

  Since Dill had visited me earlier that night, I did not expect him to pop up in my dreams again.

  He did.

  Interlude

  MY BABE’S DREAMS are private. She would not allow me to enter them even if I could. Once in a while, when she is distracted, I can nudge her to certain actions.

  Or I can listen to her rave during her nightmares.

  I wish I had known this Dill person who haunts her. Waking and sleeping, he comes to her. I cannot see him, cannot hear him in her dreams when he is most powerful.

  The other ghosts talk to me. They play with me and plan tricks on Mom.

  Dill acts as if I am absent when he shows up—uninvited.

  That is how I know that Dill does not mean well by my babe.

  Human men talk a good line. Especially to women they want to possess. Knowing when to trust them is difficult. Trusting any human other than my babe is difficult for me. I know them too well. She does not.

  How can I help when I cannot enter her dreams and he can? He has magic when she dreams. He can influence her.

  That does not bode well for either my babe or me.

  I just hope she has enough sense not to follow him into that half world between life and death. That realm is much like the chat room that leads to other dimensions. A very dangerous place for the living and for the dead. Choose the wrong door at the wrong time and you become demon fodder.

  The nightmare began again.

  Once more I drove through a dream landscape that became more real by the heartbeat. I proceeded north, through the massive rock formations that twelve thousand years ago had been the streambed of a much larger and deeper Columbia River. Now only a string of mineral lakes marked the ancient coulee.

  I drove and drove, barely able to see the twisting road through my tears. Paroxysms of grief racked my body and my mind.

  Two days before, I had buried Dill. Two days before, I had laughed at all of his jokes recited by his friends, but not his family. Three days before, Dill’s family had refused to acknowledge me as a member of the family and threatened to sue me for Dill’s life insurance and his portion of the family business.

  I let them have the business.

  Fever sent chills through my body and distorted my vision even more. I knew I should pull off the road and sleep. I knew it. And yet I kept driving. The road was narrow and twisting with no shoulder and few gravel turnouts. Darkness fell.

  I remembered seeing lights out on one of the lakes.

  I remembered glancing over. Oncoming headlights blinded me.

  I missed the curve. My car kept flying forward, off the road, over the cliff. Into the lake.

  I did not care. Without Dill, I did not think I had anything worth living for.

  My car plunged deeper and deeper into the lake at the base of the dry falls. Before the last Ice Age changed the course of the Columbia River, water poured over these cliffs in the largest waterfall in the world.

  Now only a small lake winds around the base of the eroded rock formations.

  I plunged deeper than the water, into another world.

  Another dimension.

  Monsters met me with clubs and poisonous talons. Tall hideous shapes that barely resembled human beings. Short, oozing, squiggly things. Worse than the nightmares created by Hollywood.

  They reached for me through a darkness lit only by the green and yellow gleams from their eyes.

  I fought them off with my purse, my fists, my feet, and my teeth. I fought myself, knowing how easy it would be to die here. But if I did, then I could never return to my own dimension. I’d wander endlessly in this timeless space, always fighting off the monsters.

  I’d never be reunited with Dill in any afterlife.

  Gradually, my fever abated. I had periods of lucidity when the Sisterhood of the Celestial Blade bathed my brow and fed me broths. How I got there, I did not know then.

  During these periods of half-waking I became aware of a searing pain along my face, across the top of my belly, and beneath my breasts. I slipped back into my fever dreams almost gratefully to escape that pain.

  Doors to otherworlds opened off to my right and left.

  Huge bronze doors with iron bars across them. Tiny glass doors that revealed impossibly green meadows filled with flowers in bright hues never seen by a human eye.

  Normal wooden doors that opened an enticing crack.

  I had but to choose the proper door and the nightmare, the pain, and the loneliness would end.

  How could I choose? I didn’t have Dill beside me to guide me.

  Then he appeared, not as I’d seen him last, hideously burned with his skin peeling away, flesh cooked, blood oozing through his cracked visage, bones poking through his flesh.

  He was whole, clea
n, handsome, and loving. He pointed to the tiny glass door that led to a fairyland of too brilliant colors and lovely dancing figures. I could never fit through the opening, even in this realm of distortions.

  I stood there, long dangerous moments in indecision.

  All the while the monsters crept closer. I realized they had become wary of me. I knew I could defeat them, but I would not emerge from their realm unscathed. I needed to escape.

  Dill beckoned to me anxiously. He mouthed words I could not hear. His gestures became more frantic.

  I took one step toward him and the escape he offered me.

  Then a tiny figure bounced across the landscape. It had one horn, elongated earlobes, and a hump upon its back. Other than that, it appeared vaguely human, maybe a lizard dancing on its hind legs. It kept its eyes closed as it played a haunting and wistful tune on a flute held in front of it rather than to the side. Seeds dribbled from its hump. Wherever a seed landed, light blossomed out of the darkness. The music was decidedly not European.

  Still it enchanted me.

  “Don’t listen to Kokopelli,” Dill shouted to me.

  But Dill didn’t have his normal voice. I heard deep guttural growls beneath his words, and I knew that this was not my Dilly who enticed me into a land where I could not survive. My Dill spoke in smooth, melodic tones. Almost like he was singing to me.

  And when he sang, the world stopped to listen.

  “Come with me, and we will be together forever. Come, lovey. Come to me. Our love is eternal. Death cannot separate us.” He held open the door to the impossibly beautiful fairyland.

  I could actually see little winged beings flitting from flower to flower. I could get drunk on the perfume that wafted toward me on an ethereal breeze.

  But that wasn’t Dill talking to me. That was another demon who had taken on his face and form. I couldn’t trust this dimension.

  So, if the demons did not want me to follow the little guy with the flute, then perhaps, just perhaps…

  I followed Kokopelli through a narrow slit of a door made of a rough deer hide. The tight confines squeezed my oversized butt and breasts.

  A demon grabbed my arm, pulling me back into the darkness. I resisted. The demon pulled harder, nearly dislocating my shoulder.

  Kokopelli played a faster tune that made me want to dance.

  I broke through into reality, my normal reality, with a squishy sound like popping wet bubble wrap.

  A woman wearing surgical scrubs and mask, (a doctor?) leaned over me. “Welcome back,” she said. “I see our treatment was successful.”

  “What treatment? Where am I?” My voice sounded raspy. The movements of my jaw made me aware of a tightness and dull ache along the whole right side of my face.

  I reached up to touch the soreness.

  The doctor grabbed my hand. “Best keep your hands off the wounds for a few days. You had a serious infection with a very high fever. We had to cut out the sources of the infection. I’ve stitched and bandaged them, but we can’t risk a secondary infection. That might kill you.”

  Her voice was smooth and matter-of-fact. I couldn’t place an accent, regional or foreign.

  Fever explained the nightmare dreams. I hadn’t truly battled demons. They hadn’t truly slashed me with their poisonous talons.

  “Where am I?” My nose detected the pervasive smell of disinfectant.

  “In the infirmary,” the doctor replied.

  “Which hospital?” I choked the words out. My throat was too dry.

  The doctor held a glass of water with a bent glass straw to my lips. I sucked greedily. She took it away from me all too soon.

  “Not too much at once. We don’t want to upset a very empty tummy.”

  She hadn’t answered my first question. But I had more.

  “How long was I out of it?”

  “Five days.”

  That must have been some fever. “Recovery?”

  “Oh, you will mend quickly now that the infection is gone. In fact you’ll be stronger than before once we feed you up and rebuild some muscle tissue. I think you’ll like the new you.”

  “I lost some weight?” I asked hopefully. I’d always had a rather round figure. The loss of a few inches on my hips could only improve things.

  Why bother? Dill was gone. Gone forever. Keeping a svelte and sexy body no longer mattered if he wasn’t there to appreciate it.

  Thus began my yearlong recovery and training to become a Warrior of the Celestial Blade.

  Wait a minute.

  This memory/dream was different.

  Chapter 21

  Of the nearly one thousand recognized bat species only three may be classed as “Vampires.”

  I SAT BOLT UPRIGHT in my hotel bed some three years after I had battled demons in my fever dream. I had battled those fever demons alone. Dill had not been there, either as a ghost or a corpse.

  Why was I rewriting things in my memory?

  Sleep fled, lost mist in the sunshine. So did any memory of why I might have added Dill to the recurring nightmare of my time between dimensions, keeping demons from slipping past the guard of my Sisterhood.

  Talk to me, dahling, Scrap ordered. He shifted a very stinky cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  I grabbed it away from him. “This is a no smoking room, you idiot. You’re going to get me thrown out of this hotel.”

  Then talk to me. Maybe I know something you don’t.

  “Fat chance.” I drowned the cigar in the sink, then wrapped it in tissue. In the morning I’d dump it in the ash can outside the hotel.

  You never know what I know.

  “It was just a nightmare.”

  The same nightmare that haunts you month after month.

  I was there, babe, even before you could see me. Tell me about it.

  Did I really want to relive that nightmare long enough to talk about it?

  If you talk about it, you will purge your mind of the worst of it.

  “I’ve heard that.”

  So I sat cross-legged on the bed with a glass of water and a box of tissues and talked.

  Scrap stayed a normal grayish green, nodding his head as he listened attentively.

  The tightness in my chest eased and my eyes grew heavy. I trusted Scrap with my secrets. Hell, he was my biggest secret.

  So why couldn’t I trust him when he said Dog wasn’t a demon?

  Because Dog had killed Bob.

  Think on this while you snooze, Tessie babe: Why does Dill want you to reject me and go to him? What can he do for you that I can’t?

  “He can love me.”

  Scrap winked out in a huff.

  I slept dreamlessly through the rest of the night.

  Tuesday morning dawned bright and cold. The air smelled clean with just a hint of mint and sage on the wind.

  More than just a breeze. I’d noticed that out here on the Columbia River plateau the wind always blew. Air masses shifted from here to there endlessly, without regard for human concerns.

  Bob had loved the land. A real desert rat, he backpacked through the treeless local mountains and the trackless Cascades.

  I think one of the reasons I had never married him was that the desert scared me. The emptiness, the loneliness.

  The silence deep enough to break my heart. People and monsters I could fight. Only with Dill had I found beauty beneath the relentless sun and seen color in the barren rocks.

  An empty day loomed before me, as empty as I perceived the desert. Bob’s funeral was tomorrow. A funeral I had no part in planning. Bob had been my closest friend, but was not my lover or my family. I could pay condolence calls on his parents and sister. Nothing else.

  You could sing at his funeral, Scrap reminded me.

  I couldn’t see him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t close.

  “I can’t sing anymore.” Not since Dill died.

  Can’t or won’t?

  “Is there a difference?”

  You tell me.
<
br />   A loud knocking at my door ended that pointless conversation.

  Donovan stood in the hallway bearing a single red rose and a sheepish look. “Can we talk?” he asked.

  “Over breakfast. Have you eaten?” He was right. We needed to talk.

  I didn’t want him in my hotel room. My bedroom. Not again. Yet.

  “No. I left home before dawn and drove straight here. Breakfast would be good.”

  I grabbed my purse and my key card and met him in the hallway. He gave me the rose. I buried my nose in it, suddenly shy, but warm and comfortable in his presence, just like I had been back at the salle on Cape Cod.

  In a public place I could trust him. Alone? I don’t think I could trust myself.

  We walked the long length of the hotel in silence, a scant three inches separating our shoulders and our hands. Together and yet… not yet.

  We sipped coffee while we waited for our orders.

  Scrap hadn’t showed up, so I didn’t order his favorite beer and OJ.

  “Tess.”

  “Donovan.” We spoke at the same time.

  “You first.” I gestured.

  “I reacted badly yesterday, Tess. I’m sorry.” He looked up at the plants growing around the ceiling beams rather than meet my gaze.

  My suspicions hovered on the edge of my perceptions.

  Then he smiled and I relaxed.

  “The truth is, I need to know which tribe approached you to try to get the blanket away from me.”

  “What?” Of all the explanations that was the last one I expected. “No one approached me.”

  “Are you certain? Maybe that Van der Hoyden guy said something. He’s an anthropologist. Maybe one of the tribes approached him to authenticate it.”

  “I am certain, Donovan. My interest in the blanket is…” Goddess, how did I explain it to someone who didn’t know about the Sisterhood and my imp? “My interest in the blanket is deeper than possession by any single person or group. It’s the stuff of legends. I need to study it. Research it.”

  “For a book?” He looked hopeful.

  “Very likely.” I already had a fantasy novel outlining itself in my head. The first one in the series—the one that had made the best-seller lists—was based on fact, though I’d never admit it publicly. Why not one of the sequels?