The ground had been dug up around the base of the gnarled bush.
“No.” Oh gods, no. I dropped the shovel and fell to my knees, and dug at the loose dirt with my hands. But I knew I would find nothing.
*That’s not good,* Alynon said.
“Oh, thanks, I thought I might be overreacting.” I rested my head against the cool earth with my eyes closed, and groaned.
This was where I’d buried the spirit trap amulet that held the captured soul of Kaminari, a crazed and damaged jorõgumo. In itself, that wasn’t too terrible since I had killed her in self-defense, and to save the lives of several others. But the means by which I had managed it, that was most definitely a problem.
I was nowhere near strong enough, or skilled enough, to rip someone’s soul out of their body by sheer will alone, even with the aid of a spirit trap. I’d been exiled at the age of fifteen, before finishing my basic necromancer training, and I’d missed out on twenty-five years of apprenticeship and practice. So in a moment of desperation I’d resorted to dark necromancy to stop Kaminari, consuming a spirit already in the trap to create a kind of vacuum that sucked in Kaminari’s spirit in its place. Dunngo, the dwarf whose spirit I destroyed, had given me permission; but still, nobody would be thrilled to learn the truth—not the ARC, not Dunngo’s fellow brightbloods, not my family.
There was, generally speaking, a zero tolerance policy when it came to dark necromancy. I might as well have announced to a group of young orphans that Santa wasn’t real—right after eating his liver in front of them with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
It had been foolish to hold on to the amulet. But it had felt even more wrong to simply destroy it, or to dissipate Kaminari’s damaged spirit beyond the Veil and ward her against speaking.
I had hoped instead to find some way to help Kaminari, as a kind of penance for Dunngo, and repayment for the death of Kaminari and her sister. They had both suffered terrible pain in their lives, and both fallen under the manipulation of the Shadows, who hardly saw it in their interest to heal psychological scars or temper bloodlust. I wished at least once every night before falling asleep that I could have found some way to help Kaminari rather than end her life.
So for the past month, when I felt strong enough, or brave enough, I came out to the garden and sat here at night, talking to Kaminari’s spirit. She mostly cursed me, and promised inventive tortures. But I kept trying, sharing stories of my own experiences, or of others who had done terrible things only to find happiness and forgiveness later in life. Perhaps those talks had been as much to convince myself as her that there was hope of redemption and peace. But I also hoped that eventually, just by showing her that I cared enough to keep trying in the face of her anger and hatred, that she might eventually begin to talk with me rather than curse me, and maybe later even find some peace of her own.
And now, she was gone, her spirit to be used for the Fates only knew what purpose.
I opened my eyes, and as I began to lift my head I spotted something. I might have missed it had I not been so near the ground, but my perspective, and the low angle of the sun peeking between the vines and leaves, revealed tiny footprints in the soil.
“Frakking gnomes,” I muttered.
Gnome families ruled the black market of the magical world. Stolen goods of a magical nature always seemed to find their way into gnome hands—usually because the gnomes were the ones who stole them. If you needed an illegal magical artifact, or a legal one that was too expensive to get legally, you could put a note under any gnome statue and an offer of payment, and if the gnomes accepted the deal you’d soon enough have the object in hand, no questions asked.
I’d seen a Godzilla gnome statue the other day, and a whole yard of zombie gnomes. I had no desire to test what would happen if I placed a note under one of those.
Generally speaking, gnomes did not steal from arcana, as that would quickly bring the Arcana Ruling Council down on their activities. But there were exceptions. If the item being stolen was itself illegal, for example, then the gnomes had little concern of the victim complaining to the ARC and explaining why they had the item to begin with. And I had a … complicated relationship with the Giardani family, the most powerful local gnome clan. Their leader, Priapus, saw me as bad luck at best, and dangerous to his family’s health at worst.
But Priapus wouldn’t have taken the spirit trap on his own. Someone had hired the gnomes to steal it, someone with power and wealth, and more importantly, someone who knew of the artifact’s existence.
Grandfather. It had to be.
I stood, and brushed the dirt from my knees and hands, and swiped at my forehead with a forearm, to dry it. I headed back to Dawn’s to help pack before the enforcers returned, trying not to think of what purpose Grandfather might have for the spirit of a psychopathic spider-witch, or an artifact that could get me convicted of dark necromancy—convicted again, that is, and this time for real.
7
AIN’T 2 PROUD 2 BEG
It was an hour and a half drive to the Elwha camp. We pulled into the parking lot of the Elwha River trailhead just past 7:30 P.M.
The Olympic National Forest filled the heart of the Olympic Peninsula, its snow-capped mountains and wild woods a dream destination for campers, fishers, and hikers, and a perfect shelter for brightbloods.
The Olympic Mountains appeared neon blue now in the evening glow, and a light breeze caused the spruce and cedar trees to sway gently. It was all so beautiful, so peaceful, so removed from the craziness of daily life.
“Finn!” Dawn said, and I realized she’d called my name a couple of times. I blinked, and looked at her.
“Sorry,” I said. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
We grabbed our bags out of the back of Dawn’s wood-paneled Dodge Colt. Dawn had her guitar case, and Sammy her laptop bag, and I grabbed the giant hiking backpack stuffed with clothes and supplies. We made our way along a dirt hiking trail to the viewpoint for the Elwha Dam, a small hydroelectric structure of concrete walls and steel tunnels that filled a choke point in the narrow river ravine. The giant power generators were silent now, however. Construction crews were setting up machines and barriers around the dam, their shouts to one another echoing off of the forested hillsides. In a couple of weeks, they would begin the work of destroying the dam and restoring the river.
We left the main hiking trail, and made our way up to a hidden path that paralleled the river, and I led us as best as I could remember along the brightblood trails invisible to the untrained, or in some cases unmagical, eye. A cool, moist breeze drifted up from the river, and a rich loamy smell rose from the dark soil of the trails and the mossy earth to either side.
“Youselves halt!”
Sal the sasquatch stepped out from behind a tree. He stood nine feet tall, a mass of muscle and red-brown fur, and looked much as one might expect a sasquatch to look save for the fact that his feet weren’t particularly huge. They would be quite impressive on a basketball player, certainly, but for a sasquatch they were rather small.
“Sal!” I said. “Good to see you. I see your hair’s grown back.” Last time I’d seen him, Sal had just shaved his hair and spun it into steely yarn to wrap protectively around the tree of Silene, his dryad love.
“And you got rid of the boots!” Dawn added.
I winced, but Sal just gave a shy smile and shrugged. “Iself not worried anymore what otherselves think. I know Iself’s worth.”
I smiled. “That’s great, big guy.” I looked at Dawn. “The love of a good woman is an awesome thing, for sure.”
Dawn rolled her eyes. “Do you want some wine with that cheese?”
Sal’s blush deepened. “Iself am very lucky, is big-true.”
“Ack!” Sammy said, and made a puh-puh-puh spitting sound as she swatted at the air. “I just ate a gnat. Can we end the love fest and get someplace indoors?”
“Right,” I said. “Sal, we need someplace to lay low for a bit, where the ARC c
an’t find us.”
Sal’s smile turned to a slow frown. “I cannot offer youself shelter. Youself must speak with Silene. Iself will lead you.” He waved for us to follow and led us uphill, away from the river, along narrow dirt trails hidden by overhanging ferns, up slopes with tree root steps. The sun’s glow faded, and soon we had to use our phones’ camera lights to find our way through the denser shadows of the forest. Sal had little trouble despite his beady little eyes, sniffing his way along. We hiked trails unfamiliar to me, and Sal would sometimes give us warnings to walk around a spot in the trail, or to take a side path marked only by a cluster of stones or mushrooms or some other subtle marker.
We emerged at last from the dense forest into an overgrown clearing.
“Wow,” Dawn said. “Not what I expected.”
I knew what she meant.
We faced a hot springs resort, or at least what used to be a resort, with a large central lodge and sanitarium surrounded by a scattering of lesser buildings built on the site of the natural hot springs.
The resort had been built sometime back in the early 1900s, originally intended as a gift from an ambitious waerbeaver lumber baron to his new bride. Unfortunately, his new bride called the sulfurous smell of the springs vulgar and the trip to reach it barbaric, and demanded that her husband build her a mansion on the sea instead. The lumber baron simply wandered off into the woods never to be heard from again.
The Silver Court brightbloods reclaimed the land as part of a pact after the last Fey-Arcana wars. Given the fact that the Silver Court had allied with us during the war, the Arcana Ruling Council was willing to chase off all the mundies, erase public records of the place, and allow the brightbloods to put up magical diversions so no hikers would stumble across it by accident.
Petey had gushed about the place after the first time he’d stayed out here.
The most impressive building was the 154-room luxury hotel, with the first story constructed of massive upright fir logs surrounded on three sides by a spacious veranda, and a checkerboard of windows.
Behind the hotel stood a second large building, originally a sanitarium with state-of-the-art (for the time) medical equipment, including an old X-ray machine that Petey swore looked like a death ray. And spaced around those two central buildings stood a large bathhouse, cabins, worker housing, an ice plant, steam laundry, and a gymnasium.
The golf course, croquet grounds, and tennis courts had long been reclaimed by the forest, but hints of the landscaping still peeked out between the ferns and saplings.
It was an ideal setup for a bunch of brightbloods, providing most of the comforts of modern living but in the wilds of the forest, and far from the eyes of the mundane world. Though it was not without issues.
The buildings had electricity in much the same way that the Poltergeist house had personality—there was a good chance someone was going to be shocked or burned at any moment. They also had steam heat, and hot and cold running water, but as Don Faun had informed me before, brightbloods were hell on plumbing. Just because a centaur could use a toilet didn’t mean it was necessarily the best idea. I wasn’t sure they even made plungers for that job.
It also looked pretty run down. Any paint had long worn away and many of the windows were boarded over. I spotted at least one collapsed chimney, and one gutted cabin had a tree growing up out of its center. Granted, a waersquirrel or dryad might love a nice tree growing in their house, but somehow I doubted it had been intentional.
Celebrating nature, furthering the interests of the Fey, and being stewards of the forest didn’t exactly pay well. And while there was a brief period of time when many brightbloods found it easy to get credit cards—apparently even a faun whose only possessions are fleas and a healthy lust for life met the stringent requirements of some banks for a shiny new card (with interest rates that would make Scrooge McDuck blush with embarrassment, of course)—the ARC’s infomancers quickly grew tired of having to step in and make the accounts, and the debt collections, disappear. So no more credit cards to brightbloods. Or their pets. Which meant trips to Henery Hardware were rare for these brightbloods.
Sal led us to the main resort building. The porch creaked ominously as he stepped up onto it, and he had to bend over nearly double to step through the door.
What had once been the hotel’s lobby area boasted massive wooden pillars with gilt trim, and a river stone fireplace. Hangers for what must have been impressive chandeliers now held simple bulbs strung from wires, the chandeliers long sold off.
But rather than a welcoming reservation desk, we found ourselves facing a low barricade made of heavy tables tipped on their sides and reinforced with stones. It created a nice kill zone inside the entrance, and a pair of fauns pointed crossbows at us from either side just in case there was any doubt as to the reason for the barricades. It was the kind of setup I might stick in a game dungeon, but didn’t enjoy facing for real.
“Uh, hi,” I said, raising my hands and stopping just inside the door, so that Dawn and Sammy remained outside.
“Theyself friends,” Sal said, patting me on the shoulder with enough force I nearly fell to my knees. “Where yon is Silene?”
“And Pete,” I added, rotating my shoulder.
The nearest faun lowered his crossbow, and said, “At the healing house.”
Sal grunted acknowledgment, and motioned me back outside. I glanced back as we stepped down off of the porch. “What’s with the barricades? Is that normal?”
“Weself must be fox-smart,” Sal replied, and led us on a path around the hotel. “The shadowbrights have been on the steading, sneaky sniffing.”
I frowned. “I thought there was a truce with the Shadows, after Silene won that duel with Barry and all.”
“Theyself no longer seek revenge for the spiderbright’s death,” Sal’s voice rumbled. “But theyself sense weakness maybe, and the Bright Lords and Ladies warn of war.”
“Brilliant,” Sammy muttered. “You brought us here just in time for a brightblood war?”
“It won’t come to that,” I said.
“How do you know that?” Sammy asked.
“Because,” I replied. “If it did, Petey and Vee would get caught up in it, and that just can’t happen.”
Dawn took my hand, and squeezed it. Sammy, thankfully, didn’t offer a snarky reply.
We passed several brightbloods going about their business. A centaur, two fauns, a woman who might have been a siren, or a nymph, or waer. I received courteous nods from those who recognized me from the events three months ago, when I had helped them in a battle against brightbloods pledged to the Forest of Shadows. I received suspicious glares from those I assumed, and hoped, were newcomers.
Sal made us carefully skirt hidden pits, bear traps, and clusters of deadly manticore quills. I caught movement on the rooftops from the corner of my eye. “Uh, Sal,” I whispered. “On the roof—those are yours, right, not brightblood ninjas?”
“Theyself be Silverbrights,” he replied, his voice taking on something of a growl. “Theyself will be getting a hard-talking. Should not be seen by weak arcana senses. No hurtfeels meant.”
“None taken.”
We reached the old sanitarium building, or “healing house,” a basic two-story structure of gray wood that might have once been whitewashed.
The sanitarium entry was a simple room with wooden furniture, and double doors leading to the rest of the building. Garl the waerbear sat in a rocking chair in his human form, a ruggedly handsome Native American man wearing worn jeans and nothing else—I assumed to save the hassle of torn clothing when he transformed. He’d put on some weight since the last time I’d seen him, his belly now hanging over the top of his jeans, and his face a bit rounder. He looked up from watching something extremely fuzzy and wavy on a small black-and-white television that had an intricate metal sculpture of rabbit ears and wire hangers rising behind it like a schizophrenic’s rendering of the DNA model.
“Garl!” I said. “
How are you?”
Garl gave a puzzled smile and rubbed at his jaw as if waiting for the question to be translated by a Babel fish. Finally, he said, “I am good. Do you know this Ken Burns?” He waved at the television. I glanced in time to make out a wobbly picture of the PBS logo before the scene changed.
“Uh, no, can’t say I do.”
“Ah, too bad.” He scratched casually around his belly button. “His movie about the Prohibition didn’t say anything about the arcana fears of drunk brightbloods, or how Bacchus tricked—”
“Garl,” I said, “we can’t let the mundies know about brightbloods. You know what would happen.”
Garl shrugged. “I know what you arcana say will happen. But I feel bad for this mundy, Burns.”
My eyebrows pulled together. “What? Why?”
“Because I can tell the truth is very important to him, and there’s so much he doesn’t know. I know he can’t show it in his films, but I still wish I could just tell him the truth. I like him.”
“If you like him, then best if the Arcana Ruling Council doesn’t care about him, right?” I said.
He gave a sad grunt of agreement, then perked up a bit as he said, “Did you bring any candy?”
“Uh, no, sorry. I was kind of rushed.”
Garl looked sad again, and said, “Okay. Sal can show you in. I’m sure Heather will be happy to see you.” He waved us toward the double doors.
Sal led us through the swinging doors into a wide-open room that filled nearly the entire bottom floor. Square brick columns were spaced every few feet as support, and there remained rows of metal-framed beds and lounge chairs facing the large windows along either side wall. Most were empty, but a few held brightbloods who looked sweaty and agitated, all being tended by a faun, and by Farquhar, a tall man with antlers on his head.
And in the near corner to our right, partitioned from the rest of the area with curtains, there were several chairs populated by brightbloods of widely varying ages, facing a chalkboard. In front of the chalkboard stood Heather.
Smells Like Finn Spirit Page 7