Bone Walker

by Angela Korra'ti

  Once we all made it into the car and Jake got us heading west, I probably should have asked them the same question I’d asked Millie. Elessir beat me to it, and in a numb sort of haze I heard the boys telling him that the alokhiu, in Saeko Asakura’s body, had gone full-on dragon and had been hurling hurricane-force winds into the coast for the last three weeks. Power had been out through most of Seattle for a week and a half. Warders from Baja California all the way up to British Columbia were on high alert, but since the dragon hadn’t come near a Warded city, no one had been able to do a thing against her except batten down the hatches.

  Later, I supposed dully, I was going to have to care about that. But right then the only Warder I wanted to think about was the one curled as tightly against me as he could get in the back seat of a car. My magic soaked into him like water into drought-stricken earth. Not until we crossed Lake Washington, though, did I feel him abruptly relax, and hear his breathing ease into restful slumber.

  It was only as we reached the other side of the lake that I finally realized exactly how dark the city was. There were no streetlights, and the Mini’s headlights stood out wanly at best against the rain that hammered the streets. Ours wasn’t the only car out at this hour, but what few vehicles we passed kept to the same cautious speed Jake did. All that kept the gloom around us from being complete were periodic flashes of lightning, bolts of brightness that turned the sky a disturbing shade of green.

  Carson advised that we go straight back to our place. I didn’t argue, since I wasn’t about to let Christopher out of my sight, and I was desperate for my own Warded walls, my cat, and my bed. We made it back without incident. Jake was first to the front door, and first to intercept the startled Fortissimo, who made a beeline for my feet the instant he heard us come in. After a moment’s hesitation, Elessir followed Jake and silently held the door open for the rest of us. Carson, as the biggest of the boys, helped me get Christopher into the house. Christopher shuffled blindly where we led him and eventually keeled over onto my bed, all without breaking contact with me.

  Out in the living room I heard Jake talking, though I didn’t realize that Millicent must have called again until he came to my bedroom door and held out his phone. “Millie wants to talk to you,” he reported.

  Of the five of us, four must surely have tripped the city Wards the instant we’d come across Lake Washington, so Millicent’s sensing our arrival wasn’t the least bit surprising. “Is the boy in bed yet?” she barked as soon as I took the phone.

  “He’s off his feet,” I confirmed.

  “Keep him there for at least the next eight hours. He’s been pushing the Wards further out from the city’s edge. It’s the damndest thing I ever saw, but he doesn’t know when to stop! He’s going to be useless until he recharges. Sit on him if you have to. Everything else can wait.”

  “Not everything,” I told her. I was conscious of Jake and Carson watching me from the door, and behind them, a grave-eyed shadow, the Unseelie. “It was only an hour or two for Elessir and me. He had to show me how to do a gate so I could get us back, and oh God, I knew I was going to fuck up the timing! But we’ve got a way to take the bone walker out.”

  Millie cackled at that. “Of course you do. Good. We’ll deal with that too.” Then she paused, and added gruffly, “I’m glad you’re alive. You sound all right.”

  Now it was my turn to pause as I fretted over what exactly to tell her—and whether to say it in front of the others. “Guys, do you mind?” I asked them. Jake and Carson exchanged glances and then slipped off down the hall. Elessir, however, lingered at the door. “I had to bargain with Luciriel,” I admitted when my housemates had gone, and then went on to tell her the rest.

  She went quiet on her end of the call. When I’d finished, she let out a gusting breath. “Hellfire and damnation. We’ll deal with this too, later. Right now, stay with Christopher. He’ll sleep better now that you’re back.”

  Her tone was as brisk as ever, but something lurking underneath it, some suspicious flatness perhaps, strongly suggested Christopher wasn’t the only one of Seattle’s Warders who’d been worn out. “Is everyone all right?” I asked. “Are you?”

  “It’ll take a lot more than a dragon to knock me down, honey. And we’re all holding up. I’ll tell everyone you’re back. We’ll all touch bases as soon as the boy’s on his feet again.”

  I watched him as she spoke. He was out cold. While the lines of tension were easing out of his face, he twitched every so often. It took me a moment to figure out why: in a strong and steady current, much stronger than I remembered him having access to before, power coursed up into him from the earth. If he’d managed to make it clear to the other side of Lake Sammamish, how far in other directions had he gone?

  Had he been doing it all on foot? And how hard had he been pushing himself if Seattle and its surrounding townships together had been barely able to sustain him? A crack went straight through my heart at the thought. It didn’t take much to guess what’d driven him to it, if the bone walker in her dragon form was rampaging up and down the coast. That, and looking for me.

  Even as he slept, he clung to the arm I’d laid across his chest. “Yeah, I think he’ll be okay,” I said at last into the phone.

  “Good. How about the other one?”

  Meaning, of course, Elessir. I looked up at the Unseelie, still waiting at my bedroom door. As soon as Christopher was off his feet he’d taken back his jacket and once more swathed the skull in its folds. He held the bundle gingerly now, as if it might dissolve into acid in his grasp, or maybe transform into a cobra. His mouth curled as my eyes met his, clear enough proof that his ears were even better than mine and that he wasn’t bothering to pretend he couldn’t hear both sides of the conversation. “I should take the opportunity to rest,” he said shortly. His gaunt face and shadowed eyes betrayed the unspoken addendum of because I’m still not back to normal after the ghost of my dead wife ate all my magic and I’m standing here holding her skull, but I didn’t press. “And so should you.”

  He was right, of course. It had been late when we’d all gathered in Kobe Terrace Park. From my point of view, it felt like four-thirty in the morning that same night even if a month had passed here in Seattle. Plus, I’d just pulled off the biggest act of magic I’d attempted to date, and despite the replenishing gift of Christopher’s presence, sheer physical reaction to that was hitting me. My head felt heavy and my vision was beginning to fill with random little spangles of light.

  “We both need downtime too,” I told Millicent.

  “Then take it. And get off the phone so you can save its power,” the Warder ordered. “Call me back when you wake up again. I’ll call you only if we need you first.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye. I doggedly kept it together long enough to set the phone within immediate reach of the bed. But once that was accomplished, deciding what to do next seemed suddenly, inordinately hard.

  Elessir came over to me then, setting his denim-wrapped burden down on my dresser en route. The next thing I knew, he was swinging my feet up onto the bed and laying me down to settle in next to Christopher. “Go to sleep,” he bade me. “You’ll be safe here.”

  I wanted to tell him to do the same; I wanted to tell him that it’d be okay, that he really could call me Kendis, that some part of me really did want to hear him say my name. But that too seemed harder than it should. “Don’t go,” I mumbled at him instead.

  The mask of his reserve didn’t fall away, especially as Christopher turned toward me in his sleep and curled an arm around me, pulling me closer to him. But I thought I saw the Unseelie’s gaze soften a little, and I was sure I heard him answer, “I won’t. I promise.” And that was all right, because he was of the Sidhe and the Sidhe held promises as sacred. “And just so you know—to return even close to the proper city within so short a time frame, on your very first gate between Faerie and this realm, is nothing short of phenomenal. You’ve done very well.”

 
“Thank you for helping me come home.”

  “You’re most welcome.”

  His hands pulling a blanket over us, though… I might have dreamed that. Before I could tell for sure, that vanished along with almost everything else beneath a wave of oncoming slumber. Nothing remained but the warm weight of Christopher’s arm, the rhythm of his heartbeat against my ear, and the background hum of his magic doing its level best to give him back his strength.

  Because I had those, nothing else really mattered.

  I closed my eyes, nuzzled deeper into Christopher’s embrace, and let that wave bear me off after him into sleep.

  * * *

  We all met up at my place the following morning. Christopher, Elessir, and I were less worse for wear after rest and showers, but that only freed me up to pay proper attention to what had hit Seattle during my unexpected absence.

  The last storm had hit only two days before. Most of the outlying smaller communities, as well as most of the neighborhoods in Seattle itself except the downtown core, were without power. All of the rivers in the region had flooded, along with many of the lower-lying intersections all over the city. Countless trees had come down, snarling power lines and smashing roofs and cars. Better-prepared citizens had broken out their generators, and the sound of those in action was an audible din up and down almost every residential street.

  Seven people had died, the news reported—either from trees falling on them or from carbon monoxide buildup from the generators inside their houses. Christopher confirmed these deaths with so grim an expression that I knew without asking that he’d taken each death of one of Seattle’s own as a personal affront.

  But my place, at least, was intact. Carson, Jake, Fortissimo, and the brownies were all safe within it, with a generator set up properly outside the house rather than within. The boys commandeered me from Christopher as soon as we got up so they could get in the hugs they hadn’t gotten the night before, and then I was commandeered in turn by the cat. Fortissimo stampeded me to the couch as only a Maine Coon could, climbed straight into my lap, and yowled in warning to anybody who showed the slightest sign of making me move.

  Millicent and my Aunt Aggie arrived not long after that. Aggie, being larger than my cat, dislodged Fort and took her turn to hug me. Both of the older women looked more haggard than they should have done, and Aggie in particular was thinner and more gray-faced than I remembered her being before. She didn’t ask me a single question about my absence, presumably because Millie had filled her in on the way. Once she’d hugged me hard enough, she occupied herself with joining Jake to cook a massive breakfast in my kitchen. I let them feed me, not only because I was ravenous, but also for the sake of giving us all something to do that was more or less normal.

  Everyone’s attitudes towards Elessir, as soon as I reported that he’d taught me how to get us out of Faerie, changed perceptibly. Not through any overt words, mind you, and it wasn’t like anybody showered him in hugs the way they were doing me. But Jake handed him a decent share of the poached eggs and rice he was making, and Carson gave him green tea. Millicent made a point of including him more readily in ongoing conversation. That Christopher wasn’t exactly brimming over with amiability needed no explanation. He had, after all, already admitted to jealousy of the singer, and that’d been before Luciriel had drafted him into the position of my recruitment bait. Yet even given that, at least in a rough sort of way, he did his best to be civil. Even Aggie unbent enough to speak with him—to, like Christopher, thank him for bringing me home.

  Elessir for his part said very little, treating us all with courtesy when he did speak, but otherwise staying as unobtrusive as possible. Once or twice I caught him giving us a strange, wary look, one that made me wonder when he’d last known the company of friends. I didn’t call him on it. It was no more a mystery than Christopher’s awkwardness.

  What was a mystery, though, was the absence of Jude.

  When I asked after her, Millicent told me only that “the girlie’s on her way”, and otherwise clammed up so vociferously that it was plain she was holding something back.

  When she finally arrived at my house—in the company of Melisanda—I got my first inkling of what.

  My friend didn’t look all that different at first glance. She was still short, still compact of frame, still sporting dark brown hair in a spiky butch haircut. But when I looked closer, I saw that she was even leaner of build than she’d been the last time I’d seen her—a fit leanness now, rather than one caused by the bone walker’s assault upon her. Her entire way of carrying herself had changed. Most shocking of all was the sight of her armed, for she, like the Seelie warrior, was carrying a sword.

  I flew to meet Jude at the door on impulse, only to freeze in consternation as I took the impact of her in. Jude closed the distance between us when I did not, and at last I let myself hug her. That too was different. Her arms had brand new definition to them, and when on earth had my best friend gotten biceps? Even her scent had changed, in a way I couldn’t quite quantify. She still smelled like Jude, and human, despite secondhand scents of Sidhe. Beneath all of that, most of all, she smelled somehow… healthier.

  She gave me a small crooked grin as I pulled back to meet her eyes. “What the hell?” I blurted plaintively. This wasn’t the woman I’d left curled and broken in my bedroom only a few hours ago—and yeah, sure, everybody kept telling me I’d been gone a month, but I couldn’t suppress the squeak of dismay in the back of mind that I was just here a minute ago!

  “You haven’t been here, Ken,” she said. “I had to do something. I had to learn how to protect myself. Melisanda’s been helping me out.”

  “She’s proven a most apt pupil these last months,” my Seelie kinswoman agreed.

  Months?

  Plural?

  “Wait,” I began, and then closed my mouth again, because it was painfully obvious just by looking at her. And even if I hadn’t had the evidence of my senses, all of which were informing me that so many changes in my friend could not possibly have happened over a few short weeks, there was also the evidence of my magic. It picked up an echo from her, the same resonance that still hadn’t quite faded from me several hours after the fact of my own arrival.

  “Yes, that means what you think it does, chica,” Jude told me, her crooked grin quirking up a little higher. “You aren’t the only one who’s been to Faerie.”

  Chapter Twenty

  After she dropped that kind of a bomb on me, there was no way I wasn’t going to haul Jude off and pump her for details. Which is exactly what I did—well, for values of ‘haul’ meaning ‘jerking a thumb in the general direction of my bedroom and hoping she’d get the hint’. Given her distinctly altered physique, I had the strong suspicion that this new edition of my best friend wasn’t going to be hauled anywhere she didn’t damn well want to go in the first place.

  Fortunately for my peace of mind, she got the hint. Every other two-legged creature in the house gave us our space, but I let Fortissimo escort us in, since the cat didn’t seem any more inclined than Christopher to let me out of visual if not physical range.

  “Millicent said it was only a couple of hours for you,” she observed as I closed my bedroom door behind us so we could talk in private.

  I sank onto my bed. Christopher and I had made it, and the rest of the room was as spotless as the brownies always left it, which I’d appreciate, much later. Right then, I only noticed that Fort jumped right back into my lap the moment I sat down. My hands started petting him of their own accord. My eyes, though, never strayed from Jude. Over the cat’s deep purring, I answered, “Yeah. How long for you?”

  “Just over a year, last I checked. It’s been tricky to keep track, but the Queen’s been very careful to tune the Gate in the San Juans every time she sends us back. It worked out to about six months a weekend since I didn’t have any vacation time left to blow before Christmas.” Jude’s grin quirked up again, but her eyes were solemn. “Well, before the storm
s hit, anyway. nTrust’s offices shut down when the last one blew in.”

  So she still had her day job. That was one thing that hadn’t changed, one modicum of comfort, which might have been more comforting if I hadn’t promptly wondered whether my former coworkers would even notice the changes in their tester. It wasn’t like they’d clued in about me, even before they’d been made to forget all about me. “And Melisanda’s been teaching you how to use a sword?” Which she’d said already, but I had to say it again apparently, just to get the entire concept to sink in.

  Jude sat down beside me on the bed and joined me in petting the cat. “I asked her just after you disappeared. She decided that if she couldn’t make her amends to the heir of House Kirlath, she’d make them to those the heir cared for. The House backed her up, and I didn’t even have to bargain for it. They did it out of debt to you.”

  I blinked at this, several times, and then hesitantly nodded. “It was a good call,” I said. “If they meant it, the debt’s clear as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Oh good. I figured you’d say as much, but it’s nice to hear you say it.” Her expression gentled a bit, though her eyes remained alert. More alert than I’d ever seen them, in fact. They didn’t have the jewel-bright intensity of the eyes of any of the Sidhe, or even my own. But they were sharper of focus than they’d been before, more like Millicent’s or Christopher’s. “And it’s nice to have you back finally, chica, but goddamn, it really has been only a couple hours for you, hasn’t it? You look so shocked.”

  “Understatement of the year,” I mumbled, my cheeks hot.

  “Are you okay?”

  Was I?