Storm of Reckoning

by Doranna Durgin

  Garrie hadn’t seen this morass on her first visit. She rarely opened herself to such things in the presence of strangers, and looking deeply meant finding quiet within and without. Not always available in a crowd.

  But now that she had, she wasn’t surprised at the ghost’s distress, or her impatience. Her death spot had been persistently, profoundly defiled.

  But that’s not all of it.

  “Bobbie,” she murmured, “why did you stick around in the first place?” Because surely Bobbie had fallen and died years before Feather Middleton had created her cleansing circle. As oblivious as Feather had been to the ethereal breezes, she seemed sincere, and kind enough. Garrie couldn’t imagine her deliberately creating a cleansing circle on the very spot where a young flower child had fallen to her death.

  And that meant the ghost — Bobbie, because they were all Bob the Ghost until she learned otherwise — had been hanging around long before then.

  Drew would have been able to tell her when the woman had fallen. When the inn had been built. When the circle had been formed. All that information at his fingertips — and until recently, therefore at hers.

  Well, fine. She’d do it how she’d always done it. Come morning, she’d find Feather and ask some questions. Because if Bobbie had been here before the inn, then cleaning up this so-called cleansing circle wasn’t going to resolve anything in the long term.

  It didn’t stop her from whispering in a few quiet breezes, clear and gentle, and pushing them across its stains. One breeze after another, each leaving the area just a little bit cleaner, a little bit sweeter. When Garrie finally released a long, slow breath, coming back to herself, a mere smudge remained. She decided to let it settle, and see what was left of it after the next day or two.

  Surely they wouldn’t be here any longer than that.

  Unless, of course, she didn’t get off her reckoner ass and do her aerial sweep.

  She shifted on hard rock, stretching her arms out all the way to her fingers and settling them back into place loosely across her knees, shoving braided leather bracelets back out of the way. She filled her lungs with the scent of hot earth and juniper, looking up to the splash of dramatic stars against a deep sky. Still air left the night open to a plethora of subtle sounds — water trickling in the little garden fountain near the inn, a sporadic but confident mockingbird nearby, the rustle of something in the native flowers near the inn.

  Garrie breathed it in, all of it. Deeply. She grew more solid, more centered — and then she reminded herself, sternly, what had happened on her first, too-casual sweep in San Jose.

  She wouldn’t be that careless again.

  But then she forgot all that, because in that last deep breath she’d discovered...

  Wood smoke and leather.

  Only the faintest hint of it, but Garrie untangled her legs and popped up to her knees, searching the darkness.

  Trevarr, she knew, could see her perfectly. Those eyes didn’t need light.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He said nothing, but she’d expected that. She found him, moving in the darkness, no sooner than he meant her to.

  “Everything okay?” she asked him.

  “Only making certain she was not here.”

  “The ghost, or Feather’s pushy niece?” Garrie’s tone left no question how she felt about the niece. The ghost... okay, she’d brought a giant rock down on their heads. But that was how ghosts were. They sometimes lost track of how such things played out in the corporeal world.

  Caryn had no such excuse.

  “The spirit who gave us this rock. But if you have warning of the other...” The wry tone told her as much as she needed to know about Caryn’s effect on him.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Ghostie radar, yes. Idiot radar, not so much.”

  He held his silence long enough so she thought he’d finished what little he’d had to say. But patience was rewarded; in the opening of her continuing silence, he did eventually ask what he’d evidently come to say. “Are you able to obscure yourself from them?”

  “The ghost,” she asked again, “or Feather’s pushy niece?”

  “Either,” he said, blunt and immediate this time. “Can you keep yourself from them?”

  “Sure,” she said easily. “Can’t do much work that way, so I don’t mess with it unless I really have to. But sometimes it’s best for that first look around.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter, now. Caryn’s stuck on you, and Bobbie Ghost knows I’m here.”

  This time he kept his silence, and she went back to where she’d started. “I was asking about you, by the way. Everything okay with you?”

  And if she’d spoken those words with the last hours in mind, they suddenly included so much more. The last hour, the last day, the last week. All those things they’d had no chance to discuss since his return from Kehar.

  An enthusiastic greeting in the San Jose hotel, yes; a babble of conversation and planning, a crush of logistics, yes. And then a rush to the airport, to the flight that would have taken them home to Albuquerque had not Quinn needed their help here.

  And then there they’d been, jammed into the PT Cruiser rental on the way to Sedona, everyone silent... recovering. Rehydrating. And Garrie, somehow not checking Trevarr’s injuries to see how much scary-fast healing remained. Not touching him, or taking stock of how their differing natures and energies had settled out in one another.

  Not feeling the strength of him beneath her hand.

  He’d moved in closer, barely seen — still taller than she was, even as she knelt on the rock. His low voice startled her, as did the sudden gleam of his eye. “I find it... complicated.”

  She snorted. “I know what that means.” She stuck her hands on her hips. “It’s man code for don’t fill her perky little head with details.”

  “Perky,” he said, thoughtfully, exploring the word in his accented tones. “This might not be the word I had in mind.”

  “Make it good,” she warned him.

  “Fierce,” he said. “Full of—”

  “Hey!” She dared to poke him. “That phrase doesn’t generally end well.”

  “I am uncertain how it ends at all,” he admitted, giving with the poke, not even appearing to notice it. “I think maybe, full of that which I crave across worlds.”

  Oh.

  “Oh,” she said out loud, barely enough breath there to do it.

  When he’d left her in the basement of the Winchester House, sorely wounded and with his people yet to save, she’d done her best not to think about whether he’d return. To be realistic. To understand he had a world, and he had those people, and he had obligations.

  Come to think of it, he still had all those things.

  And yet here he was.

  Right here.

  She closed her eyes, giving way to the rising conflict of energies between them — a connection born in the Winchester Mystery House when he’d saved her life, feeding her his own incompatible energies to do it.

  Those energies still lurked, not so much tamed as intermittently quiescent. Sometimes they just burned along her skin; sometimes they merely scratched to be free. But when Trevarr was near? This near? A cold burn, rising to spark along her ribs and collarbones and twine sweetly in places so privately erotic that she’d never imagined she could be touched there at all.

  She released her breath on a sigh; she opened her eyes to discover he’d reached for her face — his fingers hesitating a hair’s breadth away.

  Slowly, he dropped his hand, never taking his gaze from hers.

  For whatever his energies did to her, she returned to him tenfold. The merest breeze was one thing, just as she’d discovered — but for him, strong gusts were something else altogether. They pained him; they brought out the aspects of his nature he fought so hard to suppress. That which all the people on his world so feared and reviled.

  A turmoil beyond that she could comprehend, even seeing it now reflected on his face.

  “Twice
already today, I’ve hurt you.” She wished she could see him better in the darkness — and she definitely wished her voice didn’t suddenly sound so ragged. “I don’t know how you manage it when our energies get all mixed up inside. There are moments I’m not even sure who I am anymore. What I am.”

  “I know.” Just that and nothing more, two syllables of ragged understanding.

  Moments passed in silence, until he threaded his fingers through the hair that had been tugged into spikes behind her ear. “How it is now,” he said, with an obvious hunt for words in this second language, “is perhaps not how it must always be. Now... we have been hurt.”

  Right. Garrie, blasted from the inside out by the plasmic energies for which she’d been a conduit. And Trevarr, battered and shot and overflowing with the very energies that so distressed him.

  Acknowledgment of those things showed in his gaze — the way it went half-lidded, watching her. Still gleaming. No longer camouflaged as human, but pupils more as a cat’s. Or more as other things altogether. “We are raw,” he told her. “Still healing. Reactive.”

  Reactive. Yeah. You can say that again.

  But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “Are you going to kiss me, or what?”

  Maybe it was more of a demand.

  Features so habitually hard barely flickered toward a smile, the low light painting along strong cheek and jaw and nose.

  She drew a sharp breath when he took a final, abrupt step to reach her. His hands closed on her waist, pulling layered shirts loose of her shorts. The cold burn burst to life beneath his touch, sparking outward from his hands; Garrie made a surprised and completely inarticulate sound. He drew her to him with a startling little jerk, and his breath warmed her lips. “You are mine, now.”

  “I — what?”

  “Whatever comes,” he told her.

  If she’d thought the thing that flared to life between them in San Jose — in the dimensional pocket in which they’d been trapped, in the Keharian shelter he called sanctuary — if she thought that had been a passing thing, worried about it, even...

  Wrong.

  He met her with strong and warm, and Garrie quite suddenly couldn’t feel her feet. She couldn’t feel her knees. She barely felt her hands clutching at him, pushing at his coat and his shirt, hunting toggles and laces and skin. A pure flush of emotion shuddered through her, pushing out a frantic little noise.

  “Sha,” he whispered against her lips, barely interrupting the kiss to do it. “Atreya vo.”

  All the cold sizzle rushed along nerves and bodily meridians, swelling into an uncontrollable rush far too big for her body. She’d stopped kissing him, she realized dimly, which was absurd because at this moment there was hardly anything she wanted to do more — but there went her eyes, rolling back in her head —

  “Atreya,” he said, or maybe not, maybe something else, startled words in a language she didn’t know, strong hands owning her body for the sake of supporting it and here came that sudden cold explosion of power, bursting through a door barely cracked open, and she realized one damned farking instant before it happened that she was going to —

  Dammit!

  Faint.

  Chapter 5

  Much with Sklayne

  “Personalizing your subject can ease the path to solutions.”

  — Rhonda Rose

  “It’s better than Jane Doe, right?”

  — Lisa McGarrity

  Trevarr’s turmoil disrupted Sklayne’s sleep. It came from the place of the fallen rock and its angry spirit and lingering spiritual slights, rising and twining and fluttering like the beat of a heart. It was a thing of heat and spirals and tentative eagerness.

  Sklayne was familiar enough with such turmoil. In such times, Trevarr sometimes found physical release with convenience mates — sensations that oft spilled over to Sklayne.

  Bonded, he and Trevarr were; they knew much of each other, even this.

  But this particular turmoil was a thing apart from those previous sensations. Sweeter. More enticing.

  The turmoil had brought Trevarr back to this world when he needed to be on Kehar. For the first time ever, making decisions not exclusively based on survival.

  Sklayne sent a pointed comment in Trevarr’s direction. ::Tried to warn you.::

  But if Trevarr heard, he wasn’t listening.

  Typical.

  Or maybe not so much, with that turmoil now rising and tasting of Trevarr but not of Trevarr, tasting of that which burned within him but now lacking his lifelong mastery over it. The Garrie.

  “Mow!” Sklayne extruded claws into the thin carpet from every juncture. “M-ma-mow!”

  “As if,” said the unimpressed Lucia person, busy-busy in the room, moving the Quinn person’s thing from this spot to that, leaving a tangled trail of cords no matter where she put them. Neat little contained bricks of power, that’s what they were.

  Sklayne thought he could help things look much neater. Much neater.

  “I heard you burp, too,” she said, and she had the voice. The haughty princess voice. “How rude was that?”

  ::Am bigger than you,:: he thought at her — not that she could hear. ::Bigger than the world.::

  Big enough, inside and out, to emerge proudly from beneath this bed and stalk over to the door and demand that the Lucia person open it, never mind her haughty self. Big enough to expect it as his due, full of all the different powers of his world and her world and others beyond. Big enough to —

  But she just looked at him. Standing. Between the bed and the door. Tall and slender, haughty and self-knowing and full of a look to go along with the voice.

  Sklayne sucked his extra claws back into the cat shape. Maybe he would just leave the haughty alone. Maybe he would...

  Oh yes. He ran for it.

  Straight to the power outlet he went, the Lucia person crying out in surprise — a quick Spanish curse and a gasp as he POOF! let go of cat and became merely Sklayne diving into a power trail. The facility lights flickered, dimmed, and recovered and ::Yesss!::

  Sklayne built speed and sparkle and popped out the nearest exterior outlet — a short transit of much indulgence and sudden glee.

  POOF! back into cat and slap and crash and that little bush had been ugly anyway. And then silence.

  Darkness.

  Tidy cat face, emerging from battered brush. Ears perked, face of innocence.

  Sklayne had been practicing the innocence.

  From here, he could see — so clearly, in a night of many bright stars. From here, he could sense — so clearly, in a night so silent of energies other than these now directly before him.

  So far, Sedona had been all of silence. Not impressive, this place of vortexes and energies.

  Even the sweet turmoil in the background had faded, leaving only the familiar taste of Trevarr. And there, on the big rock, the small person of much power lay slumped against Trevarr.

  He poked Trevarr with a pointed thought. ::Tasteee?::

  Trevarr shot tight censure Sklayne’s way, tinged with snarl and worry.

  Whiskers twitched, fanned wide in thoughtful surprise. There, Trevarr’s hand cradled the Garrie’s head and the other supported her back, wrapping around her shoulder. Careful. There, he murmured regret into an unhearing ear.

  Half-blood Trevarr, man of neither this nor that and now literally living between two worlds. Hunter Trevarr, bringing in bounty for the tribunal lords. Fierce Trevarr, making those tribunal lords fear him with the very breadth of his successes.

  This very same Trevarr, now bent over the small person who had more power than any non-ethereal being Sklayne had ever met.

  More power over Trevarr than any other being, anywhere.

  So odd did it strike him, this tableau, so completely did it capture him, that he lost track of the night, and did not notice the Feather person coming, tiny dog in hand, until she was upon them. Fifteen feet away from the rock and quite obviously able to see, with her feeble human eyes, just a l
ittle too much.

  “Is everything okay here?” she asked, her tone sharp enough to indicate she very much thought not. The little dog yapped a few times, startled itself with its own temerity, and hushed. Sklayne’s tail twitched, rustling dry leaves at the base of the battered bush. Tiny dog, much with the hair, russet and black, round black eyes and dark punctuation of a nose. ::Play with it, or eat it?::

  Neither, Trevarr growled at him.

  Sklayne winced, whiskers prissing, as the Feather person flicked on a flashlight and shone it straight at Trevarr. Ugly bright light.

  Sklayne felt the instant wash of energies that signified camouflage applied — shuttering the glow of rekherra eyes, hiding elongated pupils. The Feather person evidently discerned nothing. But she saw enough of Trevarr’s expression as he turned on her, one hand blocking the light and the other still supporting the Garrie, to take a step back.

  But only that one step.

  Brave or stupid?

  Sklayne settled in to find out. The flashlight played over the Garrie — her hot energies still wavering uncharacteristically as she stirred.

  The Feather person asked, “What’s wrong with her? Have you — ?” Because of course she assumed that Trevarr had done things harmful. People did. Just as the Quinn person blamed him for earlier strife.

  They were not always wrong in this.

  Sklayne felt Trevarr’s inward reaction as true as if it had been his own. All the threat, the growl... the tang of things hidden within, rising.

  Trevarr, not about to let anyone near the Garrie.

  Somewhere, he found restraint. “She did not travel well.”

  A truth, perhaps, if you had in mind the kind of travel that Sklayne and Trevarr knew about, and that this woman would never even imagine.

  The Feather person hesitated. “I’m sure you understand that if one of my guests is ill, it’s my responsibility to get help.”

  “I do not,” Trevarr said. “You know nothing of us.”

  “I do know something, don’t I?” the Feather person returned with some asperity. “I know that my niece was distressed by your influence on this place of peace. And I know how you reacted to her. What you did.”