Yeah. Chocolate muffins.
He slipped out of the wellspring, over the cliffs... circled the troll-like canyon formations sitting along the opposite ridge. Garrie followed him with eyes closed and senses extended, and if she looked like something out of a bad séance, one hand was extended as a physical reflection of her energy manipulations, then she could live with that.
Right on cue, Robin muttered, “This looks like something out of a bad Saturday night movie.”
Okay, that hurt.
But it didn’t matter, because here came Bob, easing closer. Wary. All the turbulence he’d created now combined to make of him a solid little package — a reflective manifestation, rather than a representative one, crystal clear to Garrie’s ethereal eye, invisible to the others.
“Gonnne,” the ghost said, most mournfully, drawing out the word on the nasal consonant. His manifestation burbled slightly. “Taken!”
“I’ll try to help,” Garrie reassured him. “But I need to understand.” She fed him another little sip of a chocolate muffin breeze.
::Good,:: Sklayne said, offering sarcasm. ::Make it strong again. Then mad. Then o happy mess and I will snack on —::
Ghost poop, Garrie finished for him. But making him mad again isn’t the plan.
A nose could only deal with so much stink in one day.
All the same, it was a fine line. But Garrie’s ethereal gifts weren’t intended to strengthen the ghost. They were for the sake of the offering. The reassurance. It wasn’t this spirit’s fault that he’d been handled so badly from the beginning.
“Will you talk to me?” she asked him, ignoring the faint exhalation behind her that might have been a suppressed snort. She didn’t have to vocalize — as with Sklayne, she could focus in on her thoughts, project them. But for Lucia’s sake, for Quinn’s sake — and until recently, for Drew’s sake — she’d gotten in the habit of working out loud.
Robin wouldn’t change that.
New Ghost Bob moved closer, his energies a little more buoyant. Assent enough. He’d talk, in his own way.
Garrie asked, “Have you been waiting long?”
clap of thunderous sound universe wheeling around her chanting in the dark red and black Rorschach gore blown away by the wind oof — !
Garrie landed on her ass, rocky ground coming up to meet her, hello ow!
“What the hell?” Robin said from behind, the scowl clear in her voice.
Lucia’s cry of dismay overrode the question as she swooped down to put a hand on Garrie’s shoulder. “Chicalet, are you all right?”
“Fine,” Garrie said, still gasping as the scene resolved back to normal old sight around her. “Aside from my bony butt.” She caught sight of Trevarr, crouched off to the side and still, and lifted her chin. No, seriously. Fine. He tipped his head in response, and went back to his examination of the area that had caught his attention.
Quinn extended a hand and Garrie took it, letting him pull her back up as he asked. “Cranky?”
“No,” she said, mulling it over. “No, I don’t think so. Just trying to answer my question, no volume control. He’s fresh, Quinn.”
“Good, then maybe he saw—”
“No,” she interrupted, letting the horror of it tinge her voice. “He’s really, really fresh.”
“Oh my God,” Lucia said, understanding first. “Last night — ?”
Garrie winced, knowing the truth of it. “Let me see if I can get anything else from him. He’s struggling.”
She dusted herself off and stepped forward again, Robin said, “What does she mean, last night? Surely you don’t think—”
“Not now,” Quinn told her, not unkindly, brushing Garrie’s shoulder clean in a wholly unnecessary gesture that she took, with a glance of surprise, for what it was. Support.
They were rattled, her little team. But they were doing their best.
She took a deep breath, pushed away all the myriad breezes so persistently bombarding her, and returned to their ghost. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Nothing personal.” She waited for him to shift closer again, pushing him the faintest of breezes as reward. “Can you tell me your name?”
He hesitated, and she found herself breathing shallowly, leaning toward him... concerned she might miss it. Or that he wouldn’t answer at all. Not all ghosts had enough sense of themselves to say who they’d been. Not all knew what they needed to find their peace.
She’d just about lost hope when he managed to intone, “Daaaaandy.”
Ohh-kay then. No name. “Did it happen here?” she asked him, bracing herself this time. And good thing, for new Ghost Bob flung rapid-fire images her way — all the same image, a grouping of rocks and brush and a glimpse of sky, strobing positive negative positive negative positive gah! Garrie flung up a hand, interrupting with a pinging breeze. “Got it,” she said, wincing again. “Seriously. Got it.”
“Takennn,” he told her, tying himself into sudden dark knots of wind. “Gonnne.”
“Is that what you need?” she asked, sudden inspiration — even if she didn’t actually know what he meant. “Is that what would help you?”
He flashed bright, bright, brighter, a whirling miniature maelstrom, tightening down on the knots of wind so tight and tortured —
He collapsed in on himself and disappeared.
Garrie blinked at the spot where he’d been, her inner vision gone flash-bulb blind. “I hate when they do that.”
Lucia reached out to steady her. “What happened? Did he say?”
“Something to do with being taken. Or gone. It’s a starting place.”
Robin frowned. “What’s this got to do with Huntington’s Sin Nombres?”
“Well,” Garrie said, “Either not everything’s about you, or we’ll find out later.” She blinked her eyes clear, scruffed her hands through her hair, and shook out some of the residual influence of the ghost, energies tingling along just under her skin. Then, ignoring Robin’s skeptical reaction — fark, she thinks I’m staging — she turned to her awareness of Trevarr.
He stood not examining, not searching, but waiting.
Framed by rocks that strobed stark significance in her mind’s eye.
Ignoring Lucia, who’d reached out to her — ignoring Quinn, who’d said something — she eased to the side, head cocked... trancelike in movement. Moving, step by step, to match what she saw outside with what she saw inside.
And then it did. She blinked, came back to herself, and found Lucia and Quinn on her heels, Robin hanging back, and Trevarr, close enough to feel the warmth of him. He stood quietly, watching intently — understanding, as none of the others yet did.
Because he already knew. He’d already found it.
“Death happened here,” he told them, looking past her.
“Dandy,” Garrie said, nonsensically enough. Not that Quinn and Lucia weren’t used to it — but Robin was the one who reacted.
“Jim?” she said. “Jim Dandy? That’s not his real name, of course, but—” she stopped short. “Oh my God. Here?” She abruptly pushed her way to the front, looking down on the tufty dried grass and rocks and red gritty ground.
Garrie hadn’t looked down, not yet — she hadn’t needed to. She’d been full of the moment, the flush of sorrowing truth, absorbing what she’d felt from the ghost and integrating it into the reality around her.
Now, she looked.
She saw little. A vague jumble of smaller rocks in an area cleared of those larger; disturbed ground and crushed grass.
Robin saw no more, apparently. “I don’t understand the significa—”
“The blood comes from one of yours,” Trevarr said.
“The blood comes from — what blood? Of mine?” Robin frowned, both at the ground and at Trevarr, which was perhaps the boldest thing she’d done thus far.
“Human, he means,” Garrie said, knowing she hadn’t cleared things up one whit and not at this point caring.
But Quinn had circled around, and his mouth
tightened down. “I missed this,” he said. “I was here, and I knew it had been disturbed, but... I missed it.”
“The rocks were a circle.” Trevarr crouched, tracing a broad circle a foot above the ground. “But for this.” He picked up a chunky rock, hefting it slightly — careful to present the side with the rusty brown stain. “This rock was a weapon.”
“How—” Robin started, but cut herself off, her eyes a little wild and her expression grown wary.
Finally, she had it figured out. Finally, she saw it.
If she asked questions of these particular reckoners, she was going to get answers.
Chapter 11
Escape to Pizza
“Ethereal etiquette is paramount.”
— Rhonda Rose
“Sorry about the ethereal head-butt.”
— Lisa McGarrity
Feed me.
— Bob the Dog
“I changed my mind,” Robin said stiffly, already taking a step toward the arch trail. Clearly, no more questions or answers for her. “Let’s go. We need to call the cops.”
“No body,” Quinn murmured. And then, a moment later in consternation, “No blood.”
::Tasting,:: Sklayne said. ::Learning. Cleaning. For you.::
Garrie cleared her throat without much true dismay; she knew just exactly how it generally went when the mundane police tried to deal with ethereal issues.
This wasn’t Robin’s game any longer, anyway. This was Garrie on the trail of deeper rights and wrongs, while Quinn avidly, grimly watched Trevarr turn up traces from the previous night.
And what Garrie discovered more than anything was ongoing silence. Not the quiet susurrus of the world breathing, but spots of absence. Dead, dull places where her presence fell leaden and silent.
What the hell were these people playing at? Did they even know their impact on an ethereal ecosystem they likely couldn’t even fully perceive? And if they were deliberately pulling out the land’s specific regional energies, what were they doing with them?
Garrie had plenty of time to think about the matter on the silent hike back through Sterling Pass. The others kept their grim silence, catching their balance and gathering the smudges and smears of leaning against sandstone and grabbing for handholds.
True to form, Lucia made it through the whole hike with nothing more than a deep smirch of red dirt on one hip — a mark that spoke of her time sitting alone out by Vultee Arch, and a mark about which Garrie had no intention of telling her.
If she could convince Sklayne to do a kindness, perhaps he would take care of it.
Garrie had, in the past day or so, put enough pieces together to realize that this was just exactly how Trevarr traveled so lightly, and yet never seemed short of clean clothes. And how her own nightshirt had shown up remarkably fresh in San Jose, smelling faintly of scents Garrie now recognized as coming from Kehar.
Sklayne. So much more than the cat he pretended to be.
As Lucia moved with deliberate care on the hard trail, Quinn fell behind to walk with Robin, whose sturdy reserves seemed to have failed her. Her face was flushed and her steps overly careful as they descended back toward Oak Creek. She kept her silence — and she seemed to understand that Quinn’s grim support came only because he wouldn’t simply leave her hanging.
As the rest of the crew hesitated before the final steep descent, Garrie started right down ahead, locating Trevarr at her flank and obscured in the shadows he found so readily, relaxed and easy.
But she wondered if he, too, was thinking about those power surges near the arch, knowing they had come from the world he’d left behind. Or if he, too, was thinking about the Krevata who had almost destroyed San Jose and the world with it. Greedy for power and unheeding of the consequences, their mind set had not been so very different than these unknown Sedona practitioners that Robin called the Sin Nombres.
Of course, she wasn’t sure if she was any better than any of them. Given that she still had several of the Krevata storage ovals. They were terrifying things of bright rainbow stone that wasn’t stone, segmented by metal lacing that for all she knew wasn’t metal. And they were crammed with the energy the Krevata had hoarded away before she and Trevarr had stopped them.
Surely these people had nothing like that. Surely.
“Don’t tell me it’s all about the sex,” she said, a lot more out loud than she’d meant to.
If humor lurked briefly in Trevarr’s features, it didn’t linger. “At first, perhaps. No more.”
Truth be told, they’d left the arch with too many questions unanswered. But they’d run out of privacy and they’d run out of time — and they’d run low on water, with Trevarr the only one not feeling the heat.
He eased past her on the trail — or would have, if she hadn’t slipped a hand around his arm. “About back there—”
He knew damned farking well she didn’t mean the ghost poop or his preternatural tracking display. That he, like she, still inwardly frowned over the Keharian energy surges.
That he, unlike she, had a damned farking good idea of where they’d come from.
He tipped his head down to consider her; tension hardened the muscle beneath her hand. “Sklayne is watching for more such.”
And then the others caught up, and the tiny pull-over parking nudged into the non-existent road shoulder popped up at the bottom of the trail, and somehow Robin was pulling out her phone and ordering a variety of pizzas. She gave Garrie a skeptical look when informed that an additional large would be a good idea, but she nonetheless ordered it.
They drove past the inn to pick up the pizzas, and then doubled back to descend upon their rooms. Lucia all but dove into the girls’ bathroom, emerging moments later with hair loose and shiny, face freshly washed and apparently free of make-up. Garrie went in to scrub a washcloth over her face, arms and legs, and found just what she’d expected — an explosion of product, makeup everywhere, and her own toiletry kit buried.
Not that it mattered. She’d never gotten that soap. And she really didn’t want Lucia poking around in the Crystal Winds gift bag she’d taken — there where several ethereal energy storage stones of otherworldly origins now hummed softly beside touristy geodes and crystals.
The extraordinary, hidden in the mundane. Shoot, hidden in pure kitsch. Even if the geodes were pretty.
She wiped down the dust of the day and immediately felt better for it, pushing the sheathed knife into her cargo pants before she emerged to gather up their various travel mugs. She stuck her head in Quinn’s room, where the pizza — and everyone else — had landed.
Quintessential Quinn’s room. Research tools both electronic and hardcopy, with notebooks and papers and accordion folders, chargers and AC bricks.
As with the hotel in San Jose, very little sign of Trevarr.
She held up the mugs — size huge, readily available in the desert clime. “I’m going to find the ice machine. I think it’s near the office.” Another of the small buildings, paired with the modest workout center and a massage and treatment room. Enhancement activity room, Feather had called it.
Quinn raised a hand of acknowledgment, his mouth already full, as Lucia nibbled the pointy end of a thin slice. For the moment, Robin simply sat, looking weary and wary.
Trevarr eyed the pizza, unconvinced. “Eat it,” Garrie told him, and pulled out the Keharian knife to cut a corner off one slice — right through the pizza, the box, and into the wood of the dresser. Oops. Time to pretend that hadn’t happened. She put the crusty bit in her mouth and pointed at the rest. “Cheese, bread, various meats. Sauce. Good stuff.”
A sly paw hooked around the top of the end table, catching at the corner of the open box; she pointed a finger at it. “Haven’t you had enough to eat today?”
::Never.::
She supposed that was the truth.
Robin only narrowed her eyes. Trevarr’s accent, as exotically ticklish to the ears as it was, was far from enough explanation for a man who had not seen
pizza.
Well, screw it. She didn’t owe Robin any explanations. “Back in a mo.”
She left the door ajar behind her, the knife sitting out for anyone who was brave enough to use it, and trod the manicured path to the office cabin. The squat ice machine sat on the north side, protected from the elements by a little painted plywood shelter. If she’d been just a little bit taller, she’d have been able to set the mugs on top of it. Instead she jammed one under her arm and the other between her knees while she filled the third.
An unintelligible exclamation sounded behind her, and Feather’s niece Caryn came rushing up to help.
“Let me hold those for you,” she said, not waiting for a response before she pried loose the one clamped in at Garrie’s side. “Have you enjoyed Sedona today?”
So that’s the way they were going to play it. As if Caryn hadn’t trespassed all over Trevarr the previous day. And Garrie supposed that Feather hadn’t said a thing to her niece about the night before. Nothing about she sees dead people, nothing about fainting or altitude sickness.
At least, not yet.
“It’s been intense,” she told Caryn, quite truthfully. “We saw Vultee Arch. Maybe tomorrow I’ll look for vortexes.”
Caryn brightened. “They’re everywhere, you know — not just the four main vortexes. There are some small ones right on this property. I can grab a special Inn map for you, but basically, anywhere you see the junipers twisted up tight, or—”
Garrie bit her lip on a smile. “No, thank you. I won’t have any trouble finding them.”
“Oh,” said Caryn in a small voice. Disappointed that she couldn’t dispense her wisdom.
Garrie thought again of Caryn’s self-appointed healing duties and her very real ability to move energy, even if she did it with all the finesse of a jeweler wearing oven mitts. After all, she didn’t know that. And just as importantly, probably no one else around here did, either. Garrie clutched at the now overflowing ice mugs and guessed, “You must have quite the reputation around here.”
Okay. Not smooth. But it got Caryn’s surprised attention. “Because of what I did yesterday? That was nothing, really...”
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