Robin closed her eyes. She sighed hugely. She flopped back on the bed, arms akimbo, her chest a substantial presence rising from the bedcovers. “Oh,” she said, driven by an unvoiced aurgh, “just shoot me now.”
“I think,” Lucia said, quite sensibly, “it would just be better if you quit poking us.”
Quinn raised his hand. “All in favor!”
“Aye!” Garrie said, raising both hers.
Lucia added a silent third. She gave Trevarr a meaningful look. A prod. With a baffled frown, he took one hand off the chair and slowly raised it, holding it there.
Garrie covered a smile. She composed herself to a stern expression and cleared her throat. “So we have a plan — mostly to do with tomorrow. Huntington may try a preemptive strike with his new entropy toy, supposing he survives the night with it. Robin wants to go home tomorrow morning, but then she can meet Lucia in town, and together they can warn the most likely targets. Quinn, I’d like you to monitor things as best you can. I’ll check in with the ghost activity and then do a little recon, see if I can pin things down that way — like the entropy toy’s location. Then Trevarr and I will go deal with the thing. And then —” she looked at Robin. “Who knows. Huntington might not even have any starch left by then, between handling the lerkhet and losing it.”
But Lucia was frowning, and her quiet hands had folded together, knuckle-white. “The recon thing?” she said. “In these circumstances? Is that... safe?”
Garrie laughed. Huntington’s toxic waste oozing around, a lerkhet gone rogue and wild, and Kehar sweeping through to bring the dragon boiling up. “Hell, no, it’s not safe.”
Farking bloody hell, no.
~~~~~
Lucia stared at the ceiling, and sleep mocked her. Pale outdoor lighting filtered through the curtains and painted the room in soft moon grays and black shadows, illuminating her state of sleeplessness.
Not that she had any trouble sharing a bed with Garrie. They did it often enough, for this reason or that, and in tighter circumstances to boot. One-nighters in Clovis or Alamogordo or Santa Fe, where those artsy Santa Fe ghosts like to make a production of everything. Garrie might have lost her financially sensible parents in a car accident in her teens, but she’d still been under the guidance of her aunt... and the utterly frugal Rhonda Rose.
So they’d for certain done their time sharing hotel beds. And Garrie, wiry and vibrating with energy when awake, was nothing more than a slender bit of a thing asleep — or pretending to be asleep, quiet and still. Lucia’s long legs took up more room than she did. So Garrie lay beside her with a pillow over her head — she always seemed to end up that way — and Lucia lay stretched out on her back.
Staring at the ceiling.
Unable to blame it on a restless friend, or even snoring. And Robin had cried herself to sleep in the short couch over an hour earlier.
It’s a good plan.
It was too sensible, that was the problem. La, la, la, head out to town and play Paul Revere with anyone Robin thought might need warning.
Robin was clearly sensitive to some things, yet blind to others. She’d noticed nothing of Sklayne; nothing of her ghosts. But the energies stirred up by Huntington — she’d most certainly felt those. And whatever the lerkhet had done — she’d clearly felt that, too.
At this point, Quinn’s parajito no doubt hardly knew which end was up. She’d expected Quinn; she’d gotten the team. She’d expected to take point on mundane investigation; she’d gotten intractable, independent reckoners, headed by Garrie — still glittering from her run in with the Krevata portal, bursting at the seams with skill and power. Younger than Robin by at least five years — for if Lucia didn’t miss her bet, Robin had a couple of years on Quinn, and Quinn had a couple of years on Garrie.
Lucia could almost feel sorry for her.
But not quite.
She sighed.
Tomorrow will be fine. She stopped her spinning thoughts, pinned them in place. We have a plan. We have a good team. We have a decent idea of what’s going on and we know who has to be stopped. And if she was utterly surrounded by fresh, strong spiritual angst as she had been all this evening — disturbed ghosts everywhere, leaving her at peace only when Garrie returned to create subtle boundaries — well, that’s what Lucia was here for, wasn’t it? To judge what was happening through what she felt?
This work is how I make peace with what I am.
The air conditioning kicked on and off and on, a shift of motor noise beneath the circulating fan. Garrie sighed softly — not asleep after all, and no big surprise in the wake of a day of conflicting energies and no chance to pound them out on a treadmill or pool laps or any of the myriad ways she managed such things. But Lucia couldn’t fix that; Lucia could only manage her own needs.
This work is how I make peace with what I am.
She felt the words sinking in... finally felt herself relaxing. Dozing. Rolling over. Heading for sleep.
And then suddenly she wasn’t.
She didn’t move; she only slowly cracked her eyes open. Something had woken her, and that was never good — until she realized quite suddenly that the something was Garrie herself. That she no longer pretended to be asleep, but sighed with a kind of relief Lucia wasn’t sure she’d heard before.
That’s when Lucia knew. She hadn’t seen him yet, but she knew.
Trevarr was here.
Garrie pushed the pillow from her head and slipped from beneath the covers, clad in a girl-next-door cotton cami and boy shorts set that Lucia had foisted on in her during their final days in San Jose. She reached for the sleeveless hoodie hanging from their rustic headboard and shrugged it over that revealing nightwear as she stood. Ah, yes. There he was, then, clearly silhouetted against the window. How the hell tall was he, anyway? Enough to be thoroughly imposing. Garrie’s head came right about to his heart.
Well. Where Lucia thought his heart might be. But she was done making assumptions.
Garrie went to him without hesitation; he greeted her silently. And that, suddenly, was when Lucia knew. That was when she saw it.
That everything was changed.
This was not her friend flirting with the dark side of the Force for the rush of it. This was not Lisa McGarrity tired of her scattered, sporadic dating pattern and lured by the not-safe into a fling, wise or not.
No. This was Garrie giving everything and leaving herself wide open for heartbreak.
Because here, watching, silent in the darkness, she saw it reflected in Trevarr.
Everything. Changed.
She realized it with a flutter of fear. Because she needed this team. She needed the reckoning. And if it seldom paid well these days, Garrie had nonetheless turned it into a business — one driven by referrals and a portfolio of successes spanning more than half her life.
Not that the money mattered to Lucia. Not with trust funds, her own suite of rooms in a house large enough to hold them, a private entrance that kept her independent from Mami and Papi.
No, it wasn’t about the money at all.
So, yes. Fear. Because Lucia needed.
He raised his hand to touch the side of Garrie’s face. She tipped her head up to receive it, and when Trevarr bent to her, Lucia thought close your eyes but didn’t. And so she saw that Trevarr kissed Garrie’s brow, and she saw the hesitation before he gently kissed her mouth — a statement more of tenderness than passion.
Dammit. Fear made room for a little kick in her gut. If she normally protected herself from the world, and if she generally found herself more vulnerable to lingering emotional imprints than live emotions, she nonetheless had enough connection with her friend to feel something sweet and deep.
Oh, damn.
Don’t you dare hurt her, Mr. Not-Safe.
Not because you have your own agenda. Not because you can’t control whatever it is you’re into. And not because you forget that this one isn’t just another conquest. For if they hadn’t been together yet — of which Lucia w
as certain — then she also guessed it wouldn’t be long. That, too, was revealed in the deep and sweet.
She lost track of them for a moment — until the door opened, just enough to let Garrie pass, and then wider to let Trevarr through — closing again, without a sound. The old-fashioned porch swing wasn’t nearly as quiet as they settled into it. But then, silence.
She couldn’t help it. She slid from the bed, found her soft bunny flip-flop slippers with her toes, and eased over to the window.
Right. Who needed a hotel room when you had the canyonlands moon overhead? Who needed a blanket, when you had Trevarr and that coat? And Garrie, unlikely to sleep after a day full of so much energy no matter how tired, once again appeared well on the way to doing just that. Trevarr stroked her shoulder; he rested his chin against her hair.
Just maybe, she thought, he would sleep, too.
Chapter 16
Ghosts at the Journey
“Spirits in need have a unique perspective.”
— Rhonda Rose
“Me, me, me!”
— every ghost, ever
Garrie opened her eyes to the bare hint of dawn — coral and pale turquoise spread along the eastern horizon.
Whoa. Outdoors dawn. Birds singing, air kissed with dampness, and the scents of the day — pine and juniper and cedar — warming around her. Her legs were chilly, while the rest of her hummed with warmth.
A loud purr vibrated through the air, tickling the bottoms of her feet.
“How is it,” she said to the warmth that was Trevarr, “that I can sleep when I’m with you?” In San Jose. Here. No dreams, no jarring surges of unsettled energies.
He shifted slightly behind her. “Some things simply are.”
::He doesn’t know,:: Sklayne informed her, and smug at that. And then he purred ever more loudly, overriding anything Trevarr might have said in response.
“Don’t you?” Garrie asked Trevarr.
“Should I?”
“You’re the one who travels worlds. I’m the one who only recently learned there are worlds for traveling.” She stretched her toes, and realized then that she hummed with more than warmth. That the toll for sleep had been a slow and subtle build of the wild pressure from within her, seeping into her every personal nook and cranny. Persistent, unrelenting... hunting release.
He shifted beneath her again — his arm over her shoulders, his chest beneath her face, lean stomach beneath her hand where her fingers had slipped inside his belt —
“Oh,” she said, pulling her hand back a few inches. “Sorry.”
He made a noise that sounded a little like can’t talk just now, and for those moments they simply breathed in the dawn together — if somewhat unevenly. Until he took one final deep breath, and said wryly, “Traveling worlds means nothing when it comes to the nuances of being with you, atreya.”
“Hmph.” She tucked her light sleeveless hoodie around the snug little camisole Lucia had foisted upon her in San Jose, and looked into his face. “I’m not sure if that’s the best compliment eveh, or just plain rude.”
::You choose,:: Sklayne suggested, and, “Mow!” when her foot happened to twitch just so, nudging him off the bench.
She, too, sat up. “I hate to wake Lucia... I might as well check on our ghosties before I go back inside.”
Morning bladder might have something to say about that. But she’d see.
Trevarr stood, shedding his coat — draping it over her even as he drew Lukkas from one of those impossible pockets. He propped the sword briefly against the bench rocker to tug his shirt free, loosening the laces with a practiced hand and pulling it over his head.
Garrie resisted the urge to trace her fingers over the faint brush marks that weren’t the old tattoos she’d at first thought — the feathery scales barely visible along the backs of his arms and fanning out over his ribs, growing darker along his forearms, darker where the pattern converged toward his spine at his belt line... ever, ever so faint along the sides of his neck. He put a hand against the porch overhang and stretched against it, a ritualistic motion. Muscle and bone rippled beneath skin.
“Oh,” Garrie said, swallowing hard. “Right. Don’t mind me. I’ll just concentrate on ghosts with no trouble at all. Really. No problem.”
He straightened; he looked over at her with slightly narrowed eyes. “This is something we will deal with together,” he told her. “Soon.”
“And do you really think that’s going to help?”
Something like amusement eased his expression — something fervent in there, too. “I hope.”
And he leaned against the post again, but in that startling instant, all the taut strength seemed drained from him. He wasn’t stretched so much as he was farking being held up.
Garrie dropped one foot to the ground, ready to rise and help. But a red-buff paw landed on her leg — good God, there was a thumb — and claws extruded, ever so gently. Stopping her.
“What?” she would have demanded, had not those claws pushed just a smidgen harder, rich green eyes catching her attention. Something whirled behind the pupils, something not merely a cat’s eye at all.
Sklayne’s words came to her mind tight and precise and strained — only between the two of them, she realized, and not an easy thing, to shut Trevarr out. ::The food,:: he said. His ears swiveled — perfectly normal cat ears this morning. ::We must make this better. Soon.::
She couldn’t begin to respond. For she’d seen Trevarr hurt and agonized and wounded unto death; she’d seen him poisoned and stabbed and shot, surviving through determination and through Sklayne’s gifts and through his own obviously preternatural ability to heal.
But she’d never seem him simply falter.
He straightened abruptly, glancing her way — his expression hard, the sharp edges fully back in place. Covering. Or trying to. And checking to see just how much she’d seen.
Nothing. As far as he was concerned, nothing at all.
“Seriously,” she said, wearing her oblivious face — Valley Girl Reckoner, on-demand — and if she almost choked on the word and its blithe nature, she didn’t let it show; she somehow rediscovered her sardonic tone. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just do my ghostie thing. No problem.”
No problem at all.
~~~~~
The ghostie thing didn’t go so well.
Or maybe it went too well altogether.
“Find me,” Jim Bob Dandy implored her as soon as she went looking, all garbled words with echoing vowels and bouncing consonants. “They took me.”
Okay, nothing new there.
Unless Garrie counted the new stutter in the tumbling gusts of energy that formed his representation, guttering like a drowning candle.
“This is my place,” murmured the flower child, visible only in her upper body and the outrageous bell bottoms — and only when Garrie walked out from beneath the short cabin porch overhang to find her perched above. She clasped her arms around invisible knees and rocked back and forth, but her voice remained only a whisper, nothing of the clarity and strength it had carried the first time Garrie saw her. “Someone needs to know.”
“Me,” said another ghost, clustering in close — and if she’d seen it here before, she couldn’t identify it. A small entity, probably a child.
“Me!” insisted yet another, giving the impression that it shouted — that it shoved the others aside and jostled for the head of the line. But in truth, it was a voice so low that Garrie barely heard it. And it was one of many, all clamoring — or trying to clamor — for attention, all without managing to say what it was that they needed at all.
Trevarr worked his sword forms off to the side, the blade slicing air — singing more loudly than the faded, frantic ghosts. Fast, accurate, deadly... precision and strength once more on the prowl.
Yet if Garrie saw anything in this strange, muted clamor of ghosts around her and Trevarr’s particular form of masculine beauty in motion before her, it was that moment when all his intensiti
es had drained away and left him leaning against a porch post. If she felt anything, it was that flutter of panic the sight had inspired. Focus, mighty reckoner. Focus.
::Focus,:: Sklayne agreed.
“Thieves!” Bobbie Ghost spat without warning, louder than the rest. This was her death spot, her anchor. The others had, astonishingly, left their anchors to come here. To find Garrie.
To demand that she fix Sedona.
Damn. She wasn’t used to them in herds. Even Winchester House hadn’t been like this. There, they had been trapped. Preyed upon. Desperate to get away.
“You know,” she told them all, “it would help if you helped. How about a nice sparkling trail of obvious to the guy who’s causing all the trouble? How about a hint or two? You can all be pretty effective if — oh.”
For here came Feather and her little Yorkie dog. On its own feet this time, bouncing along as though gravity barely managed to keep its tiny form contained. “Good morn—”
She stopped short, caught flat-footed by them both — Garrie in her scrap of boy shorts and the open hoodie over the camisole, Trevarr shirtless and, oh, yeah. Swinging a sword.
“Yap!” said the dog, stiff-legged and fierce. It bounced a half-circle around Trevarr, yapyapyap, no apparent bend in its legs at all. Just bounce. “Yap!”
::For-rr meee?:: Sklayne purred from the bench seat, no thumbs in evidence and eyes all slitted satisfaction. Garrie’s admonishing glance was enough to redirect the dog’s attention, and it bounced off to challenge Sklayne.
::Ohhh yess.::
“No,” Trevarr said, voice of law. “You will not.”
“I—” Feather recoiled, startled. “I beg your pardon?”
Garrie quickly stepped between them, closing her ears to the clamoring ghosts at the same time she drew her hoodie around her and still felt not nearly dressed enough. “Sorry. We really didn’t think anyone else would be up this early. But, you know, since you’re here? Caryn said she thought you’d learned about the young woman who died here?”
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