Nevahn didn’t watch her leave any more than he’d turned to greet her. But he closed his eyes and sent out into the tides the most fervent hope that Trevarr would never return.
Chapter 18
Sin Nombres Gone Wild
“The human element remains unpredictable.”
— Rhonda Rose
“I do ghosts, not assholes.”
— Lisa McGarrity
It was a people thing, talking. Sklayne wanted to act.
He wanted to hunt the dry prickly desert, leaving not even bones behind; he wanted to taste the sharp shards of existence here. To shed the cat form and sizzle along the terrain, moving faster than the Garrie’s people could even imagine, and then leaping the power lines to surf the miles.
Oh, wait.
Yesterday.
He had done that yesterday.
He wanted to do it again.
Not the talk, talk, talk. Why not let him return to Kehar, then, and search for the pungent leaves that would help Trevarr? That would be doing. It would be fixing.
And no more sitting here on this strange world. No more feeling grayness crawl in along the edges of Trevarr.
::Tre-eyy,:: he said, his best wheedling voice.
But the Quinn person was still talking, even as he pulled car keys from his pocket. He jerked his chin in Trevarr’s direction. “So Lu and I are going to the shop, and Garrie is staying here to check things out in Garrie View. What about him? Maybe he should hunt that damned lerkhet.”
::Stays,:: Sklayne said, as decisively as if he was the one with the last word.
Trevarr said, “I stay. She is vulnerable when she searches in this way.”
The Quinn person looked both resistant and relieved at the same time — glad to have someone watching the Garrie, unhappy that it would be Trevarr.
Sklayne narrowed his feline eyes. ::Cannot both stay and go.::
“He’s right,” the Lucia person said. “She doesn’t have the faintest idea what’s going on in the real world when she’s out there in Garrie View.”
And if Sklayne knew that the true threat didn’t reside in this world, he kept it to himself. The Lucia person couldn’t hear him, and the Lucia person knew nothing of Kehar’s hunt, and nothing of the Garrie’s struggle these past days.
But the Garrie looked at her feet, and then at her hands, fingers twined and twisting at the level of her flat little stomach.
The Garrie knew. Something of both, whatever she told herself.
Kehar’s searching energies had become evident, even if the Garrie knew not why. And the Garrie had become unpredictable.
Ever since Trevarr had pushed energy into her at the Winchester House. Since she’d channeled enough plasmic portal energy to save a world.
This world.
And Sklayne’s own, if it came to that. Which it would have, eventually.
The Quinn person tossed the keys up, snatched them out of the air. “Okay, Trevarr stays. Let’s go then — because if those bastards have Robin, they’re in way over their heads.”
Sklayne wondered what bastard tasted like.
~~~~~
The rest of the team departed, leaving Garrie and Trevarr to their work. Garrie pulled the pillows off Lucia’s side of the bed and added them to her own, piling them up to create her own little soft throne.
“I can do this,” she said, and heard the worry in her own voice. She stopped, took a breath, and found better grit. “I. Can. Do. This.”
Trevarr stood in the open doorway — soaking up heat before the door closed on artificial coolness, keeping an eye on the other cabins as the guests stirred and emerged and started their own days. No particular concern, she thought. Simply a caution driven by a lifetime of need for it.
She could see him, suddenly, in this same posture, in some other doorway on another world — a child, skinny and bruised and hardly assured of survival, ever watchful of those around him. Mixed blood, he’d told her, seldom survives on Kehar.
And she was worried about a little area-wide sweep? Just because it wasn’t the same old comfortable routine, the same old comfortable her?
Yeah. She could do this.
She spread a towel on the bed so she wouldn’t have to unlace her hiking sneaks, sitting cross-legged against the pillows and taking the moment to shake out her arms and relax. Eyes closed. La la la. Reaching for that other plane of awareness, the one so familiar to her.
Instead she heard the ticking of the air conditioner, a car motor starting in the distant parking lot, the arrogantly persistent song of a mockingbird in the tall ash beside the cabin. Outside light fell on her eyelids, dimming somewhat as Trevarr finally closed the door. She inhaled the faint scent of him, and the scent of leather from his duster at the headboard.
Not to mention the remnants from the cinnamon bun she and Lucia had split at breakfast.
Hmm. Still here in the now. Not the Garrie View.
Maybe she sighed. Maybe she shifted. Maybe she didn’t make any sign of it at all, but still, Trevarr knew. He said, “You cannot shut it out. It comes from within.”
She didn’t open her eyes. She thought about it. “The dragon, you mean? Is that what I’m doing?” So determined to keep it from getting out of hand, she’d shut down everything else, too.
“Dragon,” he said, and his voice was distinct, dry irony, as inexplicable as ever. “It is part of you, now. You cannot simply separate it from yourself and still be yourself.”
No. Apparently not. “It damned well better behave.”
Carefully, she let go of her tight control, pushing aside fear and allowing the feel of the whole — embracing the familiar rush of skill and power. Sedona spread out before her, a topographic energy map of vast silver-gray plains and unrelieved emptiness, thick dank fog and same-same-same.
That map should have been teeming with differences, darks and brights and colors and textures. This place, of all places.
On impulse, Garrie gave the fog a tentative push. It shifted, and she dug into it more steadily, stirring enough power to release the dragon’s dark heat along thrumming nerves.
But the fog gave way, revealing a pale version of the underlying ethereal topography — the vortexes, clearly evident as colorful whorls throwing sparks across the land, canyons streaking through the red rocks in cold hidden places and bright streaks and soupy Crayola colors that then bubbled over the plains and trickled into the city.
And though it was all faded, enough brilliance remained to let her know exactly what this place would have been. Should have been.
Vultee Arch shone starkly in the midst of it all, a bright black impossibility with spikes and claws and barbs drilling their way into the heart of the red rock. A trail led toward town, tasting of Huntington and the corrupted lerkhet — black so bright she could barely look at it, oozing into every available crevice along the way and blooming strongly before it thinned out to wash across half the town.
Except for that one spot, there in the middle of town.
The dragon rose with an eager surge. There.
“Breathe, atreya.” A quiet voice, low at her ear. “Stay the balance.”
There in the middle of town...
It had to be Robin’s shop.
It was a pinprick of tortured energies poured into one tiny area; a gallon of hatred crammed into a thimble. The bitter roots of it — resentment, anger, a thrilling power trip — washed over her in a buffet of emotion.
“Sha, atreya. Breathe.” She responded blindly, clinging to his words. “Yes. Steady. Good.”
And still, the throb of malignancy pounded at her, sparking cold heat through her belly, sending a shiver down her back. Robin. Is she even alive? Or had they —
“Breathe it.” More commanding now, his voice, and so much closer to her. “It is of you now. It must ebb and flow, as with breath.”
Or had they left nothing more of Robin than what they’d left of Jim Bob Dandy?
Sound stuck in Garrie’s throat — effor
t, caught in a shudder. A wave of hot-scented electricity rippled through her, lightning along nerves until she quite abruptly knew the darkness would eat her alive from the inside out if she didn’t somehow control —
“Breathe with me.” His voice, so low, skimmed her ear. His warm breath stirred her hair, tightening her skin and sending her hands into clenched fists. “Breathe with me. It is us, now, atreya.” And there, below his surface she found familiar dark energies, fierce and unquenchably wild, a tumult of emotion and intensity and its own endless conflict. And he, too, had gone breathless, the pattern of it fluttering against her skin.
She gasped with the effort and fear. She cried out with it, a woman running headlong at a cliff and plunging over.
But not falling.
Breathe. Breathe us. Ebb and flow.
He caught her up, enfolding her in fiery sensation so profound she felt herself flutter and give way before it, forgetting ebb and flow and us altogether — eyes rolling back, head falling back, spine arching... clenched hands spasming out into stiff fingers.
He shook her from within, an effect that rippled from the center out. Breathe it! A demand, now, as fierce and wild as the energies surrounding her.
Take it in. Push it out.
Yes.
Take it in. Push it out. I can’t —
Give it to me.
But you can’t —
He shook her again. Sharply.
They were going to have to talk about that.
She snapped the wild energy back out at him — too much, too sudden, so he reeled beneath it and she struggled desperately to hold back the surge of more, more, more and felt herself losing control altogether — felt him tremble, not even touching her, and felt the groan of his pain and effort like a blow. Reality struck her, along with understanding — he wasn’t doing this to her, he was doing it for her. Damned farking right she was going to —
Breathe.
Ebb and flow.
Not her. Not him. Them.
She fought the overflow down to a trickle, then felt him absorb the trickle and let it go. She took in what was left, and let that go, too.
The rage of what was in her slowly settled. No more storm surge; just lapping waves.
“Like so,” he said, his calm not entirely convincing and his voice raw.
“Like so,” she said, and the sound barely made it out at all.
She opened her eyes, just a little surprised to find she was still on the bed. Not much surprised to find him on his knees in front of her, arms caging her and hands gripping the headboard. His mouth had been beside her ear; now, briefly, he rested his forehead on her shoulder. Without thinking, she tipped her head into his neck — acknowledgment and gratitude and connection.
It hurt when he sat back on his heels, hands resting on his thighs. Like something stretching, something breaking. She found his eyes all smoky pewter, the pupils gone wide in spite of the room’s decent daylight.
Wide, not round. He wasn’t hiding the reality of himself from her, and she suddenly knew that for the gift it was. She lifted both hands to his face, touching it as though she’d never seen it before. Tracing her thumb along the hard beauty of his features, dark expressive brows with a new scar cutting through one outside edge, the faint lines of hardship at the corners of his eyes, the corners of his mouth.
It had gone quiescent, that mouth. Distinctly quiescent. She ran her thumb along the off-center scar in the distinct depression beneath his lower lip, and then she ran it along the lower lip itself. Once, twice. Then she smiled ruefully and let her hands fall away, releasing a deep sigh.
“Breathe,” she said.
He turned her hands over in her lap and rubbed his thumbs along the deep, angry creases cut by her nails. “It is something I have always done.” He glanced at her, in case she misunderstood. “To survive.”
She got it then, startling a little with the thought. “When you said mixed bloods don’t survive, I thought it was because of the cruelty you were shown.”
His expression took on a dark edge. “Yes. That too. But a good number of us simply cannot exist with ourselves. Now, I think, you understand why.”
She closed her eyes on a shudder. “I guess I do.”
“It will be better now,” he said. He relinquished her hands. “Easier.”
Fear lurched at her chest. “But what if—” You’re not here? But she couldn’t say it, and reached for him instead.
Sklayne howled disapproval from outside the room. ::No, no, no!::
Before Garrie could even stiffen at that warning, Sklayne had caromed not off the window but through it, changing states so fast he was a mere blur of reddish-buff cat skidding off the top of the air conditioner unit and sending Lucia’s things flying. The window gave a belated creak of protest; a spider web of cracks shot through the surface.
::Not my fault!:: Sklayne wailed. ::Not not not! Who said to watch for trouble here?::
Trevarr’s gaze shot to his duster, at the headboard and out of reach. He flung himself at it, crushing Garrie into the pillows — and the door slammed open, frame splintering. Trevarr scooped up Garrie instead of the duster, rolling them off the bed and into a heap on the floor behind it. Somehow Trevarr’s hand slipped beneath Garrie’s head, saving her from a jarring blow against the floor.
She frantically untangled herself, scooting out from beneath him and rolling up to over the bed where five men, all weathered and fit, stood looking uncomfortable and uncertain.
“Knocking,” she said pointedly. “You should try it sometime.”
“I knew Huntington should have come,” muttered the oldest, a man probably in his early fifties but no less fit than the others.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said the buffest of them. “Don’t make this more than it is.” He gestured at Garrie. “You. Lisa McGarrity. Come with us.”
Garrie snorted. “Give us Robin back first,” she said, a reasonable guess at the connection. Trevarr’s hand touched the small of her back, a warning to hold ground — not that she needed it. He crouched, one knee to the floor, his hand filled with a knife that had come from she had no idea where.
Buff Guy said, “You can talk about that with Huntington. Let’s go.”
“No, thank you.” She said it quite politely. Or thought she did. From beneath the bed, Sklayne hissed.
Buff’s jaw muscles flexed perceptibly — expecting to make more of an impression, maybe. Not knowing just how very hard her heart already pounded.
Trevarr knew. His hand touched her back again in a brief, smooth touch. She sensed in him no worry, just readiness. If these men had any sense, they’d get back the way they came.
They had no sense.
Buff made an imperious gesture, and it took Garrie an instant to realize that he intended to perform some grand magic.
Or something.
Shields up!
Conflicting energies, never quite tamed, leaped at the chance to rise within her, blossoming out as a shield. A hot flush, a cold sweat, but under control. Flow, ebb.
Trevarr made a sound deep in his chest; she took it for approval.
Buff hurled an attack, such as it was. He flung dripping, corrupted energies; they roiled toward her with a faint acidic hiss and splashed harmlessly off the shields.
I counter your fireball with shields of doom, Garrie thought at him. But if she should have felt satisfaction, she didn’t.
Never had she defended herself against ethereal human malice before. Never had it occurred to her that she would have to do so. She swallowed down the sudden sting of it and forced a light tone to her voice. “I’m sure that impresses some people, but I just stopped two worlds from imploding and it’s not doing so much for me.”
Buff’s eyes widened — only for an instant, before he covered his surprise. The oldest man opened his mouth, might even have been about to say something sensible — if Buff hadn’t reached behind to his waistband and pulled out a small pistol.
Garrie’s puls
e kicked into fast overdrive. “You couldn’t just bash us like you did to Jim Bob Dandy? By the way, he misses his body.”
Beneath the bed, Sklayne hissed — and Garrie realized her mistake.
Now they knew how much she’d figured out. Now they knew how much she could do.
Now they had no intention of walking away from here without her.
“Farking damn,” she said under her breath, glancing at Trevarr. “Sorry. I do ghosts, not assholes.”
Trevarr spared quick a tilt of the head in Sklayne’s direction, a directive Garrie hadn’t expected to hear but did. Bring the oskhila.
::No, no, not the pockets hate the pockets!::
Do it.
Do it! Garrie urged him. If it would get them out of here...
Buff waved the pistol in a vague gesture that had nothing to do with gun safety. “Let’s go. Gather ’em up, boys!”
Oh, deceptively passive, that Trevarr — still on one knee, hand splayed flat against the ground and knife beneath it — the other leg bent and ready. Deceptively, calmly quiet as the four men approached, all of them confident and posturing and just really having no idea at all.
Garrie’s pulse hit overdrive; her throat tightened down. The surge of dark fierce wild inside leaped to the surface, beyond any simple ebb and flow, beyond controlling — but not now, not now —
“C’mon, c’mon,” Buff said to his people. “If they give you any trouble, take them down — we can use them one way or the other, so maybe that’s fine, too.”
Trevarr released the glamor from hot pewter eyes, revealing their glow, the diamond pupils beneath. “Maybe it is not.”
Power fluttered against Garrie’s spine, coruscating in her throat. The men recoiled and Trevarr surged forth — flipped the bed over with such abrupt ferocity that two of the five men went down beneath it, leaving it askew atop them. Sklayne! Do it!
::No, no, no!:: Sklayne wailed, even as he darted for Trevarr’s coat. ::No, no, no, wrong pocket scary pocket —:: and “Kkkktt!” and “Spptt! sppptt! sppttt!”
Trevarr flung himself over the bed, directly at Buff and his gun.
The other two men instantly turned on him, and Garrie cried a warning at the sight of weighted leather blackjacks. She scrambled over the upturned bed to launch at a raised blackjack. The gun went off in the chaos and her cry turned to rage; her wiry strength took the man by surprise and suddenly the crude weapon was hers. Even as she tumbled to the floor, she plied it, a hard slap against the side of his knee.
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