Relief. “Great. ’Cause even I know these towels aren’t my color.”
Lucia raised an eyebrow. Put the nail file aside. “The boys are making plans,” she said. “To get Robin. But it means trusting that chueca.” She shook her head. “We can’t do that.”
Garrie scrubbed a hand towel over her wet hair and quickly finger-combing it into place before it dried in complete disarray, a process that took approximately two minutes in this arid climate. “No way do we trust her.”
Lucia looked no more settled. Not the least bit relieved. Garrie’s hand stilled, waiting, and Lucia said, “What about you, chic?”
What?
Lucia interpreted Garrie’s confusion well enough. “You have things you’re not telling me, yes?”
Garrie offered reflexive protest. “No!”
But as she gathered her clothes, she thought again. Lucia had already sussed out that Garrie and Trevarr had been together, so that wasn’t driving her question. And maybe there were things about Trevarr himself that Garrie wasn’t sharing, but those weren’t her things to share. And besides, she was still figuring half of them out. So, what —?
Impatience flickered through her, firing the quiescent darkness inside her and snapping into a little burst of the dark, cold heat. Lucia lifted a brow.
“Oh,” Garrie said. “That.”
Lucia waited. Deeper than casual attention to her nails and that piece of lint she’d just flicked off her knee.
Garrie took a deep breath, allowing the sensations to ebb again. “It’s not that I’m not telling,” she said. “It’s that I’m not knowing. And by the time I think I understand something, it’s moved on. And so have we. Pretty much speed of light around here lately. Well, around us. Because we haven’t even been around here. Am I babbling?”
Lucia gave that one a moment’s thought. “Do you think?”
Garrie made a face. “I’m pretty sure.” She sighed, retreating to the bathroom to lose the towels, not bothering to close the door as she dressed. “Since that first visit to the Winchester House, when the ghosts got all pissy—”
“That would be when they tried to kill you.”
“That would be it.” She yanked a camisole over her head, found that Lucia had brought her the shirt from Kehar, and yanked that on, too. Trevarr’s shirt, now fitted to her — except for the sleeves, which Sklayne had forgotten. And it still felt of him.
She released another gusty breath. “So, yeah. All those breezes flying around...? Some of Trevarr’s got mixed with some of mine, and ended up in me. And I don’t always know how to handle them.” Ahh, Lucia had brought the underwear. And her crop cargos. Still stiff from a wash-and-hang the night before, but they knew the shape of her and fell into place.
She found a comb on the sink and appropriated it, taming what she could of her hair and then not liking it. With the silver-blue streaks, the smooth look... just too emo fey. So she scruffed it up again, compromising between emo fey and punk and ending up somewhere around bed-head.
When she poked herself out of the bathroom again, Lucia nodded, tossing over the collection of braided leather bracelets Garrie had pulled off before the shower — not to mention the carefully sheathed uber-sharp Keharian knife. “And if you don’t?” she said, a little too casual. “Handle it?”
Garrie fussed with a bracelet. “Bad things, Lu. Places I wasn’t meant to go. Things I wasn’t meant to do.” She found Lucia’s gaze, dark and serious, eyes perfectly made up to complement their exotic allure — and no less perceptive than ever. She took a deep breath, let it out with a whoosh, and was horrified at the sudden prick of tears in her own eyes, the betraying wobble in her voice and at her chin. “I’ve come so close to losing myself these past couple of days. If Trevarr—”
If he hadn’t taken her in, given her the buffer of his lair...
If he hadn’t held on to her in every possible way...
She shook her head, groping for words. “He’s showing me the way through it. And he’s paying for it, too.”
“I have seen,” Lucia said. “He’s not entirely well, as little as it shows. And I get that you two are both doing your best.” She did, perhaps, look a little resigned. “Maybe I don’t like it, and I’m worried about you. I’m worried about us all, and I think you should have shared with me earlier. But I get it.”
“Do you?” Garrie couldn’t keep the hope from her voice.
Lucia nodded. Once, firmly. “Not because of your mastery with words, chicalet. But...” she nodded her head in the direction of the room beside them. “Because I saw the look on his face just now.”
Oh.
Oh.
Okay then.
“We’re a team,” Lucia said. “These things matter — especially now, when everything is new, they matter. So no more things you don’t talk about, even if you don’t have any answers. Right?”
“Right. You’re totally right.” Garrie wiped damp eyes on the rolled up ends of her over-long sleeves. “Let’s go,” she said. “We’ve got a pajarito to find.”
“Little petirrojo,” Lucia said, sadly enough so Garrie thought she had little more hope than Garrie herself.
They gathered themselves and their emotions, bundled up the shower leftovers, and headed out.
But when they reached the wrecked exterior doorway of the adjoining cabin, they marched right back into high emotion, a new confrontation with Quinn grim and Trevarr cold and hard, hidden again behind his sunglasses and duster — and Feather staring at her niece with horror.
Caryn gestured wide with her cell phone in one hand. “What?”
Sklayne crouched inside the room with the end of his tail twitching a tight, furious condemnation. ::Take off geas shackles now, yess?::
“No,” Trevarr said flatly, and either everyone else had grown used to the way he spoke bluntly to thin air or they were too focused on Caryn to care.
“What?” Caryn asked again, inching toward wronged petulance.
“What?” Garrie demanded, inching toward alarm.
“Sin Nombre called her,” Quinn said, staccato words hammering home. “She told them you were here.”
Caryn responded with exasperation. “Don’t you see? It’s perfect! They’ll come back for you, and you won’t need to find them at all!”
Garrie saw, all right. She took a quick, deep breath — quick, to gain control before she even started to lose it. “I think,” she said tightly, “that you’re probably going to die.”
Caryn looked at her in utter astonishment. “You wouldn’t!”
Okay, that deserved some scorn. “Of course I wouldn’t. I don’t do people, or so I tell myself. With good reason. Because people can obviously do themselves.”
“Oh, Caryn,” Feather murmured, a hand pressed along each pale cheek. “I’m afraid I can’t fix this.”
Caryn flung her hands up again, all frustration. “You just don’t like it that I’m the one who saved the day.”
Quinn coughed a disbelieving laugh; Garrie crossed her arms tightly, making sure to keep her hands to herself. “That wasn’t saving the day. That was some twisted attempt to take control so you could try to be the one who saves the day.”
She breathed it in — the hard dark temper, eating at her control — and Lucia put a hand on her arm — gentle and soothing and fingers tightening down with just a little bit of surprise at what she found there. Garrie breathed the dragon out again. “You have no clue. None. And you can’t deal with what these people are. So mainly, I just think you’re going to get yourself killed. And I think I’m going to be too busy dealing with what you’ve just done to do stop it.”
Caryn’s mouth opened, but remained wordless, her hands slowly falling to her sides. She glanced at Feather, who only looked sad.
Garrie had nothing left to say to her. She turned to Quinn and Lucia, offering details they didn’t yet have. “This morning, Huntington’s people came to collect us. They brought guns and a guy with a vague, sloppy light show, and they t
hought that would be enough. Now they know it’s not. If he comes back, I don’t think he’s going to waste time talking. He knows, now, that we’re—”
She stopped herself short, glancing at Trevarr. Lethal wasn’t quite the word she wanted to use in front of Feather. Not that the bloody room hadn’t already said it all.
“Unpredictable,” Quinn suggested darkly. And he was looking at her.
Right. Just that.
“So we need to go after him — and we need to get Robin back now. The problem is—” She stopped, fumbling with chagrin — knowing Quinn was counting on her and knowing she was going to let him down. She forced herself to say it. “The problem is, the lerkhet’s energies are all mixed up with Huntington’s, and it left traces of itself all over the place. I can tell you where it’s been, but I can’t tell you which of those spots it still is. Or they are.”
“You’re saying you can’t find Robin?” Quinn asked, desperate disbelief coloring his voice and pressing in on his features.
“I’m saying,” Garrie said, ever so aware that Huntington and his men were on the way, “that I think you’ll have a better chance of finding her your way. You and Lucia, grab your gear and go!”
Quinn closed the space between them to take her shoulders, his gaze full of bright blue surfer-boy distress. Hoping for another way. “If I have to do the footwork from scratch—”
“Not from scratch,” Garrie said, all too aware of how Trevarr had reacted to Quinn’s intrusion, forcing her voice calm so she didn’t make it worse.
It hadn’t been a good time for Quinn to lose track of Trevarr’s nature.
She said, “Get me a map. I’ll mark the likely spots — and you check the scanner, check your chat rooms... check those reports I’m not supposed to know you hacked into.”
Quinn tightened his hands on her shoulders, and only when she winced, when Trevarr rumbled, seemed to realize what he’d done. He released her and ran an apologetic hand down her arm. “Who would have even thought—” He shook his head. “If only she’d understood. If she’d just let us do the work.”
“She made her own choices, for her own reasons,” Garrie said evenly. “And I really don’t think she thought things would ever go this far. I think she just saw an excuse to get you to Sedona.”
“If she’d trusted me—” Quinn said, and broke off with an inarticulate noise — grief and frustration and anger twisting his face as he turned away.
“Quinnie,” Lucia said, but nothing else. Troubled empath, wanting to make it all right and no more able than any of them to do it.
Sklayne sat nibbling something out from between the pads of his front paw, and didn’t bother to look at any of them. ::Me.::
Trevarr crouched before Sklayne with such abruptness that those perfectly cat eyes opened in wide green startlement. “You have a thing to say, little friend?”
Ears flattened. ::Am. Not. Little.::
Quinn glanced between Garrie and Sklayne, just as startled as Sklayne had been. “Garrie, what —?” And Caryn made a surprised noise in the background, prompting Lucia to murmur something matter-of-fact about Sklayne being more than he looked and really, Feather did need to keep her little dog from running around near this cabin.
Trevarr tipped a single finger under that stubborn cat chin. “We have only moments.”
::Say it. Not little. MIGHTY.::
“Prove it,” Garrie snapped at him. “You can help? Do it!”
Sklayne shot her a narrow-eyed sideways glare. ::Already saved your ass. Holy farking crap!::
“You’re never going to let me live down those words, are you? As if I wouldn’t be surprised when you shoved words in my mind!”
“He talks in your head?” Caryn blurted.
“Just keep the little dog on a leash, yes?” Lucia suggested again.
Quinn lost patience. “If we’re going to go, we have to go. I have to—”
Trevarr stopped him with a glance. Sklayne glared with ears flat and his eyes mere slits of cat mad as Trevarr lowered a knee to the ground and, quite surprisingly, scratched beneath Sklayne’s hard, angry chin. Scratched gently. Along his jaw. Gently.
A faint spark shot from Sklayne’s tail. His claws flexed into thin carpet. He tipped his jaw ever so perceptibly into Trevarr’s fingers.
And then his eyes widened and he jerked his head away, his fur rippling down his back. Cat embarrassment. Not-cat embarrassment, apparently. His mental voice came as a mutter. ::Can find the Robin person.::
“You can do that?” Garrie asked, startled. “That would be... that would be...”
“Mighty,” Trevarr suggested, completely straight-faced.
“Someone better start talking out loud.” Quinn took a step toward the door. “We have no idea where Huntington was when he called. Could have been halfway to Cottonwood, could have been down the block.”
Garrie gave him only a glance. “Sklayne says he can find Robin.”
“You know,” Lucia said slowly, lingering at the open door, “he found me in San Jose. When I was out shopping, and tangled with the goo.”
::Yes:: Sklayne said primly. ::Like that.::
Trevarr sat back on one heel to regard Sklayne. “Connections. Through me to one whom I know.”
::Through the Garrie, now:: Sklayne said, smug at Garrie’s surprise.
“Six degrees of separation,” Quinn said, understanding. “We wouldn’t have to use the laptop. We could just head straight there—”
“Can he really do that?” Garrie asked. “I mean, I don’t have enough of a connection with Robin... okay, face it, I have no connection at all. So that means through me to Quinn to Robin...”
::Can,:: Sklayne said. ::Loud, the Robin person.:: He stood, a trail of sparks in the air behind it his tail, and then hesitated. ::Treyyy?::
“Go,” Trevarr told him. “We will handle what has become of the lerkhet. We will... deal with Huntington.”
“Garrie,” Quinn said, uncertainty taking place of his determination... warring with the desperation.
Sklayne cocked his head. ::It comes. The lerkhet. Very sick.::
Garrie pushed Quinn toward the parking lot. “Go!”
“This isn’t right,” Quinn said, drilling her with a final look. “None of this is right.”
But he went.
Feather made it to her feet and tugged at Caryn. “You have to go with them, Caryn. Hurry!”
“I — what?”
“You want to take responsibility?” She gave her niece a little shove. “This Robin woman is in trouble because of you. Because of what you did.” Caryn gaped at her, but Feather stood firm. “And you do what you’re told,” she said. “This is the first test of the rest of your life, do you understand? No making decisions for other people!”
“But—”
“Caryn,” Feather said, her voice quavery and her face still pale and legs not altogether too steady. “I love working with you. I love you. But did you think there would be no consequences?”
Garrie heard the message, loud and clear. No free family ride here. Caryn could start working toward her redemption right now... or she could go back to her room and pack. Right now.
“Oh,” Caryn said. “Oh.” And she took a step toward the parking lot, blinking into the bright Sedona sun. In the not-too-far distance, the newly familiar sound of the Cruiser engine turned over; a car door slammed. Caryn hesitated, looking back.
::It comes,:: Sklayne said, and poof! expanded outward, a rush of sparkling clear energy and light. Garrie held her breath as he shot into motion, warp speed special effects.
Caryn startled — and then, resolute, she followed. One step, then another, and then pounding feet, on the run for the parking area.
In the silence that followed, Garrie turned to Feather. “You’d better go. It won’t be safe.”
Feather stood straighter. “Consequences.”
Trevarr opened his coat slightly. He’d outfitted himself from within those endless pockets and now fairly
bristled with weapons — a brace of balanced throwing blades, metal knuckle guards over the half-finger gloves. The sword Lukkas hung at his side; the hand-to-hand knife jammed into his belt within its sheath, within easy reach. He said, “You are sensitive. If Garrie must protect you, it will weaken her.”
Feather swallowed visibly, paling even more; her skin took on the cast of age. “Oh.”
Yeah. Oh.
“Besides,” Garrie said, with a level of casual she certainly didn’t feel, “we’ll need someone on the sidelines. Someone who can wield a cell phone. Someone who knows what happened.”
Feather clutched her phone to her chest in both hands. “Oh,” she said again. “Yes. I can do that.” She took a step toward the door. “All right, then. I’ll do that.”
“Good.” Garrie straightened, tipping her head... listening. Feeling the beat of unnaturally muddy breezes, the edges of corruption... rippling lava ribbons, a hint of smoldering stench.
The growing flaws of a thing so very hungry it could never sate itself.
It comes.
Chapter 21
Kehar: Anjhela Comes
Beware! Beware the half-breed called Anjhela!
The twining, twisting village arch stood complete, hung with scribbled messages and wishes and beseechings. Amongst them, a thin cloth call-to-alarm hung limp in the cool air of a high mountain spring. Beware Anjhela!
Nevahn had thought she’d come to him. She’d threatened and flirted and given him a taste of the gauntlet — the way it could steal his memories, and the insidious way it could force the memories of others upon him. She’d cultivated him, spent time on him, taunted him with his love for his son, and never truly believed he knew nothing of Trevarr’s hiding places. So truly, he thought that when she ran out of patience, he would be the one to pay the price.
Instead she took Ardac.
Nevahn heard the dismayed cries as he painted layered glyphs of protection around the arch base. He looked up to find Ardac staggering into the new village perimeter, three of their matriarchs dropping their laden baskets to run to him.
Nevahn left his mud paint and brush in the dust and ran, too, no speed to it but his best lumbering effort. The women reached Ardac in time to support him as he fell, pillowing his head as he lay gasping. His eyes were dazed and shocked and full of hurt, a man betrayed by cruelty. He was unmarked, save for a series of deep crescent cuts — one on his forehead, two others arching along the side of his face, a single deep mark on the opposite jaw.
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