He attempted to look amused by her. “What exactly would that be?”
She waved her hand in a vague gesture. “This sucking thing. I don’t care about how clever you are or that you think you’re the only one ever to harness these energies. You’re wrong. You’re just the one who’s done it so badly. And you’re not harnessing them, you’re stealing them.”
He offered her a polite golf clap. “The Sedona judge awards you a six-point-five for that speech. Now get your ass off the rock and come with me, or things are about to get very ugly for you both.”
“It comes,” Trevarr murmured, the merest nod toward the cabin-obscured parking lot.
It certainly did.
It came in the wake of two fit young men carrying makeshift weapons of bat and crowbar and heavy chain, and it came courtesy of two handlers hauling a low gardening cart with a solid plastic dog crate large enough for a Great Dane, the contents mostly obscured by shadow. It came whining and grumbling and shooting off ethereal sparks that blew right through the crate, while the man and the woman handling the crate — one pushing, one pulling — swatting obliviously at what they must have thought were bugs.
The lerkhet had gotten heavy, it seemed. Both its handlers were sweating, their faces red in the heat; they got no help from the two fit young men, who went to stand beside Huntington, looking just a little too aware of their own prowess. The woman handler carried some age and didn’t look fit enough for the task at hand; the man carried some weight and didn’t look steady in the heat.
“That’s it?” Garrie said. The lerkhet made a pitiful noise... the sound of a giant dog whining through a cardboard paper towel tube.
“Well, no — not quite.” Huntington said it modestly enough to raise Garrie’s hackles, and with good reason. “You see, I’ve also figured out how to make it mad.”
Chapter 23
Stop Her!
“Did I mention discretion, dear?”
— Rhonda Rose
“Fainting in three... two... one...”
— Lisa McGarrity
“You want to make it mad? On purpose?” Garrie stared at Huntington in an amazed version of disbelief, fighting back a startling surge of anger — not to mention the overwhelming impulse to slap the lerkhet down and have it over with.
Too big for your breeches, Rhonda Rose would have said. Because Garrie knew only what the lerkhet had been, and not what it had since become.
Huntington obviously lacked the advice of a Rhonda Rose. He gestured to the male handler, who reached for the dog crate’s wire door and then hesitated, visibly uncertain — his gaze caught on the gleaming puce lava lines glowing starkly from within.
Huntington gestured with impatience. “Open it.”
The man opened the wire door and fled, taking the woman with him and stopping only when they’d gone halfway to the office cabin. Huntington barely gave them time for their retreat before he shot Garrie a self-satisfied look, made a dramatic gesture, and punched the lerkhet with a heavy, toxic glob of energy. The lerkhet crackled and groaned inside its containment, its puce glow reflecting from the plastic crate sides.
Lurking Bobbie Ghost cried out and fled. A tree limb broke and fell; rocks crumbled off the bluff behind her. A bird tumbled to the ground and lay limp.
Garrie threw ethereal shields into place from atop the rock, grounding herself as best she could. “Are you insane?”
Huntington crossed his arms, his head raised with a self-righteous tilt. “I came here to find out more about you. But I don’t need you. And I don’t want you in my way.”
The lerkhet snuffled around the threshold of the crate and slowly climbed out, seeming uncertain of its own legs in this new size. Still awkward, still half pig and half tapir and altogether too much tentacle, still marked with a tracery of glowing channels.
The crumpled husk of a butterfly fluttered down beside it.
“Trevarr—” Garrie risked a glance at his back, shoulders relaxed more than anyone’s should be under the circumstances. Not the first time he’s faced these odds.
But he’d always had Sklayne. And now Sklayne was off hunting down Robin for Lucia and Quinn and the unlikely Caryn.
She could shield him, but he’d pay the price — and the two muscle lackeys were pressing in, crude weapons to hand. Trevarr couldn’t afford the distraction her shields would create any more than he could afford losing energy to the lerkhet.
Huntington smiled. “Your capable friend has cost me too much. That won’t happen again.”
Garrie felt Trevarr’s growl in her bones, a reminder that Huntington should have heeded. Not safe. Never safe. He still held Lukkas low, every bit of him bristling with warning as he held his ground. Doing it grimly, his feet set a little more firmly against the ground, his stance a little wider. The men showed no concern about the lerkhet, no awareness of its ethereal activity.
Garrie poked at the creature with a tentative breeze and recoiled in startlement when its lightning response sucked that breeze away faster than she could even release it.
Oh, fark. No poking it away, no prodding it away. No slowing it down.
Trevarr had once gathered up the misbehaving Krevata with the Keharian gathering device he carried — the ekhevia. He’d have to do the same with the lerkhet. Or use the oskhila to take the lerkhet to Kehar. Or —
Or nothing. Not as long as the two men circled around the rock, leaving him no opportunity to reach for either device, never mind to employ them. The look he sent her told her as much — still grim, with a startling hint of weariness behind it.
Feather’s voice rang across the cleansing circle. “Miss McGarrity! Lisa!”
Fark.
“Get out of here!” Garrie snapped. Feather was too far to protect with her own shielding, and too close to be safe on her own. “Keep everyone away from here!”
“But I — oh, my little Trickle dog! He’s collapsed! How can I help —?”
Double Fark. A sensitive dog. Go figure. Six pounds of sensitive dog, no more resistant to the lerkhet’s broader influence than the bird that had been. Just as vulnerable, sensitive Feather would also fall before it.
“You can’t help!” Garrie cried in desperation. “Go away!”
Feather stopped short, gaze glued to the lerkhet — to its blobby head and dangling blobby nose, the nexus of tentacles sprouting at both ends, the goggly chartreuse eyes and putrescent lava veins. Everything it had been when Trevarr had first called it forth, now super-sized. “What—”
Huntington jerked his chin at the erstwhile lerkhet handlers. “Go watch that parking lot, dammit — tell people there’s a gas leak. We don’t need fucking spectators.” The two hustled to respond, eager enough to put the distance between themselves and the confrontation.
Distance that Feather didn’t have.
“I—” She wavered, and looked down at her hand as if she expected to find herself insubstantial.
Fainting in three... two... one...
Down she went, folding gracefully to the ground.
Trevarr stood his ground. Waiting. Grim. A contrast to the men who shifted closer, growing impatient.
Garrie glared at Huntington. “You didn’t have to do that! Feather can’t hurt you, you asshat! Call that thing off!” Because Feather wouldn’t last long enough for Garrie to figure out how. Not when it had so eagerly sucked in even the faintest of probes.
Huntington shaped distorted, stolen energies in broad gestures. “You’re not nearly as interesting as I thought you’d be. No wonder little Caryn gave you up so readily.” He rolled the energies long and thin, his fingers sticky and dripping with them, the dry ground hissing as uncontrolled overflow splatted to his feet.
But it was nothing her shield couldn’t stop. Did he even realize she’d constructed one? Garrie shot him a skeptical look and riffled a breeze at the lerkhet, trying to define when its influence became critical. How much leeway do I even have? “Hang on,” she told Trevarr. “I’m working on it...”
>
The breeze danced briefly toward the lerkhet and then turned slipstream, whipping into the creature’s bunchy snout tentacles. Oblivious to her efforts, Huntington flung his lance of garish energy; it splattered against her shield, coating it in a fog of ugly.
Huntington’s head lifted, his chest lifted, his expression lifted — all as though he’d inhaled the best scent in the world. As though pleasure shot through his body.
Far too much information.
“Atreya,” Trevarr said — something of warning and something of suggestion. Let me take these men.
The lerkhet’s blobby trunk stuck straight out; it blatted a startled, flat trumpet and stumbled forward on stiff legs. Redirected. And then it fastened hungry eyes on Garrie, the trunk stretching out in her direction. Homing in for serious action. On the garish splash of energy.
Huntington had never meant to harm her with that awkward blow. He’d meant to paint her.
“Atreya!”
Huntington had made her into a target.
She knew it even as she saw the sparking glow of chartreuse eyes aimed directly at her. She knew it even before she felt the abrupt tug — right through her shield — a frigid stab of hunger rushing across her soul in liquid weakness.
Scrabbling back on the rock did no good. A thin thread of panic fluttered as her very heart skipped a beat in the thrall of parasitic connection. Trevarr jerked around, shouting something harsh and warning — staggering at the edges of the lerkhet’s influence.
Better shields — She reached for the breezes — for what was left of them — and in desperation, reached within herself, too.
“Take care, atreya—” Trevarr ground the words out as he staggered again, catching himself. “Take—”
Oh, too late. Oh, too farking late.
The lerkhet trumpeted, tentacles standing on end — sparks and spit flying, gaping lava cracks widening as it stiffened in joy, inhaling everything Garrie had meant to put between them. Garrie made a noise she’d never thought to hear from herself — a mewling, wounded sound, faint to her own ears. In the distant background, Sklayne’s distinct voice wailed dismay and warning and waiwaiwai!
Garrie crumpled to hard rock. Her shoulder buckled against it; her forehead hit red stone. A rumble filled the air, a groan from the land itself as the bluff cracked in a sharp report of unnaturally brittle, unnaturally disturbed sandstone. A small scrubby bush flung itself down the slope to land beside her.
The clean whistle of a blade slicing air. A lackey shouting in surprise. A startling slam of dark cold heat.
Garrie’s skin and hair and fingernails ached with it — but the lerkhet released her, blatting in short, sharp distress, and she reoriented — finding Huntington scowling in uncertainty and the lerkhet staggering in place with all tentacles stiffly waving. Trevarr stood spread-legged and spread-armed, holding off the now-bleeding muscle lackeys with his sword extended in a low guard. The other arm stretched toward the super-sized lerkhet and she knew that tilt of shoulder, that cant of arm — he’d pulled the ekhevia.
Cold dark heat.
The lerkhet squirmed and sputtered and oozed and struggled, coughing out energy and fading at the edges. Beginning to buckle in the legs and beginning to panic. It scrunched down into itself, pulling in tentacles and snout and ears and even folding down its eyes — and then startled them all, Huntington included, when it sprang into the air again, spewing energy from every appendage and every orifice.
The ekhevia stuttered and faltered, and then died away completely.
Crash and burn.
Garrie scrambled to assemble a shield, a stiff thing so solidly established that it was all but inert, a thing that would withstand the lerkhet without creating vulnerability to it.
The lerkhet was faster. And it was hungry. Half its previous bulk if still of the same structure, drawn away by the ekhevia but not defeated by it. Its tendrils wiggled at Garrie, straightening. Pulsing. Sucking her down again.
Her raw cry of protest didn’t do a thing to stop it.
Trevarr whirled to drive the lackeys again, snarling audibly. Lukkas shaved a curving slice of wood from the bat and left both men stumbling backward; Trevarr turned instantly back to the lerkhet, his movement no longer showing the weary weight of moments earlier, otherworldly metal flashing.
Huntington scrabbled backwards in panic — but he wasn’t the target at all, and the lerkhet wailed as Lukkas struck its hard flesh — sparks flying, metal biting deep with an unnatural clang.
Garrie snapped free with a rubber band sting, reeling with misery and implications. No shielding, no ekhevia, and no chance to use the oskhila.
Only Lukkas.
But Trevarr no longer had his back to the rock, and the lackeys went for him.
He evaded that first charge, a tumble and roll and straight to his feet, still focused on the lerkhet. Lukkas bit deeply, releasing a vent of putrid steam. The lerkhet blatted in pain and Trevarr dodged a whooshing swing from the crowbar and right into the range of the bat. It slammed against his arm and Lukkas fell to the ground.
It didn’t matter that Trevarr instantly scooped the sword up with the other hand, the expert whip of blade slicing a thin and meaningful line across one lackey’s entire torso. It didn’t matter that his grunt and stagger turned into a snarl of a Keharian curse; that his sunglasses, lost, showed eyes bright and silver and wild, as otherworldly as the sword. Garrie heard his pain; she felt it, an earthquake reverberating between them, a sudden shadow of awareness and the rising breeze, the clap of a thunderous wing.
Her fingers gained traction on stone; blood trickled down her face from her fall. As the bat-wielding lackey danced back from the sword that had twice marked him, Garrie launched herself right off the rock — grabbing the bat, wrenching it, and twisting it beneath her as they both went down and both scrambled back up.
But Garrie had the bat. And she slammed it up between the lackey’s legs from behind.
Right before the second lackey flung her hard against the rumbling stone.
~~~~~
Lucia nearly tripped over Sklayne as he stiffened to immobility in the hot sun, stuck on the stark baking ground between the car and the old store front turned storage. Frozen-still cat, half-crouched and panting, small jaw barely dropped, pink tongue barely showing.
“What the hell —?” Quinn said, looking down on him and then to the building — a thing colorless with age, indecipherable white paint lettering an arc of ex-words on dusty glass backed by plywood. Caryn had eased quietly up to the door to try the knob, oblivious to Quinn’s annoyance.
Lucia didn’t have the faintest. “I can try to feel him out—”
“Not here! Can’t you just pick him up or something?”
Sklayne growled. All deep in his throat, with a multi-level reverberation that just shouldn’t have been there at all. His glossy green eyes still stared blankly at nothing. Lucia exchanged uncertainty with Quinn and took a tentative step forward.
Sklayne went, “Mowmowmowwai!,” sprung straight into the air — poof! — and exploded into a startling cloud of sparkling vagueness. Lucia emitted a brief shriek; Quinn let out a startled oath.
Instantly, Sklayne reformed right where he had been. Just as he had been. Frozen in the hot sun, stock still on the stark baking ground.
Lucia said, “You pick him up.”
Quinn took a deep breath. A very deep breath. “Leave him for now.”
“But what if—” No, she wouldn’t finish that. She wouldn’t think about the way this baffling not-cat had a direct connection to Trevarr — and maybe even to Garrie.
She wouldn’t think about the possibility that Sklayne’s behavior wasn’t about what was happening here at all.
“Okay,” she said, pretending her voice was steady. “Let’s get through that door.”
Caryn stared warily at Sklayne, her hand still on the knob. “It’s locked.”
Quinn glanced at the dirty window — but with plywood behind it, they we
ren’t going to smash their way in, either.
The door had a small window. Garrie could have made it. Or she could have picked the lock. Or scanned the place for resident energies, or —
“Splitting up,” Quinn said. “Always such a damned bad idea.” He spared Lucia the briefest of glances. “I know, I know. We didn’t have any choice.” His voice might even have broken a little on those last few words, but now it steadied. “Who ever said we were prepared for this sort of thing? We work for people, not against them. I spout facts, that’s all!”
Lucia heard her own voice from far away. “I bet it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. How hot does this place get, anyway?”
Quinn didn’t even pause. “Sedona has a generally mild climate. Record high is a couple of hundred and ten days — most recently in 2003. Goes over a hundred about twenty days a year and — God, Lu, you got me going, didn’t you?”
Lucia just smiled thinly. “Better now?”
“Let’s just do this.”
Caryn said, “But the door—”
Quinn stalked to the car, flipping up the back hatch. “If there was someone lurking here, he’d have been out to check on your knob-rattling. So stealth mode is off.” He emerged with a tire iron in hand. “I know Robin got herself into this. I know if she’d let us work this our way, if she hadn’t kept things from us, things never would have gone this far. But those were mistakes. She doesn’t deserve to die for them.”
“Mowmowmow,” Sklayne said softly, a piteous thing. As Quinn slammed the hatch closed, Sklayne sprang abruptly to his feet, all bristling whiskers and stiff tail and mysterious thumb-claws. He glared narrow-eyed at the door.
Caryn’s eyes widened, and Lucia told her, “Maybe you should—”
Too late.
Sklayne burst into a blur of speed. Before Quinn could do more than jerk out a startled exclamation and Lucia could do more than throw her hands out in protest, he slammed into the door, leaping straight for the knob and lock assembly.
And quite impossibly, passing through it.
“Oh!” Caryn said, at the exact instant a faint flash came from the lock, an electric zing of energy. A sharp brittle crack of metal and dust poofed out around the edges of the door and keyhole.
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