Storm of Reckoning

by Doranna Durgin

  Do something!

  The lerkhet snuffled, tentacles questing the air... searching.

  “Trevarr!”

  But his eyes had closed. His body shuddered in the grip of the poison.

  Garrie swallowed against the sick touch of Huntington’s breezes, the hot poker throb of her forehead. Dirt rained down upon them from a shuddering land.

  She couldn’t handle the lerkhet on her own. Not even if it was now a creature of both worlds. She had no idea how to trigger the ekhevia.

  Trevarr jerked against her, staring out with glassy, unfocused eyes — lips forming words she couldn’t hear and weren’t English anyway. And then he went limp, and in that moment she thought how very cold he’d gone.

  No, no, no. She shook him there in her lap, injured arm and all. The bluffs howled, the sound of wind in the eaves and a banshee in the distance. “No! Because I am not done kissing you yet, you fool!”

  She wasn’t anywhere near done kissing him. Or being with him. Or wallowing in the mix of their energies or the bond already between them.

  “Damned farking right,” she said, and kissed him right then and there on bloodied lips that tasted of bitter venom and dull pain. She deliberately roused the dragon energies from which she’d been running, sending them into him through the finest of subtle threads and hoping the lerkhet wouldn’t sense them.

  Whatever those energies were, whatever part of him they had come from... they had become enough a part of her, these past days, so she could offer them in return. Her dragon.

  Just enough.

  Or they should have been.

  That kiss alone... should have been.

  Wasn’t.

  His eyes rolled back.

  “That’s not fair!” she cried, despair raw in her voice. “If this was a bad movie, that would have worked!”

  Ghostly breezes drifted past, brushing across Garrie’s skin.

  “Excuse me,” Feather said, her tone arch and offended. “You. Ugly thing. You are in my cleansing circle.”

  Garrie lifted her head, blinking through watery vision.

  Feather as ghost.

  Perfectly realized, perfectly cohesive — but not Feather as she’d been moments earlier, crumpled to the ground. Feather as she’d been ten years ago, maybe fifteen — hair glossy and complexion fresh, slender rather than spare, just a hint of transparency around her edges. She held the small Yorkie — and though it still fit neatly into the crook of her arm, it now sported large fangs and projected a fierce gold and orange aura toward the lerkhet.

  Oh, be careful.

  The lerkhet stopped, tentacles whirling fiercely as it shifted blindly between Garrie and Feather. The Yorkie went yapyapyap, its aura spiking with each little bark.

  The lerkhet found it. Found Feather. Shifted to face them both.

  Huntington cursed — a faint thing, as if he was too caught up in his own feedback loop to interfere.

  Feather said calmly, “Don’t waste the opportunity, girl.”

  Garrie didn’t.

  No more tragic kisses; no more Ms. Nice Reckoner. Freed to use the energies at her disposal, she stabbed Trevarr with a spear of piercing hard cold heat — and she rammed a very solid thumb into his ribs.

  He jerked; he snarled. It came from so deep in his chest that she felt it through her own — and she flinched, but she didn’t quail.

  “Get back here,” she told him, and jabbed another snarl out of him, the faded marks of feathery scales flushing up along his neck and going dark before her eyes, the faint scent of him rising strong once more, his eyes opening to a bright flare. He lifted his lips to grin a feral challenge, exposing teeth gone wild as well, primary and secondary canines distinctly sharp. The exotic angles of his face showed fierce in a way that struck her to the core, an atavistic recognition of power and grace and raw strength.

  “Holy farking shit.” Words whispered, as she realized what she’d done — what she’d wakened in a man too bound by venom to fight it. That which she had never truly understood.

  The other.

  But it was all she had to work with. It didn’t matter that he looked at her with the same predatory glint he’d so recently aimed at mortal enemies. Didn’t matter that he’d probably kill her if he could get his hands on her.

  Or that he was about to try.

  She jabbed him again. “Get over it!” she snapped. “And use the damned ekhevia!”

  But Trevarr wrenched mindlessly away, and damned if he wasn’t lunging for Lukkas, with no thought for the ekhevia at all.

  “Fark,” she snarled, a perfectly human snarl at that. And then again when he sprawled awkwardly, because like it or not, that body of his wasn’t in working order.

  Garrie snatched up the ekhevia and threw herself on him. Right on top of him, small and insignificant and clinging, her arm stretched out for a Hail Mary pass, shoving the ekhevia back into his hand. She gave the lerkhet a desperate, daring push — all the breezes she had left, pinging directly off the lerkhet. Huntington cried raw objection, slapping ill-aimed and futile energies to redirect it.

  “Here it comes!” Garrie stabbed a finger at the invigorated, fully oriented lerkhet.

  The vibrating, pulsating, voracious lerkhet.

  The charging lerkhet.

  “Get it, dammit, get it.”

  Huntington howled, a sound distorted by undertones of fear and sick ecstasy, his own cycling energy maelstrom sucking down his every attempt to interfere. “No! You can’t!”

  Trevarr’s blazing metal gaze seared hers, leaving her gasping — and then it found the fast-charging lerkhet, and lit anew.

  “Get it,” she whispered, not a whole lot else left in her. She closed her hand around his, and around the ekhevia between them.

  He gripped the ekhevia anew, not so much putting energy into it as pulling it, with precise ferocity, out. He pulled the device from Garrie’s grip and aimed it at the gory, oversized lerkhet.

  The lerkhet stumbled. It strobed, phasing from solidity to eerie phosphorescence to solidity, staggering onward — first at speed, then more slowly, and then dragging to a stop a mere foot away, where it shook itself like a dog.

  Lava slime hissed off skin and clothing, sizzling briefly and smoking away into ugly, damaged breezes. The lerkhet made a mournful trumpet of a noise, wrenching into its ethereal form.

  Where it hung, caught by the ekhevia but going nowhere.

  Too changed. Too damaged. Too tainted.

  Garrie wanted to sob with utter exhaustion.

  But this was meant to be her part of the drama — the moment she mustered up every breeze, every hint of wafting ethereal movement, every faint memory of a gust that Sedona still had to offer. The moment she proved she was what Rhonda Rose had once believed — a reckoner, body and soul.

  A reckoner unparalleled.

  So she found those breezes and those gusts and those hints of movement and gathered them up tightly around the struggling lerkhet. A brief moment of exacting concentration...

  Ethereal inhalation, focus...

  Release.

  Breezes exploded in all directions. Dissolution. Lerkhet scattered to the ethereal winds.

  And silence.

  It would have been nice, then, to collapse. To lie there in limp relief. To think, hey, maybe I saved the world after all.

  But no. Not with the canyon lands still self-destructing around her, the land crying out in pain, Feather’s dog yapping furious warning, and Huntington groaning in a rapturous undertone. And especially not because even before she opened weary eyes, Trevarr dropped the ekhevia, shrugged her off his back, rolled atop her — oh my God squish — and trapped her face-down between his knees, his single good hand clamping down on the back of her neck.

  It would break bone, that grip.

  Her face pushed against hard ground and fine gritty soil; it mashed against her lips.

  It would break bone, that grip.

  His growl reverberated endlessly through her body,
rumbling through his ragged breath both in and out. A predator with prey, hovering at that final moment of the hunt.

  “Atreyo,” she breathed.

  There was no real sound behind the words; no air in her lungs to make it. And she had no idea if he’d even hear it. She knew only that she had to say it before she lost the chance forever. Heart partner.

  She closed her eyes; she waited.

  It would break bone...

  Except it didn’t.

  Instead, his hold eased ever so slightly. His voice held utter confusion. “What —?”

  Garrie laughed, a short and very smothered sound that might have had a sob on the end.

  “Atreyo,” she said again, through tears. “Now let me up.”

  “You stabbed me.”

  “With my thumb. And let me up now or I’ll do it again.” Already she breathed more easily. Dirt ground into the split skin on her forehead; her cheekbone pounded in steady accompaniment. Her lips felt numb.

  Awkwardly — carefully — he removed himself. She squirmed, recaptured her barely fastened pants, and rolled up to her knees. From there she took his face between her hands, brushing back the silly bits of hair that had escaped the tie-back. “Atreyo.”

  And after a moment, he released his breath on a mighty shudder and wrapped his one good arm around her. “Atreya,” he confirmed, and pulled her in for what could only have been the world’s very finest kiss.

  Chapter 27

  Entirely Out of Control

  “Know your strengths; accept your weaknesses.”

  — Rhonda Rose

  “Oh so very yes!”

  — Lisa McGarrity

  “Can I not leave you even for a moment?”

  — Lucia Reyes

  “That’s all quite lovely,” Feather said, with an impatience that suggested maybe in fact it wasn’t. After all, Huntington still bathed himself in churning energy, rapturously absorbing what he could. Juniper disintegrated along the slope, popping and crackling to rain down in bits of tinder and acrid turpentine scent. “But this is my cleansing circle, thank you very much, and I won’t have that man messing with it! Not with my circle, my hotel, or my town!”

  This version of Feather definitely had new asperity.

  Garrie rested her cheek against Trevarr’s. “Feather,” she said, “I got nothin’.”

  “Oh!” Feather said, her voice and attention shifting to outrage at the sound of a fast-approaching car — here, where no car should be approaching at all. “Oh, no, no!”

  The car engine revved when it should have been easing down. Shouting ensued, first demanding, then frantic — and then the warning blare of a horn outshouted human voice, growing louder, louder —

  The front end of the Cruiser bounced over landscaping and sidewalk, plowed through several bushes, grounded out on high flagstone, and bore on until it was all Garrie could see. She hunched over Trevarr in a futile gesture.

  The horn stopped. The Cruiser’s front grill stood way too close, still bouncing with its abrupt braking action. Lucia bounced out from behind the wheel and stopped short, fists to hips. “Oh... my... Dios,” she said. “Can I not leave you for even a moment?”

  Not that she waited for an answer, leaving Garrie open-mouthed. She ducked back inside the car, emerging with Sklayne in her arms. His tail hung limply; his head hung limply. Lucia flinched away from a rain of rock shards to lay him next to Trevarr. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” she told him simply, and left to haul Quinn out of the back seat — pale and uncoordinated and staggery.

  “A stun gun uses high voltage and low amperage,” Quinn said, with no apparent awareness of the chaos around him. “This energy causes muscles to do a lot of work really fast. The rapid cycle instantly depletes blood sugar, and there is no energy left for the muscles. A stun gun also interrupts the tiny neurological impulses that direct voluntary muscle movement. The longer the contact, the stronger the effects.” He scrubbed his hands over his face.

  Lucia pushed him onto one of the remaining circle seats. “It was a very long contact.”

  Quinn said to no one in particular, “It also hurts like a bitch.” And then he blinked, and looked around, and said, “What the hell happened?”

  “What the hell is happening,” Garrie said, even as the bluff gave a great earthy groan and a larger tree, high up on the hill, blew itself into splinters. They performed a group duck and cover. “I pulled a dissolution on the lerkhet, but Huntington—”

  “So I see,” Lucia said, brushing wood from her hair as she aimed a narrow-eyed glare at Huntington and his personal bubble of wonder — without Garrie’s ethereal sight, she wouldn’t be able to see that bubble. But she could certainly feel it — and Huntington’s expression and eager posture served as illustration. “And you?”

  “Tapped out.” Garrie glanced at Trevarr. His uncertainty, his vulnerability — both were shuttered away as if they had never been, leaving only silence and pain stretching a tight veil over all. “Kind of broken.”

  “That is so not the right color for blood,” Lucia told Trevarr.

  “Stop this!” Feather demanded. “You young people! You brought this to my home, my inn... my circle! Now you fix it!”

  Lucia’s eyes widened. She seemed to see Feather’s crumpled body for the first time. “Oh, no! Ooh, chicalet, she’s mad!”

  “My home,” said Bobbie from up the hill. “My unborn baby’s home! You will not harm my baby!”

  Say what?

  Lucia glanced up the hill. “The other one is back? She feels different... also angry, but... mother bear, chicalet. Tread lightly.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Feather snapped. “Now do something!”

  Garrie snapped right back at her, one arm tight around Trevarr’s shoulder. She knew protective, all right. “Don’t you get it? I’m done! There isn’t anything left here to work with!”

  “It’s okay,” Caryn said, finally emerging from the car, a gulp in her voice as she glanced in Feather’s direction. She lent a hand to a seriously ragged-looking Robin, who was at least still alive. “Really. It’s okay.” She took a deep breath, meeting Garrie’s eye. “I brought help.”

  Oh, that couldn’t be good.

  ~~~~~

  Sklayne’s nose tickled. The air was full of rock grit and sawdust; sick energy glittered dimly in his mind’s eye.

  For the moment, his mind’s eye was all he had. So fragile, this body! So ill-suited to human energies, so inside-outed by pulling the Robin person back from transition. Disrupted and disconnected from itself, none of its pieces talking to its other pieces.

  Home. He wanted home. He wanted hot sullen air and heavy black fog and spicy taste. He wanted familiar energies and familiar enemies. He wanted how it had always been, Trevarr on the hunt and Sklayne prowling and gamboling and not quite doing as he was told but truly, always just where he needed to be, when he needed to be there.

  Not free, no matter what he told Trevarr. Just... home.

  Unbound, he could make the journey himself. All these years of learning, all these years of journey, and already older than so many of his kind. So many things, he knew. Things Trevarr never guessed and never needed to.

  Because bound, he couldn’t go even though he could.

  Bound, that distance would quickly grow too great for either of them to bear.

  “Mow,” he said — except he didn’t, because this body wouldn’t do it. His inner eye showed him putrid darkness, a seething murk shot through with bruised violet and streaks of brimstone scent.

  The Huntington person.

  Inner sight revealed the dull dead land, all its vivid color leeching toward the Huntington person. The bright Feather person resisted, all light dancing blues and golds and pretty frills, gentle edges and hard core. Not far up the hill, two more ethereal witnesses flickered — one hovering in protective anger and one small, bright and pure.

  Two more presences came running in from the parking lot — dull little beings of the
Huntington person’s taint, trying to look bigger.

  Hot sunlight washed across Sklayne’s lids; he forced his eyes open, seeking Trevarr in the dazzle. ::Treyyy.::

  There.

  The hair on Sklayne’s tail stood on end; his claws popped out. He felt as well as saw the leg of fiery agony, the arm battered, the venom burning down his throat and through his chest and raging through his blood.

  Atreyvo, he wanted to say. Let me fix, he wanted to say.

  “Mow,” he said instead. His tail flailed.

  Oh stupid small body, so fragile. No way to do just what he needed to do, just when he needed to do it.

  Trevarr found their connection, his presence fainter than it should be. Thin and wan. Better this than Ghehera. Be easy, little friend.

  Sklayne lifted his lip to show a sharp little fang. ::Mighty.::

  But the dull persons from the parking lot were here, showing up as a stout woman and an unfit man. And there was the Quinn person — weary but resolute as he snagged a long wooden bludgeon from the ground to stand protectively, legs braced wide, before the Garrie and Trevarr.

  “A bat applies between six to eight thousand pounds of pressure on the ball,” he said, his voice full of scraping sound as he faced the dull new persons. “My friend already knows how that feels. How about you? Curious?”

  The dull new persons hesitated. The man spat an evident curse; the woman responded high and thin and anxious — and disgusted.

  And then they left. Not at all mighty.

  For the first time, Sklayne saw the bright clean spark of the Lucia person, awash in the eddies of others. And the Robin person, muted, a wavering glow. The Caryn person, startling in a new clarity of defined edges and confined self and...

  Not alone.

  Not at all alone.

  “Holy farking crap,” the Garrie said. “The ghosts —”

  “Amazing what one can do when properly inspired,” the Lucia person said dryly, glancing pointedly at the Caryn person. “Garrie, they tanked up on Robin’s watchdog and now they want to help.”