The Garrie looked past them all to the ghosts, a wavering mass of pulsing energies — some vibrating, some steady, the growing strength of one young spirit coming to his self-awareness, the steadying influence of the older spirits, reclaiming their own. The Jim Bob Dandy entity hovered right there in the front, his tangled knots of conflicting energies wrapped tightly enough to form the shape of him, features and all.
Probably it wasn’t just exactly what the Garrie saw with her Garrie eyes, but close enough.
“Yes!” said the Feather ghost.
“Yesss,” said the Bobbie Ghost from up on the bluff.
And the Garrie grinned, so big. “Damned farking yes!”
One of these days Sklayne would tell her exactly what farking meant.
~~~~~
Garrie had been a channel in San Jose, and it had changed her forever — changed her in ways she didn’t even yet understand. She wasn’t yet stable; she wasn’t yet healed.
And here she was again. Facing Sedona’s ghosts in the wake of her own enthusiasm. Here, in this body full of conflict and uncertainties and dark new corners she still knew nothing about.
“We can do this!” Feather looked up the cliff. “This young woman and I can do this! Take from the others, Lisa McGarrity, and channel it back to us — this is our home! Ours! We know it better than you. We can do this!”
“Oh, they hope,” Lucia said, following only the emotions of it. “They want.” She looked at Garrie. “From you? What?”
“Everything,” Garrie said, her throat suddenly dry. Realizing it, with startling clarity. “Everything.” She looked at Trevarr, found more understanding than she’d expected in his eyes even as he struggled for focus. “Everything,” she said to him, and this time her voice broke.
“Ebb and... flow.” His voice rasped over the effort to speak, and her breath caught in her chest to hear it. “As with us.”
“We can do this!” Feather crowded her. “We have to — do you not see this land dying? All the magic of it fading? And do you think he’s going to stop with us?”
Huntington stood in the center of his personal maelstrom, glowing darkly. Barbed and swirling lines spiraled around him and hooked into the earth, drawing out life; a small bird imploded into a puff of down and delicate crunch of bone. The very substance of the red rocks groaned in submission.
“Do you?” Feather demanded.
“Do you?” Bobbie cried from above.
“Do you?” The ghosts, all the ghosts, a massive swell of anguish and fear, chafing to take action... needing direction. Needing to be aimed.
“Ebb... flow,” Trevarr said, but his eyelids fluttered. She clutched his duster to keep him upright. He dropped the ekhevia and blindly found Lukkas, hand settling perfectly around the grip but holding it without strength.
Garrie flirted with panic. “Sklayne—”
Great green eyes slitted at her. ::He gives everything to you. I give everything. Now you.:: A mental glare. ::Do!::
She choked on that.
And then she did.
She opened herself to the ghosts. Come on in. Give it my way.
Give it up, and she’d pass it on.
Easy to say.
Since the earliest years of her life, she’d had ghosts around her; she’d pushed ghosts away from her. She’d touched them, consoled them, controlled them... destroyed them.
She’d never let them in.
She gasped at that first clammy whispering touch, startling and bitter cold. Cobwebs in the back of her throat, damp sucking sounds in her mind’s ear, bitter rust on her tongue. A sudden rush of intense brain freeze hit her sinuses and she bent over her knees, pressing her palms to her eyes.
A hand landed on her leg, all but encompassing her thigh. Far from steady and still somehow strong.
::Breathe, atreya, :: Sklayne advised her, his deeper narrator’s voice making it clear he spoke Trevarr’s words for him. ::As it was with us.::
She buried her face in the crook of her arm, finding his hand and clutching it. Breaking it, for all she knew — all her fear, all the building pressure and energies, piling in and piling on and nowhere to go and nowhere to be —
Living through this. You’re doing it wrong.
“He’s coming for you!” Feather said, her newly assertive voice rising to sudden alarm. Garrie lifted her head to spot Huntington from within ethereal view, all putrescent streaks and heavy globs of clinging energies.
“Quinn!” Lucia shouted as Trevarr’s warmth disappeared from her side. “Quinn, no — be careful — !”
“Give her more!” Caryn demanded of the ghosts. Before Garrie could cry denial, a pure typhoon of energies rolled on through.
She might have fallen on her face. Hard to tell. Her physical world wrenched around and her ethereal world pounded through her being, incompatible and billowing forces with nowhere to go and she —
She —
She started to get mad.
Not again.
The mad brought up a hint of cold fiery darkness, and Garrie snatched at it. Uncomfortable, difficult, familiar cold fiery darkness — only now she knew just what to do with it. Ebb and flow. Let it in, breathe it —
Out.
::Yesss,:: Sklayne said, entirely his own thoughts. ::Yess, atreyvo, do this thing —::
And yes! the dark cold fierce punched a hole through those incompatible and billowing internalized forces, providing channels and yes! she poured those channels straight to Feather and straight up the hill to Bobbie Ghost — pure, clean arrows of organized power to those who knew this land so well.
Feather churned the energy right back into the earth, drilling it in beside the rock. From above them, cycled breezes washed down the hill like a gentle mud slide, renewing ground and leaf and life. And every bit of it flowed back into Garrie, mingling with what the ghosts fed her, churning and driving and finding release in the punch of cold hard ferocity — a take-no-prisoners ferocity that sucked out the darkness and left only the purity pouring through a spiraling pillar of light, taking and giving, ever in, ever out.
“Quinnie,” Lucia said, dimly in the background. “Quinnie, can you see?”
And Quinn said, “Holy. Goddam. Farking. Crap.”
And Caryn said, “It’s — it’s what happened at the storage building, only—”
“Oh, so much better!” Lucia finished for her. “They’re cleaning everything! They’re cleaning him!”
Huntington flailed for ethereal balance, fighting back. Distantly, she heard him scream, all anguish and terror and thwarted fury. And so distantly, Quinn said, “The rock... the rock —”
Feather’s voice chimed in with ringing tones. “This is my home.”
And from above, Bobbie came clear and strong. “You will not touch my daughter!”
A boy’s voice, new and unfamiliar, broke through the clamor of ghostly background cries. “You leave my mom and dad alone!”
And then there was Lucia’s very human, very alarmed solo cry: “Run! Robin, run! Quinnie! Caryn, run — !”
And for some reason they were all shouting, except Sklayne who wailed, wailed, wailed into Garrie’s mind. ::Treyyy! Atreyvo!::
Garrie wrenched her attention away from the ethereal and back to the corporeal, physical breezes in her hair, the sharp throb of her forehead and the prickle of desert grit against her knees. Energy moved within her but no longer controlled her.
She opened her eyes to chaos, unable to parse the frantic aftermath of her friends’ movements, able only to see the close up and personal — and to understand that a crushing battle had taken place around her.
Huntington lay far too close, pinned to the ground by a familiar sword, a shriveled version of what had been a man. Not a fatal wound — too low and awkward, as though he’d been twisting aside. Beside him lay the tire iron, appropriated from one of the lackeys — and to the side, the length of chain wrapped around Quinn’s bat.
Trevarr crumpled between Garrie and Huntington, a sm
all pale blot of cat stretched out beside him. Neither of them moving.
Neither of them breathing.
Living through this.
Time to do it right.
Time to do it now.
She threw herself over them both.
Dragon dark met light mixed with chaos and a tightening spiral of barbed intensity. Dark met light mixed with memory and hot cries and wild Keharian strength arching beneath her to cry out in a startled scrape of pain, a slash of startled, snarling ferocity and fighting back.
Dark met light, and spun entirely out of control.
Chapter 28
And Your Little Cat, Too
“Ponder all potential outcomes.”
— Rhonda Rose
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
— Lisa McGarrity
::BOOM!::
— Sklayne
The voices came as a babble of discordant sound.
“Garrie, will you open your eyes dammit—”
“I have to take care of my aunt’s body—”
“Robin needs a hospital now —”
“Garrie, wake up —”
“Just get her in the car — My aunt —”
“ — Did you see that oh my God did you see —?”
Water trickled down her neck; gentle knuckles passed over it, spreading coolness. Okay, that felt good, here in the heat and sweat and bright hot sun, tucked up against a blessedly familiar solidity. Trevarr.
He brushed the side of his face against her ear, whispered into it. “Atreya. You worry them.”
Quinn’s voice came more decisively. “I’ll carry her, then.”
Trevarr’s arm, folded around her shoulder, tightened.
Garrie opened her eyes, not without annoyance. “What?”
Lucia crouched beside her, gaze flicking from Garrie’s face to Trevarr behind her. “Chicalet? Are you back?”
Garrie checked. Arms, legs, hands and feet, all where they should be, covered with bright nicks and rock dust. And ah, pants, still not snapped up.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she muttered, and finally zipped that last inch over the girlie pink flowered underwear she really hadn’t meant for anyone to see.
She buckled the belt, looked her hands over front and back and then ran them over her face and hair to make sure everything felt familiar. She found the goose egg on her forehead and winced at the grimy trail of blood down the side of her face. “Maybe I’m back,” she said. “Maybe not. Depends on what anyone wants of me.” Visceral memory intruded on her awakening — the knife, the bat, the punch and kick. “Ugh! I suck! I kicked the lerkhet’s eyes off. I suck so bad.”
“But, chicalet... You’re all right?” Lucia had an expression that Garrie couldn’t quite understand. Sure, maybe the mountain had just almost come down around their ears, and sure, the lerkhet had almost sucked them dry, and sure, Huntington had almost finished the job. But this... this was something else. And then Lucia’s eyes drifted to her recently snapped pants, and Garrie knew.
“I’m fine,” she said firmly.
“I would find him in his hell,” Trevarr said, low in her ear, “and bring him back to kill again.”
Lucia eased closer, lowering her voice. “Robin wasn’t as lucky.”
Garrie’s gaze flickered over to Robin sitting against the Cruiser’s grill, pale and folded in on herself, a feverish-looking flush high on her cheeks.
Sklayne flicked a hard tail. ::Ate her memories.::
“You did what?” Garrie absorbed that little tidbit while Sklayne didn’t deign to elaborate, and cast Lucia a resigned glance. “He says he ate her memories.”
Dark eyes went wide. “Oh. I thought it was me. I thought... I mean, I had to... she needed... oh! I don’t do people!” She took a deep breath, shaking her hands out. “Okay. We did what we had to, yes? And now Robin needs the hospital, and so does Quinn—”
Quinn left the Cruiser with swift steps, and he would have been convincing in his fierceness had he not stumbled over nothing on the way. “Quinn is fine,” he said. “A stun gun stuns. That’s the way it is. I’ll get over it.”
Lucia protested, “That burn—”
“I’m fine,” Quinn said. “But I need to be with Robin.”
Trevarr’s voice rumbled briefly against Garrie’s back. “Let him go.”
“But,” Garrie said, sitting straighter to look around the devastated clearing, “You and Quinn and Robin... what happened?”
“Another time, chicalet.” Lucia gave Trevarr a pointed look. “As for this one — he’s a lot better than he was, thanks to you.”
::And me. To me.:: Sklayne’s deep green gaze followed the haphazard trail of an approaching swallowtail butterfly. The tip of his tail flicked; his haunches tensed.
Let it thrive, Garrie told him. That’s why we saved this place.
His tail thwacked her arm.
Lucia said, so patiently, “I can tell when you do that talking thing, you know. So, the hospital, yes? Quinn goes, Robin goes... and Treva—”
“No!” Garrie said, panicked at the very thought.
“No,” Trevarr said, his fingers stilling on Garrie’s neck.
“Mow!” Sklayne said, and hissed for good measure.
Lucia threw her hands up. “Whatever, then. Caryn’s calling the sheriff — she has to take care of her aunt. And there are all these bodies—”
Sklayne purred.
Loudly.
Lucia stood, her entire body an exclamation of disbelief, still blocking Garrie’s view. “No. They’re gone. They’re all—” She pivoted a circle, looking not a little ill.
Garrie could only cover her face, knowing that Lucia would find nothing but disturbed ground and exploded rock and shredded tree limbs. “Please,” she said tightly, not yet daring to look, “tell me he left Feather.”
::Respect for the Feather person,:: Sklayne said. But he ruined the effect by purring again, so smug.
“Yes,” Lucia said, relieved. “Caryn’s with her. Holding her open cell phone. So we’re leaving.”
She and Quinn and Robin climbed into the battered rental car, leaving deep gouges and crunched bushes in the wake of their departure.
In the following silence, Caryn’s phone only murmur in the background, Garrie again put her face in her hands, so aware of the grime, the sweat, the blood... the mists of lingering emotion. The ghosts were gone, aside from Feather and Bobbie’s quiet presence up the hill.
She took the deepest of breaths. “What even happened?”
When Trevarr didn’t answer right away, she twisted to take him in — finally brave enough for that.
Amusement touched his features — eyes hardly bright, but reassuringly pewter, smoky at the rims and the pupils hidden with their glamour. He bore all the bruising from that unfair battle of beast and brute force and power, his hair tipped in blood and the strands of it sticking to his neck and jaw.
His leg rested just so, glimpses of raw flesh visible beneath torn leather. And his injured arm rested against his stomach, not looking quite so damaged as it had been. “Sklayne has done what he could.” Trevarr reached behind her ear, smoothing down chronically disarrayed hair. “But only because of your courage, atreya. What the lerkhet did to me...”
::Fatal,:: Sklayne said, cheerfully enough. He’d found and flipped an armored stink beetle, and now watched it intently, nostrils twitching, to see if it could right itself. Ants by his toes, birds in the trees, the rustle of a natural breeze overhead... all as it should be. ::Too changed, it was. A true lerkhet... :: He graced her with a mental sniff. ::Stupid little squealie, bristly face, cutesie sparks. No tentacles. No big. No venom.::
Garrie cleared her throat. “Bringing it here seemed like a good idea at the time.”
::Good,:: Sklayne agreed. ::Until it wasn’t. And then! The Garrie! Then came the mixing! Us and them and you.:: His voice held the merest hint of admiration. ::Boom!::
Garrie felt resentment settle into place arou
nd her mouth and chin, the draw of her brow. “We were healing this place.”
Sklayne made a noncommittal sound. Or it might have been a feline burp.
Garrie persisted. “We even cleansed Huntington.”
Right, until suddenly there’d been nothing left of him. Without his depraved and corrupted energies, he’d been nothing but a shell.
“I had all that energy on board. It made sense to use it for you both!” Even if it had brought Trevarr’s wild other into the mix, too. The darkness that they both now strove to balance.
::Stupid sense,:: Sklayne agreed, but there was a purr behind it — pleased to be scolding. ::Boom!::
“Little friend,” Trevarr said, the mildest of warning in his voice. And to Garrie, “Not without risks. But you knew that, I think.”
She looked away from him. Not so different from Caryn, perhaps. Making decisions for all of them, when it came down to it. Her voice came out smaller now. “Is it safe to look, now?”
The smile rested at the corners of his eyes. “We do not know just how, atreya. But see what you have done.”
She didn’t, not right away. She watched his face. Hard in anger, closed off when wary, and fiercely expressive in passion. But at the moment, weary. Hurting. And something gentler than she’d expected.
An understanding.
Finally, she climbed to her feet, away from his trailing touch and warmth. She took a breath and turned around, and she —
“Holy farking — !”
The giant rock was gone, shattered and blown away, the ground scoured clear around it. The bluff itself had been largely whirled away — wind-carved and spirit-carved, the work of ages done in a matter of moments and leaving a fantastical swirl of shape and stone in shifting sandstone layers.
And between here and there, at the spot where she’d flung herself over Trevarr and Sklayne and thrown them into siphoning conflagration —
Garrie’s mouth dropped open. It stayed that way for a while.
There churned a thing of power and beauty and grace. Vortex. Mesmerizing, crystal clean curves of motion and grace and glassy layers of ethereal breezes sliding over and around each other as they made their way from the ground to the infinite sky and back down again.
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