Lucia gave the remaining confection a keenly contemplative glance and sighed. Unlike Garrie, she hadn’t just run several elliptical miles at a pro marathoner’s pace.
But also unlike Garrie, she didn’t have a day’s worth of dissonant breezes tying her body into knots.
Once those had been simple breezes, easily tamed by moderate if constant activity. Now the breezes had turned complex and tangled; they drove her hard, herding her between exhaustion and the edge she needed to handle them in the first place. A precarious and dangerous balance, and one that seemed to worry even Sklayne.
Sklayne’s remote, nosy perk of interest came from some distance. *Busy now,* he said primly, as if he’d never cared at all. *Gunpowder, tastes like boom!*
Say...what?
Lucia made a face at Garrie’s distraction, toeing her sandals off and pulling long legs onto the couch. “Drew hasn’t said way phat even once. Or grill. Or any of the other pathetic things he did.”
“Did you feel something from him?” Garrie licked the edge of the sticky bun and put the remainder aside until after her impending shower. Several pounding elliptical miles, after all.
Lucia made a face. “Dios, chicalet, it was hard enough to deal with emotional ghostie leftovers. But now to get them from the living? How can I keep it all straight?” She swallowed hard, her chin suddenly trembling in a faint, jerky struggle for control. “My family is talking about doctors again, you know.”
“You don’t have to take their pills.” Garrie stood, maybe just a little too certain of herself.
“I do,” Lucia said, no little fear in her voice, “if they put me somewhere for my own good.”
Garrie’s certainty fled in a sick wash of concern. Lucia’s parents had old money, from an old family that had arrived with the original land Spanish grants. They had influence, they were used to wielding it, and their affectionate tolerance for their idiosyncratic daughter went only so far.
She stretched as if she still had all the confidence in the world. “No biggie. We’ll work on your shielding.”
Lucia cast her a doubtful look. “I’ll never be able to do what you can.”
“You don’t have to. It’ll still be plenty.” Garrie headed for the shower, stripping her skin-snug sport shirt on the way.
Lucia nibbled the edge of one manicured nail, perfectly familiar with Garrie’s shedding habits. “Maybe,” she allowed. And then, as Garrie reached the bathroom door and walked out of her shorts, “Even a little extra mojo would help.”
“Exactly.” But Garrie wasn’t thinking only about Lucia anymore. Trevarr. And looking for him...finding him.
A little extra mojo would in fact go a very long way.
Especially when she had a whole lot of extra mojo casually hidden away in a bag of touristy New Age treasures where even Sklayne hadn’t found them. Stored portal energy in their beautiful, otherworldly little packages, all cool stone and gleaming color. Echveria.
Not safe, that’s what Trevarr had told her. Get them discharged, he had told her. Before they become unstable.
Using them would discharge them, wouldn’t it?
Right. Because it would be so smart to mess with explosively unfamiliar energies not even of this world. Putting who knew how many others in danger, while bringing herself to the attention of those on Kehar who were looking for her.
The very thing he’d sacrificed himself to prevent.
She snarled a detailed curse under her breath and cranked the shower on, barely waiting for warm water before stepping under the flow for the quickest of soap and rinse cycles. She emerged still muttering.
What she wouldn’t do to have Rhonda Rose looking over her shoulder to dispense some wisdom. Rhonda Rose, who had not only mentored her from childhood, but had, after leaving Garrie’s life, quite evidently done some traveling. To Kehar.
There was too much Garrie didn’t yet understand.
She scrubbed a towel over her hair and stalked into the bedroom to yank on some clothes. Snug ribbed tank top under a filmy batiked shirt to hide the unmitigated gleam of her skin, cargo shorts riding low on streamlined hips, feet shoved into sport sandals.
She returned to the apartment’s center room, easily tossing the towel into the bathroom on the way. Snug spacing, this apartment.
“You won’t be able to do that in that big foothills house of yours,” Lucia observed without looking away from her fashion magazine.
“It’s not mine yet.”
“Cash offer,” Lucia said by way of argument. “It’s yours.” She peered at Garrie over the top of the magazine. “You know, we really need to back into the swing of reckoner things. You want to return that call from the haunted auntie?”
“Auntie has no unusual breezes in her vicinity. I peeked.”
“How about the little restaurant that wanted a cleansing?”
“What they need is an exterminator—they have pack rats out back.” Garrie stretched, feeling the prickle of restless energies. “But I did tell them we’d come by, as long as we get a couple of their chimichangas out of it.”
“Excellent,” Lucia said. “I can tag along and look important.” She put her magazine aside and swung her legs out of the chair. “You want some chai?”
Garrie waved vaguely in the direction of the kitchen, meaning no but go ahead. She’d just finish eating the—
Sticky bun. Which was gone.
*Most fine,* said Sklayne, as smug as ever. He curled up in her comfy chair, pastry icing on his nose and satisfaction on his face.
“The truth is,” Garrie said, pretending she didn’t care, “it’s back to being quiet around the city, just like before we went to San Jose. Except...”
Lucia disappeared into the tiny kitchen to make homey noises—filling the electric kettle, clinking spoon and mug. “Chai. You sure—”
“I’m sure. And the thing is...I get the feeling it’s really not. Quiet, I mean.”
Lucia reappeared to lean against the wall. She didn’t look surprised at Garrie’s words.
“You feel it?” Garrie asked.
Lucia retrieved the pastry plate, retreating to the kitchen where ceramic clinked gently against the sink. “Honestly, chicalet?” She hesitated over the faint sound of trickling water. “I think strange things got into our world when the krevata opened that portal in San Jose, and I think we’re not done paying for that. None of us.”
“Ouch.” That deserved a wince.
After a few moments of quiet movement in the kitchen, Lucia reappeared with a steaming mug, her lively expression gone flat. “Tell me you disagree.”
Garrie opened her mouth. Closed it.
“Uh-huh,” said Lucia, and dunked the tea bag up and down, reaching for her clunky leather shoulder bag as the phone offered up a muffled ring tone. The phone peeked out the top of the bag, encased in a hot pink cover with “I Love Lucia” scripted inside a heart.
“You’re not a redhead,” Garrie noted as Lucia plucked the phone out.
“I could be,” Lucia said, with no concern for her smooth olive skin and straight black hair or the dark nature of her large and perfectly tilted eyes. “I would make it mine, and you know it.” She swiped her finger across the screen and slid the phone lightly across the vintage leather-topped footlocker that served as Garrie’s coffee table. “It’s Quinnie. On speaker.”
“Hey, Quinn,” Garrie said. “What’s up?”
“Ha!” he said, snorting distantly at something that had nothing to do with them. “Darwin’s law!”
Garrie tried again. “Hey! Quinn!”
“Oh.” His voice sounded closer to the phone. “Sorry. Just checked my newsfeed. A couple of idiots tried to rob one of the Gibson Street pawn shops. Turns out the owner had a baseball bat and the bad guys had bullets without gunpowder.”
“How does that even happen?” Garrie narrowed her eyes at Sklayne.
He returned the scrutiny with unruffled implacability. *Tastes like boom.*
“I know, right?�
�� Papers rustled in the background as Quinn sifted and sorted. “So anyway, I just checking out comp prices around your place...”
“It’s not my place yet,” Garrie said, an apparently token objection.
“...And my radio scanner program kicked in,” Quinn said, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “Another hiker went missing on the mountain today. Runner, actually. Name of Chris Martinez.”
Cold infused Garrie’s stomach. “Missing for how long?”
“A couple of hours overdue,” Quinn said. “From the Cienega Trail, not far from the loop you took. This guy had a hydration daypack, a compass, a map, knows the trail...left a note on his windshield with the time he left.”
Experienced. Like George Phelps.
Lucia wrapped her hands around the chai mug, frowning into the depths of it. “Then if he ran across something unusual, he’d know it was unusual.”
“As opposed to your casual hiker who wouldn’t know what he was looking at?” Quinn asked by way of agreement. “Yeah. He might go take a look at something others wouldn’t notice.”
Lucia said nothing out loud, but her troubled expression said enough.
Strange things got into our world. I think we’re not done paying for that.
Garrie looked over at Sklayne, who no longer seemed quite so smug.
She thought, in fact, that his overlarge ears might just be drooping, and his entirely feline gaze avoided hers.
No, not really quiet at all.
In fact, it tasted a whole lot like boom.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 4
Kehar: Anjhela, Wielder of Pain & Delight
Anjhela stood back, breathing hard. Trevarr’s battered body stretched out between chains, his breathing uneven, his consciousness fled.
Just a mortal, after all.
Even if he had once kept her alive during the vulnerable, frightening transition of mendihar absorption—and had used only his touch, the rarity of a pointed phrase, and his mere presence to do it.
But she’d known how little he understood what those things had meant to her survival. To her. For if he’d known, he surely never would have simply...
Gone.
Her pleasure faded, leaving only the ache of her arm, the glove fully absorbed back into gleaming skin and her own neat, tough nails once more tipping the fingers of elegant hands.
She was mendikha. She controlled his life now. She controlled his pain and she controlled his delight. And yet with his every silent look, he reduced her to the weak and frightened thing she’d once been. Afraid of the mendihar, afraid of Shahh’s black dripping glyphs, afraid of herself.
Anger licked up through her fatigue. Show him who you are. Show him what he lost when he walked away. She leaned against the cell door and studied him with eyes slitted and arms crossed.
He’d always been unreasonably tall. Now he’d filled out into his height, his bare shoulders broad, torso matured into flat planes and hard muscle and defined sections—pectorals, abdomen, and a flat belly braced by hard obliques.
Not a man of excess body hair, her Trevarr.
Her Trevarr.
Back in their beginning, he’d been leaner and nowhere near through growing into himself, his muscling less developed, his overall frame rangier...his features still striking, but lacking the harder lines maturity had brought them.
Then, they’d enjoyed each other mutually. He’d been fierce and lusty, not so much giving of his body as giving her lease to play with it. Never touching her with any special intensity, such as the kyrokha were said to do.
Legends. Exaggerations. Just like his hunter’s prowess, or he would not lie chained here before her.
She waited until awareness returned to his darkened gaze, and then spoke. “If I touched you just so,” she said, her voice made of rough silk, “would your body still leap for me?”
But he hadn’t spoken beneath the mendihar and he didn’t speak now. For all the things she could put into his mind, she couldn’t force anything out. It didn’t matter that she could bring him to an unwilling completion, playing his mind just as she played his body. It didn’t matter that they both knew she eventually would.
It was, after all, what she was. What she did. How she beguiled and twisted and corrupted, turning pleasure into pain and back again.
It was what he had helped her to be.
Yet none of that would truly touch him.
Nothing of what she’d done ever had.
And now she saw him grown even stronger and harder than she’d imagined he could be, commanding the room in spite of injury and helplessness. And she saw something different in his eye, in the hard determination and even in the resigned acceptance of his inevitable death at her hands.
She recognized it in him, amidst a spear of hurt and even something of despair.
For no, she had never truly touched him.
But someone else had.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 5
A Whisper Will Suffice
Rhonda Rose
“Look, Miss Rhonda Rose!” Lisa said, still evincing her fading child’s lisp. “See? I did it!” She leaned over the picnic table and looked up at me, enclosed in the backyard by old adobe walls and wooden gates and thought safe by her parents.
Safe from human predators and a proclivity to wander out into traffic, certainly. Safe from herself, undoubtedly not.
Nonetheless, she had worked the puzzle with a persistence no less admirable because it came from such a small and a comically studious form. It was an old wooden maze game consisting of a marble, a tilting game board, and marble-sized holes through which the marble might fall. I’d arrived to find her fiddling with it manually, sighing with exaggeration.
“Of course you’re bored,” I’d told her. “This is no challenge for a child of your dexterity. Therefore, you may run the marble through the maze without using your hands.”
She wrinkled her nose at me, tugging at a lock of hair behind her ear. As small as she was, she was all elbows and knees on this day, making me glad I had no lap to offer her.
“Why?” she asked.
You will note that she did not ask me how.
A challenging time, that first year with young Lisa McGarrity. So little focus, so little understanding of the stakes—for others, for herself.
“So you can become familiar with finesse, child,” I told her. “It does not do to shout when a whisper will suffice.”
She shrugged a careless acquiescence and bent to her task—just as I bent to mine: teaching her the tones of the whisper, and creating in her such a familiarity with finesse that she no longer recalled how very capable she was of a shout.
No, indeed, she certainly had no sense of this game’s importance. She was but a child—indulged through parental distraction, far too inquisitive to have been left so often on her own even had she not possessed such power.
For power, she had. At no time in collective memory had we found one such as her—and it had become my task to train her. To mold her. To...control her.
For so long as I could manage her at all.
~~~~~
Invasion Goes Both Ways
Keharian chains and cold burning and a strange, fierce resignation. Hard stone and harder power, the trace of clawed fingers along sensitive skin—
...What—”
Another missing hiker, Lucia was saying, barely reaching through Garrie’s distraction. Feline teeth closed over her hand and she blinked to find herself not chained in some diffusely lit place of black foggy edges and pain, but sitting in familiar late afternoon light, surrounded by the scent of chai.
Wherever Garrie had gone, only Sklayne seemed to have noticed. Lucia sank back into the loveseat, her phone still sitting on the leather-bound trunk, the speaker phone connection still open to Quinn—and by default, to Robin and Drew. “So that’s two of them. Seems like time to look at this mountain with Garrie View, yes?”
Garrie bounced to her feet, an effort to wrench h
erself back into this place, this time...this existence. “I don’t need Garrie View to know something’s invaded our mountain.”
They waited, knowing her well enough.
She stopped her pacing and aimed a narrow-eyed look out the window to the stark, jutting west slopes of that mountain. The day before, she’d allowed her mood to interfere with her tenuous connection to Phelps. He had deserved better. “I want to go back out to the trails. I must have missed something there.”
“No!” Lucia responded, her eyes widening in horror. “Quinnie, did you hear that? Tell her no!”
“No!” Quinn said, a hollow sound from the phone speaker, Robin echoing him in the background.
“Mow!” Sklayne said, squinting his eyes as if into a great wind.
Garrie glared at him most of all. “Really?” she said. “No? When did you ever get a vote, anyway?”
“She must be talking to the cat,” Quinn said in the background.
*Not-cat.* An irritable hiss ran down Sklayne’s back in a ruffle of fur and sparks to prove the point.
“I think it’s a good idea.” Drew’s voice came over the speaker, a little too casual in tone. “I’ll come along if the others don’t want—hey!”
A scuffling ensued; Robin made a disapproving noise and the phone jostled, movement scraping through the speaker. Garrie rolled her eyes and left to find the lotion that would tone down her shimmer for public view.
When she returned, Quinn held the phone close to his mouth again, evidently the victor of their little battle. “Drew’s reconsidered his offer to come along.”
“Might makes right,” Lucia said. “Nice.”
“Just cutting through to the inevitable end of the conversation,” Quinn said. “Garrie, Lucia’s right. Two missing hikers? The trails are obviously a problem right now. This is the time for a good overview.”
“Yep,” Garrie said, shoving her feet into sport sandals.
“Then why—”
“Because I want to.” Her tone cut through the underlying congeniality of the conversation. She grabbed for her cross-body gear bag, felt herself to be halfway out the door. “Because I’m restless. Because I’m unhappy and because I’m desperately trying to distract myself from noticing and a good hike will help!”
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