Reckoner Redeemed

by Doranna Durgin

  Everyone fell silent.

  “Ah.” Garrie crossed her arms to look up at the textured ceiling. “Did not mean to say that quite so out loud.”

  Lucia coughed, hiding behind the oversized mug. “Already knew,” she said.

  Quinn cleared his throat. “Already knew,” he added. “Robin?”

  “Knew,” Robin said, from further away.

  “Things haven’t changed that much,” Drew said from a considerably more distant spot as Sklayne leaped lightly to the back of the chair to glare at Garrie.

  *Knew,* he said. And then he did something Garrie had never seen—his cocky ears drooping, his expressive tail hanging down between lanky hocks. *Don’t-don’t-don’t go back,* he said, a rush of thought edged with fizzy static. *Please-the-Garrie-don’t!*

  She couldn’t help it; her jaw dropped. But she remembered to demand, “What aren’t you telling me?”

  He instantly remembered himself, fluffing up to ferocity and threat before he poofed into near-invisibility, a sandy-red smudge of glassy air on the way to the kitchen. *Toaster hostage will go spttt!*

  “Oh-kay,” she said, speaking to the world in general and looking out at the kitchen more specifically. Okay, she wouldn’t push him. Not yet. And okay, she wouldn’t rush out to the mountain. Also not yet. She’d beat her restlessness another way. For now.

  “You win,” she said. “You all win. I’ll do Garrie View here tonight after things quiet down. We can meet at St. Bab’s tomorrow morning before Quinn’s bookstore shift.”

  Drew’s voice filtered through with a sound of surprise. “Did she say okay?”

  “I think she did,” Robin responded.

  “Damned phone speaker,” Quinn said. “I could have sworn—”

  “Yes!” Lucia picked up her phone, held it close. “Yes, she said tonight! She’ll do it! So we’ll see you tomorrow morning at the park. Unless you hear more about the hikers. Then you call us. Adios!” She didn’t wait for a response; she poked at the phone screen and tossed the device aside to bounce gently on the loveseat. “Now. You okay, chicalet? Because this is not much like you.”

  Garrie gave her a pointed look. “I’m okay,” she said, “like you’re okay.”

  Which was to say not really. Not truly. Just floundering along like everyone else.

  “Besides,” she added when Lucia just looked at her, expecting more, “Sklayne knows something.”

  The threat was instant. *Toaster! Spttt!*

  Garrie moved to the arching kitchen entrance and propped herself against the wall. “If you know something important, little one, then I need to know, too.”

  After a moment, Sklayne struck back—sharp, silent words tipped with offended claws. *Little one!* The toaster sparked.

  Garrie bit her lip on a smile, and waited. A prickly offensive was more reassuring than any flare of desperation.

  Besides, it was an old toaster.

  Sklayne eventually muttered a sullen response. *Not knowing. Just thinking.*

  The toaster fizzled and died, emitting a tiny final stream of smoke.

  Lucia picked her magazine up again, as casual as anyone could be. “What’s up with him?”

  Garrie assumed her best Han Solo voice, which wasn’t very good. “He’s got a bad feeling about this.”

  “Oh,” Lucia said. “Well, then.”

  “Also,” Garrie said, “I need a new toaster. Want to go shopping?”

  ~~~~~

  Bad feeling. Close enough. The Garrie couldn’t afford to take chances, rushing back to the middle of a mountain that didn’t taste right. Not now, when she needed to stay strong and focused and most of all, alive.

  Trevarr needed her too much.

  And the Garrie needed Sklayne, even if she didn’t know it, and even if he didn’t know just how to make that connection.

  For Trevarr, he would learn how.

  Even if it meant eschewing the glory of riding breezes. Or of denying himself exploration. Even if it meant denying himself the recently discovered windmills lined up not so far from here.

  Big churning blades WHOP WHOP WHOP stretchy slow breezes electricity trickling WHOP WHOP WHOP...

  No. Not today. Today, while the Garrie and the Lucia person did their shopping, Sklayne limited his amusement to sipping tickles from the big gray dish on the sun-hot roof. He slipped away, glass cat, when a man stomped up the stairs with tools clanking and mouth grumbling about how he’d just repaired the damned dish the previous week?

  He had, too. Sklayne had watched him do it.

  Sklayne swirled down the cable line to the apartment as the Garrie returned from her excursion, one small toaster box propped on her hip. The Lucia person swept in behind her, carrying crinkly bags filled with soft cloth and small clinking things. She dropped them carelessly onto the soft cushions of the thing called love seat.

  Clinking, clicking, sniffy. Bottles-brushes-powders. Colors! Go into the bathroom looking one way, come out of the bathroom looking another. Yes, colors!

  The Garrie had very few of these items. The Garrie, with silver streaks in short nut brown hair and big eyes and wiry little form...

  She was nothing like the hearty females to whom Trevarr usually cleaved.

  Then again, there was nothing else like the Garrie. Not on Kehar. Not here on this world.

  Sklayne crept toward the shopping bags. Glass cat. Invisible cat. Careful cat. Recently the Lucia person had become more sensitive. He would not take her for granted.

  The Garrie yanked her new toaster from its box and went into the kitchen, plunking the appliance into place. Sklayne cast a wary eye after her and extended an invisible paw over the Lucia person’s bags, extruding his claws and gently prodding the plastic. Crinkle.

  The Lucia person lifted the bags, spilling the contents on the leather-bound trunk and removing the clear plastic bubbles of air that served as protective padding.

  Clear. Plastic. Air.

  The Lucia person displayed a delicate little bottle of something. “I love this scent.”

  “Don’t spray that in here,” the Garrie warned her. “I need to focus when I go aerial—which will be as soon as I call that real estate agent.”

  The Lucia person hesitated. “If you get the place, will you really let me have a room there?”

  Sklayne listened with only half his attention. Clear. Plastic. Air!

  “Yes, of course. We all need that place, Lu.” The Garrie hesitated. “You’re okay after all that shopping exposure, right?”

  The Lucia person shook her hands free of excess energies, treating Sklayne to the sight of rippling, gluey breezes and splattering droplets of accrued emotion. “Better than expected. But you must have been protecting me, yes? I know I’m not that good yet.”

  The Garrie’s silence said nothing, and was as good as saying everything.

  The Lucia person sighed. “You’re a good friend, chic. You wouldn’t even have gone out for that toaster if I hadn’t needed practice, am I right?”

  Clear. Plastic. Aiirrrr—

  The Garrie tugged at the hair behind her ear. “I like bagels,” she said finally. “I needed that toaster. So just let me make this call—”

  POP! Claws clear plastic air pop poppoppoppopPOP!

  The Lucia person shrieked and swatted blindly at the clear plastic air. “Bad!” the Lucia person said, with no doubt in her voice as to the culprit. “Bubble wrap, oh my God! Bad cat!”

  Sklayne made his purr audible, accepting the scolding with smug equanimity. Besides, the Lucia person would soon forget about the bubble wrap and then Sklayne would make off with it.

  The Garrie made a sound of generalized exasperation and tugged her phone from her thigh pocket to wander out into the afternoon shade of the apartment balcony, closing the sliding door before she lifted the phone to her ear.

  Sklayne could have listened if he wanted. But if the Garrie wanted to retreat, it was nothing to him—Trevarr had several such retreats hidden in treacherous territory and obs
cured by underground crystal formations.

  Trevarr. Atreyvo. Bond-partner.

  Bond partner still. Even if Trevarr had dissolved that rare bond during his final battle on this world, leaving Sklayne adrift in strangeness—without guidance, without the structure that had so long protected him from his own curious, impulsive nature. Forcing him into alliance with the Garrie, whether she realized it or not.

  But never forcing him to care. Because Sklayne didn’t.

  Sklayne did only those things that served Sklayne. Yes he did.

  Such as the task he would now undertake, leaving behind bubble wrap to scour this area clean of aimless, drifting etherea. Again. So the Garrie would use less energy doing this task herself. So she would have clear travels on her pending ethereal search.

  But it was only so she would have more energy to devote to Trevarr later.

  Yes it was.

  ~~~~~

  Garrie left a message for the real estate agent and returned to the apartment, where Lucia declared herself hungry. A quick trip to the local take-out, some chopsticks, and random bubble-wrap explosions later, and Garrie sat on the floor surrounded by Chinese take-out boxes, breathing in the evening silence and grateful to have avoided a session with Lucia’s new glitter makeup.

  Of course, it hadn’t been hard to argue that she glittered enough on her own, thank you very much.

  For Garrie glittered, all right. She shimmered. She absorbed new energies like a sponge, and no longer ever found herself in a place of silence. So surely she was doing the right thing by shifting to the foothills—to a place of privacy, and to a place big enough for them all as necessary.

  Just because this move was now happening with sudden speed didn’t mean she hadn’t been preparing for it for a decade.

  She hoped Lucia would like it there, and that the others would consider it home. She hoped that Trevarr would like it, too, and that in exchange for the mountain isolation he would tolerate the cooler foothills temperatures—given that what he called home was deep, baking hot forest over a craggy, tumbling land laced with a dark fog of drifting energies.

  He’d never said he wanted to stay, after all. Only that he couldn’t go home.

  Dusk fell over her thoughts, throwing gloom into the apartment. Lucia napped on the love seat without meaning to, worn out from her shielding practice. Zip-top storage bags littered the trunk and surrounding carpet, each filled with the ghost containment Secret Recipe and a glob of petroleum jelly spread thinly over every speck of surface.

  Just because ethereal activity had lately been full of off-world entities didn’t mean the reckoners shouldn’t be ready for same-old same-old.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, as Lucia slept, as her leftovers disappeared, containers and all, Garrie let the night finish pushing darkness into the corners of the unlit apartment and knew it was time to look out over the mountain and do her job. Her real job—the one she was never paid for, and the one she did without ever mentioning either the skill or the cost.

  The one Rhonda Rose had taught her to do.

  Watch over this land.

  Not the tasks and consultations that paid her daily way, but the big picture. Soothing and grooming and nudging Southwest breezes into overall balance.

  All of them.

  Garrie climbed up from her cross-legged spot on the floor to take a new cross-legged spot in the chair, rubbing a nascent cramp from her foot. She let the night seep into her bones, absorbing what it had to tell her—ethereal breezes, whispering clean and light. She established shielding from a veil of her own personal energy, setting a warning perimeter. After all, she’d neglected this part of the job of late.

  Not, as she took her awareness to that lofty place from which she could observe the world, that any such neglect was evident. The immediate area held only quiet native whispers. There were no remnants, no transient post-living individuals. Only simple, settled breezes.

  Well, that made things easier, if puzzling.

  She took her awareness higher. The four quarters of the city spread out in ethereal view, showing her minor areas of turbulence and faint areas of darkness. There was a small infestation of something along the river walk that she’d tidy up one of these days, and an ongoing tumult of activity in the desolate West Mesa. She hated to see it, but so far she’d left to heal on its own.

  Sometimes it was better that way—Rhonda Rose had taught her that, too. This particular tumult wasn’t likely to calm until the locally infamous West Mesa murderer was caught, no matter how Garrie handled it.

  I don’t do people, she’d said once—and again, and again.

  Now she wondered if that was changing, too.

  No. That’s not your place.

  Garrie knew better than defy Rhonda Rose, or even the memory of her voice. She shifted her attention to the east, easily orienting to the looming Sandias—and stopped short.

  All her life, the rugged Sandia Mountains had dominated her eastern horizon, a stark range of granite and limestone jutting up from the Rio Grande valley. She’d seen too many sunrises and sunsets to count, and she took for granted the stunning watermelon reflection of granite-embedded feldspar crystals.

  But never, in her earthbound vision or her Garrie-Vision, had she seen the deep, dark overlay now spreading out before her.

  It was red, the color of old blood, cloying and sickly sweet. Deepest red, the very color of Trevarr’s otherworldly blood, so often spilled these past months.

  She stuttered, briefly losing focus—briefly aware of her body sitting in the well-worn hollows of the comfy chair, ceiling fan air stirring against her face. She fought a swoop of vertiginous discomfort, resisting the impulse to look more closely at the ominous mountain range—and instead pulled back just a little more, looking not for the details but for the big picture.

  Because the deep, dark overlay told her nothing. Oh, sure, it meant trouble—unfamiliar energies and unfamiliar dangers. It obscured the turmoil against the west face where TWA Flight 260 had slammed into the mountain, leaving sixteen souls to linger in resentful astonishment. It covered the fresh and still roiling denial of the man who’d fallen to his death near La Luz trail, and the slightly more resigned imprint of the skier who’d once collided with a lift tower.

  Her reckoner’s landmarks, all gone.

  Garrie found the mountain’s crest, an ancient spine dividing the stark, steep plunge of western rock from the rolling topographical delight of the east’s wooded canyons. She located the winding Crest Highway easily enough, and from there she found her hike of the day before—the eastern branch of the Faulty trail and its complex intersection with the Cienega trail.

  And here it was. A slightly deeper shade of blackened red; a faint pulse of intensity, a faint swirl of a muddy, stagnant breeze.

  Nothing she’d ever seen before.

  She moved in closer with caution, alert and ready to run. Not so full of herself that she wouldn’t, if it came down to it. Quietly, she cast out the gentlest of breezes, whispering along behind.

  George Phelps. Chris Martinez. Can I help you?

  Then she held silent, waiting for the faintest spike of response and knowing it could come in the form of a self-aware spirit or in the fractured, damaged remnants of an entity that had not survived the transition or—

  She hardly cared to guess which.

  But the first taste of the echoing breeze took her entirely by surprise. It slammed against the emptiness inside her, familiar and heartbreaking and hope beyond hope.

  Trevarr?

  Trevarr!

  She spiraled in so close, so fast, she lost all perspective. I’m looking for you! I’m looking—!

  A tongue of energy flicked up, lashing through her with unerring accuracy—spearing her with a cold burn, a trickle of hot tear...

  An ache for home.

  Garrie ached with it, yearned for it—

  A startling surge of power erupted up at her. It was a thing of murderous intent, a thi
ng of anger and hatred and death and seething malformed rage.

  A thing that had seen her.

  Garrie wrenched herself out of yearning . She flung herself away from the mountain, at first following the thin thread of connection to her body and then thinking twice, suddenly feeling herself pursued—

  I am NOT yours!

  She reached for the clean breezes of high mountain air, the purity of white sand in a hot desert, the astringency of sharp spines and stinging fangs—braiding and twisting and wringing those essences tight before snapping them out like a whip and slicing away at ephemeral winds with the only thing that could cut them at all.

  Then she ran.

  She scattered the city’s calm with a churning gust of flight, sparking transformers and confusing signal lights. She cleansed herself in the deadwood of the wide, flat river bosque, diving full speed through thick nap-of-the-earth energies; she skimmed the edge of the reservation, sanding away her edges against the intersection of spiritual worlds.

  She ran like farking hell.

  She ran until she felt no taste of murderous fury, no bilious intent. She ran until the landmarks of the city blurred around her and within her, spiritual pinpricks of sandstorm impact that didn’t begin to slow her. When she finally tumbled to a stop, she found herself reeling within the complex mixture of influences of the city’s central biopark. Not all that far from where her body, so carefully protected, still sat.

  Wow.

  Wow.

  Hikers missing. No farking kidding.

  What the farking hell—”

  But what was far from the foremost question. Because right now it was more about how.

  How had the entity gotten there? How had it gotten so big and so powerful and so furious?

  And most of all, how had she missed it until now?

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 6

  Kehar: Dark Silvered Pity

  Anjhela left the deep, weighty underground of Ghehera, relying on Glyphmaster Shahh’s oskhila minor to transport herself and her ’bloods the considerable distance to the beleaguered village of Solchran.