*No! Do not need!*
But he was beginning to understand want.
As a kit he’d been immersed in his brood, tumbling and cuddling and hissing and rolling. Such was the way of his kind. But then came Trevarr, and Sklayne was not-alone in a different way, one without choice. Bonded long enough to grow, and learn, and depend.
Now there was no bond. No Trevarr.
Now there was only the Garrie. Partner.
Sklayne dug his claws deeply into the hard painted steel, hissing with frustration. Bond meant he could tweak and tease and play his own games. Bond meant he could pretend to be hateful of his constraints.
The Garrie had made it clear enough that partner did not mean the same.
The tram car reached the top, braked with a jerk, and then slipped more gently toward the station. Sklayne leaped to the roof, running the peak to its end. There he sat and tucked his tail around his feet, contemplating the mountain. Not just seeing, but feeling.
Ah, he said to it. Sad for you, tired now.
The entity that had once been kyrokha sat close to the earth, pulled in on itself. Drooping. Still too big for Sklayne to tackle alone, as any kyrokha would be. His kind were pranksters and gambolers and happy to snack, but they were not warriors.
Unlike kyrokha.
But this one was too sick, too distressed, to have metered its temper, and now it sat vulnerable.
Not that Sklayne could do anything about it. Sad for me.
But he could return to the Garrie to confirm that the entity had exhausted itself for now.
Glad for me!
Without power lines, he made slower progress, skimming down off the crest to follow his sense of the Garrie back to her physical self. The rain-washed foothills greeted him with a fresh chirp of cricket and the startled swooping of a bat that could, just barely, perceive him. Water dripped from the Garrie’s favorite porch and out of the gutters into the rain barrels, and broken glass gleamed in the diffuse light flowing out from a single, obscured light from within the house.
He found the Garrie sitting on the toilet.
“Awesome,” she said, not moving from where she propped against the sink, her arm draped into it. Comfortable, probably not. “We need to have a discussion about knocking.”
*Peeing, big farking deal.* But he stole a glimpse at her expression to make sure she didn’t really mind. What he found was a pale visage that had nothing to do with the peeing and everything to do with the bleeding. *Bleeding, big farking deal!”
“Yeah,” she said. The sink was littered with bandage things, half-opened and abandoned. “Musta nicked an artery or something. Who knew? I don’t suppose you’d make like Lassie and bring me the phone.”
*Do not know Lassie.*
She waved a vague hand. “Fictional dog,” she said, and ignored Sklayne’s dramatic hiss and spit. “Stupid of me not to go straight for it. I just got back to myself and thought, no, not on the new carpet.”
*Stupid,* Sklayne agreed, and then thought from her expression that maybe he shouldn’t have. *Fix carpet. Easy. Fix the Garrie. Not as easy. Not bonded.*
She gave him a hopeful look. “Can you?”
*Not bonded,* he said, adding a sad little mew of punctuation.
“Great,” she said. “As if I have the faintest idea what that really means.” Her elbow slipped a little on the counter and her eyes did an exaggerated blink, a woozy little roll. “C’mere.”
He jumped to the counter, offering her arm a delicate feline sniff. Could not fix missing blood...maybe could fix the part that kept bleeding. Gift energy.
“Hold out your paw,” she said, and demonstrated, holding out a wavering hand, palm up. Wary, curious, Sklayne raised a front leg, twisted a feline wrist as though to clean between the pads. The Garrie said, “Now spit.”
*Spit.* He said it flatly.
“Yes, dammit, spit. Grow a pair of lips or drool onto your paw or whatever.” She spat into her own palm, not neatly.
Sklayne grew himself a transitory pair of lips and spat onto his paw. Neatly.
“Great. Now shake.” She thrust her hand forward just a little bit.
With slow-motion caution, Sklayne extended his paw until it met the center of her palm. Her fingers closed gently around it and she gave them an infinitesimal shake. “There,” she said, catching herself on a wobble again. “Now we’re spit-bonded.”
He gave her the most skeptical of looks.
“Seriously,” she said. “That always works. So either do something about this or go fetch my phone. Arf.”
He yanked his paw from her grasp and flicked sparks at her from his whiskers. But he also put a third paw on her arm to steady it, an invisible paw of human size, the sensation of which made her eyes widen. *Being still!* he told her, and expanded himself outside the cat body, swooping in to peer through the matter of her and find the places where the pieces didn’t hold together. Deeper than cells, but down further where the parts of her twined and spiraled and grew into cells.
Unfamiliar. Not truly bonded. Not part of him. But he would try.
He pushed this piece toward that, tugged these pieces together...built a complex puzzle into thin, smooth tissue, barely holding against the rapid pulse of round red blood and tasty plasma.
Artery again. Mostly.
“Ow!” the Garrie cried, and the arm jerked under his ethereal paw. “Ow, dammit! You could have mentioned it would feel like getting unshot! In slow motion!”
Sklayne pulled back into himself, whiskers bristling and big ears flattened. *Ow, dammit! How else!*
But then he saw that her mouth trembled and her eyes glisten and her face being not the right color for the Garrie at all. *Not crying? No crying!*
“I’m fine,” she said, though an obvious little catch of breath, a gulp. Already the blood had slowed—enough so she gingerly unwrapped the sodden ex-shirt and extended it over the wastebasket in a fingertip grip, dropping it with a wet thump. “Thank you. I know that wasn’t easy.”
*Mighty,* he reminded her, watching suspiciously as tears glimmered at the edge of her lower lids and quietly spilled over. Definitely crying.
“I’m just tired,” she told him, wiping down the arm with a trickle of water and drying it without much care, fumbling one-handed with a tube of ointment and then a length of stretchy bandage. “Really. I’m just...you know...Trevarr and this mountain thing and the dead hikers and poor Mr. Ephram and I’m just...tired.”
*Tired,* Sklayne agreed. *Clean this up later. Pull on pants. Find bed. Mountain tired now, too. Will watch for you, the Garrie.*
She ran a hand under her nose in a great big sniffle, spreading a smear of blood across her face. “Good,” she said, a grumpy tone entering her voice. “It ought to be tired.” She stood and yanked her silly bright lime underwear into place and then simply stepped out of her cargo shorts, giving the sink a weary look along the way. “Later,” she told it.
Sklayne gave it a quick narrow-eyed look as though it might reply, and then caught up with her as she stumbled into her bedroom, found the errant phone, and left a quick message for Lucia. “Don’t worry,” she said, in a voice that would make Lucia very worried indeed.
The Garrie dropped the phone and fell onto the mattress, groaning as she grasped for the jumble of covers.
*Doing that,* Sklayne told her, and grew thumbs long enough to pull the covers up into place. *Watching you now.*
But the Garrie was already asleep, tears still leaking from the corners of her eyes and a little hitching sob of breath breaking free now and then.
*Watching you,* Sklayne said, and curled up at her shoulder to purr in the way that always made Trevarr relax when he wasn’t paying attention. He flowed into his larger self, all ears and very little tail and plenty of leg, but still tucked handily beside her. *Watching you, the Garrie. Partners.*
Spit-partner.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 22
Kehar: Because She Was Becoming Them
&n
bsp; Anjhela left Trevarr alone in his confinement.
She told herself it would soften him—the waiting, the wondering when she’d back. She told herself it would humiliate him, the forced submission to the dullest of bloods and the cleaner entities—feeding him, absorbing his waste, giving him the meanest of care.
She told herself it meant nothing that she’d returned to Solchran’s original site, the razed ground beside the rich alluvial platinum field where it had first prospered. The area was still surrounded by trees and craggy thrusts of rock, still caressed by tides of black fog and baking heat, still full of silly little flittering avians and broken rays of sunshine. Just as it had been, except for the exact spot where the village had stood.
That earth was dead, now. That earth would always be dead.
She stood upon an overlooking rock and wondered about the pressures that had formed Trevarr into the equivalent of the hard, precious metal once mined here—gleaming and true and so very valuable. She wondered about his early years and she wondered why these people had taken him in, even knowing his grandfather had been one of them. Would they have done so, knowing the price they’d eventually pay?
But she could not scorn them. Because she was becoming them.
Shahh and Ghehera had called her to review. They would want answers. They would want the identity and location of the powerful being who so far defied their search. They would want Anjhela to lead the hunt for this person—this woman—whom Trevarr so stubbornly protected.
But this village had taught Trevarr what protection meant, and what love meant, and what it meant to provide those things in defiance of Ghehera. He would not fail this love of his, no matter how Anjhela plied him.
Anjhela found herself uncertain that she wanted to try.
She could not see deeply enough inside herself to know if this reluctance was a failure or a victory. But she could look out over the flat destruction of this once-thriving village and see what would happen to her if she didn’t overcome it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 23
Ranger Rick Soto
Rhonda Rose
“What if my parents come to check on me?” Tears streaked Lisa’s cheeks as she threw her clothes in a large suitcase without evident care. Half her closet contents lay scattered around her, while her aunt searched through household files for such information as would be needed. “What if they’re just hanging around, and they see me, and they see me seeing them?”
“I’ve observed no sign of their recent presence.” I sat in her wooden desk chair with my back straight, my hands folded in my lap, and my expression carefully composed.
Because while I had not seen them recently, I had certainly seen them immediately after their deaths, when their sedan was obliterated by a driver with a pickup truck and a cell phone habit.
Perhaps as she matured, Lisa would have found a way to introduce the hidden part of herself to her parents. They were decent people, if blithely accepting of their daughter’s unusual independence and completely unaware of her true nature. I think they would have done well with the revelations she held for them.
But their death transition was not the time for them to learn such things. And immediately after Lisa’s first dissolution was decidedly not the time for her to encounter her just-departed parents.
So when their intertwined spirits rushed to her from the accident site, I stopped them; I reassured them. I provided them the peace to move on.
But I hadn’t had the courage to tell her of it. She had been so raw, so wounded. So reactive.
And now she had the power of dissolution.
“I’ve been afraid to look for them,” she said, and the tears spilled over as they had so readily these past weeks. She swiped at them with no finesse and no handkerchief. “What if they need h-help?”
“Lisa, your parents were lovely, well-adjusted, happy people. They may well have been satisfied to merely glimpse you before they moved on.” I sighed. “It serves no purpose to fret over what you should be doing as a reckoner. Your plate is quite full enough simply being a daughter.”
For an instant, her face crumpled. But she quickly lifted her chin into her most stubborn posture and stomped into her closet, yanking out a token dress and dropping it into her suitcase before flipping the lid closed. “There,” she said, zipping it closed with an unnecessary fervor. “That should satisfy Aunt Joan.” Then she threw herself on the bed and broke into loud, wracking sobs.
I closed my eyes, pressing my lips together—knowing that my countenance had grown ill-defined and watery despite my efforts to maintain composure.
Perhaps I should have allowed her parents to approach her on that evening—perhaps I should have allowed things to unfold on their own. Who was to say her parents didn’t have some subliminal inkling of their daughter’s nature? Who was to say they wouldn’t have accepted and embraced it, and focused on their chance to say farewell in a fashion so few families were allowed?
I had interfered for what I had deemed to be their sake and Lisa’s sake, too aware of all the possible ways that encounter could turn to disaster. If Lisa hadn’t yet truly normalized her energies after the dissolution...if in her shock, she’d lost control and wreaked just such a dissolution upon her own parents...
And now the child was heartbroken, believing herself to have failed her calling just when it mattered the most.
Because it was done, I said nothing and would continue to say nothing. And because I could offer her no physical comfort, I only hummed a gentle song while Lisa McGarrity waited for her aunt to take her away from the only home she’d ever known.
~~~~~
It was Sort of Shrapnelly
Garrie opened her eyes to the ceiling of her stone-damaged home-to-be and wondered how she’d explain the damage to the real estate agent and the bank and the man who still technically owned this place. Hail?
There’d been a deluge here the previous evening, after all—typically short, typically intense. And it was entirely normal for one small area to take the brunt of any given passing storm.
“Hail,” she said out loud, trying it out.
There was a dent on the pillow beside her head and a scattering of multi-colored hairs, each longer and coarser than those of any Abyssinian cat. No sign of Sklayne, which suited her fine.
She wanted to deal with this particular life hangover in private.
She rolled off the mattress, but didn’t get far, clutching at the stab of pain in her arm. “Ow, dammit!”
So much for the reckoner leaping heroically to her feet the next morning. But as pale as she felt this day, thanks to Sklayne she was still walking wounded and not bled out in the sink.
Cool.
She wobbled to her feet in the barely furnished room, preparing to wince at the mess she’d left—the big stain in the closet where she’d returned from Garrie View to the surprising news that hey, sometimes flesh wounds matter, and then the trail to the bathroom.
Nothing but pristine carpet. Sklayne at work.
Very cool.
So in spite of it all, Garrie started the day with decent cheer, climbing to her feet to exchange her undies for a clean pair and grabbing her Sklayne-clean cargo shorts from the bathroom. She didn’t wrestle with changing the shirt just yet. Ravenous thirst took precedence.
She made her way down the tight spiral stairs more carefully than usual and pulled ice water from the fancy door of the fancy fridge that had come with the place, gulping it down for an immediate refill while she pondered the insignificant contents of the fridge itself. A head of lettuce hadn’t been her plan for breakfast, but she stripped off a few leaves for starters, munching thoughtfully.
The previous evening had done more than run her through the wringer. It had given her new tools. Tools she intended to use, just as soon as she checked in with Quinn and Lucia. Which would happen as soon as she found the phone.
She padded around the first floor. A couple of camp chairs sat near her leather-bound trun
k in the center of the great room, pretending to gather around a hearth still waiting for its wood stove. An empty shelf leaned half-assembled in the corner, and a couple of boxes sat against the wall in desultory disarray, flaps half-open. High arching ceiling, lively inset tile accents and nichos, a giant dark beam running overhead...
She realized with a strange surprise that this was her home now. No more perching in an apartment waiting for it to feel like her space, but the sensation of this is where I am. Unfurnished, still smelling of closed-up fresh paint and recent carpet and waiting for window treatments, it was nonetheless home.
It lacked only the people she called family. And it lacked the half-breed bounty hunter who’d probably never be pinned to one spot, he who maintained a dozen bolt holes on his own world and then spent much of his time somewhere else altogether.
She’d only just started looking for her phone when a key fumbled at the not-locked front door, cycling it to locked. The person with the key tried the knob, realized the error, and unlocked the door again just as Garrie reached it, one piece of lettuce still in hand. She expected Lucia or Quinn; she got...she squinted, trying to place him outside of his green and tan uniform.
Ranger Rick Soto.
He stared back at her, no less stunned than she was. He had one hand reaching for the knob and the other laden with bulging cloth grocery bags.
“Hey,” Garrie said, lamely enough. “Who gave you a key?”
“It’s me, chic!” Lucia called, still out of sight down the porch, her voice just a little too bright and slightly out of breath. “I brought horchata! I brought fresh churros!”
“You, ahh...” Ranger Rick gestured vaguely and inconclusively.
“...Wasn’t expecting you?” Garrie finished for him.
He made a sound in his throat, his hand dropping but his expression still taken aback.
“Tried to call you.” Lucia arrived with several bags hooked over her elbow, a plate in one hand, and a drink cooler hanging from the other. Just the right amount of makeup covered the stone bruise on her cheek—enough to minimize it, not so much as to look like cake. Her arm was more colorful, and completely visible outside the shoulder ties of a breezy sleeveless shirt meant for city temperatures. “Check your phone. Messages everywhere. Ohh, chicalet—have you even seen yourself this morning?”
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