Reckoner Redeemed

by Doranna Durgin

  A few more rungs down, his hands closed over her waist and lifted her down, offering a strength that Quinn seldom put on display. He brushed off her back, hitched the satchel back into place, and turned her around so they faced one another, as close as happened only with future lovers—or lovers past.

  “I could have done it.” She stood more comfortably than she expected, head tipped back to look up at him. “I’m okay.”

  “Yeah,” Quinn said. “Maybe I’m not.”

  “What Drew did isn’t your fault.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is.” His blue eyes held self-doubt. “Robin is right. The way you feel about Trevarr, the things you’re doing about it—it’s no different than what I felt and did for Robin in Sedona. And even looking back, the prices we paid...I don’t think I was wrong. I think I did what I had to do. So, you know...I should have understood better about Trevarr.”

  Garrie shook her head. “Drew did that. If he doesn’t get his head on straight...” She didn’t say it. He’d not only be off their team, he’d be someone she had to clean up after. Maybe someone she’d have to stop.

  Quinn’s mouth twisted briefly. “Okay. Drew’s messed up, and he...he interfered. But he had something to work with. I haven’t been on board from the start.”

  “But you are now.” She closed the distance between them, wrapping her arms around him for a hard hug.

  He returned her embrace more gently and kissed the top of her head, then set her back. “Okay, then,” he said. “Who wants to hear about kyrokha?”

  “Oh, me!” Garrie said, raising a hand. “I do, I do!”

  “Then let’s go. The Bestiary’s down in the kitchen. So’s Lucia. She’s going to want to fix up your arm thing.” He gestured at the drooping bandage.

  “She okay?” Garrie hitched the drooping satchel back into place again, resisting the urge to tuck it away again. Her team needed to work together now—to know everything. And if they couldn’t deal with everything, she needed to know sooner rather than later.

  Quinn led the way to the sliding porch door and pulled it open, stepping aside so she could enter first. “She’s dealing. Pretty well, I think. This Rick guy really screwed up. But you know...”

  “He’s not a bad guy,” Garrie admitted, heading down the tight spiral stairs and lowering her voice. Lucia banged around with pans in the kitchen, but she had ears like a bat and uncanny instinct to boot. “I hope he’s not a bad guy.”

  “He’d better not be,” Quinn said, and his voice held a certain kind of promise, one that made Garrie grin. Her team would be okay.

  She emerged in the high ceilings and open space of the kitchen. Lucia—her hair pulled back in a casual but perfect ponytail, an unmarred apron over her summery outfit—turned away from the mixer and into an immediate frown. “Oh, your arm! Chicalet, what were you thinking?”

  Garrie looked down on at the newly stained bandage. “That I really really really needed to get information from Sklayne?”

  Lucia wiped her hands on a towel and went for the drawer where she’d stashed the first aid supplies. “And did you?” She pointed Garrie at one of the breakfast bar stools.

  “I got what I needed,” she said, distracted by the Bestiary sitting next to Quinn’s laptop. “He’s up there nursing his dignity, sucking down all our solar power, and keeping watch for Ghehera.” She tugged the book closer, flipping the pages—her first good look at the thing, which Trevarr had left with Quinn when they’d gone to San Jose. She found it thick with glyph-text and hand-drawn art, humming with the spicy taste of Kehar. “You can read it?”

  “Sometimes,” Quinn said. “It comes and goes. It’s never more than a gist. I didn’t even realize I could read it at all until I got the Bestiary back from Drew.” He made a face at himself. “It takes a while to kick in, and we were busy with Sedona, and afterward I was only glancing because—irony alert—I couldn’t read it!”

  Garrie ran her hands over the book, closing it with some effort—letting her fingers wander the heavily tooled leather until they hit the spine, where a roughened area buzzed with energy. “Oh ho,” she murmured, rotating the tome so the window light fell on the spine, and finding there a more recent tooling—an ornate glyph, carved and oiled and overlapping what looked to be a very ordinary Q.

  “I can’t quite understand this one,” she said. “Something to do with connection.” She pushed the Bestiary back in place. “It’s truly yours, I think.”

  Quinn eyed it askance. “Do you even have any idea how much we don’t know what we’re doing here? A whole culture, a whole world, and we have no idea what they’re capable of?”

  “Oh,” Garrie muttered darkly. “I have a pretty good idea what they’re capable of.” But she sighed, and patted the tome. “It’s just a book, Quinn. And what are you, if not the keeper of books?”

  “Not much of one, apparently.” Quinn opened the Bestiary with effort, found his marked place, and tapped the page for her. “Kyrokha.”

  “Drew had the book, not you,” Lucia said shortly, setting tape, gauze, ointment and scissors out in an efficient row. She wouldn’t forgive Drew soon. If he didn’t change his ways, she wouldn’t forgive him ever. “Probably almost since he got here.”

  Garrie barely noticed as Lucia put the scissors to her bedraggled bandage, and she barely noticed their conversation die away. She ran her fingers over the thick, crinkling paper of the kyrokha page, tracing the images there.

  Wings. Claws. A pattern of feathery scales.

  The hand-penned words resolved into meaning. Powerful. Rhekerra. Reclusive. Extremely territorial, occasionally driven to restlessness. A tendency to make connections, even between species. Alternately worshiped and despised, always feared.

  “There’s another page,” Quinn said quietly. Garrie emerged from fascination long enough to realize that Lucia had already smeared ointment on gauze and pressed it over her arm, and then turned the page.

  To be faced with what Quinn had found. Large and lavish, stunning her with its beauty and an imminence of power that fairly oozed from the page.

  “This is a dragon,” she said, hearing the dazed sound of her own voice. “A farking dragon.”

  A dragon that breathed energies instead of fire. A dragon that towered powerfully from its high mountain perches, drawn in reverent detail with a strong and confident hand. One that could take ethereal form, prowling the land. Seeking attachment, taking as it would.

  And giving. The text was clear on that score, if somewhat coy.

  “I haven’t had a chance to look through the rest of the Bestiary,” he said. “The translation takes a while to kick in for each page.”

  Garrie bit her lip in frustration, putting a hand over the largest illustration. Admiring the creature.

  Fearing it.

  Because this was what lived on their mountain. Miserable, furious, and utterly broken. “It must be stuck in its ethereal phase.”

  “Worse than that,” Quinn muttered. “None of what it’s doing here is mentioned in the book so far. The attachments to the mountain, the way it’s preying on people—”

  “If it’s stuck in ethereal, it had to figure out how to survive,” Lucia said, patting the stretchy bandage into place. “There. Now be careful. Or should I just keep this stuff out on the counter?”

  Garrie gave her a sheepish look, mouth open to respond, but Lucia cut her short with a shake of her head. “Yes,” she said. “I think I’ll just do that.”

  Quinn turned the laptop around to face Garrie. “Dana’s info is a little less dramatic, but it’s not good news.”

  “Didn’t take you long to dig him up.” Garrie oriented herself to the social networking site, filtering out the ads and visual noise.

  “That’s the surface stuff,” Quinn said. “The usual sympathy and shock at his death. But check this guy out.” He tapped the screen and she clicked on that user name, a man who had worked with Dana in life.

  Worked for him, rather. And who in his own p
rivate space wasn’t tolerating any nonsense about what a great guy Dana had been.

  “He’s not talking trash,” Quinn said. “But he didn’t find the guy easy to deal with. Bully about sums it up.”

  Garrie skimmed the man’s comments. “Used to getting his own way. Rules don’t apply. Etc. Why am I not surprised?”

  Quinn came around to her side of the breakfast bar and reached over to switch to a different browser window. “Looks like he ran his own little company—software solutions. Filled a niche, found enough success to keep doing it. Not a prodigy, but still...he did well.”

  Garrie sighed, rubbing the spot just below her temple. “This doesn’t look good for Dana-Bob management.”

  Lucia had returned to the mixer, where she deftly removed the beaters and scraped off the remaining batter. “Just your average overbearing guy who hasn’t ever learned that sometimes he doesn’t get his way, yes?”

  “Very much yes. And now he’s got a nearly unprecedented amount of power at his disposal, and he wants what I can’t give him.”

  “He wants it now,” Quinn added. “Sorry I didn’t have better news for you. Honestly, Garrie, if he doesn’t settle down, I don’t know what choice you’ll have. Not when he’s willing to bring the kyrokha into play.”

  Dissolution. Instead of the graceful passing that he wanted and that she simply didn’t know how to provide. Not for a Bob of his unique nature.

  “Sorry,” Quinn said again.

  “It is what it is,” she said, more shortly than she’d meant to. “But not unless I have no choice.”

  Never mind that she’d already come perilously close to that point.

  She closed the lid on the laptop, pushing it back over to Quinn. “Thanks. That was all...wow. Critical.”

  “You should have had it sooner.” He scowled.

  Garrie couldn’t do anything but make a face in reluctant agreement. “We’ve all been a little off our game. But we’re done with that.” She rubbed her temple, where an ache had settled in. “Though I think we have to consider Drew pretty much off the table, whether he knows it or not.”

  Lucia’s expression turned tight as she brushed a loose lock of hair from her cheek—naturally without leaving so much as a dusting of flour behind. Her mouth flattened, brief but telling. “I’m worried about him.”

  In more ways than one. “Me, too. But you’ll be keeping an eye on him, right?”

  Lucia nodded at the pink phone sitting on the other side of the mixer, busy with her pastry sheet. “He’s calling when he gets resettled. I’m meeting Robin this afternoon at the co-op for my interview. I asked him to come and give us a read on the building.”

  Quinn pulled the Bestiary over to his side of the counter. “I’ll keep looking for kyrokha references—at least until I head into the city for my Pages shift this evening.”

  The oven beeped. Lucia finished the final pastry with a flourish and slipped the sheet into the oven, giving her watch a glance as she started on the second sheet.

  Garrie’s stomach growled. “What’re you making and how many of them can I eat?”

  “Sueños de teruel—almond cheesecake pastries—and I will smack your hand if you try. There are leftovers in the—” Her phone rang; she looked at it with surprise. “Drew can’t possibly be ready yet.” She leaned over to look at the phone. “It’s Rick.”

  Quinn turned a page, muttering something unflattering.

  Lucia picked up the phone for a cautious greeting. “Rick? I’m baking, so I need to call you—what? What? Wait—let me put you on speaker.”

  If he waited, it wasn’t long enough. “—Doc Long parking lot.” The connection wobbled—Garrie thought him lucky to have gotten through at all. “It’s here—I think it’s here—”

  She held her breath on a barrage of questions, knowing he wouldn’t likely stop talking long enough to hear them—and knowing the connection could go at any time.

  “—Birds,” he said. “—under shelter—hikers—” Silence, until she thought they’d lost him, and then one final sputter of connection. “—you help? —Garrie—help?”

  “Yes!” Lucia didn’t wait for Garrie’s response. “Can you hear me? We’re coming!” There was no response, only the peculiar flatness of dead air. Lucia looked up from the phone, her expression defiant. “We’re going.”

  “Of course we’re going.” Garrie already had a list started in her head. “If that thing’s at Doc Long, it’s on the move. It’s hunting.”

  “The Special Recipe is in the garage,” Quinn said, already on his feet. “I’ll mix it up.”

  “Heavier on the colloidal silver than the last time,” Garrie said. “Use the five gallon containers—and grab the garden sprayers.” They hadn’t been practical on the trail, but Doc Long had plenty of parking near its shelters.

  Lucia hit the stove controls in a quick series of beeps. “Auto shut-off,” she said. “What about me—what do I do?”

  “Help Quinn—you’re better with the Recipe,” Garrie said, her thoughts whirling as Lucia took off. “I don’t get it,” she muttered to the kitchen at large. The mountain had been quiet—recovering from the temper tantrum Dana had prodded out of it. So why now?

  “Ghehera,” she said out loud. Ghehera. Coming through like freight train, splashing everywhere. Searching and searching loudly. In complete disregard of a trapped, broken entity that just wanted to go home.

  And now it was on the rampage.

  “Sklayne! Sklayne, get down here!”

  *LOUD LOUD LOUD right here.* And he was, crouched in readiness at the edge of the counter with his whiskers flattened tight and his ears canted back. Whatever he’d overheard, it had been enough.

  “Can you hold this thing back from Rick and his shelter?” she asked him, ducking out to reacquire the satchel and the coat both, thinking of the echveria she now knew how to use, thinking it might be the only way to manage this thing that was so much bigger than she was—and thinking that if she had no echveria, she would never find her way back to Kehar. That Trevarr was still chained and enslaved by glyphs, still waiting for her.

  *Hold it back?* Sklayne’s tail twitched in thought. *Depends.*

  Garrie released a breath. “Maybe it won’t come to that.” Maybe they could just go in there with Secret Recipe blazing, save the day, and worry about the monster later.

  Maybe.

  She grabbed her keys and her daypack. “C’mon. We’re fifteen minutes away from Doc Long and we have no idea how fast this thing can move.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 29

  Little Bird Bones

  Rhonda Rose

  I found Lisa on the roof of her aunt’s house, where she would be forbidden should her aunt ever discover her there. But her aunt was a person of little imagination, and had never considered that Lisa’s bedroom window was, to Lisa, a clear invitation to go sit on the roof.

  This day, Lisa seemed only a reflection of herself, tucked into a ball with her arms wrapped around her knees, her expression unguarded and weary, and her hair sporting its unnaturally blue streaks.

  “Just tired,” she said to me before I even inquired. “Graduation coming up, finals, yada yada yada.” She hiccupped quietly, and I knew she’d been crying even before she added, “Really tired.”

  “Lisa...” I found myself short of words. I understood what drove her thoughts. Her work was lonely and mostly thankless, if only because no one truly understood either the delicate accuracy of her touch or the contained power behind it.

  “Oh, I know, I know.” She adopted an overtly scholarly tone. “The consultations provide more than mere income. They allow me to remain familiar with the activity in the area, and increase my proficiency for those rarer moments when a post-living individual needs more significant management.”

  So she had been listening after all. “Once you become of age, your situation will ease.”

  “Right. No more school, no more house rules.” She glanced at me, and I knew to exp
ect testing. “I could afford to move out right now, if I wanted to. I have an apartment all picked out, you know.”

  I knew. I also knew that her aunt provided her with an important connection to the living—to family. “You cannot do this alone.”

  She tugged the hair behind her ear and scowled at me. “I’m not doing anything alone. Sometimes I have Lucia. And I’ve got you.”

  “Circumstances change,” I said, most gently. But she wasn’t ready to hear that yet, and her scowl only deepened.

  She had no way to know that of late I’d seen glimpses of other existences, absorbed hints of unfamiliar energies. They drew at me, tugging me into restlessness.

  For now I said only, “Mentoring you is not the same as helping you. Your focus is on reconciling the ills you find, but your energy is finite. You need a support system.”

  “A team, you mean.” She still scowled at me. One change too many, perhaps. Or perhaps just another of those times when I might have told her a complete truth and chose not to. “I can’t exactly advertise for that, can I? A woo-woo cattle call?”

  “Perhaps not.” I knew better than to push her in this mood. “Take the opportunities when they come, Lisa.”

  “Yeah,” she said, resting her chin on her arm where it wrapped around her knees. “Whatever.”

  A hot place of dark energies, ebbing and flowing like a living tide. A spicy scent, a flickering glimpse of a gamboling form, a fearful roar from a deep-throated creature—

  As I had done before, I resisted looking closer, sitting beside Lisa to offer what comfort I could on this especially weary evening.

  But I knew I could not resist forever. And I knew that I would not.

  ~~~~~

  That was a Terrible Idea

  Garrie bailed out of her car at Doc Long even as it rocked to a stop, dismayed to see no sign of Rick or his hikers in the nearby picnic shelters. She jammed her head and arm through the satchel strap as Lucia disembarked from the passenger side.

  Quinn unfolded himself from the back seat and flipped the back hatch open, hauling out the five-gallon container as if it didn’t hold forty pounds of Secret Recipe. Garrie snatched up her more modest one-gallon sprayer and steeled herself, grabbing her first good look around as she slid sideways into ethereal viewpoint.