“We don’t have as much space as we did before, do we?”
“Not so much,” Garrie said. She ran a hand over the satchel. “We’re gonna need to brainstorm for a few moments. We’re not getting out the way we came in.”
The group would have raised a clamor of questions—they started to—but Rick interposed himself, sending Garrie and Lucia a meaningful glance. He had control of them now, but he didn’t think it would last.
Quinn leaned the jerrycan on the shelter support and joined them, grass stains on his jeans and elbow. Lucia released Garrie’s hand to stand erect—back in control with her shields up, or at least able to fake it.
“If I make direct contact with this thing, we’re likely to get backlash,” Garrie said. “So while I can put up an uber-shield and pry that tunnel back up into place, I think it’s a bad idea. A really bad idea.”
Quinn glanced out to Sklayne’s sparklies. “What about Sklayne? Can he do it?”
*Eats me!*
Garrie made a face. “It’s one of the few beings on Kehar that can absorb the energy of his kind.”
Lucia paled. “He’s not keeping it back? Not at all?”
“He’s not even touching it,” Garrie said.
Quinn’s hands landed low on his hips, a belated defiance. “Tell me why we came in here again?”
“Because Dana put on a light show, pissed off the kyrokha, got someone in trouble, and we thought we had a way back out.” Garrie tipped her head at the group indicating them with a meaningful eye. They’re right here, Quinn. “Look, if I have to push our way out, I will. I just think it’s a really, really bad idea, in a frying pan to fire kind of way.” She rested her hand on the satchel. “Or was I the only one there when we had a conversation about this thing being too big for just me? You know, the part where I wanted to go find Trevarr?”
“Not Sklayne. No Secret Recipe. If not you, then—oh, no. No.” Quinn interrupted himself as he took in the meaning of that satchel. “You can’t mean it. Now?”
Garrie shrugged, not nearly as blasñ as she pretended to be—her heart quite suddenly tripping up into a crazy-fast beat as she realized Yes. Now. Exactly now. She said, “You said it yourself. We don’t have enough Secret Recipe. Sklayne can’t do this. And if I do it, it’ll only make things worse.”
“You’re saying we’re trapped here,” Rick said. “That the only way out is straight through the thing that just tried to eat her leg. The thing that killed my partner.”
“Way to keep ’em calm, Ranger Rick.” Garrie scowled at him. “No, I’m not saying that.”
“You kind of are,” Quinn told her. “You don’t even know if you can get to Kehar from here. You’ve never even tried it!”
“There is no try,” Garrie said. “There is only do.”
“Do or do not,” Quinn snapped at her, instantly correcting the Yoda quote. “There is no try.”
Lucia breathed, “Aiee, dios.”
Garrie made an exasperated sound. “Look, Quinn, either it works or it doesn’t. If it does, then we have Trevarr.”
“Yeah?” Quinn said. “And what happens if you go and you don’t come back? What happens if he’s in no shape to help?”
The protective woman looked at them askance. “Who the hell are you people?” They all three speared her with a look, full of impatience. She held up one hand, brows raised. “No, no—never mind. But if you don’t mind my saying, I think we should be part of this whole what happens next conversation. Because my partner and I don’t want to be stuck here through dinner, never mind if you all leave and don’t come back.”
“Actually,” said the woman with the baby, “even if you do mind her saying it.”
“It’s just me,” Garrie told them. “Who would leave, I mean.”
“But you’re the only one who can...” the protective woman stopped, eyeing the others in the shelter as to see if they were on board. The young guy scowled, the male hiker shrugged, and the woman who’d been stuck looked grim in a way that said she believed it, so the protective woman continued. “...Push us a way out of here.”
“Pretty much I am,” Garrie said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
“Seems better than leaving,” the young guy snorted, hands jammed into the pockets of his baggy denim shorts. “Not that I think you can actually do that.”
Garrie yanked the satchel flap open, reaching reached in for the smooth plastic ovoid shape of the hosiery egg—finding the seam and popping it open to spill out one of the echveria.
Exposed to the day, it made the impact she expected—gathering up and bouncing light around inside itself and scattering it back out into a swirling rainbow intensity. Otherworldly, magical...utterly convincing.
Lucia whispered a rare curse. Quinn took a deep breath, let it out through his mouth. “Garrie. How long—”
“Since San Jose,” she said. And then, “Don’t judge me, Quinn. It’s portal energy— I could hardly leave it rolling around the Winchester House basement. And things happened so fast in Sedona. Even Trevarr didn’t know until—well right before Ghehera took him. I wasn’t hiding things—we were busy.”
“Maybe then,” he said. “But since we got back? Since the kyrokha got here?” He seemed relaxed, hands at his sides—except for the way they were clenched into fists.
She gave him the most even look she could manage. “For some reason,” she said, “not mentioning it seemed the best course to take even when it did finally occur to me. Maybe you can think why that might have been.”
It wasn’t like they hadn’t just had this conversation. The ongoing challenges to her mission to find Trevarr, the escalation that came with Drew’s interference... Quinn’s jaw worked for a brief moment; his hands relaxed. “Okay, yeah. I get it.”
The protective woman said, “So, you can use that to get us out of here?”
“Not that I know of,” Garrie said. “But I can use it to reach someone who can.”
“Except then maybe you don’t come back, right?” The young man shifted, exchanging a meaningful eye with the male hiker—gesturing at Garrie with a lift of his chin that meant we should stop her, and then trying to draw Rick into the silent conversation.
But Rick took a step back, shaking his head. And Garrie took a step forward. “You have a big ugly thought bubble over your head, buddy. You want me to pop that for you? Because if you think you can get this thing away from me, you are ever so welcome to try.”
“Garrie,” Lucia said, haste in her tone. “He’s just frightened.”
He wasn’t the only one. Even Lucia and Quinn...they wanted her here.
They wanted her to get them out.
She closed her hand around the echveria and let it drop to her side. “Fine,” she told them all. “You want me to try the push?”
They nodded with universal enthusiasm.
“This,” she said, “is a terrible, terrible idea.”
*Do or do not,* Sklayne said. *Choose do not.*
But Garrie understood. They believed in her, but they did it on their own terms. They wanted her to do it their way.
She slipped the echveria back into the bag, leaving it free. The duster hung heavily on her shoulders—she left that, too. This wouldn’t take long.
The sparkling thin layer of Sklayne shivered. *Do NOT.*
“Get ready,” she told them, gently testing the available breezes and then doing what she so seldom had cause to do—quietly pulling on her own resources.
As one, they moved closer to her—teetering on the edge of the concrete area. She stopped what she was doing to give them a look. “Get ready,” she said, “means to run away. Which you maybe can’t do in here, but at least you can sort of hunch away, or hide under the picnic table.” She cast a look at Lucia, who watched the entire thing with a sort of helplessness—knowing better, unable to do anything about it.
“Garrie—” Quinn said.
She was having none of it. “You too, Quinn.”
*Cho
ose do NOT!*
Garrie chose do. She extended an unnecessary hand for the visual cue, surrounding it with an invisible nimbus of tightly knit breezes, and slipped that ethereal prybar beneath their former escape tunnel.
The entity erupted. Dana-tinted energies twisted into fury, flailing thick pseudo-limbs. Globs of itself spewed into the air, the red tint scaling up to heated, blazing gold. The ground shook, toppling dead trees along the slopes and sending birds spurting into the air. The entity absorbed them instantly, popping with flashes of extinguished etherea.
A hand grabbed Garrie’s arm and yanked her back under the shelter. Sklayne yowled, his sparkles skewing wildly as he rubber band-snapped away from the entity, flipping back into a smaller shape and coming to rest beside Garrie’s foot as a furious Abyssinian cat. *Terrible, terrible! Do not!*
Garrie reeled, finding her feet again. The close quarters in the shelter reeked of the entity’s acrid anger and the very real scent of human fear. Sklayne’s tail flicked in exaggerated annoyance, eyes narrowed and whiskers bristling; Rick’s arms had found their way around Lucia. Quinn’s arm still wrapped around Garrie’s shoulders, holding her tightly—for his sake or hers, she wasn’t sure. Didn’t matter. She was just as glad to have him there.
“Okay, then,” she said, shaking her hands free of popping, staticky leftover energy. “That was a terrible, terrible idea.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 30
Through a Spicy Air
Rhonda Rose
I never intended to leave that day. I didn’t know I’d made up my mind to leave at all.
But leave I did. Even as Lisa pondered additional education, and as she faced breaking away both from her aunt and her employer...and as she met a young man named Quinn who might, if his young mind didn’t remain too full of his own innate merit, turn out to be a decent research assistant and perhaps a decent paramour.
I’m certain that Lisa felt it to be the worst possible timing. Of course, I’m certain that Lisa would have considered any timing to be the worst possible.
And my work with her was done, after all. Even if I still suspected...
Perhaps I’d really done it a little too well. Perhaps I’d removed an edge that she might need one day.
So in the end, perhaps my departure was best done sooner than later after all.
It happened while Lisa was examining apartments with Lucia. Not deliberately; not with forethought. Merely idle exploration as I picked up on a newly emerging thread of unfamiliar energies. Such presence likely wasn’t new to our world, but merely to me: the process of defining Lisa as a reckoner had stropped my skills to a very fine edge indeed.
Intrigued, I tugged at those threads. I followed them. And I wasn’t entirely surprised when they disappeared from my perception, just as wires plug into a wall. Not gone so much as leading...
Elsewhere.
Perhaps I was simply ready. For I put very little thought into it as I spun myself down into the thready fibers of energy leading to that ethereal wall. I followed the wire. I became the wire, such as I could.
For a while, then, I was lost. A darkness...a distance. I clung to that faint hint of emitted energy, scenting it out through a sensory deprivation otherwise so profound that I wondered if I had not passed into the final phase of my existence after all.
And perhaps in a way, I did. For after a time unknown, I encountered another resistance, less significant than the first. And then I emerged.
After so long in silence and darkness, the cacophony of this unfamiliar existence stunned me into a loss of composure. I fled from it, bundling my energies into cohesiveness and riding turbulent, unfamiliar breezes—seeking stillness, seeking peace; seeking a place from which I could more gradually absorb my new surroundings. Craggy, forested mountains, peaks etched in snow and darkness. Through a spicy air, above an ominous black fog, through thick pines with drooping branches and reaching vines and shrieking denizens.
I found a cave.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 31
As if in a Dare
Garrie eased away from beneath Quinn’s arm to peer out of the shelter. The mountain entity throbbed tightly around them, fully visible as a field of streaky black-shaded red. “Well,” she said, as under her breath as one could get in such crowded circumstances, “that just can’t be good.”
Rick joined her there, if much more warily. “What now?”
“Now?” Garrie crossed her arms and cast him a scowl. “Now we probably die. But first I get to say I told you so.”
The baby’s mother looked at her with a resentful anger. “That’s not funny!”
“It’s not supposed to be funny,” Garrie said. “It’s supposed to be true.” But she was already groping down into the satchel, coming up with the echveria—and then with the oskhila and then, finally, the sheathed knife. She looked at Quinn and Lucia. “I’m going. Or I’m gonna try. If it doesn’t work...well, things could hardly be worse.”
“Bite your tongue,” Quinn said, but his asperity held a tinge of desperation—Quinn’s bright blue eyes, knowing there was nothing more he could do.
Lucia drew a shaky breath, eyeing the devices in Garrie’s hands. “Do you really know how to use those things?”
Garrie opened her mouth to answer, and decided better of it. Maybe wasn’t the answer Lucia wanted to hear.
Quinn fumbled for words. “Garrie...”
“Be careful?” Garrie suggested, shifting the oskhila until her fingers settled into place.
“Well, that too. But mainly...go kick Keharian ass, okay? And then come back.”
She gave him a fierce grin. “That’s the plan.”
But she hesitated on doing it, the oskhila in one hand, the echveria in the other, and the sheathed knife jammed into her waistband. Rhonda Rose had done this once, if in a different way. Taken herself between worlds.
Of course, Rhonda Rose hadn’t been alive at the time.
Now or never.
~~~~~
Garrie brought up her memory of Trevarr in chains, the damp scent of the cavern, the nose-wrinkling spice of Kehar’s dark fog. She connected to her longing for him and her want of him and to the faint, constant tug of his being. She held out the oskhila, tapping it with her grip and with her uncertain intent and startling when it responded, shedding a rainbow field of light.
The mountain entity stirred anew, as if sensing something but uncertain of it. She brought up the echveria in her other hand, holding it with exacting precision and a very deep breath as she released its portal energies.
White gold blinding screaming power POWER—
She fell to her knees, holding the artifacts up as if in supplication—unable to hear herself scream above the roaring power but knowing she did it, a cry of fear and defiance and purely primal expression, her lips peeled back to show teeth, tears of effort leaking from her squinting eyes.
Maybe the rest of them screamed, too. She wouldn’t have known.
She might never know, because the portal energy wavered and fluttered and beat against her, fighting for freedom like a living thing—flailing against her until she had no remaining sense of the shelter, the mountains, the entity...not even certain that she herself still lived.
Fake it.
Breathe it in, breathe it out. Ebb and flow.
Trevarr had taught her that.
She reached for remembered sensation and made herself into the conduit she’d so recently learned to be, channeling the portal energy into the oskhila. Never letting go of her sense of Trevarr—the part of him that she’d never relinquished in the first place, because it had become part of her.
The rainbow intensity disappeared beneath a screen of black. The roar faded; her scream went silent. Nothing to hear, nothing to feel, nothing to touch...
She managed to close her mouth. And she managed, as the ground once more felt solid beneath her knees and gravity tugged her down to meet it, not to fall on her face.
Warmth p
ressed in around her, already oppressive. The air stung her nose with unfamiliar scents, a thick and heady spice.
“Atreya.”
She opened her eyes and found him—on one knee, his arms tensed and pulling against the chains, his hair loose and the braids glimmering within. And his eyes...finally, she found his eyes, a fiery silver gaze riveted to her with the intensity she had missed so very damned much.
“Atreya,” Trevarr said again, and this time it was a demand.
Garrie scrambled to her feet and ran to him, flinging herself on him, not even close to knocking him over as she wrapped herself close, arms clinging, legs tangled, embracing him with her entire being. Her head pressed close to his, face buried against his hair—coarser than human, scented of wood smoke. Her breath caught for a long, unendurable moment, giving her an infinity to absorb the sensations of him—the solidity of his body, the thrum of his energy, the way his very being embrace her in return. His hands spanned across her back; the manacles dug into her spine. His tremble came not from weakness, but from restraint.
And then time started again, and he released a small huff of laughter. “Tell me, atreya. How do you really feel?”
She pulled back in teary, disbelieving laughter. “Was that a joke? You choose now to try out a joke?”
His cryptic features were no longer difficult for her to read. Not in the least. She saw the humor at the corner of his eyes; she saw the depth of emotion within. She fell on him with kisses—fast little kisses that covered his face, his brow, the new scar that ran through it, the old scar just under his mouth, his eyes, his nose...
His mouth. Over and over again, his mouth. Until he latched his hand behind her head and held her there for a longer kiss, the kiss of all kisses, right there between her mouth and his, and by the time he was done with that, her fingers had left whitened imprints on his shoulders beside the faint tattoos of feather scales that weren’t tattoos at all.
She broke away gasping for air and thought, hitting herself lightly on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “No, no no,” she said. “Must think. Must use brains. Must get out of here.”
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