WinterJacked: Book One: Rude Awakening

by Athena Grayson

  “Nancy was pissed at me when I showed up. She thought—well, I don’t know what she thought.” He shrugged. “And I didn’t know what to think, either. As far as I could tell, I’d been gone maybe fifteen minutes.”

  Lin didn’t trust herself not to be projecting a dislike onto Jack’s wife, because people handled stress differently. She hadn’t said anything about Nancy’s annoyed look to Starla, who’d stepped up to help at the reception. “What happened to the person you were chasing?” She bunched up her wrap until she came to the end of the satin and crushed-velvet accessory, and fished in the clever little pocket hidden there for her smartphone. 10:10 shone steady, next to the lit-up reception bars. It’s that early? Still, it gave her a reference. She returned the phone to the pocket.

  He shook his head. “I never caught up to him. It. I only recognized it as an Oddling later on when I started seeing them on a regular basis.”

  Jack and his mother didn’t have any relatives, so the wake consisted of friends and business associates from EvoWorld and Jack’s new employer, Dwell, Jack’s mother’s circle of friends and hospice caretakers, and a few odd-looking people she had assumed were with the funeral home. Maybe those odd-looking people were really Oddlings, as Jack seemed wont to call them.

  It dawned on her again that her mother really had been right. Spirits walk among us. Spirits, youkai, kami, oni—God, it’s all coming back. “So we’re in a place, now?”

  Jack nodded. “I think. This is different than the place I went to before. That had snow, even in May.”

  “How do you know it’s different?” She looked around.

  He shrugged. “I have to guess. But I think this path is Starla’s street. Look how it curves around, just like the road does.” He pointed to the flattened-down grasses where the trees gave way to open meadow. Or what would have been meadow had anything been blooming. Scrubby weeds and dead grasses littered the strange, alien landscape in muted shades of weird, washed-out teals and purples. The path they walked on was simply a matted trail through the inverse-color grasses. “I think it’s like…an overlay of the real world.”

  Too bad nobody thought to put up signs, she thought. But then again, would she trust any signs she saw in this place? Subtle and thick fog blotted out the place where her instincts said the house stood. Something poked up out of the landscape at the edge of the path. “Is that…their mailbox? Maybe Starla wasn’t kidding when she said her kids get letters from the f—” This time, she censored herself. The laws were different in the spirit world, and naming a thing might carry with it a certain…gravitas that they’d rather avoid.

  The mailbox looked a bit unbalanced, oversized. The crosspiece was too high and looked thicker than the standard country-mailbox size. She couldn’t hear anything, either. Not the sounds from the party, or traffic from the main roads—although, that wasn’t unusual out this far in the country.

  Wind caught at her hair as she started on the path, tugging his hand. She could sit here all night and look for boogeymen to jump out, or they could go forward. “All paths lead somewhere. You want to follow the yellow brick road, Dorothy?”

  He caught up to her. “You be Dorothy. I’ll be Toto. I promise I’m a good dog.”

  She laughed. “I take it we’re going to your place, then?”

  His smile faded. “I don’t know.”

  “It stands to reason—when you entered this place before, you found your way home.”

  “Oddways,” he said. “Everything strange that’s happened to me falls under the heading of ‘Odd.’ It’s the best way I can make sense of it.”

  She would have picked a different word, but Odd did the job. “Okay, when you entered the Oddways last time, you ended up home without really knowing where you were going. Maybe you have a home turf or home realm.”

  “Maybe. Do you want to go home with me?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and gave her a sidelong look. “I mean, I’m pretty impressed you haven’t run away screaming already, and I’m sorry what started out as a—”

  If he was searching for a delicate way of saying it, they might be here all night. “Hot make-out session in the woods?” In spite of the wry tone, the grin that crept across her face was genuine. It remained the most stunning thing that had happened all night.

  “I was going to say something that sounded more sophisticated.” His own lips twisted wry as his footsteps sussed in the grasses beside hers. “I’m sorry I dragged you into my crazy.”

  This was the time and opportunity to put a stop to the crazy world of her mother’s—even if it did come with a Jack Winters—from taking over her life. She could say anything—It’s not a good time, I’ll call you, My life is stressful right now—and he looked ready to accept any of them as truth, and a reason to back off. She could get out of wherever they were, back on solid ground, and walk away and not think about him for another three or four years. Her mother’s worldview of spirits and curses and strange youkai demons walking among us could be chalked up to too many vodka shots and sexual frustration. She could do the responsible thing and keep herself firmly grounded in the mundane.

  And go back to what? Unemployment? Mucking around for a few years while Single Career Girl slid down the hill into Middle-Aged and Underemployed? Watching as the friendship the five of them created crumbled under the weight of increasingly divergent lives? Always wondering if she and Jack had just missed too many chances?

  She stopped, tugging on his hand. He turned to face her. She met his eyes, as pale and stormy as the odd sky above them. He opened his mouth to speak and she pressed her finger against his lips. “I’m with you, Jack Winters.”

  He drew a breath around her finger. His lips felt soft and cold against her fingertip. “Why?”

  Why? Because she stayed a moth when a butterfly flitted into the meadow of their youth. She didn’t think herself bright enough, dynamic enough for that young Jack who dazzled with charm and presence and artistic grace like the harsh bright light of full sun on fresh-fallen snow. Everyone knew moths were attracted to bright lights, and everyone knew the bright lights were their doom.

  But she couldn’t tell him that. Not yet. “I have to know.” She stood on tiptoes and replaced her finger with her lips.

  ~*~

  The soft flutter of her lips against his streaked through Jack like shooting stars. Here in the Oddways, where he found nothing but questions and misery and things he didn’t understand that upended his life, one more thing he failed to understand fit her body next to his and pulled a need out of him that washed through him like snowmelt, leaving his chill wrapped in a thin shell of heat that spread fast.

  He tightened his arms around her. She opened under him and he forgot everything for a second in the faint, woodsy taste of juniper berries, vodka, and chocolate. Her warm body fit against his and drove away the cold in glittery netting and slick satin, and hot feminine hands that worked up under his scarf.

  When they broke apart, he couldn’t hear her for a second over the sound of his own heart thudding in his chest. Her eyes shone like dark glass cutting through the white light around them. The reality of the Oddways came back to remind him that they weren’t out of the woods, either proverbially or literally. He tore his eyes away from hers to check that they were still alone.

  Thick mist blotted out several points on the landscape, where the houses would be, Starla’s mailbox providing both landmark and perspective marker where the path truly began. He turned back around and saw the circle clearly outlined in red. The path of tamped-down dead grass flowed upward, matching what he remembered from the landscape of Starla’s neighborhood. The trees gave way to field, wilder than the manicured lawns, but outrageously hued in a faded sort of way.

  The path, like the street below it—beside it?—twisted along a gentle uphill slope. Well before the horizon, the grassy fields gave way to a solid covering of snow, reminding him that this place, while it certainly could pass for normal, wasn’t. Beyond where the snow started, the e
dge of the flat horizon was marred by something more stark than any of the natural, sloping hills around the city. Jack would have called it man-made, but that implied the “hu-” before the “-man” and he wasn’t all that sure it applied. But he knew architecture, and calling it a building seemed…an understatement.

  She threaded her fingers in his. “Let’s go home, Jack.”

  He turned away from that blur on the horizon as she stepped onto the path. When he followed, he expected to hear the crunch of dried grasses or the squelch of mud underneath his shoes. Instead, he heard bells. He took another step and the mailbox Lin had pointed out rushed up to meet him, and he realized the wooden cross didn’t hold anything Postmaster General-approved. A scarecrow, made of burlap and ragged flannel, straw sticking out of a pair of old, holey jeans, lounged on the crosspost where the box would have been, its legs stretched out as if reclining on a precarious perch, waiting for some unsuspecting mail carrier to just try and shove a letter where the sun didn’t shine. Jack’s lips had just turned up in a smile—trust Bailey to thumb his nose at homeowner’s association rules—when the scarecrow lifted its head.

  “Now there’s a pair of footsteps that I haven’t felt in ages. And in a dance unfamiliar in its lack of stages. Methinks to see a regent in a place not of his ruling, the question begs—no, nay, demands—who does he think he’s fooling?”

  ~*~

  Jack visibly jumped, in a humiliating demonstration of just how sideways his life had gotten. So much for feeling like maybe he wasn’t stumbling around in complete ignorance.

  The scarecrow sat up and tipped its straw hat back.

  The figure would have been cute, had it merely been a man wearing a Halloween costume far too late in the season. But when Jack looked up, expecting to see a face under paint and a handful of itchy straw, his belly clenched. The scarecrow was literally made of straw. His head was a tight ball of it, wrapped around itself in haphazard angles. Across the lower half of his face, the straw strands parted horizontally in a crude gash of a mouth. Beneath the floppy, wide-brimmed hat, bright crow’s eyes peeped out from spaces between the brittle golden plant matter.

  “Surely not an Old Crow, who stands watch among the barley.” The scarecrow-man stopped his gesture and spread his arms wide. He made a great show of hiking up his pant legs and wiggling his crackly rear end until he sat upright on the crosspiece of the mailbox post. “Name your dealer, son, and let’s get it on and settle down for parley.”

  “I’m no—” Jack was about to deny his kingship, but the Seneschal’s words stopped him. What Majesty speaketh in these lands will not be taken with benign intent. “I mean, I’m not here to fool you. I don’t know who you are. I just need passage through the Oddways.”

  The scarecrow eyed him with beady bird eyes. “Went a bit too far?”

  The meter of the creature’s speech clicked. “Rhymes? Really?”

  The scarecrow waggled a finger made out of a twist of dried grass. “Boy, don’t be silly. When all you’ve got are words and nature, it pays to choose your nomenclature.”

  The rhyming forced Jack to parse the Scarecrow’s words slowly, and he bet the bastard did it on purpose, because that was the kind of day he seemed to be having. “Why does it have to be spoken in rhyme? Can’t you just say what you want?”

  “We’re wasting our time.” Lin said. Jack turned and glared. She spread her fingers. “What? It seemed like the thing to do. It’s kind of fun. Too.” Her lips quirked.

  He couldn’t glare any harder. “You try being the one stuck in a ring. I just wanted to get out.”

  “Of that thing,” she finished.

  “Arrgh!” He threw up his hands.

  “Winter in parley must offer some gift. Amends to the people through whose lands he has tripped.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. Wallet, phone, keys, lint. Not much in the way of gifts. “All I’m doing is taking a walk. I had no idea—” Oh God. His tongue started to twist. No. Oh, hell no! “—we needed to talk.”

  Lin failed to keep a snort of laughter from escaping from behind her hand. His face burned and he felt prickles break out over his cheeks and behind his eyes.

  “You’re catching on, Sonny, now show us what you’ve got. Offer something in return for moving through this plot.”

  The rhymes had gotten simpler. I guess things are getting serious. But he was at a loss. Money hadn’t seemed to work for getting out of a circle constructed by precocious five year olds. I can’t haggle my way out of a paper bag. His freelance rates for consulting were cribbed from his old firm. He avoided negotiating rates like the plague. He licked dry lips. “Can’t we, just once, pass through for free? Prevail upon your generosity?”

  “Look at you, you made a rhyme,” Lin said, her voice barely holding back laughter. “And it hardly took you any time.”

  “You know how this works, Winter King. The trade’s the lifeblood of every feyling.” Without warning, the Scarecrow lunged forward, his breath reeking of the decaying warmth of an autumn twilight full of leaf litter and musty feathers. “Trying to pull a fast one will ensure it’s your last one.”

  Jack jerked back, away from the sudden force of an invisible wind that prickled the hair at the back of his neck and sent a twist to the base of his spine. He held up both hands. “I don’t know how it works, but I’m an honest guy. I just had to ask—I mean, I guess I had to try.”

  “Can it be? Is it true?” The scarecrow cocked his head again, this time flapping his arms for emphasis. “How’d you get that crown when you don’t even have a clue?”

  “Believe me when I say I wish I knew.” Jack spread his hands out. “I’ve got nothing you want that I can offer you.”

  “If that be true, then parley is through. This liberty you take, then war we make.” The scarecrow’s voice hardened and ended on a dissonant note. The rustle of dry leaves rose on the wind, along with the cawing of crows and a hollow clacking sound that could have been sticks or branches hitting together, but made Jack think more of bones. His nose stung with sudden, acrid must of decaying things.

  Behind him, Lin gasped. Her hand tightened around his arm and she pushed in front of him. “Cut that out. Can’t you see? This house is a place he has every right to be.”

  What was she doing? Didn’t she realize—No, she probably doesn’t realize, because normal people don’t have to deal with strange creatures from Nightmaresville every damn day.

  The scarecrow folded his arms with the slide of dry grass underneath worn flannel. “The houses of humans are out of our bounds. But enter wild places, and they are our grounds.”

  “It was the backyard! How were we supposed to know?” Jack stepped in front of Lin, putting himself between her and the Scarecrow. It put him close enough to smell musty bird feathers and dry dirt. And somehow, wet leaves. His nose twitched.

  “Yeah,” Lin said from under his shoulder. “The circle’s still on their property, you know.”

  “Bah!” The Scarecrow spat. Downy gray feathers erupted from its slash-mouth. “Human rules for human spaces. Wild kin walk in these wild places.” It gestured to the edge of the fog. “Pass outside their cultivation and enter Wildkin civilization.”

  Lin made a “hmm” in the back of her throat. “I’m learning the rules, I see what you say. So we’ll give you tomorrow if you give us today.” She’d scooted up against his back, her skirt rustling against his legs as she peeked around his arm. He, meanwhile, kept shuffling so that she couldn’t get around him. “Let us pass now, don’t make it more confusing, and you can cross Winter at a time of your choosing.”

  What was she—was she negotiating? On his behalf?

  Old Crow cackled. Brought up a straw hand to stroke his straw chin. “A passage for a passage, seems like a good suggestion. But which of you to keep behind would be my only question.”

  “What are you doing? Don’t get involved!” He bent his head, hoping that maybe non sequiturs didn’t count. But just in case they did—Oh
, crap. What rhymes with ‘involved’? “This isn’t your problem that needs to be solved.” To the Scarecrow, he said, “Oh, I don’t think so. Whatever’s between us, you let her go.”

  “The trade’s one for one, not two for three. This deal has nothing to do with me. Grant him his passage, let him go free, and you’ll get your own in a time yet to be.”

  The scarecrow slapped his limbs down on the mailbox post with a dry, crackled crunch. “Haha! Good one, girlie. That’s how it’s done! Let’s shake on the parley, and the deal is won!” Old Crow offered a sweetgrass-scented hand to Lin.

  Jack wasn’t sure if he wanted to melt into the ground in relief, or just sit there and bask in her awesome. But sheer, utter terror gripped him at the thought of the Scarecrow touching her. Given his own miserable circumstances when in contact with the Oddlings, he wasn’t about to let her suffer the same. He batted Lin’s hand away and clasped the Scarecrow’s crispy straw limb in his own.

  Black haze filled his vision, shot through with violent violet streaks. Crow feathers brushed his face, sharp bird-beaks stung the backs of his hands and the caws of scavenging birds filled his ears. Into the maelstrom a cold blast of icy, stinging wind swirled the bird feathers out of his face and the black haze lightened to a soft charcoal gray fog and the caws turned to the delicate crackle of ice cubes dropped into liquid before a white silence of falling snow quieted the cacophony.

  He opened his eyes to find himself still upright, as if he hadn’t just been buffeted by something incredibly…forceful. Old Crow’s beady eyes gazed into his with steady, curious avarice. “Curious, Regent. Curious, indeed.” He withdrew his straw hand and clapped. Dry straw dust rolled out in a puff. “Now be on your way, make haste and speed.”