“She’s working on it.”
Matt looked back over her shoulder at a living room empty except for Deirdre, standing now. Edmund’s voice said, “Dee, let me take your hand.” Deirdre held out her hand and disappeared.
Matt pushed into the wall and seeped into the house’s system.
“Jeff?” Suki said. She stood on the threshold, facing someone.
“Susan? Is that you? Susan Backstrom?”
“It’s me. I’ve changed my name to Suki. Hi, Jeff.”
“Well, good grief, hi, Susan. The next-door neighbors called 911 and said this old place was on fire. We didn’t know anybody lived here, and there was a couple minutes there where we thought we might as well let the place burn down, but who knows what it would have taken with it.”
“Fire’s out.”
“What are you doing here?”
Suki poked her toe at the porch. “I live here,” she said in a soft voice.
“Everything all right at the house?” yelled someone from farther away. “Chief, how’d you get through these damned blackberry bushes?”
Matt could feel how the big bushes, part of the house’s network, had woven closed over the path, their canes like iron and thorns like knives, holding everyone else back from the house. Why had they let this one man through?
—We needed to let one see that there’s nothing wrong,—the house explained.
Jeff walked to the edge of the porch, and yelled, “There’s no fire here, Nils. I’ll be back in a minute.” He crossed to Suki. For a moment he was silent. “You live here?”
“I do. I’ve always loved this house. I don’t know what the legal situation is, who owns it or how I could rent or buy it from them, but I needed a place to stay, and this was available. So I live here.”
“When did you get back to town? Somebody said—but I thought they were kidding.”
“I’ve been back about a month. I just got a job working for Dr. Weathers down on the bay. I’ll take care of the house situation sometime soon. You know who’s the owner of record?”
“I have to figure it’s the bank. I’ve never heard of anybody living here. Are you okay out here all alone?”
“Yes. I’m fine. And I’m not exactly alone. Right now I have some visitors.”
“Come to think of it, there is a bunch of cars out front.” More silence. “This is a pretty strange situation. Isn’t this place haunted?”
“Only in the best way,” said Suki.
“I mean, we were terrified of this place when I was a kid.”
“But we’re grown-ups now, Jeff.”
“Guess we are.” His voice roughened a little, and he took a step closer to Suki.
“Suki?” Edmund emerged from his cloak spell just behind Suki in the front hall. “Tea’s ready. Oh, hi, Jeff.”
“What? You’re back too?”
“Visiting,” said Edmund.
“Old home week. Who else came back? Your other friends? The tomboy and the little guy? Four cars out front.”
“Them, and a couple other people.”
“Well, try not to set anything on fire, will you? We don’t like false alarms.”
“We’ll be careful. Thanks for coming.”
“Nice to see you again, Jeff. Please don’t set the sheriff on me. I’ll get this situation normalized as soon as I can. See you around town.” Suki stepped back into the house and the front door closed gently.
The bushes moved aside, leaving the path clear for the fireman to leave. They closed behind him.
Matt stayed inside the house, senses wide. There were other people in the street besides the firemen. “Was everything all right?” someone asked. “It was burning like a bonfire ten minutes ago.”
“Not a scorch mark on it,” Jeff’s voice said.
“How can that be?” asked the bewildered voice.
“How long have you lived next door to that eyesore?”
“Five years.”
“What do you know about it? Haven’t you heard the stories? It’s haunted. Anything’s possible at that old place. Hey, Nils, there’s a bunch of people living in there. One of them is that bastard Backstrom’s daughter.”
“The ice princess?”
“Right. How long has it been since you last saw her? Fifteen, twenty years? Still gorgeous. All grown up.”
“Wait a minute, sir,” said the neighbor’s voice. “You say there are people living there?”
“Haven’t you noticed the increased traffic?”
A few minutes of silence. “Of course. I wondered about the cars. I was going to call the police if they stayed much longer, but most of them just arrived today.”
“We better get back to the station and write up an incident report. Good night.”
“Before the fire started, there were horrible pounding, thudding, crunching noises,” said the neighbor.
“Nothing we can do about that, ma’am. Probably just ghosts.”
“Ghosts! How can you talk about ghosts as though they exist?”
“Well, ma’am … I only know what I’ve seen. Excuse me now.”
—Matt?—Edmund pressed his hand against her side.
She eased out of the house’s sensory network and oozed slowly from the living-room wall, recollected herself beside Edmund. A glance down showed her she was still wearing what she had on before she had stepped into the wall, jeans and shirt, still too blue, and the leather boots from House. Her hair wasn’t too long this time.
Everything in the living room was also back to normal, furniture solid again, people pretty much where they had been before the fireman came to the house.
“Jeeze Louise, Matt! How long have you been doing that?” Terry cried.
Matt yawned. “I don’t know. A couple days, maybe longer.”
“How did that happen? That’s not like anything I’ve seen you do before.”
“It’s how the house is my mother,” Matt said.
“You were wild and strange before you ever came here,” said Terry. “You didn’t need the house’s help. Are you saying the house engineered you, too?”
Matt leaned against the wall and thought for a minute. “Yeah, House has changed me. For one thing, it gave me the power to break spells.” She smiled.
“Oh-ho,” said Terry. “I wondered where that came from.”
“Excuse me,” said Harry. “We were just attacked. Will it happen again? Will it take the same form? How should we prepare? What do we do next?”
“Good questions,” Terry said. “Biggest question: what the heck does that guy want with us, anyway?”
“Thirty-five years ago, when I was building my first group, someone else attacked us,” said the house. “It was skilled and subtle: we did not know we had been attacked until everything fell apart. It came in dreams. I didn’t know enough about dreams then to stop it. It drove one of my women from the house, and made one of my men lose his faith. The others suffered, too. The group broke, even before the sheriff stepped in.”
“Who attacked you, House?” Lia asked.
“We never knew. I think whoever it was accomplished his or her aim, because after my group dissolved, nothing else happened. Maybe we have been breaking too many rules. Maybe this is what happens when you get close to breaking a big one.”
“But,” said Suki, “when this demon-guy came last time, we weren’t close to breaking a big rule at all, were we?”
“Not as close as we are now.”
“I don’t think the one who attacked us in the sixties and the master wizard are the same person,” Nathan said. “The man who attacked Julio fifteen years ago was someone else. Completely different methods, and apparently different aims. He wanted to know more about us, not pull us apart.”
“Yet we fell apart.” The house sighed. “Maybe forces operate toward an end without understanding why. Smaller goals get swallowed up by larger ones. Now we are close to my dream, and someone comes to attack us again.”
“That Galen boy said his master ha
s new people he’s made into slaves, and he’ll use them to attack us,” Matt said. “He had three other people besides Galen with him just now. They all disappeared when the fire truck showed up.”
“The master is very good at disappearing,” Terry muttered. “Himself, and other people. I wish I could do that as well as he does.”
“We don’t know what he wants,” Edmund said. “We don’t know much about how he fights. Last time he grabbed Julio, and that didn’t work. Maybe it looked simple to him; maybe he didn’t know we could resist it. He knows now. And he knows now that our wards can stop a physical attack. Terry, if you were this guy, what would your next move be?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“You’re our best tactician.”
She frowned. She shrugged. “If I were trying to attack the house … I might try some more feints, to spy out the house’s strengths and abilities, test its limits, see if there was something easy I could do to win. Or, if I was confident that I had much more power than the house, I might mount an all-out attack. I don’t think he knows our strengths or our weaknesses. I’d want to know that before I committed my forces. I’d test more if I were him.”
“So we can expect more attacks, probably, and we don’t know what kinds.” Edmund frowned too. “This is outside my realm of recent experience. Anybody here play war games?”
Everyone shook their heads except Nathan, who raised his hand. “I used to haunt, and I went all out. I don’t know if that’s the kind of war game you’re talking about. The people I was haunting didn’t have many defenses, so I didn’t learn much about losing.”
“Forget trying to do this the way other people would. We should do the things we’re good at,” Matt said. “Edmund, ask spirit if it has any directions for us.”
Edmund’s brows pinched together. “Would spirit—” He shook his head. “Why not? Somehow I feel like spirit wouldn’t concern itself with battles, but spirit is everywhere. Why should this be outside its range?” He got out his devotions kit. “I need quiet for this. I’ll go upstairs.”
“Nathan and the house can keep watch in case those guys come back again, right? You guys don’t need to sleep, do you?”
“We can tell when things step into our sphere,” Nathan said, “but we don’t know what happens out past our edges.”
Matt looked at Terry. Terry shrugged. “How much farther out could we guard, anyway? What more do we need, if we all stay within the house’s sphere?”
“Is there some witch thing you can do, some kind of spell that would tell us when anything that wanted to hurt us came close?”
“I’ll see what I can do. I don’t have anything like that yet.”
Matt stepped away from the wall. “Me, I can talk to things. I wonder if those guys left any clues when they disappeared. I want to go out and talk to the street.”
“I can ask air,” Tasha said.
“I’ll go with you too,” said Lia. “I can look through the lens of fire and see if they left any traces.”
“I’ll work on that alert spell. I’ll try to come up with defenses against things I might try if I were the master,” Terry said.
“May I watch?” asked Harry. “I think your type of witchcraft is closer to what I’m learning than anyone else’s here.”
“Sure. I brought some spell supplies with me. Gotta go upstairs and get them. I think we should work in the kitchen. I need the stove for some of what I do. Suki, will you help me too?”
“Yes,” said Suki.
Deirdre stood up. “Matt?” She looked unhappy again.
“Please come with us, Deirdre,” Matt said.
“Okay.”
Matt ran upstairs and got her army jacket.
The spring night was cold enough that they could watch their breaths rise. Stars glittered in the clear sky. Matt hunched deep in her army jacket. After a minute she pulled a knit cap and leather gloves out of a pocket and put them on, then glanced back at Deirdre. Lia and Tasha could control their atmospheres enough not to get cold, but Deirdre was shivering.
“I’ve got a heavy coat in the car,” she said, edging around Matt and going on ahead.
“Wait, Dee,” said Lia. She flew after Deirdre and caught up before Deirdre reached the fence. “We don’t know what’s out there. We should stick together. May I touch your clothes?”
“Another weird-ass question!”
“Just say yes.” Lia’s voice was laughing.
“Okay, okay. Sure. Touch me all you want. No tickling, that’s all I ask. Hey, what—what? What did you do?”
“Made your clothes warmer.”
“Wow. This is great! Like really portable electric blankets. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Matt?”
—Jacket?—Matt thought.—How would you feel if someone put fire in you?—
—Would it burn me?—
“Does it burn the clothes?” Matt asked Lia.
“No. It just excites the molecules. I set it so it only works when the air is cold and the jacket is on you. It will accelerate aging, but only in certain conditions.”
“Sounds good.” Matt said.—If you don’t like this, I’ll ask her to take it away again.—
—All right.—
Lia put her hands on Matt’s shoulders for a moment, and then Matt’s clothes warmed up just enough. Lia touched Matt’s cap, too.
“Thank you,” Matt said.—Okay?—
The jacket’s reply whipped past too fast for her to make out. She got the sense it was positive, though.
They reached the fence. Matt gripped weather-silvered wind-warped pickets. For a moment they stood and stared at the road beyond.
“This is weird,” said Tasha. “Suddenly the world feels dangerous. I go everywhere and never worry about a thing. Now I’m scared to go out the gate.”
—House? Can you sense anything out there?—
—Only the cars and you.—The gate creaked open.
“But that’s silly,” Tasha added. “Air is everywhere.” She floated through the gate, her feet six inches above the ground.
Matt followed, then passed Tasha and went to where the strangers had stood earlier, just beyond the edge of the house’s influence in the street. Four cars were parked head-in along the curb: Edmund’s Volvo station wagon, Deirdre’s black Volkswagen Beetle, Terry’s Miata, and the beat-up but venerable green Geo Metro Edmund and Matt had helped Suki shop for at a Guthrie used car lot. After Matt had finished tuning the engine and Edmund soothed the car’s spirit, it worked great.
Matt got down on her knees and pressed her hands flat to the road.—Hello, road.—
—Hello! I know you! What are you?—
—I’m Matt,—thought Matt.
—But …—It sent her the impression of several layers of asphalt mixed with gravel, with compacted earth beneath, a history of things running across her—
—Oh! Yes, I was part of you,—she thought, remembering that the house was in the road, and she had been inside the house.—I’m Matt. Sometimes I’m part road.—
—One changes?—asked the road, and then,—Many strange things on me tonight.—
—That’s what I was wondering about.—
—Big thing! Almost as heavy as the ones who built me.—Image of weight, surrounded by the much lighter weight of footfalls. A trail of footfalls, too, came from the neighbor’s yard, wandered around, and went back to the neighbor’s yard. The road could tell the difference from one foot to another. Mostly it was excited about the big thing, though.
—The fire engine,—Matt thought.
—Also, these things that are not like normal walkers.—
Matt absorbed the flavors of five pairs of feet, as sensed by the road. Each of them seemed strange: one swamp-violet, another chili-pepper-ice, the third sugar-garlic, the fourth blood-apple, and the last dust-peppermint. Something clicked in her mind: she knew the last one was the boy Galen, though she didn’t know how she knew it.
—And now you and these o
thers.—
—What do we taste like?—
Beef stew-ginger, pine-chocolate, chili-pepper-music, sagebrush-carrion, juniper-cinnamon, sugar-garlic.
For a moment Matt was lost in the pleasant puzzle of figuring out who tasted like what to the road. Chili-pepper-music had to be Lia, but which one of them tasted like dead meat? Which one was Matt?
Why were there six flavors, when there were only four of them? Had somebody else joined them? Carrion and sagebrush? Deirdre’s coyote, maybe. But that still only added up to five.
She jumped up. Sugar-garlic! One of the attackers!
“Hey,” she said. She whirled and hunted. She didn’t see anyone else, even though the road knew they were there: Lia, Tasha, and Deirdre had all disappeared. Fear shuddered through Matt. Was she here alone with one of the bad people? She had been fending off ill-meaning humans for years, but she didn’t trust her strength and skills against people who had magic—she had no practice. She didn’t know how strong her house protection was.
Where were the others?
“Yip! Yow! Ruh ruh ruuur!” High-pitched cries came from behind Deirdre’s black Volkswagen.
Matt ran around the car toward the sound. In the bushes beyond the road stood a tall glowing man, his pale face unearthly and beautiful, his long white hair unbound and wavy, lifting and weaving through the air around him, his clothes flowing and green, tied here and there with jeweled bands and cinched at the waist with golden mesh. He murmured a question, and Matt heard the persuaders and invitations in his voice.
Deirdre stood facing him, her back to Matt.
“Wait—” Matt cried.
The glowing man held out a long, graceful hand, and Deirdre put her own in it.
“Stop!” Matt yelled. Tasha and Lia formed out of the air beside Matt and all three of them ran toward Deirdre.
The coyote howled, but Deirdre didn’t even turn around. She took a step toward the man, and then both of them vanished.
Chapter Sixteen
“The coyote followed her,” Matt said.
“I tried to grab the path, but it vanished.” Lia sat, shoulders hunched and arms crossed over her chest, in a wing chair. She looked tired and discouraged.
“I tried to get air to close around them and hold them, but they slipped away. I couldn’t stop them.” Tasha was pale and disheveled.
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