Spiritwalk (23 page)

“So what does it say?” Blue asked.

Esmeralda and Ohn exchanged glances.

“It’s Ogham,” Ohn said, “but the letters, when I translate them, don’t form familiar words.”

Esmeralda nodded. “It’s either a foreign language... or gibberish.”

But then Emma spoke up. “I know what it says. ’Oh all the past is lost and we despair,’” she read. “’Each root, each branch... its memories stolen, hope lost; the river grown so wide we will never again its waters cross.’”

Beside Emma, Judy Kitt ran a hand through her frizzy blond hair, combing it with her fingers. She was wearing a pair of greasy overalls and a once-white T-shirt. Her delicate features were wrinkled in a puzzled frown.

“How’d you do that?” she asked. “I mean if Ohn couldn’t read it...”

“I... I don’t know,” Emma said.

Esmeralda laid a hand on Emma’s shoulder.

“Ogham was born from the trees of the first forest,” she said. “The same forest that blessed Emma with her Autumn Gift. This Ogham must translate into the primal language that the ancient wood first taught the druids.”

“You’re saying some forest left this message for us?” Blue asked.

Esmeralda shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is that there’s something very odd in the air tonight.”

“No kidding,” Tim said and then he told him about what he’d seen by the fountain earlier that day.

“This,” Esmeralda said, pointing at the Ogham when Tim was done, “is a message. But what Tim’s just told us...”

Ohn nodded. “Speaks of borders breaking. I should have seen that earlier.”

“How could you know?” Esmeralda said.

“Say what?” Tim asked. “What kind of borders?”

“Those between this world and the Middle Kingdom,” Esmeralda explained. “What you saw must have been bodachs—a kind of wood spirit. They like to play tricks on us—nothing really hurtful, but as Tim’s already seen, they can be disconcerting. Usually they can’t cross over, but if a crack’s opened in the veil that separates our world from theirs, they would come through to bedevil us.”

“Great,” Blue said. “Like we really need this....”

Although some of those who’d gathered in Sara’s workroom had shared experiences beyond the norm with him, Blue was the only one left in the House at he moment who remembered a time seven years past when the House had been under siege by creatures from the Otherworld. A lot of good people had died. Fred. Jamie....

“They won’t be the source of the problem,” Esmeralda went on. “Just a more visible consequence—a kind of forerunner to the real problem.”

Tim looked nervously out a window to where the garden lay dark and shadowed.

“Well, what is the source of the problem?” Blue asked.

Esmeralda shrugged. “It’s too early to tell. But look.”

She crossed the room and knelt by the baseboard to point at where what looked like a kind of fungus was growing.

“Jesus,” Blue said as he joined her. “It’s some kind of mold.”

“It’s moss actually.”

“Mold, moss—what’s the difference? It still shouldn’t be growing here.”

“True, but—”

“Oh, my God,” Judy said.

Turning, Blue saw what had caught her attention. Small twigs had grown out of the wooden base of a floor lamp, complete with tiny leaves. Looking around the room they saw that other wooden furniture had also sprouted sprigs of greenery.

“Oh, man,” Blue said. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Maybe Jamie knows,” Esmeralda said. “Where’s the nearest terminal—in the Library?”

Blue nodded. “Yeah, there’s one in there hooked up to Jamie’s mainframe—”

The floor suddenly rumbled underfoot, shaking the furniture and making them all lose their balance.

“It’s an earthquake!” Tim cried, heading for a doorway.

As a second tremor shook the building, they all started to move—all except Emma. She stood in the center of the room, riding the shock like a sailor on a deck braced against a rough sea. Her eyes had a far-off look about them.

“No,” she said. “It’s the forest. It’s coming back.”

“What does she mean by ’it’s coming back’?” Blue asked Esmeralda, who had caught hold of his arm to keep herself from falling as a third tremor made the floor bounce underfoot.

“I don’t know,” she told him. “But it can’t be good.”

7

Cal Townsend had always been a little leery of the pagans he met. He was a slender, intense-looking individual; his eyes a little too large and owlish behind his glasses for the narrow features that surrounded them; his dark curly hair cut so close to his scalp that he appeared to be wearing a skullcap. He had his own way of worshipping what he saw as the creative force behind the world—anthropomorphizing nature in ways that were similar to the Wicca’s Antlered God and Moon Goddess—but he could never quite get comfortable with the organized pagan versions of worship. It smacked too much of the lunatic fringe to him, for all that he was basically at one with and sympathetic to their beliefs.

At least it was like that until he met Julianne Trelawny.

She made the weird seem both logical and normal to him, but he couldn’t quite shake the nagging doubt that the only reason he was into all this stuff now was because he was hot for her.

If it was only looks, that’d be one thing. She was voluptuous—there was no other way to put it—with a heartbreaker of a face and gorgeous red hair that hung all the way down to her waist. And unlike most redheads, she had a dark complexion—due to one of her grandparents being a Native American—and that just made her seem more exotic and attractive to him. There weren’t many women—pagan, Christian or otherwise—who could come close to how good she looked in her ceremonial cloak.

But it wasn’t just looks. He could listen to her talk for hours because she always had something interesting to say, from her wry commentaries on the world at large to her ability to convey her very sincere old-religion beliefs without ever sounding like she was a space cadet. And she wasn’t all deadly serious, either. She loved the old hardcore punk from the seventies, for example, as well as the new acoustic music that was currently making its mark on the charts, and she had a pixilated—a truly whimsical—sense of humor that just charmed the hell out of him.

Was it any wonder, Cal thought, that he was so taken by her?

They’d first met at the Occult Shop on Bank Street. They were both browsing through the bookshelves—she comfortably at ease in the place, while he felt as though anybody walking by outside and looking in through its window had to be thinking that he was a real basket case to even be in here in the first place. But they’d struck up a conversation and when he found out that she was living in Tamson House—or rather when he found out what kind of a place Tamson House was—he moved in as well. Not in the same room or anything, but it was almost like they were living together, wasn’t it, even if the House was the size of a city block and had who knew how many people living in it?

The downside of all this was that she had no idea that he was so crazy about her—or at least she never let on that she did—because he’d never got up the nerve to tell her. He’d been very cool about everything, just hanging out with her, not coming on, being her pal, and now he just didn’t know how to broach the subject.

He probably wasn’t even her type. Probably she’d go for a guy like Blue, who—thankfully—already had a girlfriend. But in the three weeks he’d known her, he hadn’t seen her go out with anybody, so he didn’t know what her type was.

Maybe it was him.

Yeah, and maybe the Easter Bunny really did hide all those eggs on Easter Eve....

Tonight it was just the two of them, sitting together in the small ground-floor parlor on the Patterson Avenue side of the House where the people interested in the old religion usually gathered in the evenings. The room was called the Birkentree Room—which was very appropriate, Julianne had told him once, seeing how the birken tree was another name for the birch, which stood for the first month of the druidic calendar of the trees and represented a time of beginning and cleansing. But Esmeralda had told Cal one day that the name actualy came about because a Scots folksinger used to live in the room. “The Birken Tree” was an old traditional song that was kind of her signature tune, so eventually people just named the room after it. When Cal had mentioned this to Julianne, she’d just smiled and told him that it didn’t make any difference; it didn’t change the appropriateness of the room’s name.

Naturally, even though she obviously hadn’t thought it was a stupid thing for him to have mentioned, he’d still ended up feeling like he was about an inch tall. He got all flushed whenever he thought about it—it and the hundred other times he figured he’d made an ass of himself around her.

“It’s so weird,” she was saying now.

“About your cloak?” Cal said.

Julianne nodded. “I just can’t figure out what happened to it. I hung it up in my closet right after I got in from the ritual last night and it was still there when I put away my bathrobe after my shower, but this morning it was gone. Someone had to have come in while I was sleeping and taken it.”

“Weird,” Cal agreed.

He was still trying to ignore the image of her taking a shower that refused to leave his mind’s eye.

Down, hormones, down, he commanded.

It didn’t do much good. Not when she was sitting there on the other end of the sofa, her legs folded under her, looking so damn gorgeous that it was all he could do not to stare. He crossed his legs to hide the telltale indication of his more than platonic interest in her.

Julianne sighed. “Things just don’t get stolen in Tamson House,” she said. “It just... doesn’t happen.”

“Did you talk to Blue about it?” Cal asked.

“No. I didn’t want to start up any weird vibes, because maybe it’s just someone playing a prank on me. But still...” She turned the deep green of her gaze fully on him. “There’s something different in the air tonight, don’t you think? It’s like something’s about to happen—everything’s all crackling with pent-up energies just waiting to let go.”

Cal wished she hadn’t used those particular words to describe what she was feeling. He knew all about pent-up energies. And he was going to get lost in those eyes. Then he realized that she was waiting for him to say something.

“I... uh”—he cleared his throat—“know what you mean.”

Oh, brilliant. What was it about her that always left him tongue-tied and thinking about sex? He wasn’t like this normally. Hell, he worked as a data processor in an office with a half-dozen beautiful women and he just hung out with them, made jokes, life was easy, they were all friends. Why couldn’t he just relax for once? Or at least tell her how he felt?

She’d fallen silent, head cocked to one side as though she was listening to something just out of hearing range.

Just do it, Cal told himself. Tell her now before somebody else comes into the room.

“You know, uh, Julianne,” he began.

She blinked lazily, then focused on him. His pulse jumped into double time.

“I—”

There was a sudden roaring sound and he never got a chance to finish what he’d barely begun. The sofa they were sitting on tumbled over backward and to one side, spilling Julianne into his arms, but he had no time to appreciate the moment. The air was filled with the crackle and crunch of breaking wood and then a tree—a giant, full-grown, honest-to-real, no-fooling, enormous old oak tree—came pushing up out of the floor, splintering floorboards and anything else in its way.

He tugged Julianne aside as a large branch whipped out of the jagged hole in the floor and whistled by them, cutting the air just where she’d been. Adrenaline whined through his body so that he was manhandling the big sofa before his rational mind could tell him that what he was doing wasn’t possible. He pulled it the rest of the way across the room, all the way over, with the two of them between it and the wall, the body of the sofa protecting them from the other branches as they came whipping out of the floor as well as from the slabs of plaster and wood that crashed down from the ceiling as the tree continued its rapid upward movement.

And then he collapsed and just hung on to Julianne.

The air was thick with plaster dust and the sound of tearing wood, which was as loud as thunder. The floor and wall against which they were pressed shook with the violent fury of the tree’s passage through the room. Julianne gripped him back, arms holding him tightly, head buried against his shoulder.

They were going to die, Cal thought.

Fear raced at a panic-quick speed through him, but for all his terror, he found himself focusing on Julianne being in his arms and realized that if they were going to die—

Well, at least I’m dying happy.

8

Ginny Saunders was putting away books in the Library that evening. Esmeralda marked the passages and chapters to be entered into the computer, and the students they’d hired did the actual data entry, but it was Ginny who knew where to find the necessary texts and insisted on replacing them on their shelves herself afterward. If was the last thing she did every night before leaving the Library, the final task of her daily routine.

She enjoyed the solitude at that time of day, the sense of orderliness and completion that the practice of tidying up left her with. She read voraciously, but was also a lover of books for their own sake. She appreciated the look of the bindings, lined up in neat rows on the shelves, the idea that so much knowledge and thought was tucked away between the boards of all those many books under her care.

She knew that there were people who thought she was a little strange—“moling away” in here, as Tim liked to put it—but it didn’t bother her for a moment what people thought. She’d been wealthy in her time, and she’d been poor, but this was the first time she’d been responsible for something and she liked the feeling. It might just be a private library, in an odd old house, and she received only her room and board for her work, but it was still a full-time job and the satisfaction she derived from it more than made up for what people thought she was missing in the world that turned and spun on its mad axis beyond the Library’s walls. She’d spent most of her life in that world and found only sorrow and pain there.