The Onion Girl (50 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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“And it'd help if you lost the dog face,” Cassie said.
Wendy blinked as the wolf's features morphed into that of a handsome,
dark-skinned man. The transformation so riveted her that she almost missed their names when Cassie introduced the pair to her.
Bo gave her a wave from where he still sat by the fire.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
There was nothing so casual for the more flamboyant Whiskey Jack. He smiled warmly, hat in hand, his teeth flashing white. When he walked toward her, arms opened to give her an embrace, Wendy didn't know whether she should straight-arm him or more politely hide behind Cassie. She was never fond of people who were so touchy-feely right off the bat. It didn't matter how charming they might make themselves out to be, they just made her squirm.
“It's not simply nice to meet you,” he was saying. “Trust me when I say that, in this lonely place, it's an honor and a privilege to—”
Cassie intercepted him, saving Wendy her decision. He wrapped his arms around Cassie, winking at Wendy over her shoulder.
“If only you weren't my best friend's gal,” he told Cassie.
Cassie good-naturedly returned his hug, then disengaged herself from his embrace.
“See the problem,” she said to Wendy, “is that canids like these—and especially our good friend Jack, here—live in their libido, twenty-four seven.”
“And that's a problem because?” Jack asked.
Cassie ignored him. “That's the part the stories seem to miss or gloss over. Take ‘Little Red Riding Hood.' When they say the wolf ate her grandmother—”
“Now you're just being rude,” Jack said, but he was smiling.
“Anyway,” Cassie went on. “The point is, they don't mean to be so lecherous, it's just hardwired into their genes—”
“I love it when you talk dirty,” Jack told her.
“And they rarely force their advances on anyone.”
Jack turned to Wendy. “It's that we don't have to,” he said.
Bo finally stood up from the fire and came over to where they were talking.
“You know it's always a pleasure seeing you,” he said to Cassie, “but I'm guessing you're here for something a little more serious than putting Jack in his place.”
“My place, your place,” Jack said with a laugh. “I'm easy.”
“Joe sent us,” Cassie said. “Those dream wolves you've been chasing
kidnapped Jilly out of the rehab. He's on their trail now and wants you to meet up with him.”
Wendy was astonished in the change that came over Jack. He went from teasing joker to serious in the blink of an eye. Where before she wanted to back away because he was too forward, now it was because he was too scary. Joe could do that, too, though his teasing was usually silly rather than lewd. She wondered if this ability to switch moods so quickly was another canid trait.
“How long ago?” Jack asked.
“We just left him.”
Jack nodded to Bo. “Come on, partner. Let's finish this business.”
“We left him at—” Cassie began.
“We can find him,” Jack said.
They took a few steps and then vanished, as though they'd slipped behind a curtain of air. Wendy stared at where they'd disappeared.
“How'd they do that?” she asked.
“Once the People have been to a place, then can usually just will themselves to and from it. It's something that comes naturally to them—like their shapeshifting. We can do it when we're dreaming, and we can learn how to do it outside of dreaming time, but it's harder for us.”
Wendy looked past Cassie to where the red rock canyons seemed to go on forever. The view was so magnificent it seemed to stop her breathing. The red stone vibrating against the green of the junipers and ponderosa pines, the immense sky overhead, so blue it could make your eyes sting. She'd never seen anything remotely like it back home except in picture books and nature specials.
“We should get back to the rehab, I guess,” she said, unable to keep the regret out of her voice. “Lou's going to be having a fit.”
Cassie nodded. “We should, but I just want to try something.”
Wendy followed her to the edge of the mesa. Cassie cupped her hands and gave a sharp, resonating cry that seemed to rise from the bottom of her chest and soar out into the canyon.
What …? Wendy thought as Cassie repeated the sound a couple more times.
But then she was unable to do anything except take a startled step backward and stare.
A giant dragon lifted up from behind the line of hoodoos directly in front of them, golden and shining. Wendy stared at it in an astonished
awe that grew only more profound when the dragon suddenly broke up and she realized it had been made up of hundreds of birds, flying in formation.
“They're golden eagles,” Cassie said. “Joe's told me they like to put on this show if you ask them politely enough. I don't know what that sound he taught me means, but it sure seems to work.”
“I … I never …”
Cassie grinned at her. “Me, neither. I thought he was putting me on when he told me about it.” She took Wendy's hand. “That's something to remember.”
Wendy could only nod.
“Unfortunately, now we have to go back to the real world,” Cassie said.
“It won't seem as real as this,” Wendy said. “This seems like the template on which our world was based.”
Cassie gave her fingers a squeeze in agreement. Then she led her away.
MANIDÒ-AKÌ
I hope I wasn't too rough on Wendy, but there just isn't the time to be polite. Who knows what these wolves want with Jilly? I only know it can't be good. And to make things worse, they've hidden their trail. The damnedest thing is, I don't even think it was willful. It's not a canid trick—I'd see through that. It's something else, something that slides away from my mind every time I try to look at it straight on.
I remember what I said to Lou, back in the rehab.
It depends on how you view the world and what you expect to see when you look at it.
That works here the same as it does back in the World As It Is.
Thinking about Lou makes me realize how little he's changed over the years. He was always steadfast and true—a rarity in a man these days, little say a cop. I know Jilly's grateful for how he took her off the street back when, but it's him being who he is that keeps them friends.
Cops just see too much of the wrong end of the world. You can see
how it wears them down. They can't match the stats up on the rez, but more of them eat their guns than you'll find in a cross section of regular citizens. The ones that don't are either in AA, or still drinking, or have closed down their ability to feel much of anything.
All these years gone by, and Lou still cares. Plays everything too tight by the book, so far as I'm concerned, but you've got to give him credit. The only thing he's lost is any kind of lightness in his heart. I guess in a job like his, that's the first thing to go. It's why cop humor's so grim.
I shake my head and bring my mind back to the problem at hand.
What did I expect to find here?
That's easy. Jilly and the wolves that grabbed her from the rehab.
Why can't I find them?
Because they've hidden their trail.
Hidden it how?
I roll a cigarette and light it, studying the woods around me.
Something hidden. Something secret.
And then I know. It's
the
secret, the one that binds them, Jilly and her sister. Jilly and Angel both refer to victims of abuse as Children of the Secret, how the secret gives these victims a connection the rest of us can't have—something deep in their bones that answers to each other when they meet, doesn't matter how long ago they had to live through their own private hell.
So I'm thinking, that's where they've gone. Into someplace only they can access, these Children of the Secret. To find them, I have to get myself into that head space if I can, but I don't know if it's possible, and I don't think I have the time. But then I realize I know someone who can help me and she won't be as hard to track down, because she's not hiding from me.
Like I've said, I'm no derrynimble, but I do have a gift of being able to find things in the dreamlands.
I close my eyes and concentrate on her. It's kind of like how Holly Rue—that friend of Jilly's with the used bookstore—describes how you can access other people's computers over the Internet. You send out a little search program and it goes pinging against firewalls until it finds a computer that isn't protected and sends the information back to you.
What I'm sending out instead of a program is a need to find something, but otherwise it's not much different. It's just as random and
there's not really all that much mysterious or magical about it. When it bangs up against what I'm looking for, it sends an echo back and I know where to go.
I get a quick return on this search. Doesn't surprise me—she's only been in the dreamlands for a few hours and everything being new to her, she wouldn't have gotten far. I take a last drag of my smoke, put it out, and store the butt in my pocket. Then I find me a quicklands trail and head off to find her.
NEWFORD, MAY
Lou was pacing back and forth in the hall outside Jilly's room when Sophie arrived. She got the feeling he'd been doing it for a while. As they drew nearer, the policewoman who'd escorted Sophie from the front door of the rehab center cleared her throat.
“Sorry to bother you, Loot,” she said, “but this lady was saying—”
She broke off when Lou turned and waved her off.
“It's okay, Barb,” he said. “Thanks for bringing her.”
“Where's Wendy?” Sophie asked as the policewoman returned to her post. “I came as soon as I heard, but the cab took forever to get to my place.”
Lou pointed at the blank wall across from Jilly's doorway. Sophie's gaze followed his finger, then returned to his face.
“I don't get it,” she said.
“You and me both, Sophie. All of a sudden everybody's walking through walls, except they don't end up on the other side. Nope. They're just gone.”
“Gone?”
Lou made a helpless gesture with his hands. “There's a room on the other side of that wall, but there's nobody in it.”
“
Wendy
walked through a wall?”
He nodded. “Along with Cassie and Bones. And before that—at least according to Wendy—it was Jilly's sister and her partner carrying off Jilly.”
“But—”
“I know what you're thinking,” Lou said. “It's nuts. But I saw them go. They stepped right into that wall like it wasn't even there, and then they were gone.”
Sophie ran a hand across the plaster of the wall.
“If it's a trick,” Lou said. “It's a damn good one.”
“It's not a trick,” Sophie said.
Lou nodded slowly. “So, are you going to follow them?”
“I wouldn't know how.”
“I think I'm kind of relieved,” Lou told her.
“Relieved?”
“Because if you went, I'd have to go with you and …” He shrugged. “This world's already weird enough for me. I don't need to add the problems of another to it.”
“It's not all bad over there,” Sophie said.
“So you have been over?”
Sophie gave him a small smile. “Only in my dreams.” She looked away from him, back at the wall. “You say Cassie and Joe followed after Jilly?”
Lou nodded. “With Wendy in tow.”
“Well, that's something. Joe'll know what to do. I think he was born there.”
“So it's not just a shtick—his reading fortunes and making like he knows more about the world than you and me can see?”
“He's for real,” Sophie told him. She sighed. “Though it's not something I've ever been comfortable admitting to—knowing about this sort of stuff, I mean. But I guess I've always thought of Joe as this trickster figure who's got one foot in our world, another in the dreamworld. Jilly says he's way older than he looks and—how did she put it?—potent.”
“Tricksters,” Lou said. “They're like con men, right?”
“I suppose they can be. But Joe's on our side. No matter what's going on over there, he won't let anything bad happen to Jilly.”
“He'd better not,” Lou said.
Sophie nodded. But she knew it wasn't going to be up to Joe. While she had no idea what was really going on anymore, she was sure of this much: things had spun way out of anybody's control.
Except for maybe Jilly's sister.

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