The Onion Girl (53 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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I'm no stranger to violence, though
it's been long years since I was a teenager, living on the street where people getting hurt or dying was an everyday occurrence instead of something you just read about in the morning paper. Those days are gone and it's simply not part of my life experience anymore, my recent accident notwithstanding.
The accident.
When Pinky points that shotgun at me, I go right back to that night. I freeze, just as I did when the headlights caught me. Then the shotgun goes off and Raylene gets shot. Her stepping in front of the spray of buckshot meant for me hits me as hard as the impact of the car did.
I lose all awareness of Pinky and the shotgun, of the danger to myself. Only one thing matters. I scrabble and slide the rest of the way down the slope until I'm down on my knees on the damp grass and leaves, crouching beside my sister. I touch her with a trembling hand. Everything I know or can feel or can think about narrows into this singular
focus on what's happened to her. I don't want to look, but I can't turn my gaze away.
I stare at the ruin of her chest. The way her head lolls at an unnatural angle. The splay of her limbs. The horrible fact that she's not breathing. That her eyes are rolled up, showing their whites.
That she's dead.
I want to call her back from wherever's she's gone, from wherever she's been taken. I try to put my arms around her and lift her up, but she's a dead weight. Her blood makes my hands go slick and I can't get a good grip.
I don't know how long I'm gone.
When I finally remember Pinky and look up, I blink in confusion. Joe's standing over her still body with a pit bull the color of pale yellow ocher at his side.
I open my mouth, but my voice doesn't seem to work.
When did they get here? What happened to Pinky?
I dimly remember a second shot. Did Pinky shoot herself?
I can see the shotgun in the leaves and brush not far from where she's lying. Joe's hands are empty. That leaves only the Broken Girl, but she's still the unconscious lump she was when I first got here. Knowing her as well as I do, she couldn't have lifted a gun, never mind pulling the trigger.
I get a sharp pull in my midsection—
come to me, come to me
—when I look at the Broken Girl and quickly turn away. My gaze returns to Joe to see he's approaching me. He crouches down on the other side of Raylene's body, those half-crazy, half-laughing eyes of his filled with sympathy.
“I'm sorry it ended this way,” he says.
I open my mouth again but I still can't find my voice so I give him a slow nod. I watch his fingers as he rolls himself a cigarette. He lights it and inhales, blows out a stream of blue-gray smoke. When he offers it to me, I shake my head.
“We've got to get you back to the rehab,” he says. “Everybody's pretty worried.”
My gaze drops to Raylene's face. I reach out with bloodied fingers and close her eyes, one by one. The marks I leave behind on her eyelids look like red war paint. I clear my throat and finally get control of my voice.
“Fuck the rehab,” I say.
He looks as though he's about to argue, then nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “Healing's way overrated, isn't it?”
“That isn't fair,” I tell him. “And you know it.”
“I suppose. Though the longer your dreaming self is separated from the rest of yourself, the harder it's going to be on you. You pay for this kind of shit, Jilly.”
I shake my head. “It's too much to pay.”
“I don't mean what happened here.”
“It doesn't matter,” I say. “It's happened anyway, hasn't it? My sister's dead. I think I was actually getting through to her, but now she's dead. I haven't seen her in forever and now I'm never going to get the chance to know her any better.”
“Not much to know,” a second voice says.
I look up to see that the gulch has suddenly gotten way more crowded. I recognize Nanabozho from having met him before in the Greatwood. The other man, the one in the black hat who spoke, isn't familiar, but from stories Joe's told me in the past I make him out to be Whiskey Jack. Another canid.
They seem to have appeared out of thin air—which doesn't startle me, not at this point, knowing what I know about the People, but it's certainly taken the pit bull that came with Joe by surprise. There's a low growl coming from the bottom of its chest. I realize that I've been aware of it in my peripheral hearing for a while—from when the canids first showed up—I just wasn't listening to it, if that makes any sense.
Joe turns to the dog and murmurs, “It's okay.”
But it's not okay. How can anything be okay?
Then I focus on what Whiskey Jack said.
“Maybe not for you,” I tell him, “but it was the world to me.”
“Oh, for Christ's sake. You're acting like she was a saint.”
“Jack,” Joe says, a warning in his voice.
But Whiskey Jack ignores him.
“She was killing our cousins,” he says. “And you know why? So she could bathe in their blood. Make herself young. Make herself high, her and that pack of wolves she was running with.”
I look at Joe and he gives me a reluctant nod.
“She was doing a lot of killing,” he says. “We've been hunting her and her pack for a while now. We didn't know it was her when we first
started looking. We just knew she had to be stopped. One way or another, the killings had to end.”
His voice is mild, soft, like he's trying to gentle the hurt, keep me calm. Though I get the sense it's not just for me, but for Jack, too.
“She was my sister,” I say.
“But she was doing wrong.”
“I don't care.” I look back at Jack. “You don't know what she had to go through as a kid.”
“I don't need to know,” Jack says. “You think that's some kind of excuse? People treat you bad and that gives you a license to do whatever you want to anybody else?”
“No, but—”
“Joe says you both went through some hard times,” he says. “So tell me this: how come you turned out so stand-up and she didn't?”
“I could've gone down the same road she did,” I tell him. “The difference is, I had people to help me, to pull me out of the gutter and show me there were other choices. All she had was that psycho with the shotgun.”
“Bullshit. She was just born bad.”
I stand up. I want to wrap my bloodstained hands around his throat and squeeze the life out of him.
“Nobody's born bad,” I tell him, my voice tight with anger.
“She was going to kill you,” he says.
“We … we don't know that.”
But now I'm on unsure ground. I don't know why Raylene brought me here. I remember the hate I saw in her wolf eyes. I think of all the paintings she destroyed—she had to know they were the ones that would mean the most to me. I don't know if she was planning to actually kill me, but I know she wanted to hurt me.
“Well, I'm sure of it,” Jack says.
“Get out of here,” I tell him. “You got what you wanted. My sister's dead and everything's good now in dreamland, so why don't you just go away and leave us alone.”
Jack doesn't say anything for a long moment. I get the sense he's about to turn and go away, but then everything changes again.
Hearing all the voices coming from the gulch as he approached, Toby crept the last few yards, crouching down behind a fallen tree when he reached the top of the ridge. He peered down, then hastily pulled his head back out of sight. Canids. Two—three. So many of them. His pulse, already pounding because of the long run back from the vervain field, quickened still more.
He swallowed thickly, afraid almost to move. But the more he heard, the more he knew he couldn't stay hiding up here.
As her dreaming self, Jilly wouldn't be strong enough to stand up to so many of the People, all at once. But she had that light in her, shining so strong. The spirit of the Greatwood was on her side—it had to be. Hadn't it allowed her to claim the twigs the way she had? If she could be reunited with her broken self, if what she called the Broken Girl was healed and the two were one, hale and strong, perhaps she would have a chance.
So reluctantly, he rose to his feet. With the vervain wreath in hand, the blue flowers and sweet-smelling leaves intertwined with cream-colored flower heads of yarrow and that one piece of Greatwood magic, he topped the ridge and started down into the gulch.
NEWFORD
Sophie sighed. Tonight was like the vigil when Jilly had been in her coma all over again except there weren't as many of them in attendance this time. And there wasn't a comatose body on the bed.
They waited in the hall of the rehab building where Jilly had disappeared. She, Wendy, and Cassie sat on the floor, all in a row, she and Wendy with their legs pulled up to their chests, arms around their knees, Cassie with her legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. After registering shock at seeing Wendy and Cassie reenter the rehab through the same section of hall that they'd disappeared through earlier, Lou had spent
most of his time pacing back and forth until Angel arrived. Now the two of them stood farther down the hall, conversing in quiet voices.
Sophie glanced in their direction. When it came to Jilly, they were like divorced parents. Lou had taken her off the street and brought her to his social worker girlfriend who had gotten her into a detox program and then helped her finish high school and get into university. Though Jilly treated them both as friends now, in those early years they had been like surrogate parents—the ones Jilly should have had, instead of the ones she'd gotten.
When Lou and Angel broke up, Jilly had confessed to Sophie that she felt like the kid caught up in her parents' divorce. She loved them both and knew they loved each other, so the acrimonious breakup had been all that much harder to take. Jilly carried the child's guilt for a parents' divorce as well. While she knew she wasn't personally responsible, it was because of Lou's and Angel's differing perspectives on how Angel's clients such as Jilly should be treated that had led to the breakup.
But tonight, as had happened when Jilly was in her coma, their differences were set aside and they were united in their worry and grief.
Sophie had considered calling some of Jilly's other friends, but hadn't known what she'd say to most of them. She was now willing to accept that this kind of thing could happen, that two women could waltz into the rehab and carry Jilly off into the dreamlands by stepping through a wall, but to try to explain it to anyone else besides Christy or the professor would take far more energy than she could summon.
Better to wait, she told herself. At least get through the night. Cassie had assured them that Joe and his friends would be able to rescue Jilly, so it was just a matter of holding tight. Any moment now, Joe would come back from the dreamlands with Jilly and any explanations that were needed could be given by Jilly herself in her usual exuberant style.
But the minutes dragged into hours and there was still no sign of either of them. Sophie wasn't giving up, but her anxiety grew in direct proportion to the passing of time. It was two-thirty now, almost five hours since Jilly had been spirited away. She didn't want to think about what could be taking so long. She knew all too well that danger lay as thick in the dreamlands as wonder.
She glanced at Wendy, sitting beside her. Although Wendy was carrying
a soft radiance about her from her own brief visit into the dreamlands, she'd been oddly subdued ever since her return. Sophie reached over and gave her hand a squeeze.
“It'll be okay,” she said, putting all of her own hope into the assurance.
“I guess. It's just …”
“Just what?”
Wendy sighed and shook her head.
“I feel like such a shit,” she said. “Now that I've been over there, I know how it is for you. How could you
not
want to be there?”
“What are you talking about?” Sophie asked.
“I was just feeling … left out.”
“Of what?”
“Of the three of us. There were you and Jilly, both going into the dreamlands now, and I was turning into the third wheel.”
“It would never have been like that.”
“I know,” Wendy said. “But it felt like it. And the worst thing is, I could have prevented all of this.”
Sophie gave her a blank look.
Wendy sighed. “Jilly knew something was up. Maybe she guessed how I was feeling, or at least knew I was feeling something weird. She sent me a message through Angel to come and talk to her about it, but I got caught up at work and then, instead of coming over right after, I went out to dinner with everybody.”
“I still don't understand how that puts you at fault.”
“Don't you see?” Wendy said. “If I'd come earlier, I would have been here when those horrible women took Jilly away. I could have stopped them.”
“Or you could have been hurt.”
“Maybe. But before I did I would have raised a stink and maybe the security guards would have got here in time.”
“Oh, Wendy,” Sophie said, putting her arm around her friend's shoulders. “I can see why you're feeling the way you do, but you really can't blame yourself for this.”
Tears welled in Wendy's eyes.
“It's just …” she began, then had to start over. “I don't want maybe the last thing Jilly thought of me to be that I was angry with her or something.”
She got a pained look on her face, as though by simply expressing her fears, she might have made them real. Sophie hugged her.
“Jilly'd never think that,” she said. “And we'd never have left you behind in anything.”
“Joe will bring her back,” Cassie assured them from the other side of Wendy. “Trust in him.”
“We do,” Sophie said.
But the waiting was still so hard.

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