The Parting Glass (Caitlin Ross Book 4) (12 page)

McGuyver hid.

Finally, worn out, I trudged upstairs to the bedroom. That’s when I lost it.

It smelled like Timber. Smelled like us. The sheets were still rumpled from lovemaking, half off the bed. The pillow where he had lain held the imprint of his head.

I crumpled in the doorway and bawled. And bawled. And bawled.

Chapter Ten

T
he next morning I did not remember stripping the bed. I did not remember fumigating with incense, either. But I must have done both, because my sheets were blue, not lavender, and the bedroom reeked of Nag Champa.

I felt horrible and my mouth tasted like a badly-used carpet.

Staggering into the bathroom, I stood under the shower for almost an hour, until the water turned from steam to ice. Then I struggled into an old, blue jersey sundress, put up my hair, and hobbled downstairs.

Something smelled really bad down there.

I found the charred remnants of the lavender sheets in the book room fireplace. They had been my favorite sheets, too. I sighed. I had been out of my mind.

I retrieved a large garbage bag from the box under the kitchen sink, shoveled out the mess in the fireplace, and deposited the bag in the trash bin on the back step. The stench began to abate, and I lit some more incense to help it along. Then I wandered back into the kitchen to feed McGuyver. He wound himself around my ankles, meowing as if he were starving.

“I know you talked to him,” I said to my cat. “What the hell did you say to make him run?” For, now that my head had cleared a bit, I knew Timber wouldn’t have left the way he had, with hardly a word, if he hadn’t been upset about something. Something more than just inadvertently sleeping with me. He wouldn’t be so rude.

McGuyver stuck his face into his dish of kibble and declined to answer.

I made a cup of tea and some dry toast. I even managed to get most of it down.

Then I opened up the store and sat at my stool behind the counter.

And sat.

And sat.

I didn’t have a single customer all morning. I wondered if the tourists I had scared off the day before had been bad-mouthing me. Or maybe I had unintentionally made the store invisible. That happened sometimes, when I was upset. I didn’t actually care, either way.

About noon, the phone rang. I debated not answering. But I figured I should at least make an effort.

“Good afternoon. Beljoxa’s Eye.” I couldn’t be bothered to make myself chipper and welcoming, as I usually did.

“Caitlin!” I knew the voice. Gina Polizzi. Why was she calling me? “Thank god you’re there. You have to come over right away. There’s something at my house.”

“Call 911.”

“No!” She sounded terrified. “Not someone. Something! Something in your line.”

At first I didn’t understand. Then I did.

“I’ll be right there.” I slammed down the phone, grabbed my fanny pack, and hotfooted it out the door.

Gina lived in one of those big houses on the west side of Boulder, where Fourth Street backed up to the foot of the mountains. I’d been there for a party once. It was only a few blocks from Beljoxa’s Eye, and I ran all the way.

I had already started up the drive when I felt it: the same gut-wrenching darkness that had permeated John Stonefeather’s studio. Crap! What was
that
doing here? No time to pause and consider what in hell Gina had done to attract it. And this time I had no reason to bear the nausea. I threw up a quick shield and barreled in at the kitchen door. Scarcely five minutes had passed since I’d answered the phone.

“Gina!” I plunged into the dining room and found her huddled against the Queen Anne buffet, eyes wide with terror.

“Caitlin,” she sobbed as I rushed to her side. “It’s here. In there.”

She jerked her head at the opening leading to the living room.

“Okay.” I took a couple of deep breaths, cursing Timber MacDuff with each one. If this thing that had invaded Gina’s house was the same thing he hunted, the Dark Being that had Stonefeather so freaked, this concerned Timber much more than me. Where the fuck was he? Oh, right: being an asshole.

Anger gave me strength. I poured it into my shield.

“You stay right here,” I told Gina. “This could get ugly. You were right to call me.”

Although what I could do, I had no idea.

It never even occurred to me to get Gina out of the house and head for the hills. If the thing had come here, it might follow her anywhere. I had to deal with it. Somehow.

Drawing a deep, steadying breath, I advanced into the living room. Nothing there but furniture. The thing had been through, though, and not very long ago; even within my shield I could feel the awful, oozing darkness of it, like the reek of something left for far too long in a dank cellar. My gag reflex tried to kick in, and I swallowed.

Crossing the living room in a few careful steps, I poked my head into the next room, the entry. Front door on my right, stairs on my left, with a hallway going past them to a study and parlor in back. The stench of malice was stronger here; the thing had come this way. I moved into the hall.

And heard a voice from the second floor.

“Gina!” Something familiar about it; I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “Gee-na! Why are you hiding from me? I need you!”

Footsteps overhead, coming closer. I faced the stairs.

A man appeared on the landing. A Native man, about my size, with long, unkempt black hair and a craggy face. My eyes widened in shock.

“John? What are you doing here?”

Even as I spoke, I knew it was not John Stonefeather, though the thing looked enough like him to be his twin. It had the same hawk-like features, the same polished mahogany skin. Coming down a couple of stairs toward me, it moved the same way. But the eyes… the eyes were wrong. Black and almond-shaped, yes. But I had never seen such an expression in John’s eyes. Fear, yes. Despair and helplessness, yes. Not this mad look of lost malevolence. A twin, without a doubt. But a dark one.

“What are you?” I wanted very much to turn tail and run. I held my ground.

The thing advanced a couple more steps.

“I’m John Stonefeather. Or some of him.” Then it paused and sniffed the air like a dog, or a wolf. Its eyes opened wide, eager and frantic.

“You! You know him!” It rushed down the remaining stairs, straight at me. “You know him!”

It grabbed my arms, fingers digging into my skin. It felt like being bathed in bile. I reacted instinctively, jerking away and at the same time sending a shock through it ten times more powerful than any I had called up in my life. The surge of energy blasted the thing right off its feet; it flew through the air into the living room, where it crashed down on top of the coffee table. I expected the delicate piece of furniture to smash, but it didn’t. For all its emotional presence, the thing didn’t seem to have much physical weight.

The thing rolled off the coffee table and picked itself up.

“You know him!” it repeated. It sounded hungry.

About that time, I became aware of movement in the dining room, behind the thing’s back. Gina. Crap, what was she up to? I’d told her to stay put.

“Know who?” I asked, keeping the thing’s attention on me.

“The Raven’s Child. The Lion.”

“Huh?” I had no idea what it meant. I scrolled through my mental list of acquaintances and came up blank.

“The Spirit Walker from Over the Water.” It sniffed again, its mouth open, like a cat detecting the scent of a stranger. “I smell him on you.”

A switch clicked in my brain. My stomach lurched. “Timber? What do you want with Timber?”

Against my will, my erstwhile lover’s voice surfaced in memory:
Not so long ago shamans expected to face death—real death, not some metaphor—in their final test. Some survived and some didn’t. That was simply the way of it.

Right on the heels of my thought, Gina appeared directly behind the thing, a cast iron frying pan in her upraised hands. Without any hesitation, she clocked it over the head.

Its eyes rolled up. It crumpled.

I let out my breath.

Gina fell to her knees beside the thing, her face streaked with tears.

“John! Oh, John, what have you done?”

I blinked. Okay, weird. How did Gina know Stonefeather? I pushed the question aside. Plenty of time to ask questions after I made sure we were safe.

“Gina.” I touched her shoulder. “Come on, get up. We have to restrain…him. Before he comes to. Do you have any…?”

She got to her feet, face at once composed. Resolved. I blessed her ability to act without wavering. She would have made a good soldier.

“I’ve got some old stockings. I keep them for tying up tomato plants. Will those do?”

I nodded, and she disappeared for a brief time. While she was gone, I inspected the intruder. It looked human. Gritting my teeth, I knelt down and touched it. Felt human, too. Warm skin and all. Yet, at the same time, it had something insubstantial about it. Something I couldn’t quite grasp.

Gina returned with an old grocery sack full of tattered stockings. Together, we hauled the thing into the Queen Anne armchair from the dining room suite and secured it. Gina had no compunction about touching it, but went about the business in her usual brisk manner. It gave me some relief, because I felt an automatic loathing for it. Something about it struck me as unnatural.

“Now,” I said when we had finished. “How do you know John Stonefeather?”

She looked astonished. “He’s my boyfriend. The one you did the reading about last week. I thought for sure I’d told you.”

“Your boyfriend?” I tried to remember the reading; it seemed so long ago. Something about a trickster with problems. Yeah, it could have been John.

“I broke it off with him the same night. It upset him, but I didn’t think he’d come after me.” She sighed. “I should have got a restraining order.”

“You saw him Friday?” I tried to arrange the pieces in my mind. Friday afternoon, Stonefeather had disappeared from my shop. Saturday night he’d gone off with Moon Pie.

“Spoke to him. On the phone.”

“Where was he?”

“At home.”

But the neighbors hadn’t seen him. And he hadn’t picked up his newspapers or mail. So had he been there all along, but in hiding? Or had he just stopped in for a moment, and Gina reached him by chance?

I glanced at the thing in the chair.

“Gina, you do know that’s not John, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Yes. I knew all along, really. I heard him …it…calling me. Trying to get in. It had John’s voice, but it wasn’t right. Something about it… And I know what he does. So I called you.” She sagged a little and sighed. “It just shocked me. Seeing the face.”

“Okay.” I gave a sigh of my own. I knew what I had to do next, and did not look forward to it. “Do you have a phone book? I need to make a call.”

“Right here.” She led me to the other side of the living room, where a phone rested on a spindle-legged stand beside a comfy armchair. The chair seemed out of place compared to the rest of the elegant furniture. I could imagine Gina sitting there with a glass of wine, gossiping with her girlfriends.

I found the phone book on the bottom shelf of the stand and turned to the “M” section, crossing my fingers. My luck held. There were several MacDuffs listed, but only one S. MacDuff. No address. But most of the student apartments weren’t far from the University, or from downtown.

The young woman who picked up on the second ring had no accent. And she sounded irritated. “Yeah?”

“May I speak to Spruce MacDuff, please?”

“This is Spruce. If this is a telemarketer, sod off, okay? I don’t want any aluminum siding or life insurance.”

“I’m not a telemarketer. My name is Caitlin Ross. I’m…”

I didn’t get any farther before she broke in.

“You’re looking for my brother, aren’t you? The big jerk. I told him you would.”

Oh, gods. What had Timber said about me?

“I mean, you don’t just spend the night with a woman and then walk out on her, even if you think it was a mistake. And I don’t care what your spirit guides, or whatever, told you.” I remembered Spruce was the sole member of Timber’s family who knew about him. I didn’t need to be told that Timber considered our encounter a mistake. He’d made it clear enough with his actions. But what did his spirit guides have to do with it?