The Parting Glass (Caitlin Ross Book 4) (25 page)

Timber sat up, clutching his throat and coughing. His eyes whipped around the circle, taking in the situation in a glance. His hand shot out for his discarded drum.

“Caitlin!” he shouted, even as he struck the drum with such violent strength that I thought he’d drive the beater right through the head.

I knew at once what he needed; I’d done it before. This time, I had three other women adding to my energy, not to mention the Powers they carried. I sought the might of the Earth beneath my feet, and felt myself grow. Hands the size of boulders wove a container within the circle and threw it around the writhing Darkness. Fingers like tree limbs squeezed.

The Shadow contracted.

Another drumbeat boomed through the circle. “Again!”

I picked up the last reverberations of the drum and knitted them through the container. Squeezed again. The Shadow grew still smaller.

“Again!”

One more drumbeat rolled forth. I took it, added its power to my own, and made my container as small as I could. The Shadow flinched away from touching it, withdrawing into itself. Now no longer enormous, it was merely very large.

Timber could cope with that. He leapt to his feet, one pissed off Scot, drum crashing like a wave against a dark shore.

“Right, ye wee shite bastard! Back where ye belong!”

He drove the drumbeat at the Shadow, and the Shadow retreated. Straight into John Stonefeather, who stood behind it, arms open in welcome. His arms closed, embracing what he had cast off. A second of struggle engulfed him as the Shadow tried to fight free, but Stonefeather did not let go. And the Shadow melted into him, finding a home in the space from which it had been evicted.

“Now I am a whole man!” Stonefeather cried. “Now I reclaim what is mine!”

Incandescent fire shot into the sky, turning the old man into a pillar of light. It burst through the crack in the sky, and the watching Presences swallowed it. When, at last, it ebbed and faded, nothing remained of John Stonefeather. Not even a pile of ash.

The Presences withdrew, taking with them all the Powers the six of us had been channeling. One by one, all around the circle, we women dropped the circle. One by one, our knees crumpled beneath us, and we sank down to the packed earth.

The red orb of the sun lifted itself into the sky and turned to gold.

Timber beat out a new cadence, three sets of four quick beats each. He lowered his drum.

“It’s finished.”

He looked at Zee. Remarkably, the cabby still stood, looking much the same as always, although a bit worn around the edges. A charred coup stick dangled from his hand.

“Thank you,” Timber said.

Then he collapsed.

We maneuvered Timber into the front seat of Zee’s cab. I crawled in beside him and cradled his head on my shoulder, leaving it to the others to clean up. Tears rolled down my face without my will or control, making puddles in the collar of my sweater. Timber was too still, too pale, his muscles too lax. He’d done what he’d come to Boulder to do. But at what cost?

Eventually, the other women piled into the back seat. Zee finished putting the detritus from the ceremony in the trunk and slammed it shut, then climbed into his place. I found myself squeezed between two large men, one unconscious and the other attempting to drive a packed car. I tried to shift over and give Zee more room.

“’Sokay, Caitlin,” he murmured, pulling into the road.

He took us down the back of Flagstaff Mountain Road, to where it met up with the Canyon above Marilyn’s house. It was a long way. I might have dozed off for a time; even worry for Timber couldn’t compete with my utter exhaustion. The next thing I knew, the cab had stopped and Marilyn was getting out.

“Thank you for having me,” she said, for all the world like an unpopular girl who had, at long last, been invited to a party. Not such a bad comparison, at that.

“Thank you, Marilyn.” I’d never call her Moon Pie again, not even in the privacy of my own thoughts. None of us would.

“May I keep this?” Her fingers wandered to the white buffalo fetish still about her neck.

“Of course.” It had no power now; it was a memento, no more. Besides, she deserved it.

We dropped Gina next. Before she got out of the cab, she said,

“I’m going to arrange a memorial service for John. Friday, I think. This weekend is the Fourth, and I’d like to have it done before then.”

I gave her a weak smile. Only Gina could remember the Fourth of July after the morning she’d been through.

“Will you help me?”

“Sure.” Provided Timber recovered. I couldn’t let myself think that he might not recover.

Gina leaned over the seat and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you, Caitlin. And thank Timber, too, when he wakes up.” She winked at me. “I was right about him, wasn’t I?”

Then the cab door slammed and she was gone.

Last, we dropped Sage back at her home in the trailer park on Thirtieth Street and Valmont. She got out of the cab and stuck her head back through the window, which I had rolled down to give Timber air.

“Well, Girlfriend,” she said. She hadn’t spoken a single word since showing up at Beljoxa’s Eye at four o’clock in the morning. For Sage, that had to be some kind of record. “You sure know how to throw a party.”

“It was Timber’s party,” I whispered.

“It was both of yours.” She raised her eyes to Zee. “Good job rescuing the Big Man back there. Kept me from having to hunt him down in the afterlife and force feed him his own testicles.”

Zee flinched, the way all men do when that particular piece of anatomy comes under assault. “Uh, thanks.”

“Hey.” Sage’s voice deepened. Her face seemed to shine, and the yellow track suit clung to the lush contours of a desirable woman. “How come I ain’t seen you before?”

“I…uh…I don’t know,” Zee stuttered.

Erzulie laughed, low in her throat. “Well, I’m around, Sugar. Look me up sometime.”

Hips swinging, she disappeared into the house. I sank back into the seat, giving Zee a moment to pant after her. His lady friend had better act fast, if she wanted to keep him.

“Home, Jeeves,” I said, when he had finished.

“Yes, Milady.”

Back at Beljoxa’s Eye, the two of us managed to manhandle sixteen stone of unconscious Scot out of the cab and in through the door, and drag him upstairs, where we put him to bed. Zee hung around for a little while to make sure I was going to be all right. But I could tell he wanted to go and take some time to recuperate from the past couple of days, and, frankly, I wanted him to.

“It’ll be okay, Caitlin,” he told me at the door. “Your man there is as strong as a bull. It’ll take more than a little brush with a Shadow Entity to put him down.”

I wanted to believe him. “Thanks Zee. For everything.”

“Any time. I’ll see you.”

When he had left, I hunted up a pair of tweezers and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and spent the next half an hour or so picking fragments of Soul Catcher out of Timber’s flesh and swabbing the wounds with disinfectant. I didn’t know what to do with the shards, so I put them in a little glass jar from my personal altar and stored them away. Timber could deal with them when he woke up. If he woke up.

He had to wake up.

He hadn’t stirred the entire time I’d been working on him, not even when I’d used my nail file to dig out a shard that had penetrated especially deep. It disturbed me to see him so passive, so bereft of his familiar energy. Without his natural healthy flush, he looked weird, like his own effigy, modeled in wax. I couldn’t make myself view his aura. I was too afraid it would flicker and die as I watched.

Still, he breathed, if shallowly. When I laid my hand on his chest, I felt the faint beat of his heart. He’d been through an ordeal. He needed rest, and time to recover.

So I told myself.

Somehow, I got through the day. I didn’t want to sleep, in case something changed. In case Timber woke, or… In case he woke. I made myself a pot of strong coffee and attended to all the things I’d neglected over the past ten days. Things I hadn’t been able to do because I had no time to myself. I balanced the books and wrote up a deposit for the next day. Good gods above, I’d never in my life left so much money in the cash register for so long. It was a miracle I hadn’t been robbed. I finished the inventory I’d begun after the Solstice, and filled out some order forms. I’d call them in later in the week. Wednesday was my usual day for that. My wholesale contacts probably thought I had died.

From time to time, I checked on Timber. He never showed any change. He lay in my bed like a corpse. Not even a flickering eyelid told me he might be dreaming.

I wondered if the destruction of his Soul Catcher had hurt him in some way not evident on the outside. Some way that didn’t catch up with him until after the ceremony had been accomplished. It could have done, if part of him was bound up in it. Maybe picking out the shards had been the wrong thing to do. No way to fix it, now.

Toward evening, I lit a charcoal brick in the miniature cauldron on my bedroom altar and sprinkled it with a mixture of cedar, sage and copal. The sweet scent spiraled up to the ceiling. I prayed, and imagined the incense carrying my prayers with it. If anyone answered, I didn’t hear it.

I’m not sure I ate at all that day. If Timber had known, he would have read me the riot act.

At last, I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I debated making up the daybed in the sitting room because I didn’t know if I could bear to be in bed with Timber in his current state. Then I decided I couldn’t bear not to be, and crawled in beside him. I got my arm behind his neck and hugged his unresponsive body against mine. His lack of reaction to my touch frightened me beyond belief.

I dozed off only to jerk awake in panic, over and over again. At one point, McGuyver came in and hopped up on the bed. He walked right onto Timber’s chest, kneaded himself a nest in the sheet, and curled himself into a furry ball. Timber still didn’t react, and that scared me worse than anything. He’d talked to McGuyver even when he hadn’t talked to me.

Finally, I slept.

Morning came when I wasn’t looking. I opened my eyes to bright sunlight. McGuyver had vanished. My arm had fallen asleep from cradling Timber’s head. He hadn’t moved.

I touched his face. It was cold. His body was cold, too.

I lay back on my pillow, silent tears welling up from the deep places of my soul. I felt as if my heart had been ripped right out. I thought, if I reached down, I could touch the jagged edges of the hole in my chest where it belonged.

Then a hoarse, beloved voice spoke from close beside my ear.

“I feel as if I’ve been run over by a bus.”

Timber drew in a great, ragged breath and let it out, coughing. Violent shivers wracked his body. I threw myself at him, kissing his face, his chest, his neck, every inch of him I could find.

“Gods, woman, dinna start,” he complained, trying in vain to fend me off. His struggles were so feeble and he sounded so weak, I started crying again. “I havena the strength for such carryings-on. And I’m verra cold. Shock, I expect.”

I made myself get up and go the closet for a blanket, which I tucked around him before crawling back beside him and wrapping my body around his. Gradually, his shivers subsided and, at last, ceased.

“That’s better,” he said.

“You came back,” I whispered.

“Did ye think I wouldna?” He rolled an eye in my direction.

“Yes.”

With an effort, Timber turned himself to face me. He laid a hand on my hip.

“I’ll always come back tae ye, Caitlin,” he said. “No matter where I go. I’ll always come back.”

Almost before he had finished speaking, he drifted back into sleep. Not the horrible, entranced coma of the past twenty-four hours, but real, healing sleep. Already the color had returned to his face and the warmth to his skin. He would get well, now.

Sighing, I laid my head on my pillow. In a little while, I slept, too.

Chapter Twenty

B
y Tuesday morning, it had gotten around via the Boulder metaphysical grapevine that John Stonefeather no longer walked in the world of the living. I didn’t expect many customers to show up, and few appeared. But the subdued regulars who wandered into Beljoxa’s Eye at intervals all knew. Most bought some kind of memento: a chunk of pipestone, a cedar wand, a smudge stick bound with red thread. I caught some of them peeping at me from the corners of their eyes with a new kind of regard, and I wondered if the story of the ceremony, and my part in it, had also circulated.

Quite a few already had heard about the memorial service, to be held at ten o’clock the coming Friday morning on the lawn at Chautauqua Park. Gina had arranged it, and had called on me the day before for aid in getting the word out.

“No flyers,” she’d insisted. “They’re tacky. I won’t advertise a memorial service like it’s some kind of rock concert.”

“I think I can arrange something better,” I’d assured her.

So, Monday night Sage had come over, and between us we’d concocted a tiny spell to carry the message where it needed to go. It involved my keeping a brazier stoked, and burning up quite a lot of my stock of cedar, sage and copal, but I didn’t mind. Anyone who ought to hear about the memorial service would hear about it, and no tacky flyers involved. And if the people our spell reached passed along the information, so much the better.

“How’s the Big Man?” Sage had asked on her way out. I didn’t think she’d softened much toward Timber, but the ceremony had earned him her respect.

“Better,” I’d said, glad to be able to give a positive report. “Still resting.”

By Tuesday afternoon, however, Timber had made it most of the way back to normal and was climbing the walls. I had a bit to do to keep him out of my hair, as he had a tendency to clomp up and down the stairs at odd moments, or to pop his head out of the kitchen and frighten the customers.

“I need to get back to work,” he informed me in bed that night.

“Haven’t you done enough?” Actually, I found it more than a little alarming that he’d remained quiet as long as he had. That alone told me how far the Stonefeather business had sapped his resources.

“There’s the clean up yet. Cleansing the house and the studio. I canna leave such a mess lying about, and I want to get it done before Friday.” Before the memorial service. Neither of us had to speak of it, but it lay between us, all the same.

“Gina wants us to sing.” I had no idea how she’d found out about Timber’s and my non-magical talents. She had her ways, I supposed.

“Aye?” He wrapped me up in his arms. He’d not yet regained the energy for lovemaking, but we still enjoyed each other. “I know the perfect song.”

“So do I.” The same one, most likely. I snuggled closer. “Fine. Go back to work if you must. I can’t stop you.”

In the morning, I presented Timber with my spare set of keys. I should have done it before, but now it was necessary. We’d both be coming and going a lot, he on his own business and I helping Gina with the details of the memorial. Our schedules might not match up. Giving Timber his own keys seemed plain sense to me. So it startled me to see the awed reverence with which he added them to the ring in his pocket. Then it hit me: he’d never been in a serious relationship before. He’d never lived with a woman, not for any length of time, at least. In fact, when I took his profession and his ability to travel light into account, it occurred to me that it might have been a long while since he’d genuinely thought of any place as a home.

Wednesday night, under not entirely pleasant circumstances, I learned the truth of the notion. We hadn’t seen much of each other during the course of the day, and were spending a congenial hour after dinner in the sitting room upstairs, reading. Before Timber, I hadn’t used it much, but now it made a good place to hang out—more comfortable than the showroom or kitchen, and less dangerous than the bedroom. I had a lame fantasy novel by an author who thought far too well of himself; I’d supposed it might give me a needed break from the intensity of the last few days. Timber had a book on Tarot from my stock downstairs. We shared the daybed, one of us at either end. My feet rested in his lap.

My mind kept drifting off the intricacies of demonic plots and time travel in favor of appreciating the niceties of my lover’s profile. At a certain point, he caught me looking, and his lip twitched.

“Now who’s eating who with a spoon?” he teased.

“Well.” I shifted position as my body reminded me that we hadn’t made love since before Stonefeather’s ceremony. I’d gone longer, of course. Much longer. Still, Timber affected me the way no one else ever had.

“I dinna think I can yet.” His eyes held eloquent regret.

I pouted. I had reckoned without that particular physical consequence of shamanic energy drain.

We went back to our respective books. I tried hard to concentrate. It seemed Timber’s attention span had also reached its limit, for after a minute he snapped the Tarot volume shut.

“I dinna ken how you remember all this…stuff.” I could tell he’d been a mere moment’s reflection short of using a different word. One not so polite.

“I don’t, actually. I just say what I see.”

“Aye, well. I’ve something else on my mind.” He hesitated, then plunged ahead. “I need to take a trip.”

“What?” I sat up, dropping my book to the floor. “When? Where?”

He winced. “Watch your feet, aye?” He picked them up and shifted them into a less precarious position. “As soon as possible. And as to the where, well. No farther than the next room. In body, at any rate.”

Oh. He meant a Journey. I relaxed.

“Are you up to it?” He’d cleansed the studio during the afternoon, and it had taken a toll on him.

“I think I must be. I’ve not checked in with Mitch for some time. He should know…”

He didn’t need to say anything more. Of course, he had to inform his teacher of how his test had turned out.

“If you must, you must.” Shrugging, I picked up my book. Truth to tell, I didn’t like it much, and not just because my body kept insisting on hot sex, as soon as possible. The notion of Timber speaking with his teacher sent a chill of unidentifiable anxiety through me.

“Well, then.” He stood up and straightened his shoulders. “No time like the present.”

He went into the bedroom and closed the door. Pretty soon, I caught a whiff of sage and heard the roll of his drum as he started out. The drum settled into a steady, driving pulse, and I had to work hard at not letting it carry me anywhere. I stared at my book, but the words on the page didn’t make any sense to me. In a short time, it fell from my lax hands into my lap, and I dozed off.

Some little while later, I woke with a start, aware that the drum had fallen silent. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. Earlier, I’d lit some candles on the bookcase. They still burned, and didn’t appear very much shorter. Maybe not long, then. I wondered if Timber had accomplished what he’d set out to do. Likely he had. Time could do strange things in Journey space.

I waited. No sound came from the bedroom. Timber didn’t emerge. After about fifteen minutes, the door finally opened and he came out, his face white.

“What is it?” I demanded, alarmed.

“He wants…” He paused to clear his throat. It almost sounded as if he’d been crying. But of course that couldn’t be.

“He wants me to go back.”

“To Portland?” I asked, maintaining a careful calm. “Well, you’d have had to do it at some point anyway. To get your stuff, take care of details and like that.”

“There’s nothing there I want.” He glanced down at his hand, which still held the drum beater in a death grip. With an oath, he hurled it against the wall. Taking care, I noticed, not to aim for anything breakable. “I dinna want tae go!”

He stormed across the sitting room, in the throes of a rare passion. A tantrum, as a matter of fact. It was as if a violent thunderstorm had descended into my sitting room, throwing lightning all over the place.

“I told him about ye. About us.” He smacked the wall and whirled on me. “He wouldna hear it. Not a word. He said I should ken my duties take precedence over…och, what did he say? ‘Mortal desire,’ that was it.”

Timber stalked back the way he had come, kicking the rug when it got tangled up in his feet.

“
Drùisear! A ’dàirichadh seann mhagairlean!
”

I had no idea what those words meant, but they sounded appalling.

“
Is urrain dha ag itheadh orm!
” He dropped back into English. “Fucking duty! I’m sick tae death of it. I’ve done everything he ever asked of me. Not this. I canna do this.” He punched the bedroom door.

“He’s not wrong,” I said.

One stride brought him to the daybed, and he fell to his knees at my side.

“Ye canna want me tae go?”

“Of course not.” I caressed his flushed cheek, swallowing back a rush of dread. This. My earlier anxiety had portended this. Not Timber’s outrage, but his departure. I had a horrible feeling that if he left, he might never be back. “I think you have to, though.”

Timber already knew it. “I told him I had tae stay through Friday. He allowed me as much. ‘Fitting,’ he called it.”

Two more days. I said nothing.

“I’ll come back.” He took my hand. “I promised ye I’d always come back. A week, nae more. Then I’ll be home.”

“Home,” I repeated.

“Aye. I’ve not had a home since I was small.” He gazed into my eyes, until the blue swallowed me. “You’re my home now. And I dinna mean tae lose ye.”

I stroked his hair, once more not speaking. I believed in Timber’s intent. But I also knew that people did things they did not mean to do.

All the time.

Thursday, I helped Gina tidy up the last details of the memorial. Timber cleansed John Stonefeather’s house and returned in the evening looking as if he’d been force-fed a large helping of something vile.

Friday morning, we walked up to Chautauqua.

Timber had gone all out for the occasion and bought a new shirt, somewhat sheepishly justifying the cost by telling me he hadn’t brought anything appropriate with him from Portland. And besides, he’d said, he’d found a new place to shoot pool. As if I cared. It gave me a not unpleasant turn to see him in something other than a black t-shirt or a flannel. He’d chosen a silk cotton blend in a blue exactly matching his eyes. I could hardly keep from tearing it off him.

I wore a sundress.

By the time we got there, people already crowded the front lawn, milling around the rows of folding chairs Gina had rented in the eternal manner of people at such functions. No one seemed to want to take a seat first. I saw some people I knew, and a lot I didn’t. Kevin was there, looking uncomfortable in a button-down Oxford, his dreads tied back. Sage sported a chic red sheath with an improbably low-cut front. I noticed Zee staring at her, and hid a smile. Marilyn drifted in wearing black, which shocked me. I hadn’t thought she’d own such a negative color. A couple of Native People had on full ceremonial dress. Some of the neo-Pagan crowd appeared in t-shirts and tattered jeans, but their loads of jewelry made up what their garments lacked.

I headed toward a seat at the back. Timber took my elbow and steered me firmly in the direction of the second row, where he installed me in a chair just in from the far aisle.