The Trouble with Fate (24 page)

“You will regret your actions.” Her eyes were slits. “This is my kingdom.”

“Go ride your broom,” I said through tight lips.

With that, she put her hands on me. I felt her cold fingers bite into my shoulders.

But her mind. It tried to
invade
mine.

“What are you?” she asked, deeply puzzled.

Same song, different singer.
I curled my fingers into a fist with the thumb on the outside, just like my brother
had taught me, and bopped her hard, square on her freaking, long, aristocratic nose.

She cupped her snoot with a shriek.

Who’s top dog now, Mad-one?
I stood firm, both fists clenched, ready to give her another poke.

“Is this how the Black Mage chooses to provoke me? He sends me a creature such as
you?” Mad-one said, winding up on a rant. “Who believes me to be no more than a lowly
witch? Riding a broom of twigs?” Oh yeah. She was pissed. One arm up, one knee bent
up, the Mystwalker levitated skyward. She hovered ten feet above me, hair floating
in an eerie nimbus around her head.

And then she did something truly horrible.

She glided over to the male tree’s soul-light. Her fingers stretched for its tether.

“Don’t,” I said sharply.

But she did. She tore the glowing ball from its berth, and held it tightly under her
arm, pressed close to the ribs that protected her frozen heart. Then she glided downward
and away, heading back toward the hedgerows and the clearing.

Two feet lower and I could have snagged her foot. I lifted a hand to send a stream
of magic at her, but … what could I use? There were no convenient broken tree limbs
on the wood’s ground. No rocks, no stones. Just moss, blue haze, and soul-balls.

I ran at her heels, calling, “Give him back, bitch.”

Her head turned, her hair sliding over her shoulder. She smiled. “If you wish to save
this soul, then you must follow me out of the wild.” She glided through the gap in
the hedgerows, indifferent to the smell of smoke, or the thorns that tried to catch
her gown.

She glided faster than I could run, with one shoe.

But when I cleared the hedge—another streak of blood marring my arm—I found Mad-one
hovering, halfway to the safety of her branch barricade. She sank slowly to the ground,
her attention focused on the sky above the black walnut. It looked … pinpricked. Natural
light glittered through each tiny point. As I watched, a section of the gray canvas
tore. Just a small rend, which widened until it was a jagged smile of blue, through
which bright white light streamed.

“Daylight comes,” she said flatly.

A streak of sunlight fell on her face. She lifted her head for a second to absorb
it, looking young and unblemished. Her mouth parted slightly as she watched another
tear appear in the heavens. Sunbeams streamed across the clearing’s carpet of emerald
moss. The transition from gray-shrouded night to sun-dappled day happened very quickly.
In a matter of moments, every bit of pewter had been banished except for one dark
cloud. The sun—or whatever was the source of the daylight—hid behind it.

But Threall still supported the flat-earth theory. Where a gray blanket had obscured
the hypothetical division between land and sky, now there was only cerulean-blue heaven.
The land past the walnuts looked like a precipice to an endless plunge toward … what?
Earth? What would happen if I walked over to the edge of Threall’s world? What would
I see? While I speculated over that, a plume of white materialized. Like a rocket’s
vapor trail, but completely vertical and alive like water—it streamed upward, disappearing
into the heart of the dark cloud.

“What is it?” I breathed.

She stroked the ends of her long hair. “The passage to Merenwyn.”

“A portal to Merenwyn?” I frowned at her. “I thought they were all closed?”

“Are they?” Then with a small lift of her shoulder, “Such things matter not to a mystwalker.”

I slanted my eyes toward the soul-ball tucked under her left arm.
Yeah, it looks like a lot of things don’t matter to a mystwalker
. Casually, I took a step closer. Then, I pointed to another, much smaller, thinner
stream of white that had sprung out of the central plume. It forked in two, and then
folded back onto itself, so that its end was nothing more than a hook. “And that?”

Her fingers paused, mid-rake, in her hair. “An endless hell for the wrong traveler.
False trails such as those emerge from the portal walls. They are traps for the unwary
or unschooled.” She pointed to the hook at the end of the stream. “Observe how the
false trail has turned back onto itself. Very soon it will collapse.”

Creeping horror. “What happens to the people inside them?”

“They become part of Merenwyn’s portal. Their essence is absorbed into the fabric
of its walls.” She stared at it for a bit, chewing the inside of her lip. “You can
hear their cries some evenings.” Then she looked at the soul-ball as if she had forgotten
it was there and bent to place it by my feet. “Your Mage did not call you home,” she
said. “You should find shelter. They will be mourning the loss of this one and searching
for its killer.”

She started walking toward her beech, before I could ask her who “they” were.

I crouched for the soul-ball—
oh Goddess, he’s awake and calling for his soul mate
—and tore after her. “Come back!” I yelled. “It’s not dead yet!” I ran after her,
holding the pine tree’s spirit gingerly in my grasp. We caught up to her before she’d
reached the sanctuary of her enclave. “You have to put it back where it belongs,”
I demanded. “You can’t leave that woman to mourn.”

Mad-one turned around, much too slowly and deliberately. “It will serve as a lesson
to her.”

“What, for cruelty?” I held the ball tighter. “Because I can’t see any other lesson
she’d learn.”

She dipped her head toward the soul-light. “He has the instincts of an agitator. With
his absence, she will spend every waking moment caring for the crops so that she has
food to feed her children. She will have little time to ponder his political views.
I made a balanced decision. She has her children and the rot of his destructive thoughts
has been cut away.”

“You don’t know her.” The soul inside the sphere was worried, deeply so. “She’ll grieve
herself to death.”

“That will be her choice. I gave her a choice.” She shook her head, and looked past
me. “Do you find it beautiful?”

I cast an anguished glance at the soul-light. “Yes.”

“But you can’t reach it.”

I looked up, confused. Her gaze was fixed beyond me, to the blue sky and its plume
of white. “You behold the passage to Merenwyn and you wish it possible to slip into
the sky and retrace your passage home, as safely as one of its portal travelers. To
forget about Threall. To go back in time, to a safe place, when all you understood
was the comfort of your home, and the warmth of its hearth. But it is a thing a mystwalker
can never do. We cannot turn back time. The first thing we are taught is not to grieve.”

Mad-one shook her head, and walked toward the trembling archway of branches, holding
her long skirt aside with one pale white hand.

“You’re everything my mum said you’d be,” I shouted after her. “Soulless and mad.”

She turned, her eyebrows raised. Then she said, “Wind.”

A split second later the soul-ball and I were skidding across the clearing. The nails
on my free hand made a furrow in the moss. I made a lunge for the sharp end of a half-rotted
stump but overshot. The soul-ball and I did a tandem bounce off its crumbling remains
and then we were in the arms of Mad-one’s wind, the landscape a blur around us—gleaming
lights, dark forests, and wind-whipped walnut trees.

I closed my eyes—
please, Goddess, save me or make it quick
—before we sailed into the blue void.

Thud.

My back hit the half-dead walnut’s bulk in a breath-catching smack.

We ricocheted off that dead branch, were shoved by the force of the wind straight
through several broken boughs—
ow, ow, ow
—until we smashed into another that didn’t give under our weight.

But on impact, I did the unforgivable.

I dropped the ball.

As per my prayer, salvation came for one. No help was granted for a soul-light that
was nothing more than a bit of parchment over a brilliant sphere of light. So light,
so flimsy, so fragile. It got caught on a cradle of foliage at the end of a mostly
dead branch. I stretched for it, feeling the strain in my gut and my shoulder. My
nail pierced its thin skin—
he’s wailing, he’s wailing
—then the net of greenery holding it parted, and the ravenous wind plucked it from
me.

The soul sailed off the ends of Threall, its inner light bleating, straight into the
restless, white plume of air. A noise splintered across the clearing. Horrifying.
Screams. Not one from one voice, but from many. Aborted and choked, but I heard them.

I swear I did.

I buried my head in my arms.

“I will find your soul,” called Mad-one into that hollow silence. “The Black Mage’s
spell of protection will not keep you eternally safe from me. When it wears off, I
will search for your tree. But first, I will find those that you hold precious. The
first soul I will feed to the wind will be a friend. Then I’ll find a sister, a brother,
perhaps a lover. I’ll cause pain and grief to every person you hold fondly in your
heart.”

Lexi … Lou.

“You are not worthy to call yourself one of our number.” Her voice climbed. “A true
mystwalker is trained and educated. But it is evident by your speech, and your graceless
manner that you have never spent so much as a month in apprenticeship. What were you?
A farmer’s daughter? A miller’s child? One with a set of doting parents who kept your
gifts well hidden? Though something happened, quite recently, did it not? Somehow
your weak spark of talent was discovered and you were taken to the Black Mage. Did
he promise you freedom if you traveled to Threall? Did he tell you his wards would
keep you safe? Did he instruct you to hurt me and those I guard? You shall not. I
am
always
on guard. The Black Mage lied and abandoned you to my care—a provocation one day
that he will rue. As will you—before I grant you death, I will make you grovel in
grief and mourning.” Mad-one clapped her hands together. The branches held aloft by
her magic began shuffling back into their places, until there was no crack in her
barricade. From within it she said, “There is none to keep you safe from my wrath.”

I pressed my cheek against the walnut’s deeply furrowed bark.

I want to go home.

I said the last thing inside my own head. I know I did.

The mostly dead walnut replied, “All you need do is wish for it.”

Oh crap, I’m one freak out short of a twig fence and tree conversations
.

A dry chuckle. In. My. Head.

I’ve got to get the hell out of here before the munchkins start singing.

“Wish for it,” repeated the nut tree.

I feel sheepish about the next bit. I didn’t spare time to wonder why the tree was
talking to me. I didn’t search for its ball of light to check to see if it was scary
looking or benevolent. I didn’t ask it a single helpful question—for example: Do you
know where my brother is?

Instead, I curled my legs around the branch and put my hands together in a prayer
position. I thought of where I wanted go. Not to a dreary apartment, or Bob’s car,
or even to Creemore. I thought of a person, instead of a place. Someone who made me
feel like I could have a home. Yeah, I know. A tad on the hopeful, mad side. But hell,
I was already listening to a mostly dead tree’s travel advice.

Then I said, “I wish to go home.” And holy crap—suddenly I was falling, wingless and
sharp—the same sort of sickening jolt you experience when your body drops off to sleep
before your brain does, except in this case it was a longer fall. I had mists to breeze
past, clouds to tumble through, and gray-blue sky to plummet from before I landed
in the real world, hard enough to knock me out cold.

*   *   *

It’s getting tedious, waking up confused
.

Could have sworn I landed hard and went splat. And yet, here I was, standing upright
in the strip club’s parking lot, knees wet, hands stinging, my fingers wrapped around
the handle of Trowbridge’s gun. The rain must have started again while I was soul-traveling.
I wiped a bead of it off my chin.

Bob’s Taurus was five feet behind me. The strip club’s door perhaps less than that.
Disorienting. I thought I’d left my body in the car.

How’d I get here?

I looked down at my shoes.

My feet were pointed toward the club’s door.

Another rap song ended. The new tune’s beat was more seductive, less in your face.
A woman could move to the song. Sway to it like a cobra as men with glazed eyes and
bomber jackets a size too small watched with appreciation that never peaked and never
waned.

“I want to go home.”

Faced with a decision, I usually choose the most obvious solution.

I followed the direction of my soles.

Chapter Thirteen

Suzy-Q swung around that pole like she was weightless. I might be able to do that,
maybe, if someone showed me how. And if I had zero body fat. And if my hands were
as strong as vise grips, and I wasn’t weighed down with clothing. Maybe if I wore
a sateen string bikini top, a pair of abbreviated boy shorts, and a G-string, I could
do it.

Maybe.

The club was a mixture of dark and light. The walls were black, and the furniture
was drab colored. What light there was had been planned, thought out, and directed.
Electric blue LED tubing outlined the bar and doorway to the can. Yellow beer logos
flickered on the wall. A long bristling line of spotlights ringed the stage. They
bathed the dancers’ flesh in a film of red.