Widdershins (30 page)

I nod in agreement. Fairy are all about keeping their skeletons to themselves. They’ve got this big colonization mentality—the way they see it, only fairy can lay judgment on another fairy.

“We don’t know fairies are involved,” Joe says.

Jack shoots back a sudden fierce grin.

“But this is as good a way as any to find out,” he says. “I get it.”

I do, too, though of the three of us, I think I’m the least happy with the idea. Because if fairy are involved, what exactly does this pair of canids think we can do?

But all I say is, “Count me in.”

I’ve already made the commitment, given my word. I’m not like some humans, ready to take it back the moment the going gets a little tough. But I’m wondering about Jack’s earlier caution about not wanting to start a war by taking out the wrong pack of bogans. This Jilly must be something really special.

I’m looking at Joe, not letting any of that show, and he gives me a nod, those crazy eyes of his glittering like he’s ready for anything.

I get the feeling he probably is.

“Let’s do this thing,” he says.

Geordie

By the time Cassie arrived, I
was a jumble of nerves. It was only forty-five minutes from when I’d talked to her on the phone—not even ten o’clock yet—but it felt like it had been hours. Hours of rattling around in this hotel, wanting to be doing something,
anything,
only there was nothing I could do but wait. It got to where I couldn’t be inside anymore—not in the room I was sharing with Jilly, not in one of the other band members’ rooms, not in the cafe or the bar. So I went outside, walking up and down Main Street a couple of times before I finally took the stairs across from the hotel and went down to the waterfront.

The others checked in with me from time to time, but mostly I was there on my own, looking out across the water, worrying. Con had just left when Cassie arrived with the crow girls, who’d given her passage through the between. It wasn’t that Cassie couldn’t navigate the between herself—it’s just not the same for humans as it is for spirits. We really need to have been, at least once before, to the place we’re going, otherwise we’d take just as long to make the trip as if we’d gone by more conventional methods.

I’ve never learned the trick of it myself.

They made quite the sight and would have cheered me right up if I wasn’t so worried about Jilly. Cassie was her usual flamboyant self: bright yellow T-shirt which set off her dark skin and dreads, even brighter pink baggy cotton pants, purple running shoes. The crow girls were dressed in plain black T’s and jeans, but their hair was done up with what looked like a hundred barrettes and Zia was doing a handstand when they suddenly arrived on the pier beside me. Zia almost went off the edge of the pier, but she caught herself just in time. Maida clapped when she did a perfect flip to a standing position.

Most people can’t seem to tell the pair of them apart, but I always have, right from when I first met them. I can’t tell you what the difference is because they sure look identical. I just know.

All three had big smiles for me, though in Cassie’s eyes I could see a trace of the worry that I was feeling. I couldn’t tell what the crow girls were feeling, but then who can?

“Hello Geordie-Pordie,” Maida said. “Don’t you worry anymore.”

Zia nodded. “Because we’re helping.”

“We’re looking everywhere.”

“And then at all the theres all over again.”

“Thanks,” I told them. “I appreciate it.”

“Of course you do,” Maida said.

“We’re the sort of people that should be appreciated.”

“Because we’re so helpful,” Maida explained, just in case I didn’t get it.

They looked at me for a moment, heads cocked like the birds that were their natural shapes.

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” Zia said.

“But we can’t stay.”

“We’re busybusy, you know.”

“Very very.”

“Looking and all.”

“Being ever so useful, don’t you think?”

Before I could respond, the pair of them were gone, and it was just Cassie and me on the pier. I took a deep breath, feeling as though I’d just run up a flight of stairs. Talking to the crow girls always did that to me.

“How are you holding up?” she asked me.

“Like crap. Do you have any news from Joe?”

She shook her head. “Not since he called me from Jimmy’s. He’s got Whiskey Jack helping him out and a corbae named Grey.”

I gave her a sharp look. “Did you say ‘Grey’?”

She nodded. “Do you know him?”

“No. But I think he’s involved in all of this.”

I gave her the longer version of what had happened to Lizzie the other night, all the details I hadn’t gotten into when we’d talked on the phone. The business with Grey and the cerva hadn’t seemed relevant then.

“From what you’re telling me,” Cassie said when I was done, “it doesn’t sound as though he’s got it in for Lizzie, and he doesn’t even know Jilly—does he?”

“Not so’s I know. But doesn’t it seem weird to you that Grey should be helping Joe, when Jilly was kidnapped by the same bogans that he had the run-in with a couple of nights ago?”

“Maybe. Joe doesn’t know about the bogans—or he didn’t when I was talking to him.”

“We should tell him.”

Cassie nodded. “Except since I can’t get him to carry a cell phone, I have to wait for him to call me back.” She paused for a moment before adding, “Maybe this Grey doesn’t know what happened either.”

“I guess.”

It didn’t take a genius to see how discouraged I was feeling.

“Let’s go see the room that they took Lizzie from,” Cassie said. “I’m not nearly as good as Joe is with this sort of thing, but I might be able to pick up a trace of where they’ve taken her.”

Except when we went back to Lizzie and Siobhan’s room, the only thing Cassie could confirm was that bogans had been there. The other members of the Knotted Cord joined us before we could leave the room and I made introductions.

“What about the cards?” I asked.

“It’s hard when I don’t know the person I’m laying them out for.”

“Can’t you use that mind-meld thing the fairy woman did?” Con asked.

Cassie raised her eyebrows.

“Mother Crone was scrying earlier,” I explained. “You know how she can tap into your memories by taking your hand?”

Cassie nodded. “It’s a good trick, but not one I ever mastered. You probably need fairy blood to be able to pull off that sort of thing. But maybe if you’ve got something of hers that she was particularly fond of, a favourite shirt or—”

“Her fiddle,” Siobhan and I said at the same time.

“Normally she wouldn’t go anywhere without it,” Siobhan added, “and she played it every day.”

“That might work.”

Siobhan got Lizzie’s fiddle case from the corner of the room and took it over to her bed. Sitting down, she put the case on her lap and opened the clasps.

“Is it okay if I touch it?” she asked. “I mean, it won’t throw off whatever you’re going to do, will it?”

“No, it’ll be fine,” Cassie told her.

She took the fiddle from Siobhan and sat cross-legged on the floor. Closing her eyes, she put the fiddle on her lap and rested her hands lightly on its wooden top. Siobhan, Andy, and Con watched wide-eyed and expectant, and I had to smile. I don’t know what they had in mind, but some vision wasn’t going to suddenly appear in the air before us. Although to be fair, this was all so new for them, they could be forgiven for thinking that anything really might happen.

But all Cassie was doing was getting a vibe off the instrument, making a connection between herself and its owner. After a few moments she handed the fiddle back to Siobhan and pulled a pack of cards out of her pocket that were held together with a rubber band.

Cassie’s a street fortune-teller, and she’s got this amazing pack of Tarot cards: large, with beautiful art on the back pattern and individual paintings for each card’s front. When she takes them out of their silk bag for a customer, you can’t help but be impressed and expect an accurate reading—which is the whole point of them, of course. But this old pack she pulled out now were her real working cards, battered and worn with a plain pattern on their backs. She’d apparently gotten them from some old witchy woman years ago, long before I met her and Joe.

She shuffled the deck once, twice, three times, then laid three cards down on the carpet by her knee.

“They’re all blank,” Siobhan said.

They were. The fronts of the whole pack were blank. But that would change, now that Cassie had put her mojo on them.

“Watch,” I said. “Pictures will show up.”

A long moment passed with no visible change, but I, at least, could feel something in the air. It was like the static charge you get when you walk across a carpet in the winter and the air’s so dry; like a promise, except instead of a static shock it was the promise of magic.

“Are we all supposed to believe in this for it to work?” Andy asked.

Cassie responded with a wistful smile.

“If magic required any kind of widespread belief to exist,” she said, “there wouldn’t be any left in the world at all—not in this day and age.”

Andy looked like he wanted to ask something else, but then the images began to form on the blank fronts of the cards, rising up from the white surfaces the way a picture develops in a darkroom, and we all leaned forward.

“Jesus,” Andy murmured.

I didn’t pay attention to anything the others went on to say as I studied the images.

The first showed a number of small figures doing something in what looked like an empty lot surrounded by abandoned buildings and rubble—I thought it might be the Tombs, that part of Newford that’s fallen into the worst kind of urban decay. I needed a closer look to see who the figures were, and what they were doing, but first I turned my attention to the next card.

It had Lizzie riding a small brown pony that was walking along a deserted shoreline. Sand, sea, and sky all appeared leeched of colour, which made the bright red shock of her dyed hair really jump out.

The third . . . I caught my breath. The third showed Jilly, but not the Jilly who referred to herself as the Broken Girl. This was the Jilly I remembered from when we were in our twenties—a vibrant and young Jilly who didn’t need canes or a wheelchair. She was in a forest of some kind, but it wasn’t the Greatwood—at least not the way it had ever been described to me. It looked more like the bush country up around here or over in Tyson, where Jilly was originally from.

I looked up to meet Cassie’s gaze.

“It doesn’t look like they’re together,” I said.

She shook her ahead. “But they seem unharmed.”

“Who are these people?” Con asked, pointing to the first card.

I got down on the floor so that I could get a better look. I could see now that they were bogans, but not just a marauding pack like Lizzie had described. There were old and young ones here, male and female. An extended family, maybe. And then I realized what they were doing.

“That’s a bogan funeral,” I said. “See the figure on the pyre? Why are the cards showing this?”

“I think it’s the Tombs,” Con said. “That building back there is the old Charleton Mill.”

He was right.

Siobhan pointed to the third card. “And that could be anywhere between here and Tyson.”

“Damn Joe,” Cassie said. “Because,” she added when we all looked at her, “he’d know where these places are. He could
take
us to wherever they are. And if he’d carry a cell, we could call him right now.”

“Can you get hold of the crow girls again?” I asked. “They could take us, couldn’t they?”

“Probably,” she said. “But I don’t know to get in touch with them. I was lucky to run into them in the first place and just like Joe, they don’t have phones.”

“Fairies don’t use phones?” Andy asked.

“They’re not fairies,” I said, “and they’re just like us. Some of them have no use for technology, some can’t live without it.”

My gaze returned to Jilly’s card and I went away for a moment, remembering. We’d been such good friends in those days, seeing each other every day. We could have been more, too. I remember trying to build myself up to broach the possibility of that with her, but then we took a road trip to Tyson and on the night when our relationship could have slipped into a more physical intimacy, we’d shared war stories instead, sorry tellings of how bad it had been for each of us growing up. Hers were worse. Somehow, that night changed the possibility of our being lovers to the certainty of our being best friends instead.

I’d never want to not have Jilly for a best friend. But they were times over the years when I wished it could have gone differently. That we could have had both.

“What do we do now?” Siobhan asked.

I blinked and looked away from Jilly’s card.

“Mother Crone said that the bogans who’ve been bothering us are camped nearby,” I said. “Along with a cousin she thinks is pretty powerful. So I don’t understand why we’re being shown this funeral.”

“You know how it is,” Cassie said. “It’s never completely clear if the cards are showing us the present or a possibility. And sometimes it’s . . .” She looked for a word. “. . . more like a metaphor, rather than something we should take as literal.”