Widdershins (31 page)

“But we could go the Tombs, couldn’t we?” Siobhan said.

Cassie nodded. “Except if those bogans
are
there . . . well, for one thing, they outnumber us, and for another, they’re not exactly prone to talking to humans in the first place.”

“I don’t understand,” Andy said, still looking at the cards. “Why aren’t Jilly and Lizzie together? And if this is a metaphor, then what is it saying? Jilly in a forest, Lizzie riding a pony along some shoreline. She doesn’t even ride, does she?”

He looked to Siobhan.

“We both did some riding when we were kids,” she said, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Whatever. It still doesn’t explain what this means.”

I tuned them out, trying to pin down something that was creeping around at the edge of my thoughts. And then I had it. Walker had told Lizzie to call his name three times if she needed his help.

“You don’t need a phone to call Joe,” I told Cassie. “You can just speak his name three times, can’t you?”

She shook her head. “I’d have to use his true name.”

“Oh, right.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Con asked.

“Joe wouldn’t be the only person to hear it,” Cassie explained. “It would give his name away to anyone who might also be listening—the bogans, for instance, or that cousin camping with them.”

“So what?”

“So it would give them a power over him,” Cassie said, her voice sharper than she probably meant it to be.

“Having the gift of someone’s name like that,” I explained, “isn’t something you can take lightly.”

“This isn’t anything light,” Siobhan said. “Who knows what kind of danger Lizzie and Jilly might be in?”

“The cards say they’re not,” I told her.

I didn’t want to say it. Just like her, I wanted to get Joe here
right now.
I wanted Jilly and Lizzie back. I wanted all these stupid problems to go away.

But we couldn’t do it like that.

“It wouldn’t be fair to give up Joe’s name unless it was a real crisis,” I added.

“And if the cards showed that,” Cassie put in, “I’d be the first to call him to us.”

I could tell Siobhan didn’t understand—or at least she didn’t agree. I sympathized, but I still wouldn’t do it. I didn’t know Joe’s real name, anyway. I’d heard him referred to as everything from Bones to Joseph Crazy Dog, depending on who I was talking to.

And I trusted the cards enough to believe that wherever Jilly and Lizzie were, their situation wasn’t critical. Lizzie was just riding that pony. Jilly leaned against a tree and was looking out over a landscape of rolling forested hills. Neither seemed in any immediate danger.
We
were the ones obsessing and worrying.

“Well, what about that other guy?” Con asked. “Didn’t Walker say Lizzie could call him for help? She didn’t say anything about having to use a secret name with him.”

Cassie and I looked at each other.

“You never know,” she said. “If he made that offer to her, he could respond to us as well. And Walker was the name he gave her to use—or rather, Walks-with-Dreams.”

I gave a slow nod. “I guess we could try. Although we might be taking the risk of having a seriously pissed off stag show up and complicating matters even more.”

Siobhan stood up from her bed. “Well, I say we try it. What do we do—just call the name?”

“I suppose,” I said. “But not in here. We can’t just call him into this room because what if he shows up in his stag shape? We need to go somewhere else, like the woods behind the hotel.”

Siobhan looked around at each of us, then started for the door.

“Well?” she asked. “What are you waiting for?”

Andy and Con walked over to the door where Siobhan stood. I waited for Cassie to put away her cards before joining them myself. A little reluctantly, I might add. I had an uneasy feeling about this. The trouble with the spirits of the wild was that unless you’d gotten a promise from them before, you never knew how they’d react to being summoned.

But like Siobhan, and for pretty much the same reasons, I was willing to take the chance.

Lizzie

The landscape was a dreary grey
for as far as Lizzie could see, which wasn’t all that far because of the banks of fog that shifted with the winds. Sometimes a hole appeared in the fog and she caught glimpses of the water that she could hear lapping against the shore, or the grey dunes that disappeared into the distance opposite the water. But mostly the fog hung close, blocking her view. It made the air damp and cool, waking a chill in her.

The new clothes the doonie had provided didn’t help, nor did the warmth of his pony body under her as he walked along the drab shore. To add to her discomfort, she was also feeling a little motion sickness from the sudden passage they’d taken between the worlds. They never mentioned that in stories. How come the crew of the
Enterprise
didn’t throw up every time Scotty beamed them somewhere?

She took a deep breath of air—it was bracing, with a bit of a salt fishy smell to it—and tried to focus on something other than the damp cold and the queasiness in her stomach.

“What is this place?” she asked Timony.
“Where
is this place?”

I’m not sure.

Lizzie grimaced and put her free hand against her temple. The other was wrapped in the doonie’s mane.

“Do you have to talk inside my head like that?” she asked.

Only so long as I keep this shape, and I need to keep this shape until we can get someplace safe.

“This place isn’t?”

No. It’s . . . connected to the blind man.

“So why are we here?”

When I had to shift us away from my hidey-hole, this was the only place that was open to me.
He hesitated a moment, then added,
That’s never happened to me before. I’ve always been free to come and go through the other-world as I willed.

“Maybe . . . um . . .”

My dying has something to do with it,
Timony finished for her.
Yes, I’d already thought that.

“So can you take us away from here?” Lizzie asked.

And the sooner the better, so that she didn’t have to have the soft burr of his voice resonating inside her head. It didn’t hurt or anything. It just felt way too creepy.

I’ve been trying from the moment we got here,
Timony said,
but I can’t find one single point of exit in my mind.

“Well, we can’t just wait here for them to show up.”

No, we can’t. That’s why we need you to find us a way out.

“Then we’re screwed,” Lizzie told him. “Because when it comes to all this magic and stuff, I have zip. The only reason I’m here is because I spoiled the bogans’ fun a few nights ago.”

You don’t need magic,
Timony assured her.
You just need to focus on a safe place and then hold on to the thought of it. I’ll do the work to take us there.

“You mean like back to the hotel where the others are?”

If you mean your friends, then, yes. That’s as good a place as any, and we’ll at least have the safety of numbers.

“I hate to break this to you,” Lizzie said, “but we’re just musicians. Musicians and two incapacitated women. We’re not exactly the National Guard or anything.”

It doesn’t matter. At the moment, the most important thing is that we get away from here. I don’t know exactly where we are, but I do know it belongs to the blind man. His smell is all over it.

Because he smells fishy to you, Lizzie thought, and that’s what it smells like here, what it always smells like around the ocean. But she was as ready as Timony to leave the place. It was depressing and just didn’t feel
right.

“So, what do I do?” she asked.

Concentrate on a safe place,
Timony said.
On safety. I’ll do the rest.

Safety, Lizzie thought. So far the hotel hadn’t exactly proved to be a safe place, between Siobhan getting pushed down the stairs and her being kidnapped.

What was safety?

She thought of Siobhan and the other band members. Andy and Con were great guys. She liked them both, and she knew if it came to it, they’d try to protect her, but they weren’t exactly bruisers. And then there was Siobhan with her arm in a sling, already hurt because of all of this.

If only they knew more about the bogans and the blind man—what they wanted, what their weaknesses might be.

That made her think of Geordie, but more of Jilly. Yes, she was in a wheelchair, but she still exuded this air of calm efficiency and knowledge. And courage. Just knowing what Jilly had gone through in the past couple of years . . . if it had happened to her, Lizzie thought, she’d have curled up in her hospital bed and just waited for the world to go away instead of facing it head-on the way that Jilly did. And Jilly certainly seemed to know
all
about fairies.

I
don’t think we have much time,
Timony said.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “I’ve got it.”

She focused on the hotel, but only because that was the last place she’d seen Jilly, gaily waving goodnight to them all in the bar while Geordie helped her up to their room.

Hold it firm in your mind,
the doonie told her.

“I am.”

Jilly. That great welcoming grin of hers and those startling eyes, the blue of sapphires.

I can feel it,
Timony said.
Hold on. Here we go.

Lizzie grabbed his mane with both hands and the world dissolved around them. As it did, the nausea rose up her throat once more.

Grey

First time I heard about the fairy courts
I was like anybody else, expecting castles and turrets and dainty little pennants fluttering high from towers. There’d be fairy knights in spiffy armour, ladies in gowns, all that kind of thing. And maybe it’s like that, back in the old countries where they came from, but here, they mostly go around dressed like humans and set up their courts in shopping malls and theaters, hotels and apartment buildings, all of it a step sideways from
Kakagi-aki
—you know, the human world.

So, humans can’t see these courts, but to tell you the truth, there’s nothing much to see. Fairies live pretty much like humans. The only difference is they don’t look right. Oh, they seem human enough. It’s just that everything about them is too much. They’re too handsome, too beautiful, sometimes too ugly. Too tall, or too short. And if they don’t look human, then they kind of run the gamut from what they call the treekin—little creatures that look like they’re made of twigs and leaves and the like—to shapeshifters like us. But while they can turn into birds and horses and dogs and all, it’s not the same. They don’t have the animal blood in their veins. They’re not cousins.

Anyway, Tatiana McGree’s the big deal in the fairy world, so her court’s housed in the Harbour Ritz, that fancy place on the lakefront whose main claim to fame is that it once housed Mickey Flynn, the last of the old-time Irish mobsters. Those days are gone now, though they’re not so long gone—especially not how we see time. But these days the place is strictly for the upscale rich, or CEOs coming to town on business trips, with a few penthouse apartments on the top floors for the seriously connected, money-wise.

Jack, Joe, and I get the once-over from the hotel staff when we come in the door looking like three braves down from the rez, but the fairies know who we are and step in quick, moving us sideways to Tatiana’s court where, if there’s going to be a problem, it won’t spill over into the human world. There’s a lot of talk between Joe and the fairies then—these tall, slender blonde guys in nice tailored suits. They argue about protocol and crap like that, but Joe won’t budge and they finally shuffle us off to a waiting room and have somebody bring us tea when we won’t take them up on their offer to partake of something stronger. Oh, I can see that turning down some of that strong fairy home brew is hard on Whiskey Jack, but he’s ready to follow Joe’s lead. Me, I’m only along for the ride, and I’ve got no problems doing the same.