Widdershins (56 page)

We diminish because it’s simply the way of the world.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Chloë says, her thoughts obviously travelling a similar road as mine. “No one ever wonders why the Raven who made the world would be living in an old house on Stanton Street. Why Cody, the Great Trickster, wanders the world like a hobo, when he’s not spending his time in pool halls or playing poker. Why even Nokomis can be met and spoken with, for all that she
is
the spirit of all these worlds, made manifest.”

“It’s because we’re more than the stories,” Lucius says. “And less than them. Reduced only, perhaps, because there isn’t room in the world for beings of such mythic proportions. So the stories stay big, but the subjects of those stories . . . we become cousins and dreams and old men living forgotten in old houses.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” I ask.

“Not even a little. Perhaps I did bring the world into being, but so what? I don’t see it as my having done anything more marvelous than someone opening a box to see what’s inside. The world goes on the way it will. It doesn’t follow my wishes and I wouldn’t want it to. That, it would seem to me, is a responsibility that would break anyone.”

I don’t mention the stories I’ve heard about his withdrawals from the world—breakdowns, some might say.

“So there’s nothing you can do?” I ask instead.

“I didn’t say that. I still have a voice. I can still be heard. The old mysteries rest somewhere in my blood and things still happen when I speak. But I don’t control those mysteries. I don’t know that I ever did. They come and go of their own choosing. Mostly they seem to leave us to muddle through our lives as best we can.”

I nod.

“But I will speak to Minisino,” he says. “Perhaps he will listen. Perhaps it will make a difference.”

“That’s all I can ask,” I tell him.

I see Chloë smile.

“You seem disappointed,” she says.

“I’m not. It’s just . . . I’m hearing things I didn’t expect. They make perfect sense, of course, but it’s just . . .”

“Here’s something to remember,” Lucius says. “Respect the old spirits. Even venerate them. But don’t set them above you. The world in which they lived and the one in which we do are no longer the same.”

But a funny thing happens while he tells me that. The room seems to swell with a presence too large to be held by these book-laden walls. Too large to be held by a cousin’s mind.

Then the moment’s gone and it’s only Lucius in the room with me once more. Still massive. Still a big presence. But the scale is so much more normal.

He rises from his seat with a lightness and grace that belies his size.

“Let’s go see the buffalo,” he says. As I get up, he turns to Chloe. “Can you look into this business with Jilly while we’re gone?”

“I will.”

“And Odawa . . .”

“I’ll have Brandon talk to him.”

“I want him alive enough to face trial.”

Chloë nodded, a grim look in her eyes. “That’s why I won’t do it.”

At my upraised eyebrows, Lucius explains, “Chloë was very close to your wife at one time and is deeply resentful that she didn’t live long enough for them to be reconciled once more.”

I want to ask what the rift between them was, but this is neither the time nor the place. For now, I keep my mouth shut and simply follow Lucius as he leaves the library. But when this business with the buffalo is over, I’ll have questions for him.

Instead of taking me back through the house, Lucius leads me down another hall that brings us into a large kitchen. He opens the door and after we go through a summer kitchen and another door, we step out into the Rookery’s backyard. He looks up at the trees, still filled with all those gossiping blackbird cousins.

“I know you were listening,” he says to them. “Now make yourselves useful. Find those bogans for me.”

They rise in a noisy cloud of black wings and fly off in all directions. He turns to me and smiles.

“I might only be the memory of that Raven of old,” he says, “but they refuse to believe it. Sometimes that can be useful.”

“I can see how it would be,” I tell him.

But I’m still not completely buying it myself. The way we all feel in his presence, that natural ruling charisma of his . . . there has to be more of a reason behind it than simply his being a memory of the Raven of old.

Those dark eyes of his are studying me, then he smiles again.

“Show me where the buffalo gather,” he says.

Christiana

“Okay, here’s the thing,”
Christiana told the fairy court. “At tops, there are maybe fifty actual buffalo soldiers out there looking for your scalps. The rest are all ghosts. Meet them in the between or the otherworld, and they’ll cream you—that’s a given. But if you make them come to you here, in the human world, you’ll only have that fifty to deal with. The others can cross over, but so what? They’ll be wraiths in this world. Spooky, yeah, but they can’t touch you.”

“Are you sure about this?” Tatiana asked.

“I didn’t spend all that time in the libraries of Hinterdale just partying.”

“I’ve no idea what that means.”

“It means, yes. I’m sure.” She paused to give the council a once-over. “You can muster more bodies than you’ve got gathered here, right?”

“Of course. I’m just not . . .”

The queen’s voice trailed off and Christiana nodded.

“You don’t trust me,” she said.

“It’s not so much a matter of trust,” Tatiana said, “as that we are in the wrong, not the buffalo.”

“Haven’t you already said that you didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“Yes. But this is still my court. I rule. I am responsible for what my subjects do, even when they do it without my knowledge.”

“Okay,” Christiana said, “but you can’t go to them. You need them to come here.”

“You obviously don’t understand.”

“Oh, I do. You want to take responsibility. You feel you need to tell them that even though it wasn’t you, you should still have known and stopped the deaths before they happened.”

“Exactly.”

“But you don’t need to be a martyr to do that,” Christiana told her. “You can tell them the same thing here in this world, where they’ll number fifty or so instead of in the thousands. The whole martyr thing is really overrated, trust me. It doesn’t work for anyone, except maybe Joan of Arc, and she still had to die.” Christiana paused a moment, head cocked as she studied the queen. “You don’t have a death wish, do you?”

“She’s annoying as hell,” Mother Crone said before Tatiana could respond, “but she’s right.”

Around the table, other heads were nodding in agreement. The queen took a moment longer, then gave in to their consensus.

“So, what do you suggest we do?” she asked Christiana.

“Let me go talk to Minisino,” Christiana replied, “and see if I can’t get him to come into this world to meet with you. What’s a common ground close to here?”

“Fitzhenry Park,” the queen’s captain immediately said. “It’s in the city, so we have access to it, but there’s enough of the wild and the green in its borders for the green-brees to feel comfortable.”

The queen nodded.

“A word of advice,” Christiana said as she rose from where she was sitting on the table top. “Don’t call them ‘green-brees.’ You might think you’re being clever, but everybody knows it’s got something to do with cesspools back in your old country.”

“I think we can manage to remember that,” the queen said with a dry tone to her voice.

Christiana shrugged. “Whatever.”

And then she was gone.

Jilly

When Del steps out of the room
, all the anger I feel toward him drains out of me and leaves with him. I watch until the doorjamb blocks him from view, then my gaze turns and settles on Geordie’s remains. There wasn’t much left of him in the first place, just a mess of dirt and leaves and twigs that had once been a human being. A manlike shape on the floor.

Until Del kicked it apart.

I stare at the scattered pieces with a morbid fascination, but for some reason the anger doesn’t return. There’s only a deep, painful sadness, swelling up inside me once more, creeping up on me from someplace just out of sight.

This can’t be right.

How can Geordie just be
gone?

But I saw it with my own two eyes. I watched, trapped in this child’s body, while the sick freak that is my brother waved his hand and Geordie was gone. Transformed like fairy gold into forest debris.

Once upon a time . . .

If this were a fairy tale, I could get him back. I would have befriended a sparrow, a spoon, an old woman by now, and one of them would help me sew a sweater from nettles, or climb down into the underworld to bring him back.

But it’s not a fairy tale. It’s just this sick place inside my head, where women are changed into little girls, and little girls have their mouths erased. Where the true love you didn’t appreciate you had is forever stolen away from you by a monster that has no right to be back in your life.

I get up from the floor where I’ve been crouching and go out the door into the familiar hall beyond. I know this house so well. Too well. It’s been decades since I’ve set foot in it, but I know its every inch. I can detail every horror that happened to me in it and where it took place.

I see Del at the head of the stairs with that shotgun in his hands.

I see a little red-headed girl . . . Lizzie, I realize, putting the name of the adult woman I knew to those child-sized features. Lizzie at the bottom of the stairs, a blank expanse where her mouth should be.

Between them, I see a yellow dog. Some kind of bull dog—no, pit bull. Charging up the stairs toward Del.

Del aiming the shotgun.

I have a flash of recognition when I see the dog. No, it’s more like I know I
know
that dog, but I can’t remember where.

It doesn’t matter.

Right now, all that matters is that I wasn’t lying to Del. I really don’t care anymore. I’m not scared of him because there is no worse he can do now that he’s taken Geordie away from me. Poor, sweet Geordie, always there, my best friend, my soul mate through thick and thin, my should-have-been true love except we were both too stupid—maybe just too scared—to recognize it.

I’m right behind Del. I know he’s about to shoot the dog. I know he can turn around and work his ugly mojo on me with a wave of his hand, with a word, with a look in his eye, and I’ll be changed into dust, or deformed like Lizzie, or simply killed like Geordie was.

I don’t care.

I’m not scared.

I give Del a push, just as he fires. His shot goes wild, spraying a blast of buckshot into the walls. There’s no time for a second one. He doesn’t turn on me to work the mojo. He doesn’t turn the dog into a newspaper, or mushrooms, or a pile of dirt.

My ears are deafened by the blast of the shotgun in this confined space.

In an eerie silence, filled with the ringing of bells, I watch the dog tear out his throat. Blood sprays everywhere. The two fall on the stairs, man and dog. The shotgun goes clattering down the risers. Del’s body follows, blood fountaining from his throat, splattering on the walls, the dog, the risers, Del’s clothes.

The dog stumbles, but catches its balance.

Together we watch Lizzie scramble out of the way as first the shotgun, then Del land at the bottom of the stairs where she was standing. The dog turns to me, its muzzle and honey-coloured fur splattered red with my brother’s blood, and I remember where I’ve seen it before. Not it—her. It was in the dense acres of brush and forest that grow along the edges of the Greatwood. She was there to save my life once before, from another human with a gun, except that time it had been Pinky Miller, my little sister’s best friend.

There hadn’t been any blood then. Just the sick wet sound of Pinky’s head cracking on a rock when she fell, knocked down by the dog.

I wouldn’t be able to hear that now. My ears are still ringing from the blast of the shotgun.

“Did Joe send you?” I ask.

I can’t hear my voice, so I doubt she can either. But I guess I’m thinking the words as I say them, and she seems to be able to talk and listen without the need for sounds, because she answers me all the same.