“Keep it.”
She waited until he’d finished the cigarette and ground it out under his heel. He pinched the butt with his long brown fingers, then stowed it away in a pocket of his shirt.
“So,” she said. “Has this all been your doing?”
“All what?”
“Tamson House shifting from its homeworld, Jamie lost, my being here.”
“Some,” he admitted. “But I didn’t start it.”
“Of course not. You never do. You just happened upon the situation... innocently.”
Her voice was mild as she spoke, but her eyes flashed dangerously.
“You have a sharp tongue,” he said.
“The truth hurts?”
He gave her his coyote grin. “It just stings a little.”
“So what happens now?” she asked.
“That’s up to you.”
Esmeralda sighed. She seemed to do that a lot around him, se realized.
“Okay, she said. “Can you help me find Janice? The House needs him.”
“The House needs someone—he’s lost his chance.”
“Tamson House,” he interrupted her, “is important to us: where it stands, what it has become. It requires a guardian with a sense of responsibility. We gave Jamie a great gift—to continue on his Wheel, though its turning was done. It wasn’t lightly gifted.
“As things stand now, he deserted his post, allowed the House to cross over into the Otherworld and left its strengths open to attack. That wasn’t in the contract.”
“You never showed him a contract.”
“He never asked.”
“He made a mistake,” Esmeralda said. “People make mistakes.”
“We have no time for mistakes.”
“You’ve never made one?”
“That’s not relevant.”
“The hell it isn’t,” Esmeralda said. “Where would you be if Grandmother Toad hadn’t forgiven you your mistakes? Jamie deserves another chance.”
The mismatched eyes studied her for a long moment, their expression unreadable.
“It will cost you,” he said finally.
Esmeralda shook her head. “You get just as much out of Tamson House as we do—more probably. It’s an easy gate for you to a world that’s growing steadily more difficult for you to reach. The way I see it, you owe us.”
“Someone must pay.”
“I don’t think so,” Esmeralda said. “Jamie already has—scattered the way he is over a thousand worlds—and no one else was responsible except for you.”
“You can’t have everything,” he said, changing tack. “Take your friend Emma. We gifted her and all she does is deny her gift. You people want it all, but you aren’t willing to pay for any of it.”
“What’s happening with Emma is between her and you. We were talking about Jamie.”
“I know. I just thought that perhaps Emma would be willing to pay in Jamie’s place.”
The smolder in Esmeralda’s eyes fanned into sudden flames. She stood up and a wind arose that moved counter to those that already whistled across the cliff top. It whipped her hair about her head.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said softly.
He shrugged. “Or I could make you pay.”
Esmeralda’s winds gusted, lifting him from the rock and blowing him over the side of the cliff. A whirlwind of spinning air held him aloft as she stepped to the edge and looked over at him.
“Fire and air don’t listen to you,” she said. “But the wind listens to me.”
There was no alarm in his eyes; they mocked her with the same coyote grin that lay laughing on his lips.
“You won’t let me drop,” he said.
“Maybe, maybe not. But think of this: if you don’t treat us fairly, we won’t treat you fairly. Maybe I’ll see that the House is sold and they build an office building in its place—a few acres of concrete and glass and steel. How will you use the building then?”
“We would stop you. We—”
“Or maybe I’d just burn the place down.”
The laughter in his eyes faltered.
That’s got to him, Esmeralda thought. He might know that she wasn’t capable of letting him drop, but he could see that she could, and would, make good her threat to burn the House.
She let her winds bring him back to the stone where he’d been sitting. They dropped him unceremoniously so that he fell in an untidy tangle of limbs. He was on his feet like a cat, casually brushing the dirt from his shirtsleeves and jeans as though nothing untoward had occurred, but he couldn’t fool her. Her last threat had shaken him.
“You wouldn’t,” he said, his voice betraying his uncertainty.
“Try me.”
“But you love the House.”
She nodded. “But I love the people more. I’ll take people over a building any time.”
He seemed to deflate. All humor left his features. He sat down on his ankles, hands on his knees, back leaning up against a stone.
“Can I have another cigarette?” he asked.
She passed him the tobacco and papers and waited patiently while he rolled himself a cigarette. When he was done and had it stuck between his lips, he reached out with a hand that seemed to disappear into a hole in the air, making it look as though his arm ended at his wrist. When he drew the hand back, it held another burning twig.
Somewhere, in some world, Esmeralda thought, surprised faces were looking at a fire near which a hand had appeared to snatch up that twig. She wished she could pull that feat off as easily as he did, but the best she could do was use a pocket or a pouch and have something of her own that she’d left back at the House appear in it. While she didn’t smoke herself, she kept the tobacco on hand for those times she fared into the Otherworld. She’d left so unexpectedly today that she hadn’t had time to collect any of her usual traveling gear.
“That was some trick with the wind,” her companion said as he lit his cigarette.
He was rapidly regaining his composure, but then he’d always been quick to bounce back. He had to be to survive as long as he had with his particular nature. Blue-gray smoke clouded around his features before the wind blew it away.
“It’s only because we’re so far into the Otherworld,” Esmeralda said, “and the winds here lent me their strength.”
“Still... I don’t remember you being so hard before.”
She smiled for the first time since she’d met him. “I learned that from you.”
“Did you now?”
Esmeralda ignored what was no more than a rhetorical question.
“Will you help me find Jamie?” she asked. “Without bargaining?”
“It’s in my nature to always try to turn a profit.”
“It’s also in your nature to make the simplest thing complicated,” Esmeralda said. “Why couldn’t you have just asked me instead of making us go through all of this?” She waved a hand vaguely around her. “And bringing the House here...”
“I didn’t bring it—Jamie drew it in after him. I’m cleaning up messes this time—not making them.”
“Will you help?”
Now it was his turn to sigh. “All right. But it’s not just finding Jamie that’s the problem.”
Esmeralda nodded. She knew. Her companion might be able to bring back all the parts of Jamie from where they were scattered on who knew how many worlds, but that didn’t mean that they would all come properly back together again. They could easily end up with a spirit that was as mad as a Bedlamite.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said, “although that’s another part of the risk.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
He took another drag from his cigarette, exhaled. They watched the wind take the smoke away.
“It’s what’s happening to the House in its homeworld,” he said.
The grin that came to his lips at her look of confusion had no sense of victory about it.
“What are you talking about??
?? she asked.
So he explained it to her as he had to Emma earlier.
“So that’s what’s causing the forest to intrude,” she said when he was done. “This man has woken a ghost of the first forest to enter the House and is using it to protect himself while he siphons off the House’s energy. But doesn’t he realize that while the ghost of the forest can be wakened, once awake it takes on a life of its own?”
“How do you know that?”
“I thought everyone knew that about the first forest. That’s why so few people dare to wake even the ghost of one of its trees.”
“Not that,” he said. “How do you know he woke the first forest?”
“Well, what else can it be that caused the forest to enter the House itself? You know, and I know, that the House straddles more than one world, but those places are always in clearings—never in the middle of the woods or in a swamp or a lake.”
Her companion laughed. “Of course. You’re right. But that’s perfect. We don’t have to do a thing—the forest itself will take care of him for us.”
“And the House,” Esmeralda said. “When the forest is done with it, I might as well have burnt it down. Tamson House won’t exist anymore. Not on any world.”
Uneasiness played across her companion’s features again.
“Then what do we do?” he asked.
“That’s simple.” Esmeralda ticked the items off on her fingers. “Call back Jamie and install him back in the House. Deal with whoever it is attacking us. And strike a bargain with the forest.”
“That’s beyond my abilities.”
“Mine, too. But we’d better think of something. We can start with bringing Jamie back.”
He nodded, but still seemed distracted. He was probably thinking, Esmeralda realized, of just how he was going to explain the seriousness of the situation to those who held him accountable. She felt a moment’s sympathy for him.
“Whiskey Jack,” she said.
He had as many names as he had shapes, but that was how he had named himself to her the last time she’d met him. It was a corruption of the Anishnabeg word wee-sa-kay-jac and meant Bitter Spirit. The time before that he’d called himself the Hodja—that was in Turkey. She’d known him as a small spiderman in Africa, a round-faced Robin Goodfellow in a Sussex forest, a raven-headed woman in Oregon. Trickster had a thousand and one shapes and names. Sometimes she felt as though she’d met every one of them.
“The sooner we begin,” she added, “the sooner it can be ended.”
He nodded. “We’ll need a vessel—something to put him in until you take him back to the House. Without it, he’ll just scatter again as you make your return journey.”
He looked down at the tobacco pouch that was still on his lap, then shook his head and stowed it away in the pocket of his shirt. Esmeralda said nothing. As he’d said, it was in his nature to look for payment, and if that was all that his help would cost her today, then she was coming out far ahead. From the other pocket of his shirt he drew out what looked like a small dead bird.
It was a dead bird, she realized as he handed it over to her: a stuffed kingfisher, its wings tied tightly to its body with overlapping leather thongs and decorated with beads and feathers; it was a kind of magic charm that Native American warriors had once worn into battle. She accepted it gingerly.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now we call him.” His mismatched eyes caught her gaze and held it. He pointed to the fetish she held and said, “Don’t drop it.”
That familiar grin returned to his features. He bounced lightly on his heels, eyes closed, head tilted back, and began to bark. The winds caught up the yip, yip, yip of his voice and sent it spiraling off into the Otherworlds.
In Esmeralda’s hand, the dead bird began to twitch.
3
Everything was falling to pieces, Blue thought. Jamie disappearing, being stuck in the Otherworld and having the forest intrude on the House had been bad enough. Then Esmeralda had to take off, looking for Jamie, and she’d been gone for hours. Who knew how long that trip would take her? But to top it all off, they’d been under siege for the past few hours and it didn’t look like it was going to get any better.
What if they were permanently trapped in the Otherworld? What if there was no way back?
The first danger, Emma had explained—passing on what the weird guy she’d run into in the woods had told her—was the way the Otherworld worked on people. Blue could already see the strain in his companions. Richard Fagan was the worst; he’d just stepped out of his head and maybe his mind was never going to return. But it was touching them all to some degree.
They were more on edge than he remembered any of them to be. Arguments started quickly, and escalated even more quickly. And there was a constant nagging in the back of everyone’s head—not just the worry that they were trapped here, maybe for good, but that there was something changing in their thought processes. Their minds were making weird connections, crazy ideas kept cropping up, and there was an incessant rattle and murmur of inner conversation that didn’t always feel like it had its origins in one’s own head. It was as though the sanctity of their minds had been breached and they were all slowly being turned into crazy-eyed fanatics like the Radio Man back home who walked up and down the bike path by the canal having long, loud conversations with the radio he carried on his shoulder; a radio that didn’t work.
And if they were growing steadily mentally unstable—Emma said that it was because there was the House and so many of them intruding on the Otherworld that the deterioration was so rapid—they were also cut off from their food supply. The flight up to the second floor had happened so quickly that no one had thought to bring any provisions with them. They had water, courtesy of the washroom just down the hall from the Postman’s Room, but no food. Night was coming and Blue was worried about some of the Otherworld’s creatures getting at the generators and cutting off their light supply as well.
But there was nothing they could do about any of it. They were trapped here on the second floor, hiding behind barricades that they’d hastily erected out of stacked dressers, sideboards and tables to block off the east side of the House’s second story from the rest of the structure. From their vantage points at either end of the north/south corridor on this side of the building, they could see an increasingly varied array of beings and creatures that were wandering through the House:
Some fought among themselves, like the monkeymen he and John had seen earlier and an enormous boar; the monkeymen had won, but only after losing two of their number.
Others tried to breach the barricades to attack them. The bear had been the worst; it had taken all their combined firepower to stop it. Poor sucker wouldn’t normally have come near them, Blue knew, but something had driven it into a frenzy. Blue felt like a shit for having to kill it.
Still others just watched them like the owls that Emma said were manitou, drawn to them by the heavy use of magic it required to maintain the House in this Otherworld.
When Tim came to spell him at the barricade, Blue started wearily back to the Postman’s Room, which had become their command center. He was bone-tired—like most of them, he hadn’t slept for over thirty-six hours—and depressed about the bear. In direct contrast to his depression, the nagging in his head was like a toothache, making him want to just strike out at something. Anything. It was becoming a major effort just to think clearly.
It was okay when he was talking to someone, but as soon as he was alone with his thoughts, the inner jabbering started up like an angry buzz that wouldn’t go away. He knew he wasn’t alone in that. There was a lot of forced conversation going on around him.
They weren’t holding up well, he thought. Sara and Ohn were handling it the best, but then they were used to the Otherworld. His own experience in it was limited, but he figured that part of his own problem was that he’d been messed up before the House ever got shifted into the Otherworld.
That made him think
of Emma. Oddly enough, she was hanging in strong as well. In fact, with Esmeralda gone, it was Emma who was holding them together. He guessed that Julianne had been right. He had been overly protective with her. Given a chance to show her stuff, she was proving her mettle. She’d just needed the opportunity to draw on that core of iron she had inside her.
Ginny and Julianne were doing pretty well, too: Ginny because she was concentrating so hard on making sense of the computer’s own brand of craziness, while Julianne had been too busy taking care of their own wounded to think of anything else. Richard Fagan had finally stopped freaking enough to drop into a drugged slumber, as had a girl Blue remembered seeing out in the garden doing watercolors before all of this began. Her panic attack had caught everybody off guard; it took three of them to haul her back from the barricade when she started clawing at the heaped furniture, screaming, “Let me out, let me out!”
Then there was one of the Irish students, the one named Barry, who’d dropped his side of a sideboard on his leg and opened up a gash about a foot long that needed to be sewn shut again. A couple of others had been hurt in a tussle with some humanoid creatures that looked like they had iguanas a few generations back in their ancestry.
They were lucky that so few of them had been hurt so far, but Blue knew it wasn’t going to last.
Julianne was sprawled wearily in one of the club chairs when he stepped into the Postman’s Room. Ginny was still at the keyboard, worrying over the flurry of images that were continually flickering past on Memoria’s screen. Emma was with Sara. They were standing by the window looking outside.
Emma looked over her shoulder as he came in. “All that noise earlier,” she said. “Was that the bear?”
Blue nodded. “We had to shoot him. Sonovabitch wouldn’t pay any attention to our warning shots.”
“You left Tim in charge?”
“Yeah. He’s with Cal and a couple of others. Sean’s on the north barricade. We’ve got a bit of a lull. I think all that gunfire freaked them.”
Not to mention the way it left his own ears ringing. Rifles and shotguns were not meant to be fired in enclosed spaces like this.
Blue propped his Remington up against a bookcase and slid down on the floor beside it.