“How can we expect them to believe we don’t mean them any harm,” she asked, “if we’re all standing out here with our rifles and shotguns like some lynch mob?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Please,” she said. She turned from Sean to address Julianne and Ohn. “You know I’m right.”
Julianne nodded. “But that doesn’t mean we like it.”
“I’m not going,” Emma said.
“All right,” Esmeralda said. “But the rest of you—”
The drums of the shaman spoke suddenly.
Esmeralda glanced at them, then quickly turned back.
“Our time’s up,” she said. “Please?”
Finally they began to file into the House until only Ohn and Julianne were left.
“Take care of them,” Esmeralda said.
“It’s not really my thing,” Julianne said. “I don’t even like asking somebody to go down to the store for me.”
“But... ?”
“But I’ll try.”
“Thanks.”
“Remember your winds,” Ohn said, before he left. “As a last resort.”
“What did he mean by that?” Emma asked as she and Esmeralda turned to face the shaman and their bison-headed champion.
Esmeralda didn’t answer except to let a breeze gust up and flick her long hair about her head. Emma’s lips made a startled “O,” but then she nodded, understanding that they weren’t necessarily as helpless as they seemed.
Esmeralda used her hands to speak to the old woman shaman. We will not fight. What was done here was done in defense. We are sorry for the unhappiness this has brought to you, but we were given no choice but to strike back when we were attacked. What we will not do is compound that tragedy with yet more unnecessary violence.
The shaman frowned. You are the intruders, she signed.
I know, Esmeralda replied. Yet we are not here through any choice of our own. We—
A startled cry from the House behind them interrupted the flow of the words that sprang from her hands. Esmeralda turned to see Julianne in the doorway. At first she could see no reason for Julianne’s alarm. Then she realized that she could see right through her.
“Esmeralda!” Julianne cried. “Come quick.”
But it was already too late. Julianne became a ghost, and then she was gone, along with the contents of the House. The structure made an alarming lurch. Wood creaked and groaned until suddenly the entire building fell in upon itself. It collapsed in an odd kind of silence. In the wake of its destruction, Esmeralda and Emma exchanged worried glances.
“It’s Jamie,” Esmeralda said softly. “He’s taken the House back. Either that or...”
“Or what?”
“The enemy has stolen all of the House’s power. But whichever it was, it leaves us abandoned here.”
“Uh, Ez,” Emma said. “I think it’s a little worse than that.”
The shaman had begun drumming once more, all except for the old woman. Her hands danced with conversation.
Our magic has driven the evil away. Now only you two daughters of the darkness remain.
“What’s she saying?” Emma asked.
“They’re taking credit for the House disappearing.”
“Well, that’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, if they want to think that they did it, why should we argue with them?”
“Because they think the House was evil,” Esmeralda said, “and that makes us evil and also their last two pieces of unfinished business.”
The bison-headed being stamped his feet on the ground, keeping time to the drumming, which had taken on a frenzied rhythm.
“Your winds,” Emma said. “Can they take us out of here?”
“Let’s give it a try,” Esmeralda replied.
Now that the others were gone, there was no reason for Emma and her to stay here. She closed her eyes and called her winds up, but after the prolonged use she’d put them to in fetching Jamie, it seemed that they could move her hair about and little else. The forest around them was peculiarly still—there wasn’t even a breeze for her to borrow—and she wasn’t deep enough into the Otherworlds for her to augment them in other ways.
“It’s no good,” she said.
Emma hid her disappointment. “You tried.”
A quick rattle of drumming drew their attention back to the shaman.
It was ill chance, not evil that brought us here, Esmeralda told the woman. Harm us if you must, but we will fight no more. On your heads will lie the guilt of further violence.
There is no guilt in slaying enemies, the shaman signed back.
“What did she say?” Emma asked.
She looked worriedly from the old woman to the bison-headed man. His penis was beginning to harden, thickening like the bough of a small tree and rising up the length of his thigh until it stood erect, bouncing slightly as he continued to dance to the drumming.
“Basically,” Esmeralda said, “it boils down to us saying our prayers.”
“Oh, shit.”
Esmeralda nodded. “In a nutshell.”
She didn’t feel nearly as calm as she was pretending to be. But for Emma’s sake she tried to keep her panic at bay as she desperately looked for a way out of their plight, but without her winds she couldn’t step them out of this world. Given time, allowing them to replenish their strengths, she could do it, but the shaman and their champion didn’t look as though time was something they were offering.
This had to be Whiskey Jack’s doing, Esmeralda realized suddenly. He’d lied to her again. She should have known. No matter what he’d promised, there was always a price to pay.
The bison-headed man began to shuffle toward them. Emma made a small sound in the back of her throat. Esmeralda took her hand and gave it a comforting squeeze, then stepped forward so that she was between Emma and the bull-man.
She thought she could hear the distant sound of a coyote’s cry, its yip, yip, yip sounding far too much like laughter. She sent her winds after its fading sound with a last final curse before the bison-headed man was upon her:
Damn you anyway, Whiskey Jack. Damn you to whatever your kind knows as hell.
Then she faced the bull-man, her face an expressionless mask. She knew she was going to die, but she refused to give them the pleasure of seeing her fear.
6
The owls were starting to get to Blue as well. He hated the way they just sat there in a long, silent row along the eaves of the House, staring down at them with their unblinking gaze. Their constant presence worked its way under his skin. It wasn’t so much an itch as a coldness that traveled relentlessly along the spiderwebbing road map of his nerves to settle in the marrow of his bones.
He felt like putting his rifle to his shoulder and picking off a few of them, but then he realized it wasn’t the owls giving him the creeps—at least it wasn’t just the owls. There was something about the House itself, a kind of diminishing of its presence, as though the mysteries that always lay at its heart had suddenly been pulled into the light, where they were revealed to be just so many conjurer’s tricks.
He looked at his companions. Sara was shivering; her features seemed unnaturally pale, even in the poor light. Pukwudji appeared even more freaked out. He held one of Sara’s hands and leaned against her, his big eyes looking mournfully at the House.
I can feel him, Sara had said. He’s so close... so cold....
Yeah, Blue thought. Our heebie-jeebies have got a definite source; we just don’t have a make on the sucker yet.
“C’mon,” he said and ushered them toward the nearest doors. “Let’s get in out of the open.”
The eyes of their enemy—like the eyes of the owls—seemed to fill the sky, bearing down on them with an intolerable pressure. He thought they’d feel better once they were inside, but it was only worse. Their footsteps on the floor of the empty ballroom echoed eerily and the pressure of their unseen enemy’s gaze seemed stronger than it had been outside.
At least we left the
owls behind, Blue thought when he looked up at the top of the window frames that ran the length of the garden side of the room. There were birds perched there, looking in. Owls.
Blue led his companions out into the hall. They looked into one or two of the rooms along the way, but everything was empty. The interior of the House had moved to the Otherworld; all that remained was a shell—just the structure itself, as much under siege as its interior was in the Otherworld.
“If we ever get the House back,” he said, “there’s going to be one hell of a mess to clean up, but at least we don’t have to worry about structural damage. Doesn’t seem like the forest did any damage to the building in this world.”
Sara nodded glumly. Pukwudji just held her hand and didn’t respond at all. But Blue felt he had to talk. The echoes of his voice gave him a creepy feeling, but the silence bothered him more.
“You know what really gets me?” he said. “The way this all feels so... random. It’s like there’s nobody to confront, nobody to point the finger at and say, ’You’re the bad guy. Your ass is mine.’ “
“There’s someone now,” Sara said.
Blue shook his head. “Intellectually, I know what you’re saying, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a tangible enemy. It’s just some faceless thing—a cipher. How the hell do you go to war with something that’s just a feeling? This guy’s just a ghost.”
“I can do more than feel him,” Sara said, her voice betraying her tension. “I can lead us to him.”
Blue didn’t say anything for a long moment. Finally he lifted up his rifle and slapped its barrel against his left hand.
“Then let’s do it,” he said.
“He’s not far,” Sara said. “A street over, maybe two at the tops. I can feel him just sucking the vitality out of the House.” She touched her right temple with a finger. “I can see him in here.”
She put her back against the nearest wall and slid down until she was sitting on her heels. Pukwudji crouched down beside her.
“But we can’t just go and shoot him,” Sara said.
Blue hunched down until his face was level with hers. “Why the hell not?”
“Because we’re not in the Otherworld anymore,” she replied. “You can’t just walk down the street, carrying a rifle. Someone’ll call the cops before we get to the end of the block.”
“It’s night, Sara. Who’s to see?”
She shook her head. “It’s not going to work. Let’s say that nobody sees us and we get to whatever building he’s in without being stopped. If we just walk in and try to shoot him—that’s saying he’ll even let us get that far—we’ll have police all over us. He’s not doing anything that we can prove is illegal; he’s not doing anything we can prove is real at all. And even if you should manage to kill him, you’re going to go to jail for doing it.”
“Then what should we do?”
“I don’t know. I thought I’d know when we got here, but he’s so strong and I don’t have any magic—not the kind I’d need to take him on.”
“What about you, little buddy?” Blue asked Pukwudji.
The honochen’o’keh could only shake his head.
They fell silent then. Blue ran his hand up and down the cold metal of his rifle’s barrel. The presence of their enemy was almost palpable in the air—a thick, cloying sensation.
“If we don’t have magic to use against him,” Blue said, “then we’re going to have to do it my way.”
“We can’t,” Sara said.
“Maybe we can’t,” Blue said, “but I’ve got to. Besides, it all makes a kind of sense. The House has always had a kind of mythic feel about it, so maybe it’s time I played out my part of the story—sort of like the king of the wood.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s in one of Jamie’s books. Back in the old days there were these societies who picked some guy and made him their king, you know? He could do anything he wanted, have anything he wanted. You name it and it was his. But this only lasted for a few years—I can’t remember how many—and then when his time was up, they’d kill him.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Sara said, but Blue could tell she knew what he was getting at.
“You see, before I met you and Jamie, I was a real loser,” he went on. “I rode with the Dragon, I did all kinds of bad shit. Man, I was a mess, heading straight down the highway to hell. But then I met Jamie and he brought me back here and suddenly I had options—that was something I’d never had before. That’s something you and Jamie and the House gave me: a chance to be one of the good guys.”
“What’s that got to do with this king-of-the-wood business?”
“Well, you see, it’s like I’ve been the king of the wood for the past bunch of years. I’ve been able to do whatever I wanted. I’ve had my past wiped clean like it never happened and got the chance to start all over again, to be the kind of guy I might’ve been if I hadn’t taken a wrong turn way back when.”
“That still doesn’t—”
Blue cut her off. “I figure it’s time for me to put something back now. Lots of those guys went willingly, you know. I figure it’s because they knew that their dying meant something. It renewed the land, made everything okay for the tribe. I can get into that.”
Sara shook her head. “That’s not what’s going on here.”
“I think it is,” Blue said. “I think it’s going to cost us something to get things back to the way they were before. Even Pukwudji said that.”
“But—”
“We’ve all got to die sometime, Sara. If I’ve got to go, I’d rather have my death mean something than just be another statistic on the obit page.”
When he stood up, Sara scrambled to her feet.
“I can’t let you do it,” she said.
“I don’t see that we have a choice.”
“But—”
“Think of all the good the House does. Think of all those people we left in the Otherworld. You don’t think they’re worth dying for?”
“Not all of them.”
“Everybody’s worth helping, Sara.”
“You know what I mean.”
Blue found a tired smile. “Yeah, we’d all rather see a stranger get it than someone we know.”
“Well, I’m going with you,” Sara said.
“You’re going as far as it takes to point me in the right direction,” Blue corrected her. “Then you and Pukwudji are out of here. We’ve only got one gun; only one of us can pull the trigger at one time.”
“I don’t want to do this, Blue.”
“Shit, and you think I do?” He lifted a hand to her hair and ruffled the curls. “Things’ll work out.”
“It’s not fair.”
“Well, you know what Jools says about fair.”
Sara shook her head.
“It’s just the first third of fairy tale and you won’t find either in the real world.”
“This is the real world and we are in the middle of a fairy tale.”
“So sue me. Or her.”
“You’re not the king of any wood,” Sara told him. “You’re just a king of fools.”
“So what does that make you?”
“Who said you were my king?”
It was tough making jokes, Blue thought, feeling the way they did, but it was that or cry. If Sara started to cry he didn’t know if he could go through with this.
He found himself wanting to say things to her: how much he cared for her, how much he’d missed her, how much she was a part of his becoming the person he was now, but he knew that would just make it harder. Then he thought about Emma, waiting for him back in the Otherworld, and all the friends he was leaving behind. Judy. Esmeralda. Ginny.
Ohn. Jools. They were good people. They were worth the sacrifice, but man, he was going to miss them.
“This is why the owls are here,” Pukwudji said suddenly.
“Say what?” Blue asked.
Pukwudji stood up from where he’d be
en crouched on the floor, his hand creeping back up until it was nestled in Sara’s once more.
“They gather at the birth of great deeds,” he explained.
“Well, hell,” Blue said. “Let’s not keep them waiting.” He turned to Sara. “Which way do we go?”
“He’s somewhere near the south side of the House,” she said. She looked miserable; her voice was strained. “I think he’s in one of the houses on Clemow.”
Blue led the way to the closest of the doors on the east side of the House that led out onto O’Connor Street. When they were out on the street, he kept the rifle close to his body so that it couldn’t be easily seen. Sara walked on his right as they headed down the block to Clemow, Pukwudji’s hand still in hers.
There was a sound on the air—a kind of whispering that made them pause and lift their heads to look around. Blue and Sara exchanged troubled looks, then started off again. Above them, the owls followed, flying from house eave to telephone pole. Still silent; still watching.
“This is the place,” Sara said.
Blue changed his hold on his rifle. He wiped his right palm on his jeans, then took the grip in that hand again, finger snaking into the trigger guard. He looked up at the building. They were halfway down Clemow, between Bank Street and O’Connor. The house was an older, two-story brick building with hip-and-valley roofs, set snug in between its neighbors, the houses all standing in a neat row on this residential street. There were a few lights on inside, but heavy curtains killed any hope of a view. It was the only building on the street with any lights.
It looked about as threatening as day-old bologna, he thought. Maybe less. You could get food poisoning from bologna.
“This guy’s in there?” he asked.
Sara nodded. She took a step up the walk, pausing when Pukwudji didn’t move with her.
“We have to do it,” she told the little honochen’o’keh.
“I know,” Pukwudji said. “But it only requires one of us. This is a bad place, Sara.”
Only one of us, Blue thought. Well, he was the guy with the big gun, wasn’t he?
Before he could start down the walk, Sara let go of Pukwudji’s hand and went ahead of him. He hurried to catch up, but she was already on the porch by the time he reached her.