Forests of the Heart

  He put on his coat, not relishing having to go out and join the misery.

  “Call me if you get a number for one of those Creek sisters, would you?” he said to Fiona. “If I’m not in, just leave a message on my machine.”

  “Yessir, boss.”

  “It wasn’t an order.”

  “Nosir.”

  Hunter sighed as the pair of them giggled. The phone rang, and that, too, for no reason Hunter could discern, struck them as funny. Miki was still snickering when she picked up the receiver.

  “No,” he heard her say. “We still don’t have any Who bootlegs.”

  Putting up his collar and wishing he had a hat, he left them in the store and immediately lost his footing on the icy pavement, only just saving himself from a fall by grabbing onto the side of the store’s front window. He refused to look back inside at their grinning faces. Instead, he shuffled off like the rest of the pedestrians, sliding his feet along the ice instead of lifting them, feeling like one more drone, inching his way down the assembly line.

  By the time he got a few blocks away, his hair was plastered to his head with a thick coating of wet ice and his legs were aching from his awkward gait. If it were just ice, or just rain, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But the ice on the pavement was also covered with puddles which made the footing even more treacherous. You literally couldn’t do anything more than shuffle along.

  He hated the winter, he decided. Or maybe just this winter, where it seemed that everything that could go wrong, had. And then some. He didn’t bother wasting his breath cursing how things had turned out. What was the point? But the miserable weather was putting him in the perfect mood for what he planned to do this evening.

  7

  Donal woke fully dressed on an unfamiliar bed, with a foul taste in his mouth and a pounding in his head. Sitting up made his stomach do a small flip. He waited a long moment, dully curious as to whether or not he was going to have to throw up, but the nausea went away. If only the headache would. Reaching under his pillow, he pulled out a mickey bottle of whiskey. About a half-inch of golden liquid sloshed in the bottom—what the old man used to call a cure in the morning. He downed it, grimacing at the bitter taste.

  Jaysus. Jameson’s it wasn’t. It was barely a step above rubbing alcohol, insofar as taste was concerned. But it was eighty-proof and he could already feel the pounding in his head begin to recede a little.

  Swinging his boots to the floor, he clomped across the uneven floorboards to what he hoped was a toilet. It wasn’t until he’d relieved himself and come back into the main room that he sat down on the edge of the bed and took a good look around, orienting himself. A hotel room, obviously, with the blinds drawn and next to no light coming in. Not exactly four-star. Not exactly a half-star, truth be told. The whole room seemed to sag—ceiling, furniture, the bed, the floor. Old and tired and worn out. But cheap, no doubt. He couldn’t remember checking in, but considering the state he must have been in, that was no surprise. He had so little memory of the latter part of the night, he’d probably blacked out before he’d passed out.

  He picked up the mickey bottle and tilted it so that the last few errant drops could fall onto his tongue. Where had he gotten it? Most of the previous night really was a blur. He remembered leaving Miki’s apartment after she’d had her little snit, and really, what was her problem? You’d think she’d be happy that a Greer might do well for a change. Besides drinking and arguing, that was.

  He turned the bottle over in his hands. There was no label on it, but why should there be? The bars had all been closed, so he’d come down to Palm Street, wandering aimlessly around the Combat Zone until he’d found a small after-hours bar down at the end of some alley. He’d had a few drinks there he was sure, then finally wandered off with this bottle of the barman’s homemade poteen, though it hardly deserved so poetic a designation.

  Back home, poteen was the water of life. Kicked like hell once it got down, to be sure, but it was smooth on the going down. Or at least smoother than this rotgut the barman had foisted off on him. Jaysus, but wasn’t it foul. Mind you, he wouldn’t say no to another bottle of it right now.

  He set the empty bottle down on the night table beside an old digital alarm clock radio with an LCD display so tired the time was barely visible. He leaned a little closer. Just past eight. There was something he was supposed to be doing by eight, he realized, but he was damned if he could remember what.

  Go somewhere. Do something. With someone. Not Miki, he decided, bless her hard little heart. Cold as one of the Gentry, she was last night.

  Then it came to him. It was Ellie. He’d promised to drive her up to Kel-lygnow this morning. Well, he’d be a little late, and she’d be a little ticked off, but surely she was used to it by now. Had he ever been on time for anything? Not likely. Ah, and what was the rush? That’s what he always asked. What was the rush? Jaysus, stop and appreciate things a little bit for a change, even if all you had to appreciate was that your life was shite.

  Oh, don’t go all maudlin, he told himself. Things were looking up. Ellie was starting on the mask today, and between it and the Gentry backing him, he’d soon be looking back on days like these and fall down on his arse laughing that he’d taken it all so bloody seriously.

  Pity he had to share the mask’s power with the Gentry though. He was taking all the risks, not them. Bloody mask could cook his brains into a stew if it wasn’t done just right. ‘Course they were all vague about the details, them and herself, that strange old dyke who’d slammed the door in his face yesterday, pretending she didn’t know him. Should’ve been a bloody actress, that one.

  But Donal didn’t need their help. He had it all sussed out on his own. Because he knew how to pay attention, didn’t he? He hadn’t been like Miki, sitting there with her hands over her ears when Uncle Fergus and his cronies were going on back home. Nor falling down drunk like the old man. He’d paid attention to the tales those bitter old men told, sorted the wheat from the chaff in their spill of story.

  It took intent. It took a man capable of putting everything aside and concentrating his will on what was needed. The new mask was merely a focus— powerful enough in its own way, especially when created by someone with the geasan the Gentry claimed Ellie carried, but hardly the almighty talisman they made it out to be. If that was the case, any fool could pick it up and call on its power. No, it required a man such as himself. Focused, determined. Someone who didn’t much bloody care about anything except getting exactly what he wanted for a change.

  Of course it helped that he’d been as intimate as he had with the woman who was making it, left his seed in her and you couldn’t get much more bloody intimate than that, could you? Even the old dyke up in Kellygnow had to admit he was the best man for the job and you could just tell she was aching to slap that mask up onto her own face. But it needed a man to wear it and wield it, which she wasn’t, for all her dressing butch and pretending to be male. It needed a man, a mortal man, and that left the Gentry fretting, too, but sod them all. This was his turn to be on the top of the wheel and no one was going to take that away from him. Not Miki’s misguided conscience, nor the needs of the Gentry and that old dyke they’d kept alive well past her time. What use did they see in her anyway, exiled for two-thirds of the year in the Gentry’s otherworld for every few months she could live in this one?

  Well, he thought, who really gave a shite?

  He pushed himself up from the bed and tucked his rumpled shirttails into his pants. He’d better go pick up Ellie or the mask would never get made. He wondered where he’d left the van. Had to be somewhere nearby.

  He didn’t bother closing the door when he stepped out into the shabby hall beyond his room. Humming a bit of reel, he followed the path that had been worn into the carpet by a few thousand other feet heading for the same stairwell as he was now. He stopped when he realized it was some tune of Miki’s. Ah, Miki. She wouldn’t be so high and mighty once he was wearing the mask. Once she
saw the world give him his due, she’d be begging for a taste of the same.

  Maybe he’d share, maybe he wouldn’t. It all depended on how repentant she was when she got down on her knees and asked him.

  But they’d all listen to him. Miki and Ellie and that soft-spoken Spanish woman up at old Kellygnow who wanted him, he could tell. They’d be singing his praises and mooning about, looking for a bit of his kindness then.

  He reached the lobby. The fat woman at the check-in desk looked up from her fashion magazine and gave him a once-over before returning to the depictions of that vastly better life that the waif models were living in its glossy pages.

  No, Donal thought. I didn’t steal any of your towels. Jaysus, I wouldn’t want to touch the bloody things.

  He continued to the exit. It wasn’t until he’d pushed through the dirty glass doors and stepped onto the street outside that he realized it wasn’t eight in the bloody morning. It was eight at night and pissing down rain. Freezing rain.

  “You see what I mean about everything being shite,” he muttered.

  A businessman passing by shot him a quick look, then hurried on his way.

  “The hookers are over on Palm!” Donal shouted after him. If they were stupid enough to be out in this foul weather. Of course, their pimps and whatever jones rode around in their guts weren’t about to let them take the night off, regardless.

  The man ducked his head, slipped on the icy sidewalk, and only just caught his balance before continuing on his way.

  Donal looked away. He sighed, the man already forgotten. Ellie was going to be livid and that wasn’t good. Part of what made him important to the Gentry was the closeness of his relationship to her. Lose that and the Gentry could try to cut him out and find someone else to wear the mask, and that wouldn’t bloody do at all.

  Not that he gave one silver shite what they thought or did. As soon as the mask was his, they’d be the first to go. But until he had it, it had to be, yes, mister scary elf lord this and, of course, mister scary elf lord that. Bloody punters.

  So first thing on the agenda: Make nice with Ellie.

  As he got ready to leave the shelter of the hotel’s awning, the heavy canvas sagging about him, he caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the glass door of the hotel. Jaysus, didn’t he look the sight. Before heading out to see Ellie he’d better take a run by Miki’s and get some clean clothes. With any luck, she’d have climbed down from that high horse of hers by now and would let him in long enough to have a shower and change. And if his luck really held, she wouldn’t be at home at all.

  He hunched his collar up against the freezing rain.

  Stop for a pint on the way? he wondered as he stepped out from under the hotel’s awning. Better not, though lord knew he could do with a drink. Maybe Miki’d have some beer in the fridge.

  He took a brisk step, another, and then did the same comical lunge for balance that the man passing him earlier had done, only just managing to stay on his feet.

  Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph. What a foul night.

  8

  After dinner, Bettina walked with Ellie to the front door where the sculptor planned to wait for her ride. Neither had been outside since the morning and while they’d been aware of the nasty turn in the weather, they hadn’t really paid much attention to how much freezing rain had actually fallen. When Ellie opened the door to see if Tommy had arrived yet, Bettina gave a small gasp of pleasure.

  “What is it?” Ellie asked.

  Bettina made a motion with her hand, encompassing the whole of the outdoors.

  “Es muy hello,” she said.

  And it was beautiful. The lights from the house awoke a thousand highlights on the ice-slicked trees and other vegetation. The longer grass and bushes at the edges of the property were stiff and beginning to droop, as were the boughs of the trees as the weight of the ice built up, but the reflected lights shimmered and sparkled in the ice, turning everything they saw into a magical fairyland.

  “Beautiful,” Ellie agreed. “But treacherous, too.”

  Bettina only shrugged. She’d had so little experience with ice and snow before coming to Newford that every new aspect of winter delighted her. Sleet and snow. The cold, the frost. Bone-chilling winds and sun so bright on the snow that it blinded you. Blizzards. An ice storm such as this. Perhaps in a year or two, if she was still living in this city, she’d grow as tired and blase with winter as most of the natives seemed to be, but somehow she doubted it. She knew snow, but it rarely lasted out the day in the saguaro forests where she’d grown up. And something like this … could one ever become indifferent to such marvelous beauty?

  But she could also understand the danger presented by the ice-slicked roads and tree limbs growing too heavy under the steadily increasing weight of the ice. As if to punctuate that realization, there came a sharp crack from the woods behind the house, followed by the crash of a falling limb and a muffled sound like breaking glass that Bettina realized was the ice fragments rattling against each other in the wake of the fallen bough.

  “If this doesn’t let up soon,” Ellie said, “that’s going to become an all too-familiar sound.”

  Bettina nodded. And they wouldn’t simply be falling in the woods. Trees and boughs would come toppling down onto houses, across streets, taking down power lines …

  She turned to her companion. “Do you really think you should go out on a night such as this?”

  “I have to,” Ellie told her. “It’s at times like this when the street people need us the most.”

  “But—”

  “You should come out with us sometime,” Ellie went on. “Maybe you could use your magic to help them.”

  Bettina gave her a considering glance. She could tell that Ellie had surprised herself in saying that, was perhaps even a little embarrassed by it, considering her vehement denials to the subject earlier. Eh, bueno. Bettina didn’t blame the sculptor. Anything could be disconcerting, if you weren’t familiar with it. Something like la brujería would be even more so, since to someone like Ellie, it went against all she’d been taught and had experienced in the world to date. It wasn’t as though she had grown up with a curandera for a grandmother, or spent her whole life as Bettina had, with one foot in this world, one foot in the other.

  “La brujería,” she said, “only helps those who want to be helped, Ellie.”

  “Don’t you have to believe as well?”

  Bettina shook her head. “Does the sun require our belief before it can rise or set?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  Bettina laughed. “Don’t look so glum. What’s happening to you doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

  Before Ellie could reply, they heard the approach of an engine on the driveway, then saw the vehicle’s headbeams. A few moments later, the Angel Outreach van made its way up the last part of incline, tires slipping as they sought traction.

  “Here’s my ride,” Ellie said, no doubt relieved at the timely rescue.

  Bettina nodded. “Cuidado,” she said. “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  Bettina watched Ellie pick her way carefully across the icy driveway to where the van waited. Reaching the vehicle, the sculptor got in, waving before she closed the door behind her. Bettina returned the gesture. She waited until the van had made its slow way back down the sharp incline of the driveway before turning to go back inside, but once she’d closed the door on the wet night, she felt uncharacteristically restless. It was nothing she could put her finger on, only a disconnected feeling that had her wandering from one common room to another until she finally found herself in the kitchen. There she stood by the window and looked outside at the freezing rain, her gaze settling on the uninvited visitors who had gathered on the ice-covered lawns.

  How could they be here again, on such a night… ?

  She put on her coat and boots and went outside to where the wet night was waiting for her. The wet night and los lobos.

  Once outside, she pau
sed for a long moment by the back door of the kitchen, sheltered from the freezing rain by its overhang, and watched the dark-haired men. They didn’t sit tonight, standing in their rough circle instead, still smoking their cigarettes, gazes still on the house. Not all of them at once, but there was always at least one of them regarding the building.

  Basta, she thought. Enough. She only had so much patience.

  She pushed herself away from the door and started towards them, losing her balance in the process. Her boots slipped out from under her on the slick ice and she flailed her arms. She was falling, she would have fallen, except strong hands caught her from behind and held her upright. As she turned, her rescuer keeping a grip on her arms so that she wouldn’t lose her balance again, she found herself facing one of the wolves. Which one? She couldn’t tell at first. They were all too much alike. And when she glanced at where they’d been standing, there was no sign of them at all. The others had all slipped away and only this wolf remained, holding her arms the way one held a child just beginning to walk.

  Despite herself, her pulse quickened when she realized he was the same one who had approached her the other night.

  “Can you stand on your own?” el lobo asked her.

  He let her go as he spoke and Bettina had to do an awkward shuffle to stay upright.

  “Who are you?” she demanded when she finally had her balance. “What do you want from me?”

  “Not even a thanks?”

  “Perdona. I am grateful for your help.”

  Her hair was rapidly getting plastered against her head—a cold and decidedly uncomfortable sensation. El lobo, she noticed, wasn’t even damp. Nor had the others been. Of course. They were only partly in this world, enough to see and be seen, but not enough to be affected by the inclement weather. She concentrated for a moment and sidled into that in-between place herself. The relief from the freezing rain was immediate, though she still had a chill and her hair continued to drip icy water down the back of her neck.