Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls

“I can’t believe this has happened.” Ronald Stewart was a large man, muscled and fat, but despair had cracked open his shell and ripped out his center. The nutless husk that was talking to us barely knew we were there. “Courtney was…I mean is…”

He began to cry, ragged, high-pitched sobs that shuddered through his whole body.

His wife was just the opposite.
If Ron was a shell, tragedy had turned Debby Stewart to stone. Her body should have looked soft—she was plump and pillowy—but her face was hard and cold and devoid of weakness. “How much does an expert tracker charge, Mr. Morris?”

I looked around their home. It was a simple one-story affair, and most of the furniture in it looked decades old, possessions acquired from dead relatives and
department stores. He was a retired truck driver and she worked for the city of Bonaparte in some sort of secretarial capacity. More than half of the photos in the living room had their missing nineteen-year-old daughter in them. She was a beautiful girl.

I did them the courtesy of not smiling. “I came here as a favor to Sarah. I don’t want to charge you anything. I’m not a monster.”

Which
was either ironic or an outright lie because that’s exactly what I was.

Sarah was sitting next to me on the sofa, and she reached out and patted my forearm like the old friend she was pretending to be. She was an attractive woman with long black hair, closing in on forty and wearing it well, the sort of person you think of when you think “yoga instructor” although I had no idea if she did
yoga or not. I had met her two hours ago.

“This place looks funky,” Isaac Roberts had commented that morning. “But it feels like Christmas.”

I would have described it as Norman-Rockwell-meets-the-pagans myself, but I knew what he meant. The bakery we were sitting in was a combination of delicious smells and New Age art and old-fashioned corner store. The counter of the glass case
and the Formica tables had been overrun by pewter figurines of forest life and tiny trees made of copper wire with green beaded leaves. All around us lots of earth-toned pottery held pretty plants that you just knew had pretty names, long Latin titles that would roll off the tongue mellifluously if you only knew how to pronounce them.

The beadwork and tapestries and paintings hanging all
over the place were filled with spiraling designs, and I wondered idly what kinds of runes and sigils they hid. It couldn’t have been anything too bad or I would have sensed it in the reactions of the people around us. The customers ran the full gamut of ages and races and economic classes, and even the people waiting to pick up takeout orders at the counter seemed relaxed around one another
and comfortable in their own skins. The effect was probably temporary, but I could see why people would keep coming back. The bakery was a blessed place.

I was almost relaxed myself, sitting there rereading a used paperback copy of
Ride With Me
by Thomas Costain. I hadn’t come there for the cheesecake or the coffee, but both were delicious. When I bit into a pastry puff called a “Bonaparte
Bite” that came free with my order, it had a slip of paper in it. I pulled the fortune out and read: “Old wines and old friends are best.”

Since I don’t drink and my oldest living friends are trying to track me down and kill me, I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Isaac wasn’t eating anything. He couldn’t eat anything. The only reason he was even able to sit down was because I
had pulled out the chair, pretended to reconsider where I wanted to sit, then sat at the opposite side of the table. Isaac was a ghost, or close enough to one that it made no difference.

“I don’t see how people can just read,” Isaac complained. A tall blond with an athletic build and fine features, he had probably been popular in high school not too many years ago. He was an extrovert, at
any rate, one of those restless people who always have to be doing something; the fact that I was the only person who could see him or hear him had been rough on both of us for the last couple of days.

I restrained myself from wondering out loud if his hatred of reading was the result of being a dumbass or the cause of it. Unlike Isaac, I was good at waiting, and I knew that if I ignored
him long enough, he would get bored and drift off to eavesdrop on other customers. And he did.

Not too long after that, Sarah White came over to the table. She had been working around ovens all morning and was dressed lightly in a sleeveless lilac-colored top and a white muslin skirt. Her hair was done up in a ponytail and her skin was slightly flushed. She looked lovely.

Sarah was also
wearing a cross around her neck, ankhs in her earlobes, and matching rings that had the Tree of Life worked in silver. I would be willing to bet that if she ever described herself on one of those dating sites, she would say “Spiritual but not religious.” Charms dangled from her bracelet, and probably not just decorative ones.

“What have you brought into my home?” she demanded without preamble.

I put down the book. “Someone who needs your help.”

She pulled her own chair out and sat down. “You must be in some really big trouble to come in here pulling this quiet and respectful act. Are bad things going to follow you to my door, knight?”

I looked around us. None of the people at the neighboring tables had even looked at her. “Can we talk privately?”

Sarah waved her hand dismissively.
“This is my place of power. No one is going to eavesdrop on us.”

She wasn’t showing off—she was giving me a warning. Sarah had called me a knight because she thought I was one of the people who make a point of keeping beings like her in line, and I could see why she thought that. I move like a knight. I am in peak physical condition like a knight. More to the point, when she tried to see
me with her second sight, nobody was taking her calls on the psychic hotline. The same geas that compels knights to do their duty keeps any other kind of mind magic from getting a toehold. It is one of the reasons knights of my former order are feared by the shadow world: They cannot be possessed, charmed, warded, cursed, predicted, or beguiled.

This fact was also where my family had gotten
its unusual last name. I come from a long line of witch finders and enchantment breakers, and my name is Charming. John Charming.

In any case, I had stopped being a knight when I became the same sort of creature I hunt. I didn’t see any point in telling Sarah White all of that, though. I was still geas driven, and the same magic that kept her from seeing me with her second sight also concealed
the wolf.

“I’m not in trouble, Miss White,” I said, nodding at Isaac. The idiot was across the diner, scrunching up his nose and sticking his head through the middle of a table and making pig noises while a chunky man in a T-shirt and shorts shoveled some kind of pie in his mouth. “He is.”

Sarah didn’t take her eyes off me. “You are the only knight who has ever called me Miss.”

I sighed.
“Look, if you need to call me a jackbooted thug or something, go ahead and get it out of your system. But I came here to ask for your help, not demand it.”

“So if I tell you to leave, you’ll leave?” she asked skeptically.

I gave her a lopsided smile. “Eventually.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Why would you be different?”

Sarah was one of the cunning folk. She wasn’t going to stop asking
until I gave her an honest answer, and maybe not then. “Failure and loss.”

Sarah was still looking at my face. “I believe that.”

“I also—” I began, but Isaac picked that moment to sit back down at the table.

“You didn’t tell me she was hot,” he admonished me.

It was the first time since we walked into the bakery that Sarah looked at Isaac as if doubting he was real.

“She can hear you,” I informed
him. “That’s why we’re here, butt plug.”

“You didn’t tell me that, either,” Isaac griped. He didn’t have the sense to be embarrassed. He had gone into the Marines straight out of high school and thought he was attractive to women, and maybe he was. Being an idiot doesn’t seem to be too big of a deterrent to women when the idiot in question is six foot three, well-muscled, smooth featured,
and confident.

“Knights don’t tell anyone more than they have to,” Sarah informed Isaac. “Now be quiet and let the grown-ups talk.”

And Isaac actually shut up. It really must have been her place of power.

“What is he?” she asked me. “He’s not a spirit. He’s not an astral projection, either.”

“He’s Isaac Roberts,” I said, hoping to personalize him a little. “A private in the Marine Corps.”

Her
cool stare told me that she was no fool. “I asked what he was. Not who.”

“That’s a little complicated,” I said.

Her expression didn’t change.

 “You know how some beings use faery rings to take shortcuts through time and space?” I began. “They travel through some in-between place…”

Sarah nodded. “I call it the Twilight Isle.”

“Don’t we have enough names for that place without making new ones?”
I was mildly annoyed. “Is something wrong with Limbo? Or the Dreamtime? The spirit paths? The fourth dimension? Hyperspace?”

“What’s really bothering you?” she asked curiously.

I thought about it. “Our world is weird and melodramatic enough without giving things even more romantic names. If I were going to make up my own name for that place, I’d call it Hank.”

“That’s because I respect magic,”
Sarah snapped. “And you don’t want to admit that you’re afraid of it. I suppose it would be harder to kill magical beings if you allowed yourself to feel awe.”

“Well, if you’re going to get all insightful, I’m going to stop arguing,” I shot back.

Her mouth made a reluctant smile that she tried to hide by sipping from her coffee. “Get on with your story.”

“Anyway, I found Isaac in a faery ring
in the Great Smoky Mountains while I was hunting a wila,” I continued. “She had enthralled him and stuck him in that in-between place when I performed a countercharm that let me see him. The only way I knew to deactivate the damned thing was to kill the wila that had summoned it.”

I looked at her with a touch of challenge. “Which I did. If you think that makes me a murderer, go ahead and think
it.”

“What I think is my concern, and I don’t need your permission to do it,” Sarah answered levelly.

“When he killed her, I woke up and walked out of the ring,” Isaac finished. I think he was a little worried about the way the conversation was going. “I was stuck like this. Tom here says that the only reason he can see me is because of that counter-thing he did.”

And no, I hadn’t given Isaac
my real name.

“That evil bitch killed two of my friends,” Isaac added. “And she made me love her anyway. Tom isn’t no murderer.”

There’s nothing like being defended with a double negative.

Sarah didn’t respond to Isaac’s words directly, but she did reassess him. “So this is actually your material body? It’s just out of sync with our reality?”

Isaac looked uncomfortable. “I guess so.”

“Why haven’t
you starved?” Sarah asked bluntly.

“Isaac discovered this weird ability while he was obsessing over some beef jerky in my car,” I explained. “If nobody is looking at a thing, and he focuses on it for a long time while he’s in contact with it, he can drag it onto whatever plane he’s on. That’s the only reason he’s dressed right now. If he stops making contact with the object, the thing eventually
rematerializes. But eating something or wearing it keeps him in touch with it, so to speak.”

Sarah’s brow wrinkled. “So when you use the bathroom, does whatever you leave behind rematerialize later?”

Isaac was not amused. “I hope not.”

“The part about not being able to do this while anyone is looking is fascinating,” Sarah went on. “Physicists have proven that just observing something changes
the way its particles interact. I wonder if…”

“Can you help me or not, ma’am?” Somebody should have taught Isaac not to beg and rudely interrupt at the same time, but I understood his impatience.

“I think so,” Sarah admitted. “But I want something in return.”

I can’t say I was surprised. The supernatural world runs on a barter system, and all three of us were a part of that world whether
we wanted to be or not.

Isaac’s face took on a haunted, freaked-out expression. “You can’t have my soul.”

“Oh darn,” Sarah said dryly. Then what she saw in Isaac’s eyes made her soften. “It’s all right, Isaac. I know you’ve been through a lot, but not all magic is evil.”

It’s possible that the look she gave me was a tad pointed.

“So what do you want?” I didn’t try to keep the suspicion out
of my voice. Any practitioner of magic who changes her name to “White” is either hiding something or declaring her affiliation, and Sarah had a good enough reputation that I was willing to take a chance on her out of desperation. But I didn’t trust the cunning folk any more than she trusted knights.

“A girl who works for me is missing…” she began.

We were behind the Stewarts’ house.
They lived at the top of a lightly wooded bank that led down to a river. Catching glimpses of that long, twisting body shining dark green through patches of vegetation, I repressed a shiver.

Sarah noticed my discomfort anyhow. “Do you hear music?”

“No,” I told her. “And my hearing is pretty good.”

That was an understatement.

“Courtney heard music,” she said absently. “I can hear an echo of
it myself. She climbed right out of her window and into the heavy rain like it wasn’t even there and stood right where I’m standing now. The music was all she could think about.”

“What are we talking about here?” I said. “Music made by one person or many? A flute? Harps? A violin? Bells?”

“It’s a guitar.” Sarah paused and her expression became a little too dreamy for my comfort. “It’s beautiful.”