The Parting Glass (Caitlin Ross Book 4) (13 page)

“Look, Spruce. I need to talk to Timber. Please. Is he there?”

“Yeah, he’s here. But good luck talking to him. He locked himself in my bedroom yesterday afternoon, and he’s been in there drumming ever since. It’s driving me insane. Hey!”

The sounds of a brief struggle floated down the line, and then Timber’s voice came on. I made an effort to stifle the thrill it sent though me. No nonsense. Just business.

“Where are you?”

“At a client’s house. Gina Polizzi’s.” I gave him the address.

“I’m on my way.”

I heard Spruce’s faint protest that he couldn’t take her car because she needed to go to work. Then the line went dead.

“Well?” Gina asked as I hung up.

“We should have reinforcements soon. Let’s go check on our guest.”

We went back to the dining room.

“Oh, fuck,” I said.

We had left the thing that looked like John Stonefeather out cold and tied in a chair. I knew we had. But it was no longer there. Although the old stockings were still knotted around the chair’s arms and legs, they didn’t restrain anything. Nothing at all. Only the clothes the thing had been wearing remained, and they were covered with strips of flayed skin and some kind of stringy goo. As if the Dark Being we had captured had just…dissolved.

“Oh, fuck,” I repeated.

“Did I kill it?” Gina asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Then where is it?”

No help for it: I had to lower my shield. I gulped as I let it go and sickness washed over me. Diffuse. Not centralized.

“It’s everywhere,” I croaked.

Emotions eddied around me, ebbing and flowing like the tide. Fear. Confusion. Frustration. Anger. Wanting. Sorrow. A pollution in my soul.

“We should get out of here,” said Gina.

“We can’t. Timber’s coming.” And the thing wanted him for some reason. I couldn’t let him face it alone.

Chill fingers brushed my heart, insubstantial as mist. Beside me, Gina gagged.

“Oh god. I feel it.”

“What do you want?” I demanded of the empty room.

A drawing inward, as of a snail pulling into its shell. A gathering. In the corner, by the buffet, a shadow began to coalesce. I sensed relief, of a sort. The thing had found a center. A lot of it still oozed throughout the house, and tendrils of black vapor kept stretching out and breaking off, getting lost and creeping along the floor. Each time it happened, I perceived another wave of pain and fear, and a high, keening sound scraped against my inner ear like the cry of some horrible, lost child. It almost made me pity the thing.

But it was getting stronger. More and more of it accumulated in the corner. I didn’t like to think what might happen when it collected itself altogether. It might not be able to do much without a body. Then again, it might.

The front door slammed open and rapid footsteps rang in the hall. He’d been quicker than I had expected. Either Timber had driven like a maniac, or Spruce lived closer than I reckoned.

“Caitlin!” he called.

“In here!” I glanced over my shoulder in time to see him run into the living room, face grim and hands entirely empty, and I felt a surge of exasperation. What in seven hells had he been thinking? Weren’t there some shaman’s tools he should have brought along? A drum? A smudge stick? Anything?

Timber halted in the doorway, his eyes fixed on the shadow. In just the few moments since his arrival, it had gotten bigger, its center denser. A tentacle of smoke reached toward Gina and writhed back. A few smaller ones crept along the carpet.

“Holy shite,” Timber breathed, awed. “I’ve not seen anything like that outside the paths. Where did it come from?”

“Never mind where it came from,” I snapped. “Can you do anything about it?”

“Aye, I can. It’s my job to do something about it.” He reached under his shirt for the thong around his neck. “That’s someone’s soul. Or a piece of one.” He eyed the thing from under that unruly lock of hair. “Quite a large piece.”

The shadow exuded another thick tendril. This one quested toward me. When it brushed my face, I felt a rush of panicked hope through the overwhelming vileness of it. I shuddered.

“Well, do your job, then.” I choked.

Timber drew out his Soul Catcher and set one end of it to his lips with a frown of concentration. After a moment, he lowered the bone tube again.

“I canna,” he admitted, grimacing. “It’s too scattered. Even if I tried, I couldna be certain of getting it all.”

“Well, now what?” Useless Scot. I wanted to kick him. “We can’t just leave it there! The thing’s frightened and in pain.”

When had I ceased to be afraid of it? Maybe when I’d heard it cry; it had sounded so miserable.

“I imagine so.” He regarded me thoughtfully. “You told me you can manipulate energy fields, aye?”

“Yes. What of it?”

“Can you contain it? Put it all in one place? Then I could get at it, ken.”

“I don’t know.” Doubt filled my voice. “I’ve never done anything like that before.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I believe now would be a good time to try.”

“Okay. Here goes.”

I drew my consciousness in, away from Timber, away from Gina, who was observing the whole thing with a look of mild amazement on her face, away from the thing in the corner. Deep in my own center, I paused, feeling my power. I didn’t have enough for something like this, so I pushed down and outward, concentrating on the sensation of my sandaled feet on the floor. There. Beneath me lay all the power anyone could want. Enough to destroy me if I didn’t take care. No human had the strength to contain it, let alone use it. Not without some kind of divine intervention. I sent a thin tendril of thought into it like a tap root, just enough to draw up a bit. The earth’s raw strength poured into me. My heart gave a ragged thump and I stumbled.

“Caitlin!” Gina sounded very far away.

“Hush.” A large hand gripped my shoulder, bracing me.

Breathe. Keep breathing. The air around me sparkled and snapped. I could see the way it fit together. Pretty. Distracting. Focus.

The thing in the corner darkened. It had gathered in more of itself. Good. That would make this easier. Now what? I knew how to shield myself. Could I throw a shield around the shadow? I’d have to leave an opening, so it wouldn’t be cut off from the parts of itself yet outside. And I’d need to run an attracting current through the whole thing, to bring more of it in. Okay. I could do that.

I shaped energy into something like an enormous bell jar, plopped it down beside the shadow thing and
pulled
.

My knees buckled.

“Steady.” Strength flooded me and I dragged myself up it.

My container began to fill, but the shadow fought me. Terror beat against me; it didn’t know what was happening. Still, I
pulled
. There was so much of it. Bits and pieces and drifts of it, all over the house. I sought them out with my mind, trying to drag them together. The shadow’s struggles intensified. Cold sweat broke out on my face.

Come on,
I thought.
We want to help you.

It heard me. The scattered fragments of it grabbed at the picture in my head of the place where I needed them to be. All at once, with a rush like a noxious wind, the bell jar filled. With a twist of my mind, I snapped it shut so nothing could escape. I glanced through the haze in my brain to the corner, where a horrible black cloud had formed.

“Smaller,” said Timber’s voice.

Grunting with effort, I
squeezed
, compressing the cloud from the size of a compact car, to that of an armchair, to that of a watermelon. It got thicker and denser by degrees, until it became blacker than black and quite motionless.

“That’s it,” I gasped. “That’s all I have.”

“It’ll do.” Timber removed his hand from my shoulder. The loss of the energy he had been giving me was like dying. “It’ll have to.”

He crossed the dining room in three long strides, putting his Soul Catcher to his lips as he went. Bending over the shadow thing, he sucked in a sharp breath. The blackness fairly leapt into the hollow bone.

Timber lowered the Soul Catcher from his mouth, coughing and spitting. “Ach! That’s foul, that is. But I got it,” he said with a satisfied grin.

I passed out.

Chapter Eleven

I
woke to darkness and pain, with an indescribable taste in my dry mouth. I tried to lick my lips. It didn’t help much.

“Gods,” I groaned, pressing a hand to my forehead. “My brain feels like it’s been used as an anvil.”

“Over strain, I expect,” Timber’s voice said from nearby, soothing and calm.

“That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“And you did it well. Can you open your eyes?”

With an effort, I lifted my heavy eyelids. Light flooded in, making me flinch. I was lying on the sofa in Gina’s living room. Turning my head, I saw Timber perched on one of the dining room chairs, which he had drawn up nearby, not quite close enough to touch me. The movement sent another jolt of pain through my head. “Urgh. Do you suppose Gina has some Tylenol?”

“We can ask.”

“Where is she?”

“Fixing us some lunch. She said we looked as if we needed it and I expect we do. Can you sit up?”

I floundered around on the sofa for a few seconds and at last succeeded in hauling myself to a sitting position. I felt utterly drained and my whole body ached. But Timber didn’t offer me any of his energy, and I didn’t ask. We weren’t working now. It would pass in time.

Timber didn’t look much better than I felt. His hair hung lank and unwashed about his striking face, and his skin was very pale, with dark rings of sleeplessness under the eyes. His eyes themselves were wrong, their usual fire dimmed.

“You look like a train wreck,” I observed. “Spruce said you were drumming all night.”

He brushed his hair back from his face in the gesture already familiar to me. “Aye.”

“What were you after?” It took almost all my remaining strength not to ask the other questions crowding my mind. Why did you leave the way you did? What did you tell your sister about me? Would you actually have called me if I hadn’t called you first? But he seemed to want to pretend the whole Solstice had never happened. And, well. So did I. We had to work together, after all.

“This.” He touched the Soul Catcher on its thong around his throat. It looked different. Darker. Stranger. I fancied I could see wisps of black mist oozing out the ends of it.

“I think,” Timber went on with a sigh. “Perhaps. I dinna ken. I walked the paths for a long while. It seemed so, at least; time can be peculiar there. Then I went…around a corner and bumped right into…a horror. Shocked me right back to my place of power. I shouted at my guides, ‘What in hell was that?’ My totem, she… She roared at me. ‘You must go now,’ she said. And she reared up, and she pushed me right out of the Journey. Right back into the World-That-Is.”

“Sounds painful,” I murmured, wondering what he’d neglected to tell me.

“Aye. It was, that.” He gave himself a brisk shake, and his eyes focused. “At any rate, then I heard Spruce talking to you on the phone. And here I am.”

“With a horror from the paths in your Soul Catcher,” I said. “Can it hold it?”

He glanced down. “It’s built to hold it.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll manage. It’s not bad. Just…heavy.” He shrugged. “Now what about you? How did you happen to walk into this?”

“Gina called me. She said a thing was trying to get at her. I came over.” I paused, remembering the wrenching nausea that had permeated the house. It felt better now. Almost back to normal. “Timber, you know it’s the same thing. The thing from the studio.”

“I wondered. Why would it be after Gina, though?”

“Because she was dating John Stonefeather.”

He sat straight up, a flush suffusing his haggard features. “Gods, Caitlin! You could hae told me!”

“I didn’t know! Gina’s always seeing somebody or other. She never names names.”

Timber settled back into his chair.

“It had a body at first.”

He lifted an eyebrow in interest. “Did it, now?”

I nodded. “It was wearing his shape. Stonefeather’s.”

“So what happened?”

“We backed it into a corner and Gina clocked it over the head with a frying pan.”

Timber’s mouth twitched. After a second, he couldn’t hold it in anymore and burst out laughing.

“Shut up! It wasn’t funny! It was terrifying!”

He clamped his mouth shut, but amusement still twinkled in his eyes. It heartened me to see it. He looked more alive than he had.

“We tied it up in a chair while I called you. But when I got off the phone, it had just…dissolved or something.”

“A cast iron frying pan, was it?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Iron is proof against magic and spirits in all kinds of traditions.” His voice took on a somewhat pedantic tone, and I thought I heard the Cultural Anthropologist speaking. “If it wasn’t used to being in a body, a hard blow with an iron pot might have been enough to knock it loose. Where did this happen?”

“Over there.”

I jerked my head in the direction of the dining room with hardly a wince; the headache had let up some. Timber got up to examine the remains. I didn’t much want to follow; one glance had been enough for me. But I hauled myself off the sofa and stumbled after him anyway. I still felt pretty shaky, and I thought moving might help.

“Hmmm.” Timber squatted down and studied the mess in the chair. “The clothes are real. This world, I mean. Fetch me a stick, will you?”

“A stick?”

“I’m not about to poke my bare hand into this muck.”

“I doubt Gina keeps piles of sticks lying around,” I grumbled, but I went over to the buffet and pawed through it until I found a bamboo chopstick I thought she wouldn’t miss.

“Here.”

Using the chopstick as a probe, Timber carefully lifted layers of gooey clothing, used skin and gobbets of congealed flesh that I hadn’t noticed before. Gross.

“No bones. Curious.” He bent over the chair, inhaling deeply. “No smell, either. Though the flesh appears decayed. And the skin’s dry. I’ve seen such skin on mummies, or bodies that have been left out for a while.” He prodded the remains some more. “There’s some kind of vegetable matter here. Fibrous. Root, maybe. And this.” He lifted the chopstick, trailing a long string of slime. “I’ve no idea what this is.”

“Spirit glue?” I suggested.

“Perhaps.” He dropped the chopstick onto the chair and sat back on his heels. “I’ll tell you something, though. There isn’t enough mass there to make up a body. Not a whole one.”

“It had a body. It looked quite whole to me.” But I recalled the odd weightlessness of the thing when it had hit the coffee table.

“I believe you.” Timber stood.

“If that’s not all of it, where’s the rest of it?” I asked, disturbed.

“I dinna ken.”

Just then, Gina emerged from the kitchen bearing a tray of tea and sandwiches, cutting off further conversation. She took the tray into the living room and set it on the coffee table. None of us wanted to eat in the dining room. It was a silent meal, unbroken even by small talk.

Afterward, we dealt with the chair. Timber carried it outside while I hunted in the kitchen and located a five-pound bag of sea salt. Once I had given the chair a liberal coating, Timber smashed it up with a giant sledge hammer Gina happened to have in her shed. We stacked the fragments in Gina’s fieldstone grill, doused them with charcoal starter and set the whole mess on fire.

“Sorry about the chair,” I told Gina as we watched it burn.

She took it with relative calm. “I wasn’t about to sit in it ever again. Poor John. I do hope he’s all right.”

When the chair had burned down to coals, Gina escorted us to the front door.

“Thank you so much.” She sounded so matter of fact, we might have been exterminators come to deal with a bad roach problem. I had a weird impulse to reply with, “Let us know if you have any more trouble, ma’am.”

“Aye, well.” Timber looked almost embarrassed. I wondered if he’d ever done a job for a Mundane stranger before. “Keep safe. Come on, Caitlin. I need to get Spruce’s car back or she’ll take my skin off. And we need to talk.”

I had no fear he meant to talk about anything but the job. Still, I didn’t want to get into a small car with him. Not yet. To my relief, Gina stepped in to rescue me.

“Oh, I want a word with Caitlin.” She turned to me. “If that’s all right.”

“Sure. I’ll catch up with you in a bit,” I told Timber. “Where does Spruce live?”

“Those big apartments on Broadway, up from the health food market.”

“I know them. Okay. Give me half an hour, forty-five minutes. Meet me…” Someplace neutral. Someplace safe. I had no intention of ever having Timber in my home again. “In the park on Broadway and Canyon. Near the band shell.”

He didn’t look too pleased at leaving me behind, but he nodded and left without giving me an argument. I watched the horrible Pacer pull away from the curb with a stupid ache in my heart.

“Caitlin.” Gina spoke from behind me. I’d forgotten all about her.

“Oh. Yeah. What’s up, Gina?”

“That man is in love with you.”

“What?” Timber? In love with me? The words didn’t make sense. They were a bad joke. “No. Not a chance.”

“He’s trying hard not to show it, but he is.” I must have appeared as astounded as I felt, for she gave me a wry smile. “Trust me. I’ve been around a few times, and I’m old enough to be your mother. The look on his face when you collapsed… Well. He might have been gut shot. I’m certain he expected to see his bowels in his hands, once the shock wore off. Then he scooped you up and carried you to the sofa, and refused to leave. I had to make him sit down.”

Well, of course. I’d known it must have been Timber who carried me to the sofa. Being Timber, he wouldn’t just leave me lying on the floor. But…

“He’s a Healer. It’s what he does,” I said.

“It’s more than that.” She gazed at me for a long time. “I didn’t think you knew. And I can’t tell how you feel. You keep yourself closed, you know. So I wanted to ask you, please, to go easy on him. He’s kind, and he has a soft heart. The big ones often do.”

I was too astonished to speak for quite a while.

“Gods, Gina,” I said at last. “Why do you keep coming to me for advice about men?”

She gave me a sad smile. “Those who can’t do, teach.”

By the time I reached the park where I had agreed to meet Timber, I had reached new heights of being pissed off. Who did Gina think she was? What gave her the right to mess in my life? Timber was
not
in love with me, no way. We’d been thrown together by chance, and things had got out of hand. And I was supposed to “go easy” on him? Please! What about me? What about my feelings? He hadn’t exactly gone easy on
them
! I had a reasonably healthy sense of self, but having a man swear and run away when he woke up next to you left a mark.

Timber was already waiting on a bench in the third row of seats in front of the band shell. I stomped over and plunked myself down beside him. He raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“I take it what Gina had to tell you wasn’t welcome.”

“She wanted to give me advice! She thinks she’s my mother!” Of course, my blood mother would never have done any such thing. But still.