Widdershins (23 page)

“When you switched back to your Jameson’s.”

“But only the one,” I said.

“I wish I could say the same. I shouldn’t have stayed up so late.”

I nodded. “Good music, though.”

“That’s always my downfall. Good Scotch and music.”

There’d been some playing around the table before Jilly and I called it a night. The others were still at it when we left.

“We never settled up yesterday,” Andy said after a moment.

He pulled some money out of his pocket and offered it to me.

“Here you go,” he said. “It’s a quarter of what we made for the two shows. And thanks again for driving all the way out here to help us out. You really added a lot.”

“It was good fun.”

Andy nodded. “That it was. And we were wondering . . . we’ve got a few more weeks of work lined up and since Siobhan’s not going to be able to play for a while, well, we were wondering if you’d consider sitting in until she’s better. It’ll be for the same as yesterday: a fourth of whatever we make.”

I hadn’t picked up the money he’d put on the table.

“What about Siobhan?” I asked.

“We’re going to cover for her out of our share.”

I shook my head. “No. I’ll play the gigs, but for a fifth of what we’re getting paid.”

“That’s not fair to you,” Andy said. “Siobhan’s our responsibility.”

“We’re all each other’s responsibility,” I told him.

Though I could tell he was pleased, I knew he was going to argue some more. And he might well have, except just then Siobhan herself appeared in the door to the restaurant. She wore nothing but the oversized T-shirt that obviously served as her nightie and had a panicked look in her eyes.

“She’s gone!” she cried. “You’ve got to come.”

“Who’s gone?” Andy asked.

We were both on our feet and halfway to her when she replied.

“Lizzie,” she said. “They’ve taken her—right out of her bed.”

“Who’s taken her?” Andy asked.

But I already had a sense of what she meant and said, “How do you know?” at the same time.

Andy gave me a puzzled look.

“Because all her stuff’s still here,” Siobhan said. “If she’s gone out walking, then all she’s wearing is panties and a T-shirt shorter than this. So they
must
have taken her. We have to find her.”

I nodded. “And you need to get dressed.”

“I’m not going back up there . . .”

“We’ll be with you.”

Andy plucked at my arm as I started to follow her to the stairs.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Siobhan thinks the fairies have stolen Lizzie.”

“Oh, for god’s sake.”

But then I realized something else and got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Because Jilly was missing, too.

“Wait a moment,” I said as we got to the door of the room I shared with Jilly.

It took me only a moment to see that her clothes still lay on top of her bag where I’d put them last night. I knew she hadn’t taken her wheelchair, because I’d noticed it before I’d gone downstairs. Now I saw that her canes still leaned in the corner by the head of her bed.

“They got her, too,” I said as I rejoined the others in the hall.

“Now just hold on,” Andy started.

But I ignored him and led the way to Siobhan and Lizzie’s room. I went ahead in, but Siobhan hesitated in the doorway, blocking Andy from entering.

“I know what she has with her on this trip,” Siobhan said from where she stood, “and she didn’t take anything with her. Not her clothes, not her purse, not her
fiddle.
”

She said the last as though it was the clincher, and for many of us who played the instrument, it was. I couldn’t imagine going anywhere without mine. Downstairs to the restaurant for breakfast, yes, but anywhere further? Not likely.

I took a closer look at the bed. It was hard to tell, but the covers appeared to have been thrown back, or pulled off roughly. Half of them were puddled on the floor.

“She was taken right out of her bed, wasn’t she?”

I turned to see Siobhan standing right behind me. Andy came into the room and looked around.

“It’s not possible, is it?” he said. “Tell me it’s not possible.”

“It shouldn’t be,” I said. “But it is.”

Because I’d been through something too much like this before. Just a couple of years ago, Saskia had been stolen away into the otherworld—not by fairies, exactly, but it wasn’t all that different, really. One moment she was talking to my brother Christy, the next she’d vanished from their apartment, just disappeared, right before his eyes. She wasn’t alone, either. Hundreds of people were taken away from their homes, swallowed into a Web site that had a physical presence in the otherworld.

It was all over the news when it happened—and then it wasn’t. The fact that it had ever taken place was wiped away by the spirits that live in the wires. It’s this thing they have—spirits, fairies, and the like. Everything’s secret, including their existence. It’s an easier pretense to keep up than you’d think, because we help them in how we’ll grasp at any rational explanation to account for whatever supernatural experiences we might have.

I’d been doing it myself for years, but I couldn’t do it anymore once Saskia was taken. Because, as a direct result of that, I ended up meeting Galfreya and going into the otherworld myself, pretty much losing any chance I’d had of pretending that none of it was real.

“You should get dressed,” I told Siobhan.

She nodded, then lifted her bandaged arm. “Except I can’t do it on my own. I didn’t bring anything that buttons up.”

“I’ll help you,” Andy said. “It’s not like I haven’t seen it all before.”

That made me wonder if they’d been a couple at some point, but the thought was fleeting.

“Look,” Andy said before he followed Siobhan into the bathroom. “Maybe we should check with Con first. I mean, Lizzie wasn’t in there when I went to bed, but who knows? He’s been making eyes at her ever since he joined the band. She could have gone in after I went downstairs.”

“And Jilly is there to make it a threesome?”

“Well, I didn’t mean that . . .”

“They’ve both disappeared wearing only what they went to bed in,” I said. “I don’t think they’re with Con, charming though he is.”

“Not Lizzie, for sure,” Siobhan said from the bathroom door. “Now come help me, Andy. I’m getting the creeps staying in this room.”

I turned away and looked out the window.

When Saskia disappeared, the first person Christy called was me, not that I was much help, because what did I know about that kind of thing? He and Christiana were the experts in the family, not me. But now, when I took out my cell phone, it was Galfreya’s number that I punched in.

She answered on the first ring.

“Hello, Geordie,” she said.

This wasn’t her being a seer. Even fairies have caller ID.

“Does this mean you’re not angry with me?” she added.

“I don’t know that I was ever angry,” I told her. “I’m more confused and a little hurt.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t handle it well, did I? But I didn’t know what else to do. All I knew was that I could keep you from danger by making sure you stayed near the court.”

I so wasn’t ready to get into this right now.

“That isn’t why I called you,” I said. “I’m in the Custom House Hotel in Sweetwater—do you know where that is?”

“Yes.”

“We’re having fairy trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Bogans have kidnapped two women from their beds.”

There was a long moment of silence—not the kind that comes when the person on the other end of the line doesn’t know what to say and you’re just getting ambient noise through the receiver, but utter silence, as though the line had gone dead.

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“Who are you talking to?” Siobhan wanted to know.

She and Andy had come out of the bathroom, and I turned to look at them.

“A friend who I hope can help us,” I said, “except we seem to have been cut off. Hello, hello?” I added, speaking into the phone.

“We’re here,” Galfreya said. Her voice came from the receiver again. “Just in front of the hotel. I can see you in the window. Is it okay if we come up?”

I turned back to look outside and she really was there, wearing her usual baggy skateboarder pants and a tight top, standing on the sidewalk below with Hazel and Edgan on either side of her. Hazel waved when she saw I was looking.

“Um . . . sure,” I said.

And then, almost before I got the words out, she and the treekin appeared in the middle of the room.

“Holy shit!” Andy cried.

He took a step back, tripping against the footboard of Siobhan’s bed and went sprawling across it. Siobhan stood staring at the fairies’ sudden appearance with big eyes and an open mouth.

“It’s okay,” I told them. “This is Mother Crone, Hazel, and Edgan.” I pointed to each as I said their names. “And this is Siobhan and Andy,” I added for the fairies’ benefit, finishing the introductions.

“You . . . they . . .” was about all Siobhan could get out.

She backed up slowly and sat on the end of the bed that Andy had tripped over. Andy pushed himself into an upright position.

“How . . . how did you do that?” Andy asked the fairies.

Galfreya turned one of her hundred-watt smiles on him.

“Do what?” she asked.

“Just appear like that.”

“We travelled through the between.”

“The between,” Andy repeated. “Right. Of course.”

I held up my hands and made two fists.

“Look at it this way,” I said. “This is our world, this is the spiritworld. They’re connected by another . . . well, world’s not really the best term. Let’s say they’re connected by a place that’s wider than the whole of our world in places, thin as a veil in others, and it’s called the between. Time moves differently there, just like it does in the otherworld. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. Which can be confusing, for sure. But if you know the right paths to take, you can move almost instantaneously from one place to another by going through it.

“But the thing is,” I added, turning to look at Galfreya, “to be able to do the instant travel bit, you usually have to have been to your destination before. Otherwise you could end up just about anywhere.”

“I haven’t been keeping tabs on you,” Galfreya said. “We were able to get here so quickly because Edgan has been following some bogans for me, and they took him here last night.”

Andy was staring hard at Hazel and Edgan, the one like a piece of a forest come to life with a body made out of twigs and leaves and moss, the other like an animated cartoon with his spark-plug nose and a computer mother-board for a torso.

“So Lizzie wasn’t shitting us,” he said. He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular, just thinking aloud. “You guys are for real, just like the bogans that attacked her.”

“Bogans attacked a friend of yours?”

“A couple of nights ago,” I said. “We think they came back last night and grabbed her and Jilly. Why was Edgan following bogans?”

“They were acting suspicious: wandering outside our territories, having clandestine meetings with one of the native spirits of this land.” She smiled. “You know me, I like to stay informed.”

“So you had them followed.”

She nodded.

“Did Edgan see those bogans take our friends?” I asked.

“No. It must have happened after he came back to report to me.”

“I don’t understand,” Siobhan said. “Why would they want to push me down the stairs, or kidnap Lizzie and Jilly? What did we ever do to them?”

Galfreya sat on the other bed, the treekin scrambling up to perch behind her. That left only me standing, so I sat beside Andy.

“You need to tell me what’s been happening,” Galfreya said.

So we did. Not as clearly, or in as linear a fashion as maybe Christy would have, but Galfreya was patient and we got the story out. Then she told us what she knew. After she had Edgan play back the conversation he’d recorded last night, he turned on one of the PDAs that was attached to his torso to show us a picture he’d snapped of this Odawa that the bogans were with.

It was a side-shot, not particularly clear. The small size of the PDA’s screen didn’t help, either. But looking at it, I remembered the tall man I’d seen at the back of the bar last night, staring at Lizzie.

“I think he was at the show last night,” I said. “I saw a man in sunglasses at the back of the room during the last set who seemed awfully interested in Lizzie, but when I went to point him out to her, he’d already done a fade.”

“But what does he
want
with her?” Galfreya said.

“I don’t think he wants Lizzie at all,” Siobhan said. “She only just met this Grey guy so she hardly knows him. They’re talking about someone who’s his girlfriend.”

Galfreya nodded. “Except they think
she
is.”

“Bogan logic,” Hazel said, then snickered. “As if they had any.”

“What did you see last night?” I asked Edgan.

“Little enough,” the little techno treekin replied. “They were by the riverbank when I got here, Big Dan and Odawa watching the hotel, while the others were drinking beer, which they probably stole from somewhere. I couldn’t get close enough to hear what they were saying before they all went off into the between where I couldn’t follow.”

“Wait a sec’,” Andy said. “I thought you guys just used this between to get here.”

“We did,” Galfreya replied. “But it’s hard to go unnoticed in it. Everything has more presence over there. If Edgan had gone after them, they would have quickly realized he was following them.”

“So that’s why this Odawa guy wanted to walk to Sweetwater,” Siobhan said. “He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.”

“So it would appear,” Galfreya said. “I would dearly like to know what he’s up to, why he’s stolen away your friends.”

“It doesn’t really matter why they were taken,” I said. “Or whatever’s going on between you fairies and the native spirits. What we need to do is figure out where Jilly and Lizzie are and get them back.”

“Of course,” Galfreya said. “I’ll need a bowl and some water—preferably from the river.”