Widdershins (38 page)

“So what are we waiting for?”

“Nothing. Except I’m going alone—it’s safer that way. You and Walker check out where that trail leads, see if you can’t get a line on your friend Lizzie.”

“And Odawa?” Walker asked.

Joe looked up between the trees where the giant salmon had swum away through the air, a bogan clinging to his dorsal fin.

“Damned if I know how we’re going to deal with him,” he said.

Without wasting any more time, he stepped away into the between and it was just Walker and me.

“Are you ready for another trip into the between?” he asked.

“If it gets us any closer to finding Jilly and Lizzie . . . just bring it on.”

Grey

Joe’s concise with whoever he’s got
on the other end of the phone, just laying out the main facts with none of the details. He listens for a moment, then looks over to us.

“Cassie’s with Geordie,” he says, “and they’ve got something that I need to check out. Can you hold the fort here?”

He steps away into the between before either Jack or I can respond.

Mother Crone gets up from her chair, heading for where Joe disappeared. I don’t know if she’s planning to follow or what, but Jack grabs her arm as she passes by him.

“I didn’t hear an invitation,” he says.

“It’s just—”

“And according to Tatiana, we’re free to come and go as we like—or did I get that wrong?”

“No,” she says. “But I’m concerned about Geordie.”

“Then maybe you should have been helping him instead of running to the queen to see what you’re supposed to do. Do you have to check in with her to see if it’s okay to blow your nose?”

“You don’t—”

“Yeah, I know. You like me as much as you don’t like Joe. Feeling’s mutual, darling. But right now, you need to keep being a good little fairy and sit down and wait with us like Tatiana told you.”

Her face is dark with anger, but she shakes her arm free of Jack’s grip and returns to her chair. Her two little treekin glare at us from where they’re sitting, but Jack only grins at them and comes back to me.

I turn so that I’m facing away from them.

“You’re being a little harsh,” I say, soft, so only he can hear.

Jack motions me out of the chair with a nod of his head. When I get up, he walks me to the far side of the room.

“Fm just playing the card Joe would want me to,” he says, pitching his own voice so low that I have to lean in to hear him. “Until we know where everybody stands on this, we need to act a little hard-core. Don’t forget—they outnumber us something like a hundred to one in this place.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” I tell him.

Jack nods. “But just for the record, I want you to know that Joe’s normally an easygoing guy. You look up patience in the dictionary and there’s his mug, grinning up at you. And he’s not one for getting all messy and physical, either—that usually falls to me. But there’s certain things you don’t do to him and messing with his family’s the big one. That’s when the promise in those crazy eyes gets real.”

“I got that,” I tell him.

“So what’s with this Odawa guy? He really so powerful?”

“Hard to say. You know the story of the first salmon? The one that sleeps in a pool at the beginning of the world and how when he wakes the world will end?”

“Aw, come on. Don’t tell me this is him.”

I shake my head. “No, but they’re kin. They share the same gifts of knowledge and . . . I was going to say wisdom, but that’s something Odawa lost along the way.”

“Maybe it’s got something to do with you plucking his eyes out.”

I can tell from the tone of his voice that Jack’s just trying to get a rise out of me, but I answer him seriously.

“Maybe,” I say. “But remember, I thought he was dead at the time, frozen half in, half out of the water. The thing you need to keep in mind with Odawa is that he’s got a one-track mind and an indomitable will. That combination’s hard to make peace with.”

“Hard to fight, too,” Jack says.

“Hard to fight,” I agree, “and impossible to reason with.” I wait a beat, then add, “Look, if this is really about me, I should just stop trying to avoid the problem because it’s obviously not going to go away, and I don’t want anybody else to be hurt because of me. Let me track him down and we can finish this once and for all, just the two of us.”

“How’s his helping bogans hunt cerva supposed to hurt you?” Jack asks.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“The point is,” Jack says, “this isn’t just about you and him anymore. He’s crossed the line and needs to be taken down.”

“I said I’d do it.”

Jack nods. “But he’s old and powerful—you said so yourself. And if he’s in bed with bogans, who knows what else he’s been up to. You could go face him on your own, only to find he’s got an army and you don’t even have one person to cover your back.”

I shrug. “That’s the chance I’ll have to take. Anyway, if they kill me, it’ll still be over.”

“I don’t think so,” Jack says. “This has gotten too big for that now. You think Tatiana would be so concerned if it was just some little skirmish between a few bogans and cousins? You can bet that somewhere out there in the bush cerva are mustering.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were at the blessing ceremony—you saw the buffalo soldiers there.”

“Do you really think they would break the truce?”

Jack shrugs. “Anwatan’s not the first cousin to be killed by aganesha in the past few months. And the buffalo have a new leader—a hard-line warrior type. You know the kind.”

I do. The buffalo lost more than most of us when the aganesha landed on our shores to start their long, bloody march inland.

“The funny thing is,” Jack adds, “I’m not sure I want to stop them.”

I know exactly what he means. I don’t want to pretend that everything was perfect before the aganesha’s arrival, but things only seem to have gone downhill since then. Maybe what this world needs is a good cleansing.

“But see,” Jack says, “that’s where we’d be wrong. We’d be letting our personal feelings get in the way of what’s really important, which is that we take care of each other and this messy old world we’re living in. Because that’s why Nokomis put us here, right?”

I give a slow nod.

“Even,” he goes on, “when we feel we could really do without some of the people who are making the mess.”

I nod again, more reluctantly this time.

“So that’s why we need to get this business of Joe’s settled, because we need Joe on this. But he’s not going to be worth a damn while he’s worrying about Jilly.”

“And if we’re too late to help Jilly?”

Jack shakes his head. “Then we’re screwed because you don’t want to see the hurt that’ll go down if Joe loses it.”

“I don’t get it,” I say. “He’s not one of the original People. He’s not like Cody or Raven. He’s not even of one blood.”

“Canid and corbae,” Jack agrees. “But he’s got something old and dark in him. Some piece of the long ago that Raven didn’t use when he made the world. Don’t know what it is, and I doubt Joe does either—that’s even saying he’d admit it’s there—but if he gets turned around and goes all hard and looking for payback, that piece of the dark’s going to come roaring up through his soul, and we won’t have Joe to deal with anymore. We’ll have something new and a hundred times more dangerous.”

I give Jack a long, considering look.

“And this is who we need to make peace?” I finally ask.

Jack grins. “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Whatever that old power he’s got sleeping inside him is, if it wakes for a just cause, it’s going to be shining the light instead of bringing on the dark.”

“You ever heard the term ‘playing with fire’?”

“Sure. But none of that’s got to happen. We get him working on this—with his mind free of other worries—and nothing needs to wake up. It’s as simple as that. Joe’s got big-time peacemaking skills. Who do you think negotiated the last truce between us and the fairy courts?”

“I thought that got worked out between Tatiana and Raven.”

Jack nods. “And who do you think kept them talking?”

I glance over at Mother Crone and her pair of treekin. They’re pretending not to care what we’re talking about, but who are they trying to kid? I’d be wanting to know if I were in their shoes.

“So maybe,” I say, “we shouldn’t be taking such a hard line with the aganesha right now.”

“Maybe. But I want Joe in front of me telling me to back off before I do.”

“Except—”

“Yeah, I know.” He glances at the fairies and sighs. “Do you have any tobacco left? I’m a little short.”

I nod and pass him my pouch. He takes half of what I’ve got left and puts it in his own pouch, then rolls a cigarette one-handedly—showing off for the fairies, I suppose, since it’s sure not going to impress me—and lights it with his Zippo.

“Obliged,” he says, handing me back my pouch.

He has a drag, then returns to where we were sitting and offers the cigarette to Mother Crone. She looks as surprised as I am, and maybe she’s pissed off with us, but she knows enough protocol to understand what Jack’s doing. Nodding her thanks, she takes the cigarette from him.

They smoke it in silence. The little treekin are still glaring at us—or at least the one that looks like a walking shrub does; it’s hard to tell about the one with the spark plug nose—but you can feel the tension leaving the room. I’m not sure where we would have gone from there, but there’s movement in the doorway right then and we all look up.

It’s Tatiana. And this time she’s only got one guardsman with her. He looks totally worse for the wear—his clothes torn and dirty, face bruised and swollen, and he’s favouring one leg.

“Where’s Joe?” she asks.

“He got called away,” Jack tells her. He gives the beat-up guard a pointed look before adding, “What’s up?”

Tatiana looks the way Mother Crone did earlier, when Joe was grilling her—she really doesn’t want to tell us. But she doesn’t make Mother Crone’s mistake.

“We’ve got a problem,” she says.

Jack and I stand up.

“What kind of a problem?” Jacks asks.

His voice is mild, but he’s not fooling anybody. He’s alert and ready for trouble now, just as I am.

Tatiana glances at her guard.

“Maybe I should just let Corin tell you,” she says.

Jilly

It’s harder than I expect
to tell my story, mostly because of the doonie’s reaction to what I have to say. He stares at me in disbelief as I talk about my brother and the priest and all—experiences that are all too common in the world Lizzie and I come from.

“Humans really do such things to their own children?” Timony asks, unable to hide revulsion.

And I haven’t even gone into any real detail.

“That and worse,” I say.

“I can’t imagine it. Not even trolls or Redcaps would treat their own in such a way.”

What a great world it would be, to live where the kinds of things that happened to me are impossible to contemplate.

“Welcome to the real world,” Lizzie says. Then she turns to me and adds, “I knew you had a rough time growing up, but I had no idea it was anything like this.”

“It’s not important—” I start, but Lizzie cuts me off.

“How can you
say
that?”

“I just mean I’m not telling you about it to make anyone feel sorry for me. But you had to know the background because it’s the reason we’re here. Or at least, it’s the reason this place is here, that it exists.”

I go on to tell them about Mattie and her teddy bear that can turn into a giant version of the real thing, about the house two fields away and how I came to realize what this world is.

“I’m not so sure I like magic,” Lizzie says. “All it seems to bring is grief.”

I shake my head. “Oh, no. This isn’t the fault of magic. It’s us. People. And what we bring to it. Magic . . . the otherworld . . . it all exists as we shape it. And I guess if you’ve got a lot of baggage, it gets messy like this.”

“So we created the bogans that killed that poor deer girl and have been making my life so miserable?”

“No, there’s good and bad in the otherworld, same as in ours. And while the bad’s pretty extreme, so’s the good.”