Widdershins (39 page)

I’m thinking of some of the experiences I’ve had, especially those in the Greatwood. I’m thinking of Joe and the crow girls and the gemmin, these lovely spirits of a place that collect stories and have the most amazing violet eyes. I’ve had all sorts of wonderful encounters with spirits and magic, but I don’t suppose this is the place to get into it. But I can’t entirely let it go, so I settle for:

“It can fill you with such joy and awe,” I tell Lizzie, “that it feels like you can’t possibly contain it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind a shot of some of that right about now,” Lizzie says.

“You’ve seen some of the worst,” Timony tells her. “When we get the chance, I’ll show you the best, as well. But first . . .”

“First, we have to figure a way out of here,” I say, “and let me tell you, I’m totally open to suggestions.”

“Well, it’s your world,” Lizzie says. “Can’t you just make it let us go?”

I shake my head.

“And there’s nothing I can do, either,” Timony says when he looks at her. “No matter where I push or prod, the way out is closed to me as well.”

I guess it’s because we’re so into our conversation that we don’t realize that we’re not alone anymore. We don’t know until a sweet child’s voice suddenly says:

“There they are.”

We look up to see Mattie pointing at us. Her giant bear is just a raggedy plush toy, held against her chest with her other arm. Beside her . . .

My heart goes still. I can’t breathe.

Beside her is Del.

Del and the priest I caught a glimpse of earlier. Dear old Father Cleary.

But it’s Del who grabs my gaze, and I can’t look away.

Raylene told me she cut him with a knife the night she ran away from home, cut him bad enough in the leg that he was still walking with the trace of a limp when she saw him years later. He was also a fat, alcoholic loser, living in a trailer park.

But that was her Del. The one that lives in the real world.

Mine’s from before, when all of Tyson County was still his playground and nobody’d dare give him a hard time. Tall and lean, that lick of hair hanging down on his forehead. Dark-eyed and mean, even when he’s smiling. Maybe especially when he’s smiling.

“You did good,” Del says, and he rubs the top of Mattie’s head, mussing up her hair.

She beams up at him.

All the guilt I was feeling, for what I did to her when I was a kid, for
making
her . . . it all just drains away. But it’s not replaced by anger. There’s only fear.

No, fear’s too tame a word.

I’m terrorized.

“Is that him?” Lizzie asks from beside me.

But I can’t answer. I can’t move.

Lizzie and the doonie get to their feet, neither of them quite sure what to do. It’s not like there’s any apparent threat. It’s just a good old boy and a priest and a cute little girl, holding her teddy bear.

“They’re so old now,” the priest says. “Why does the good Lord let sweet little girls grow up, anyway?”

Del grins. “What, they’re too old for your tastes? Well, you old perv, like the old saying goes, I may get older, but my girlfriends never will. ‘Cept here we don’t have to go looking for new ones. I can just make ‘em younger.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t say a thing, but I feel something happening to me. I can’t tell what until Lizzie speaks.

“What the fuck?”

It’s a little girl’s voice. I glance at her and see that she’s small now. Younger. Eight, maybe nine years old. I lift my hands and they’re a child’s hands. I’m still the me I always was, but now I look like a little kid, just as Lizzie does.

What has Del
done
to us?

“Fight this enchantment,” the doonie says. “It’s up to you how you appear in the otherworld—what shape you wear.”

My gaze goes to him. He’s unaffected by what’s happened to us.

What enchantment? I want to ask him. Since when did my white trash brother become some kind of wizard?

But my tongue’s still stuck to the roof of my mouth. Paralyzed with fear, I can’t speak, can’t move.

“I can’t do a lick with that boy,” Del says. “You wanna give it a try?”

Father Cleary shakes his head. “He’s just going to want to do dirty things with our little girls.”

He makes a brushing away motion with his hands and just like that, Timony’s gone.

They’re
both
wizards?

What kind of sick world have I made inside my head?

At that moment Lizzie rushes forward, but the two men sidestep her rush. Del sticks out a foot, and she goes sprawling in the grass.

“Somebody needs a good spanking,” the priest says.

Del laughs, but his gaze is on me.

“Knock yourself out,” he tells Father Cleary. “Me, I’ve got some unfinished business with little Jillian here.”

He takes a step closer, and I cringe back against the trunk of the tree.

“I hear you’ve been telling tales,” he says, “and you know what happens to little girls with big mouths, right?”

My gaze darts right and left. But there’s no help, no escape—even if I could get my muscles to work.

I see the priest pick up Lizzie. He laughs as she bats ineffectually at his big hands holding her. Mattie’s watching it all with this small, awful smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“Well, toodle-oo,” she says.

“Don’t you stray too far,” Del tells her.

She doesn’t answer. She just walks away. He doesn’t turn to see her go. He’s too busy reaching down for me.

Big Dan

Big Dan knew he shouldn’t have let
his nephew go off with that pluiking green-bree. He didn’t doubt that Rabedy would handle the blind man—not after he’d given his nephew Odawa’s true name. No, that wasn’t the problem at all. The problem stood beside him, smelling like she hadn’t washed yet this week, although that wasn’t stopping her from leaning in close to speak in his ear with a hoarse whisper.

“Is this what you have in mind for my boy?”

Gretha Collins was unattractive even for a bogan—a squat barrel of a woman with a nose like a ski slope, wide-set eyes, and lips so thin they might as well have been nonexistent. Her hair was always greasy, hanging down her back in long untidy braids, and she dressed like a ragpicker who was too fond of her own wares.

She was also Big Dan’s sister, Rabedy’s mother.

They were attending the funeral for Gathen Redshanks in an empty lot, deep in the Tombs, with abandoned buildings rising up all around them. It had proved to be a far more sizable gathering than Big Dan had expected. All the Redshanks were in attendance, which was only to be expected, but at least two-thirds of the other local bogan clans had gathered as well, including a sizable showing of Flynns and Burtons, both of whom had been feuding with the Redshanks for about as long as anyone could remember.

But it had been a long time since a bogan had fallen in battle. At least that was the story Big Dan had told. How they’d been attacked by a pack of canids in the otherworld, how Gathen had fallen in that struggle, but not before he’d driven the canids off through the sheer ferocity of his own assault.

Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea—not if the ugly murmurs and whispers he’d been hearing among the crowd were any indication. All they’d need was for a gang of pluiking Redshanks and their kin to go looking for revenge against the green-brees. That would bring the whole business right to Tatiana’s attention, and then there’d really be hell to pay.

But at the moment Big Dan’s main concern was Gretha, worrying over the son she only paid attention to at times like this, when it gave her a chance to rag on Big Dan.

“Rabedy’s in about as much danger as you are,” he told his sister.

Less, really, he added to himself, because he was in no mood for her games today and if she kept it up, he’d see how a good whack across the back of the head might set her straight.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Off in the otherworld with some murdering greenbree. That’s safe as plucking flitter wings afore you bite off their little screeching heads. Safe as rooting for food in a garbage bin instead of stealing it off a table the way a good bogan would. Safe as—”

“We’re at a funeral,” Big Dan said, interrupting her. “Could you show some respect?”

“What? For a Redshanks?”

“He was one of my men.”

“Aye, and much good that did him.”

“Give it a rest,” Big Dan told her.

She had something to add to that as well, but the look in his eye made her keep it to herself.

Big Dan turned his attention back to where Gathen’s body lay on a pyre of scrap wood, newspapers, and whatever inflammable items could be found on such short notice. It wasn’t like the old days, when they could go into the forest and get what they needed. Here they had to scrounge through the city streets and back alleys to find any sort of fuel at all. The whole mess had been doused in gasoline to ensure a quick ignition and the smell of the gas drifted throughout the empty lot where they had gathered for the funeral.

Stourin Redshanks, Gathen’s grandfather, stood in front of the pyre, a flaming brand raised high in his hand. Though he cut a fine figure for an old bogan, Big Dan was more mesmerized by the sparks that came from the brand as Stourin waved it back and forth above his head. Any moment, Big Dan expected one of those sparks to land in the cloud of Stourin’s frizzled grey hair and set the whole hairy bush on fire.

“He was a good lad, Gathen was,” Stourin said, his voice ringing and clear. “He had many years left in him. But those stoogin’ canids didn’t see it that way. Oh, no. Cut him down and leave his kith and kin to grieve the loss while they go laughing on their way. And for what? What crime did Gathen commit ‘sides being a bogan?”

Many of those gathered had staves which they pounded on the ground in response. Those that didn’t, stamped their feet.

That brought Big Dan’s attention away from the sparks and Stourin’s hair.

Oh, he thought. Maybe he shouldn’t have made up that story. He’d meant well, but he hadn’t wanted this. Even his own men—who had been there with him and heard Rabedy’s tale, who’d seen Gathen’s body without a dog or wolf bite upon it—were getting caught up in the anger against the canids. They
knew
how Gathen had really died. Taken out by some pluiking slip of a girl. But here they were, getting carried away by the elder Redshanks’ speechifying.

“Tatiana will tell us we need peace,” Stourin went on. “That we must maintain the truce. But what do we tell her?”

“No!” almost a hundred bogan voices cried in return.

It made a sound loud enough to be heard halfway across the Tombs.

This wasn’t good. This wasn’t any bloody good at all.

Big Dan had only meant to give Gathen some measure of respect in how his life had ended. A tale of a battle with canids seemed so much more noble a death than the truth.

“And if she sends her guard to tell us different?” Stourin demanded.

“We’ll send them back in pieces!” someone shouted to a general roar of approval.

This was truly, pluiking bad, Big Dan thought. But it was too late to own up now. Better the anger be turned on the court’s guard and the canids than on him. And besides, by the time Tatiana actually sent anyone to look into this, all the hubbub would probably have died down, just the way it always did. There’d be no pack of bogans heading off into the wild and the green to hunt down Gathen’s supposed murderers. That was too much like work. A more likely scenario was that the next canid some of these bogans ran into here in the city might have himself a bit of a hard time. But so what? Big Dan’s sympathies had never run with canids, innocent or not.

He let himself relax and concentrated on the moment at hand. He thought of the good times he’d had with Gathen, the stupid little bugger. Lairds, but he was a bogan’s bogan, always into something and none of it good.

When Stourin stopped for a breath in the middle of a particularly descriptive rant against the canids who’d murdered his grandson, Big Dan let himself get into the spirit that the others were showing.

“We’ll hunt the pluikers down like the dogs they are!” he shouted.

That brought him a response of thumping staves and stamping feet as loud as any Stourin had received. Big Dan let himself look stern, hiding the grin that was building inside him. Maybe this was a better way. Instead of making deals with some pluiking green-bree, to just take what they wanted from the green and the wild. Bugger them all.

But then the guard had to arrive, twenty strong and with a gruagagh in tow, and everything went very bad indeed.

The guards all had bows, with arrows nocked and ready. They fanned out when they saw that they were outnumbered five-to-one, and if their captain had had any sense at all, he’d have withdrawn and come back another day.

But they had a gruagagh with them—a tall, gangly wizard with dark eyes, who was too full of his own importance the way gruagaghs inevitably were. He ignored the numbers and the anger of the crowd, and called out the names of Big Dan and his boys, their true names, so they had to come stepping out from where they stood with the others, ready to be magically marched back to the queen’s court to face whatever pluiking business she might have with them.