Rhonda Rose
I often think about when I first saw her. So young, and so full of power.
So bored.
She had no idea what she was playing with, that night—how she roiled the essence of my world. She had no idea how rare she was, how valuable...how endangered.
I’m still not certain why I allowed her to live.
~~~~~
Meditation on Sandia Mountain Trail
Lisa McGarrity sat cross-legged on the tinder-dry ground above Bill Spring Trail, reaching for a meditative state. She wouldn’t be alone for long. She could hear her intruders—and, eyes closed or not, could see them. Convenient thing, the ethereal viewpoint.
But I don’t do people.
Ghosts, yes. The occasional darkside entity, sure. And of late, a variety of otherworldly beings varying from merely annoying to nearly apocalyptic. But not people.
Maybe they won’t see me. Small person, tucked up against a tree on the crest of a steep Sandia Mountain slope. It could happen.
She’d left the trail and come up this steep jut of land for the singular purpose of hunting what might remain of the hiker George Phelps. With several October days gone and the ethereal breezes blowing unusually brisk and dark, it seemed about time for the Southwest’s only reckoner to take a look.
Garrie View, her team called it, though they didn’t truly understand it, or what she could do from that place. Today it showed her the usual cool spots and warm spots and scary spots, breezes and gusts and bubbling uglies—and underlying it all, a new, persistent thread of darkness.
Not to mention the bright, distinct stamp of the oncoming human intrusion. Or the distant ringing male voices that came to her very ordinary ears—loud, without care for the peace they shattered. Out on a lark rather than appreciating this primal mountain and its harsh fall beauty.
Garrie touched the knife beside her leg—the knife that had come from a different world, with a handle that looked like nothing so much as black bone, and a blade that caught a coruscating pattern of light.
Not to mention an edge so impossibly sharp she routinely left inadvertent damage in her wake.
The voices faded into silence; perhaps the men had turned around. She went back to work, hunting what she’d come to find. Heeere, little ghosties...
She hadn’t always been this way—hadn’t been so automatically prepared for trouble. She’d once had merely a simple, healthy dollop of confidence nestled alongside good common sense, a reckoner of rare power working the Southwest region with a ghostly mentor in her past and a team of something-extra friends in her present. Lucia. Quinn. Drew.
But that had been before she’d fought semi-ethereal escapees from Kehar, and before she’d channeled the energy of a plasmic portal through her body. It had been before she’d tamed the wild ethereal winds that bore a new Sedona vortex in their wake.
It had definitely been before she’d watched Keharian bounty hunters carry away the limp form of the almost-human man she’d come to love.
But that man had taught her something about survival along the way—and she’d taught herself just as much. So now she sat cross-legged in the pine needles on the side of the mountain, the sun glinting off the pale electric-blue streaks in her hair and shimmering skin that had nothing to do with sparkly vampires and everything to do with the cataclysms she’d survived.
A faint spark of awareness tickled along the searching breezes, interrupting her awareness of that near intrusion. A Ghost Bob—because all of them were Bobs and Bobbies until she knew them otherwise.
This Bob was tentative, seeking...just barely responding. Not knowing how, and a skittery thing at that, fresh and still frightened.
She calmed the breezes, making a pool of safety where a pale spirit might go to coalesce and confirm itself to be the remnants of George Phelps. Perhaps he could give her an inkling of where the body lay; if not, she’d have to search it out, following the faint scent of his ethereal trail.
After that, things would get tricky; she’d have to contrive a realistic “stumble” over the body, or she’d have difficulty explaining what she’d learned. Things had changed since early summer, when the fugitive krevatas and their malformed portal had briefly wrenched the two worlds together. She could no longer simply alert Phelps’ family and let them make of it what they would.
Come on, Bob. You can do it—
A man’s voice intruded with jarring volume. “Awww, hey—you look lonely up there.”
Garrie’s pool of calm rippled; her target ghost slipped away, leaving only the echo of darkness.
“Whatcha doing?” another man asked, his reedy voice even closer—and oh hey, now he was on his way up the short, steep slope, his feet slipping in uncertain footing. “Meditating or something?”
“Or something,” she said without opening her eyes, still futilely casting for the frightened spirit. “How about you leave me to it?”
“Aww, why you gotta be like that?” Within reach, the owner of that voice. “We just wanna talk to you. Give us a smile, why don’t you?”
“She thinks she’s better’n us,” another voice came from below, full of resentment. That made three of them. “Skinny little bit of nothing, don’t know her place.”
The resentment must have been catching. “Hey, little puta, I come all the way up here to see you. Least you can do is open your eyes.”
She did just that, meeting the hot, annoyed gaze of a young man standing half his height over her, the rest of him still a few steps down the slope, dressed more for urban impact than a fall hike where the weather could turn on a dime. She returned his scowl. “I don’t want company.”
“It’s not my fault you’re all cute.” His fingers weren’t quite gentle when he tugged the lock of silvered hair running through her bed-head bangs.
“Really?” she said, and couldn’t hide her scowl. “You think it’s okay to touch me?”
“Why’d you dye your hair if you didn’t want attention?”
“She needs lessons in nice,” said the voice from below. “The girls in our neighborhood know better. You should show some respect, putita.”
“Go away,” she suggested, very much aware there were three of them and one of her, and that it should frighten her but didn’t.
So very much aware of how the day’s dark breezes coaxed a responding trickle inside her, a little swell of anger pressuring her from the inside out. New energies, still untamed and roiling within her. Breathe with it...ebb and flow...
Trevarr had taught her that.
“Just trying to admire you, eh?” He took up the silvered lock at the side of her head, his fingers closing tight. “Why you gotta be rude?” His other hand drew back, fingers poised to flick her cheek now that she couldn’t flinch away from that small assault.
Now, she should be frightened.
But she still wasn’t. Untamed...
That stinging little blow never landed. She jerked her head and hair away, caught his wrist, and pushed him back.
He stumbled on the slope, sliding back and down, and scrambled to regain his balance. His two friends cursed her and surged forward, the first of them already reaching to yank her from her perch.
But Garrie had started the summer by herding pale, pesky ghosts out of inconvenient places and ended it with blood on her hands and otherworldly breezes trapped within. Power coursed through her body; crushing loss drove her. Those dark Keharian energies now stirred with rising emotion, gathering breezes these fools couldn’t even see.
Dark, beguiling, surging...
The preternaturally sharp blade came to her hand in a warm fit of black bone against flesh. By the time the guy reached her, its point waited for him, gleaming subtly with something other than perfectly natural light.
His face contorted with anger. “Motherfu—!”
“Go away,” she said, if with a calmness she didn’t truly feel. Trevarr had once walked her through the process of letting those dark otherworldly energies go, ebb and flow—
But Trevarr wasn’t here. And all she’d wanted was the peace of this hillside. “Go. Away.”
He grabbed for the knife, his expression gone over to resentful fury. She jerked it aside, knowing he’d lose a finger before he ever even felt the inadvertent brush of the blade. It whispered over his arm, slicing skin and raising blood she’d never meant to shed.
Emotion rushed her, all resentment and anger and loss—
Garrie grabbed the dark energies and turned them to a point, stabbing at him with a weapon she should never have thought to wield. She reached for his friends, too, encircling them all in a barbed wire noose of sharp, red-edged bindings.
The young man cried out, jerking back and nearly falling again. His face registered dread and growing confusion, a vague but certain awareness of that circling darkness.
His friends staggered backward, losing attitude for wary fear. One of them started to say, “Maybe we oughta—”
“Let’s go,” interrupted the other of them, already turning to go, his face distorted with the struggle of fighting what he shouldn’t have felt.
The guy standing too close to Garrie lowered a trembling fist, blood dripping from what was no more than a shallow cut after all. “Witch.” His voice scraped over fear and accusation. “Bruja—!”
“Leave me alone,” she suggested, and twisted the dark bindings a little tighter.
He broke, scrambling down the hill to move off with his friends—all of them looking back with both fear and resentment, unable to understand what drove them but unable to stand against it.
Garrie sighed and laid the knife down beside her leg, oh so careful of that edge.
She really, really didn’t do people.
~~~~~
Sklayne dug his claws into chunky reddish Ponderosa bark and hissed silently at the men below, shifting from cat to his true form—bigger, lankier, a stubby lashing tail and much with the ears.
Not to mention the thumbs.
The Garrie didn’t know he was here. She didn’t know he’d followed her ethereal scent to this place, or that he’d watched over her as she worked, making herself vulnerable. She didn’t know he’d been ready as the men approached—that he would have stopped them had it been necessary.
That he could have.
Because the Garrie didn’t yet understand how things had changed those months earlier, the moment Trevarr had shouted the harsh syllables to release their bond.
The moment before the Keharian bounty hunters—Trevarr’s own kind—had dragged him away.
For Sklayne was no longer bound, even if certain subtle shackles lingered. Not to Trevarr, and not to the geas that had for so long prevented him from acting on a being of sentience.
These men, not of sentience. No, no.
And they wouldn’t pose any challenge for Sklayne—not for the entity Sklayne had become, living his life bound to Trevarr. Living longer than most of his kind, without access to the foolish curiosities that inevitably plagued them. Gathering understanding. Gathering power.
Finding most excellent snacks.
Sklayne settled slightly as the men left and Garrie relaxed back into a working pose, releasing the unearthly energies she should never have gathered in the first place. But she, like Sklayne, had been changed by their mutual loss.
She, like Sklayne, still intended to do something about it.
O wise the Garrie, he thought with approval as she left the knife unsheathed beside her thigh, resting her wrist over one knee of her crossed legs, the undertone of dark Keharian energy still weaving through her personal breezes.
The undertone of Trevarr.
After a moment, she made an annoyed sound. “I know you’re out there,” she said, and Sklayne instantly shrank himself, from true-form back to Abyssinian cat. Not-cat.
But the Garrie looked out over the fall’s evergreen woods and browning oak scrub, not up to Sklayne’s tree. She spoke to the flicker of personality echo she’d been calling up. The fresh ghost.
That frightened entity would not likely re-emerge in the wake of the Garrie’s darkly powerful ethereal gusts. The Garrie knew it, too. She sheathed Trevarr’s knife, showing it the proper amount of respect. She stood and brushed the seat of her jeans, grabbing up her little pack and snapping the belt over her hips.
The Garrie standing, Sklayne thought, was not so very much taller than the Garrie sitting. Not compared to the length of Trevarr. Not compared to the length of most anyone. Nor did she carry breadth or weight. Small person of much power.
Sklayne forbore to think scrawny. He thought, instead, what he’d felt from Trevarr. Spare. Toned. Wiry. Amazingly tight little—
Yes. Trevarr had thought such things. Though Sklayne thought it a shame that the Garrie could not—or did not—grow herself, considering her command over the breezes.
But it didn’t matter. Sklayne was here. Sklayne was free. And the Garrie...she was his.
She just didn’t know it yet.
~~~~~
By the time Garrie emerged from the Sandia Mountain trail into the Doc Long parking lot to the sight of her battered old Outback, she felt better. Calmer.
As she’d best be, if she didn’t want Lucia plumbing her secrets. Even if she had just clandestinely bared her teeth at two off-leash dogs that would have knocked her down, shoving them in a way that dogs always felt while their owner warbled blithely about their friendly nature.
Awesome. Parlor tricks from the mighty Southwest reckoner.
But still. No bruises on her chest. Which was, she thought, already as insignificant as it should be. No matter what Trevarr told her, not so much words as—
Trevarr.
The loss of him swamped her, stopping her in mid-step. It swelled up in her throat, tightening down...catching her breath. Trevarr—
Her thoughts spun away from here and now and the Doc Long parking lot to a place of darkness and containment and deeply spiced air, cool, bright metal pressing around her wrists, their poison seeping through to her bones, one arm aching deeply and gritty shards of pain twisting within an outstretched leg. A velvet-toned voice caressing her ears, promises of comfort that trailed a cutting lash—
Lucia’s voice sliced through the fugue—clear, cool, its musical tones so perfectly suited to the model-clean lines of her face. “Chicalet, you’re thinking of him again.”
Thinking of him? More like being him. What—”
Garrie clutched at her own reality, layering it over pain and loss. With great care, she gave Lucia a perfectly normal grumble. “Don’t peek.”
Reality put her back in the trailhead’s upper parking lot, her old Outback one of only two cars in residence. From the lower lot, beyond the toilets and picnic pavilion, a car door slammed.
“As if I have to peek,” Lucia said, not skipping a beat. She gave Garrie a Look.
Given that Lucia’s sensitivity to spiritual echoes had recently notched up a significant degree to include strong human emotions, and given that Lucia was far from happy about it, and given that she was Garrie’s best friend and the only one who had ever even met Rhonda Rose, Garrie offered the only correct response: she winced an apology.
Lucia, hand on hip, head tilted with that slight lift to her chin, only looked at her.
“It caught me by surprise,” Garrie admitted.
“Because of how you think about trying to find him when you should be sleeping,” Lucia told her, not even having to guess. “Chic, this is not good for you. There is nothing you can—”
But they’d had this conversation before, too, and Garrie wasn’t ceding it. Not now, not ever. “You don’t know that I can’t find him,” she said, and her voice was harder than she’d meant it to be. Harder and laced with the darkness she’d so recently tapped. “You don’t know that I can’t help him.”
Lucia closed her mouth. Deep brown eyes reflected an instant of hurt, and then she flicked an invisible piece of lint from her pristine blouse—a cap-sleeved thing with strategically placed eyelet lace that would have looked too cutesy on anyone else but simply looked crisp and beguiling on Lucia in the bright, strong mountain sunshine. “So,” she said. “How was the ghost hunting?”
Garrie went with it. “I found someone really fresh,” she said. “Either the missing hiker is dead, or someone else is dead and they don’t know about it. But this particular post-living individual is spooky.”
“Spooky. Nice.” Lucia wrinkled her nose, but couldn’t hide her surprise. “You don’t mean you scared him away?”
“I had an interruption of the dumb-ass variety.” Garrie shrugged, unable to hide annoyance. “I’ll have to come back when things quiet down.”
Lucia glanced around the parking lot—the windward side of the an aggressively folded and jutting land covered with pine and oak and scrub, infiltrated here and there by prickly pear and yucca. At seventy-five thousand feet the sky had that impossible blue tint, just as impossibly clear. “Aiiee,” she said, dead-pan. “You mean we have to come back here?”
Garrie affected her Tone of Doom. “Yes, Lu,” she said, “we do.” But then she wrinkled her nose. “Problem is, until I can reach that ghost, we won’t know where to accidentally stumble over the body. And meanwhile, the family...”
She had a particular, biting familiarity with what it was like to not know the fate of a loved one.
“Maybe the Search and Rescue people will find him,” Lucia suggested, most sensibly. “It doesn’t always have to be us.”
“Not always,” Garrie admitted, squinting into the forest where something rustled through a tangle of dead roots.
Something reddish and sly.
She raised her voice. “Sklayne. Seriously? You followed us?”
*Go where I want,* Sklayne reminded her. *Not-cat.*
“Hey,” Lucia said, looking off in the other direction. “Is that Quinn? Finally! What took him so—“ But she abruptly silenced, and Garrie turned to see for herself why.
Not just Quinn, that was why. And not Quinn plus Robin, his girlfriend so recently transplanted from Sedona to Albuquerque. But Quinn and—
*Holy farking shit!* Sklayne said for her, never willing to let her forget her own stupefied reaction when she’d first heard his voice in her mind.
For once, she paid him no attention. “It is,” she said. “It’s—”
“Drew!” Lucia blurted out with happy surprise. “Drew!”
Drew grinned at them as he grew closer—all lanky lack of grace, his murky brown hair trimmed, his face clean-shaven and his complexion nearly clear.
“Drew,” Garrie said, still stunned. “What’re you—” But she stopped herself, because what’re you doing here didn’t sound half welcoming. He’d been with her reckoner team for less than a year before splitting to do his own thing in San Jose, but he’d been one of them all the same—able to read the historic details of any location, stymied by the slow pace of acquiring an architectural degree the conventional way. He’d gone to the Winchester House with them, met someone, and stayed behind to freelance on a suspected sacred burial ground.
But he’d still been through that San Jose ordeal with them. He was still one of their own. Even if he hadn’t sent more than a vague postcard since he’d split away.
So, only a little less lamely, Garrie said, “You look great, Drew. Beth Ann must be good for you.”
His face shuttered up and Lucia jabbed Garrie with an unsubtle elbow.
Quinn didn’t quite speak through his teeth, but the tone was there. “Found him on my doorstep this morning while I was reading up on the Phelps hiker thing.” Quinn was their token person of normality. Ex-college athlete, still fit, always rumpled enough to look just-kissed. Although since Robin had moved to Albuquerque, just-kissed was also more than likely the case.
“I’m cleaning up loose ends,” Drew said. “Kinda spur of the moment.”
“Right,” Garrie responded. “Indiana Jones probably doesn’t call ahead, either. Just like he doesn’t answer email.”
Her words fell into heavy silence. Lucia jabbed her again, and this time Garrie glared at her.
“We could have used you in Sedona,” Lucia said to him, a little too brightly.
“It sounded intense.” Drew glanced at Quinn—maybe looking for guy-solidarity. “But you had Quinn-man and his information station, right?”
“Things are changing,” Quinn told him, as the breeze ruffled his blond hair to perfection. “Seems like we need every tool we can get these days.” Quinn, his computer, his books, and his inexhaustible penchant for detail...not quite the advantage it once had been. Not even with the massive book Trevarr had brought for him, the heavily illustrated tome they called the Bestiary that Quinn could sometimes almost read if he stared long enough.
No one said it out loud—that the change, too, had come with Trevarr. It had come in San Jose, when Keharian miscreants had torn the boundaries between their worlds and pieces of Kehar had bled through.
Most of those pieces of Kehar weren’t happy about it.
“Maybe you need a break from this place.” Drew jammed his hands in his back jeans pockets.
“Busy,” Garrie said. “Going out to look for a place of my own tomorrow, in fact. You’re welcome to come.”
Drew rocked on his heels. “You know, you could visit my way. Lots of stuff hanging around the old tribal site.”
“Busy, thanks,” Garrie repeated, side-eyeing him. “I don’t do native stuff. It’s trespassing. You know that.”
He shrugged. “I meant as a spectator.”
*No,* Sklayne said, unexpectedly close—or at least, unexpectedly loud. *We stay in this place. Your focus place. Place of hidden power.*
Place of hidden power?
“Chill,” she said out loud. “We’re not going anywhere. And what do you mean, place of—”
She caught Lucia’s faint, patient amusement and Quinn’s raised brow, and most of all Drew’s startled and slightly wary expression. “Oh,” she said to him, belatedly remembering that Sklayne’s nature had in fact still been a secret when they’d parted ways. “Right. Just, um...talking to Sklayne.”
“That cat?” Drew glanced around as if he might spot the sandy red Abyssinian he’d known in San Jose.
*Not cat.* Sklayne hadn’t been standing with them; now he was. Now he circled Drew, placing his paws with exaggerated stalking care—his newly tufted ears slanted back and thumbs extruded and clearly visible. His fangs peeked over his lower jaw.
Drew emitted a startled sound. Sklayne lifted one paw, toes spread—thumbs spread—and excessive claws popped out one by one, each with a snicking sound that would have been more appropriate in a Saturday morning cartoon. *Talk to the claws.*
“You’ve been watching reruns again,” Garrie said, grateful that Drew couldn’t perceive the mind-words that Sklayne aimed at him. “That stuff will turn your brain to static. Now be nice.”
Drew took a stumbling step back, then held his ground. “That’s not a cat.”
Lucia cast him a sympathetic look—but a matter-of-fact sympathy at that. “Maybe you should have answered those emails.”
“Give him a break,” Quinn said, finally coming through with the bro solidarity. “He’s been caught up in things. We all have. And it’s only been—”
“Months,” Lucia said firmly, arms crossed. “Three months of postcards. Sometimes.”
Drew shoved his hands even further into his pockets. “No, you’re right. I knew something heavy went down in Sedona, and I just...Beth Ann...the work...” He shrugged. “How about we grab some lunch and catch up?”
Sklayne glared with emphatically narrowed eyes, an expression that looked childishly just short of sticking his tongue out.
“Boys,” Lucia murmured. And then, “We’re done here, right? I think it’s a good idea. Lunch. He’s got a lot to catch up on. Like that house for sale you’re going to see this afternoon.” Faint resentment lingered on those words.
“Things change,” Garrie said, somewhat darkly.
Things change a lot.
~~~~~~~~