Rhonda Rose
Lisa looked back toward her aunt’s house as she wheeled her bicycle from the garage and called out, “Yes, Aunt Joan!”
Her response to her aunt’s curfew reminder came in an appropriate tone, but from my perspective her expression was less than respectful.
She flipped the bicycle pedal into position to mount, catching it with her toe. “Don’t even start with me, Rhonda Rose. Curfews and schedules and charts and rules. How am I supposed to get anything done around here?”
To say that I warmed with satisfaction at this display of dedication to her calling would be an understatement. The changes in Lisa’s life had hardly been easy to absorb. Even as she grieved, she’d moved across town into her aunt’s home and her aunt’s less flexible way of life. Her training had all but stalled, just as she should be stretching her skills and independence.
Lisa muttered something inaudible, swinging her leg over the bicycle—a youth model, to suit the height she’d never grown into. She jammed on her protective helmet over short, disarrayed hair and snapped the chin piece before pushing off to swoop down her new street. “Here I am going out to exercise. You’d think that would make her happy. I should be a couch potato?”
That would never happen. It had become significantly clear to both of us that wielding energies often left Lisa jittery, activating her in ways that only physical effort would soothe. Even her teachers had noticed, and waged an ongoing campaign to sign her up for their sports teams.
In a normal life, she probably would have done just that.
In this life, however, she was frustrated—and losing her reckoner finesse because of it. “Lisa,” I said, staying alongside her with very little effort, “We’ve spoken of this. It’s a difficult situation, but one with a limited duration.”
“Three years,” she spat, barely braking as she swooped around a corner and onto the Tramway Bike path. “That’s forever.”
In the past, she might have called it a lifetime. Her perspective on that term had changed in the past several years, however.
“I’ve been pondering an option,” I told her, and allowed the ethereal breezes to lift my hair.
She coasted long enough to cast me a look, then skimmed around the outside of a jogger. “I’m listening.”
“I’ve been in touch with someone. A woman who, like you, has a certain facility with energies mostly gone unseen.”
“Is that what we call it now,” Lisa said. “A certain facility.”
“Lisa.”
She sighed, her breath coming faster now—that petite and wiry body finally putting forth some real effort as she geared down for a hill. The Tramway Avenue path took her straight north between the edge of the city and the rather abrupt base of the Sandia Mountains. She seldom traversed the entire length of it, usually splitting away to the Bear Canyon Arroyo trail, but she always put the most of her energy into this section, burning away the agitation within.
After some moments she said, “Sorry, Rhonda Rose. I’m just not very happy right now.”
I allowed one of my personal breezes to stroke along her cheek in understanding. “If you were to obtain a work permit and assist this woman, you could start on your path to independence now, initiating your progress toward financial security.”
“Assist her?” Lisa cast me an incredulous look—fairly so, I must admit. “If she has any real mojo, Rhonda Rose, you would have introduced us a long time ago.”
“The truth of your nature will become clear soon enough. I think it highly likely that we can negotiate a percentage-based commission, in return for which she will serve as a front for you.”
Lisa rode in silence for a few moments, weaving her way through a modest spate of activity on the path and then waiting at a road crossing where the presence of others made continuing conversation inadvisable.
As soon as she broke free of that cluster, she cast me a look. “Maybe.”
But I knew interest when I saw it.
Together we progressed in silence, turning away from the path and into the Bear Canyon arroyo. There we rode in the company of another man, a post-living individual who frequently forgot to manifest his bicycle, but whose hazy appearance and dreamy expression suggested his time here was growing short. This was not a spirit in need of Lisa’s help, although he acknowledged her pleasantly enough. Soon enough he drew to the side of the trail, where a small gathering of obviously related people clustered together around a grieving woman with a small urn.
His family.
Lisa rode on, as did I. These people were doing what they needed, as they needed it, and had things in hand.
Not so the young woman we approached. She sat on the ground, knees drawn up and shoulders shaking. As Lisa slowed to stop before her, ostensibly to inquire after her wellbeing, the girl looked up with a glare. “It’s not fair!” she said. “Why would they come and spread his ashes here?”
She was a stunningly beautiful adolescent of Lisa’s age—her skin a toasty brown, her hair long and glossy, and her outfit of a certain exacting quality, perfectly suited to the mid-fall season. But her eyes and the tip of her nose were red with tears, and her precisely formed features held a weariness unexpected in a person of her age.
It seemed only natural that Lisa should say, “Because he’s here. They must know that, in their hearts.”
The girl stilled in a way that indicated Lisa had acquired her complete attention. “You know that?”
Lisa shrugged in a way that offered affirmation.
The girl wiped the back of her hand across her cheek and stood. Somehow, her outfit bore no sign of her brief tenure on the ground. She looked down at Lisa— unfolded to her full height, she was a tall and graceful individual—and stuck out her hand. “My name is Lucia Reyes. What’s yours?”
“Lisa.” Lisa grasped that proffered hand with its manicured nails, wrapping it in her own utilitarian grip—small hand, practical nails, scuffed knuckles. “Lisa McGarrity. But you can call me Garrie.”
I knew interest when I saw it.
~~~~~
She Sees Dead People
Rick walked into Garrie’s kitchen with a grim expression, tucking the phone back into his pocket. “That was my supervisor,” he said. “A woman went up to Wolf Spring and didn’t come back. You got your wish—we’re closing that area, and the FBI is on its way. Now, are you a hundred percent sure you don’t have anything you’d like to share?”
Another one.
Reckoner fail. Because she’d already done everything she knew how to do. Buying time, hoping to understand...hoping for inspiration.
Not wanting the responsibility at all. Or anything to do with the FBI.
“We got those trails closed once,” Garrie snapped at him. “Wasn’t that enough?”
Lucia wiped the counter and tossed the damp cloth at the sink with resignation. “Oh, just tell him. Then he can write us off and go on his way.”
Rick looked at her with some intensity. “I’m not here to write you off, Lucia.”
Lucia just laughed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Garrie said, her voice low—for Lucia’s ears, even if Rick happened to hear. “There’ll be others.”
Lucia put on her Spanish princess exterior—the one that protected and impressed at the same time. “You’ll want to tell that supervisor that we’re a dead end, hijo. Because what Garrie saw that day—” she hesitated, then lifted her chin just a little bit more. “It wasn’t a bear. It was a thing.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Garrie muttered. Rick clearly hadn’t expected the thing gambit—for the moment, his features froze in studious neutrality. Garrie had little sympathy for him. “Listen, Rick. I’m sure you checked me out. You probably know I do personal consultations. Now you’re starting to wonder what that means.”
His expression said yes.
“She sees dead people,” Lucia said, her clarity brutal. “And I can feel them. And we have some other friends who can do other things. But mostly it’s Garrie, cleaning up the messes of dead people.”
“I see.” Rick’s tone remained perfectly neutral, his back perfectly straight. “So you’re telling me a ghost is behind the missing hikers.”
“I never said that.” Garrie crossed her arms, annoyed not just with him, but with the whole situation. The counter dug into her spine, and her arm ached at the movement. “It’s more like an entity that wishes it was dead. Or is maybe halfway there. Doesn’t really matter. It’s big, it’s dangerous, it’s eating people, and you’re never going to find any sign of the bodies. So. Go tell your supervisor that, why don’t you? Or even better, tell him we saw a damned bear. But either way, watch your step on that trail.” She didn’t wait for him to respond before turning away, briefly resting a comforting hand on Lucia’s stiff back.
“That’s it? That’s your story?”
“That’s our truth,” Garrie said, just barely turning back to look at him. “So you go do things your way and we’ll keep doing them ours. But remember that warning—because this thing is bigger than I am, and that’s saying a lot. You see yourself out, now, okay?” Because she recognized the rejection on his face, the hint of pity. Lucia would see it, too.
Something inside Garrie grew—that cold burning mix of anger, budding large within her, pushing its way out...showing in her eyes.
Rick held up placating hands. “Okay,” he said. “Wow. Okay.” He ran a hand through thick black hair cut short. “Okay, I’m going. I’m...” He shook his head. “Lucia, I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” she told him, arch princess words.
His footsteps on the tile were loud, all the way to the door. But the latch snicked closed with quiet care, and after a moment his car engine started. Tires on gravel started loud and grew distant.
Lucia took a deep and tremulous breath. “I am so sorry,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Garrie said, sharply enough to make Lucia look at her. “Jerks happen.”
She shook her head. “But I didn’t think he was a jerk. I thought...” She said the words in a rush. “I thought he liked me. I thought it was a chance to at least practice dating. To pretend.”
“It wasn’t pretending,” Garrie said, and she tugged Lucia’s long ponytail, completely annoying, and suppressing a little grin as a frown poked through Lucia’s chagrin. “He did like you. Powie, sparks—right from the time you flagged him down in the parking lot. He just got stupid about this, and you know it.”
Lucia heaved a sigh, but now it held more resignation than sorrow. “He should have just told me he needed to ask some more questions. It was my idea to come here when he suggested coffee—it felt smarter, with you here. No wonder he agreed so quickly. All of that and he never did help with the painting!”
“We’ll get it done.” Garrie stretched, shifting back into the day. “After all, we’re all fueled up and ready to go.”
Lucia’s snort was as demure as the rest of her. “That was a dessert breakfast, and you know it. We’ll do something hearty for an early lunch, I think. And we’ll talk more about what happened last night. Now, go call your real estate agent and tell her how the hail storm tore things up around here, and I’ll get the paint.” She smiled, determined to rediscover her happy anticipation as she headed for the door. “Pale silvery gray. It’s going to go so well with those eggplant blinds!”
“We don’t have eggplant blinds!” Garrie called after her. “We don’t have blinds at all!”
Lucia’s voice floated back in through the open door. “Details!”
Garrie could only hope that Rick Soto would leave them out of his details—especially when it came to working with the FBI. Either way, it had just gotten a lot harder to deal with the broken kyrokha.
Three dead.
So far.
~~~~~
Lucia popped the lid on a paint can and picked up a stirring stick. “Robin thinks a little booth to start. A half-space. She says the vendors will be unable to resist. And the customers will make small impulse buys—the trick is to find low cost things that look big.”
“It’d work on me.” Garrie twitched the corner of the drop cloth into place and picked up the trim brush. “Give me some of that paint.”
The stirring stick drooped. “Oh, chic. I know you don’t want to paint today. You looked tired. And your arm must hurt. That was you last night, wasn’t it? Shielding my place until the storm was over?”
“That was me,” Garrie said. She’d already called the real estate agent, who was handling repairs with her counterpart. “Thanks to Dana-Bob. Very little effort for him, big mess for me. He really shouldn’t be thinking that clearly yet.”
Lucia wrinkled her nose, pouring paint into the pan. “Dana-Bob. You know, he reminds me of...well, I guess he doesn’t.”
“Rhonda Rose,” Garrie said. “Except so very not. You’re not the only one to think it.”
Wiping carefully at the paint drip at the lip of the can, Lucia passed it to Garrie and picked up a roller. She said, very very carefully, “Could you have won a fight against Rhonda Rose?”
Garrie snorted. “Rhonda Rose would never be so crude as to engage in a fight. But...I don’t know. Maybe. But maybe not. I can’t let things get that far with this guy.”
Lucia’s mouth flattened, a wry little quirk at the end. “I get the feeling he wants things to get that far.”
“Yeah,” Garrie said, and dipped her brush in the paint. “So do I. Problem is, I’m not a strike first kind of reckoner.” She stood, caught in understanding. “If Rhonda Rose had been a strike first kind of spirit, I wouldn’t be here now.”
“Right.” Lucia gestured with the roller. “Except you were a child—what, five years old? You were a polite child. A nice child. Dana-Bob isn’t any of those things. You’re dripping, chic.”
“Drop cloth,” Garrie said by way of response. She started a bead at the edge of the wooden window sill, concentrating there for long moments, the swish of Lucia’s roller in the background.
Probably she should have been thinking about how any of them could possibly deal with an entity bigger than she was, stronger than she was, and madder than she was. And especially how they could deal with the entity if Dana-Bob was going to rile it up in his attempt to get his own way. Which she needed to do before he, too, got so strong that he couldn’t be managed.
Probably.
She drew the brush lightly over the wall, creating a broad wiggly barrier line between here and there. Between Trevarr and Garrie. A nebulous thing that she didn’t understand and didn’t know how to traverse.
With the very tip of the trim brush, she made a little stick figure and added short hair sticking up everywhere. And then on the other side of the broad wiggly barrier...
Chains.
All while thinking about what had happened the previous night. Not the pissed-off mountain and not Dana-Bob’s instigation, but the moment Sklayne had so casually instructed her on how to locate Lucia.
How to locate anyone she knew.
The brush retraced the crude image of chains and stilled, and Garrie stopped thinking and started feeling.
The scents of leather and wood smoke. The fine pattern of feathery scales that looked like tattoos but weren’t. His body heat, warmer than her at all times. His voice, the accent distinct and beguiling, the timbre changing—sometimes smooth and deep, sometimes with a feathery rasp. The cold burn of his energies, the intimate sensation of muscle flexing beneath her hands.
But most of, she reveled in the sense of his presence. Not the physical, but the very essence of him. Complex and yet solid, the most solid thing in her life. The awareness that told her he was standing behind her. The breath of relief she released upon feeling him there. The undeniable joy when he’d returned from Kehar at San Jose, back when her heart had known what her mind hadn’t and she’d leaped upon him, wrapping herself around him with a fiercely proprietary grip.
She let it grow inside her, all of it. And then she followed it.
Surprisingly easy. Surprisingly swift.
Surprisingly right there. Through a swirl of rainbow colors over black, through a quick dash of nothing at all, Garrie View gone wild.
Garrie View doing what maybe she could have been doing all along.
Finding him.
The cavern wasn’t vast, but it was far from cozy. Water trickled along the edges; black fog followed it, heavy and crawling like a live thing. The floor had the look of worked stone—nowhere near level, but sections of tool marks and the uneven remnants of stalagmites. The walls bulged with formations—pale folded draperies deposited over a rougher base, blackened flowstone in a waterfall of gleaming beauty. Harsh, angular glyphs traced the shape of a doorway in otherwise seamless rock, their edges wrought with laser precision. One end of the cavern bulged with flowstone—not in limestone grays, but black and purple hues.
And there he was.
Her breath caught; her pulse tripped up into overdrive.
There he was.
Resting against the formation, his legs sprawled long before him, his wrists resting on his stomach and heavily manacled, dark metal glinting with silver glyphs. He looked the same as he ever had, and yet nothing like the man she knew. Old bruises mapped his face but couldn’t hide the underlying weariness there; one arm sat more gingerly than the other, and his torn pant leg revealed the healing injury from that last day in Sedona.
His captors had used that injury against him, Garrie knew that much. Abused it. Abused him, every which way they could. And yet for all of his injuries and weariness, he nonetheless looked robust. He looked as though he’d spent every possible moment inventing exercises to keep himself strong.
That meant they were feeding him well enough. It meant that the night she’d saved him with channeled energies had been an aberration. It meant that so far, they distinctly wanted him alive.
Of course they do. To find ME.
The containment door flared with brief, dark energies before sliding aside. Trevarr’s eyes gleamed silver, but he otherwise failed to react to the entering tumble of squat little toad-like creatures—or to their ministrations, when they uncurled long tongues to clean his wounded leg or ran sticky hands over his pants, his face, and his hair. They offered him no privacy, and no extra care for tender places.
The doorway remained open, but it didn’t remain empty.
It didn’t matter that Garrie had never seen the woman who now stood there. She knew her.
Anjhela, Sklayne had said.
He had not said she was beautiful. Stunning. Her features were cover-model exotic, her eyes tipped, her nose slightly flat, and her lips full. She was clad in unfamiliar leather, her skin an amazing deep chocolate in color and an even more amazing shimmer of the finest scales in texture. Her eyes simmered a golden hue, and her movement...
It was blatantly dangerous. Blatantly sexual.
She told Trevarr, “You should have worked with me. Now it’s just a matter of time.”
“It was only ever a matter of time.” His voice sounded harsh and unused...or maybe overused. Garrie had heard the screams.
“One final chance.” But Anjhela should have been all menace and promise, and she wasn’t. Not even as she lifted her hand, splaying her fingers with the palm out.
A shimmer of darkness coruscated over the hand from fingertip to mid-forearm, and when it cleared, a gauntlet enclosed every inch of that skin—snug, fully articulated, and tipped with long, pointed metal nails. She gave Trevarr a meaningful look. “In gratitude, they would give you to me. Would it be so terrible?”
“No more than when they strip you of the mendihar for your failure.” The harsh note of his voice didn’t improve with use.
She made a derisive noise. “I am far more than any single confession,” she told him. “Whereas your life hinges on these moments.”
“No,” he told her, lifting his eyes to look at her full force, pewter shining unto silver and driving her back a step with the impact. “This has always been the end point for me. From the moment they took me from my village. Ghehera will not suffer me to live, no matter their promises to you.”
She didn’t argue it; she couldn’t keep her golden gaze up to meet his. “So be it,” she said. “I’ve done what I could.”
“You’ve done what you wanted.” He knew her, and he knew her well. No doubt about that.
Anjhela clucked a harsh syllable and the squatty creatures tumbled away in a dark, trailing fog of dull energies. One of them left food within reach, a tray of uncooked vegetables and a barely cooked slab of meat. In their wake, he sat cleaned and to some extent revitalized.
Yes, they still wanted him alive. They hadn’t given up on finding Garrie.
The door closed, latching into place with seamless precision. And then Garrie would have moved closer to Trevarr, but for the way he lifted his gaze. He made no effort to reach for his food or to test his limbs, sitting quietly. But when he looked...
It was at her.
Or not quite at her. Off to the side, as if he had a sense of her presence but no more. “You’re here.”
I’m here, she thought. She cleared her mental throat and took a step sideways to the place in her mind where the babbling resided. I’m here, she repeated, this time in his own tongue with its sharp edges and skimmed consonants and deep throaty moments.
She thought he might not be able to hear. From the brief flash of anger on his face—a face otherwise inscrutable—she wasn’t sure if he had.
“You shouldn’t be,” he said, making it clear enough, his speech patterns subtly different now that he spoke in his own language. “It’s you they want. If they claim you, then this—” he gestured at himself with a shift of chain— “is for nothing.”
Right. As if I can just move merrily onward if you die here. As if they won’t just keep looking for me.
He frowned, and it felt like acknowledgment. She didn’t give him the chance to voice it. They are going to kill you, yes?
He gave her little corner of the cave a steady look. “It would have come to this regardless. They fear me.”
They should fear ME, she thought at him, as fiercely as she could. They should have left us alone.
“Yes,” he murmured. “They should have done that.”
I’m coming for you, she thought at him, trying for exacting clarity. I’ll figure out a way.
Just that fast, he was no longer sitting, but crouching, constrained, his injured leg favored but still taking weight and his eyes blazing. “No! This place is not yours. It is not safe.”
She returned the emphasis right back at him. There’s nothing safe about doing nothing, either, and you know it! We need to be fighting this together!”
He put tension on his chains, leaning against them—testing them with the efficient fervency of a practiced movement. Sweat gathered on his brow; pain gathered at the corners of his eyes. Dark blood trickled down from his wrist and one bare foot slipped against black stone, but the chains didn’t so much as creak. Garrie’s heart cried for him.
Maybe he heard. He gave up the battle, falling back on one heel, his head bowed as he sucked in air.
Garrie drew her own deep breath, a metaphorical thing. Steadying herself. Trevarr, I’m learning. I’m changed. I think I can come for you. Tell me you’ll fight if I do.
He lifted his head, and the strength lurking in those eyes was beyond anything he’d shown Anjhela. His eyes flashed a brief intensity, and the manacles spat dark sparks, tracing a sizzle along his forearms. “Come for me, then. Come for me, and we will be the bane of Ghehera.”
~~~~~~~~~~