Rhonda Rose
I found Lisa on the roof of her aunt’s house, where she would be forbidden should her aunt ever discover her there. But her aunt was a person of little imagination, and had never considered that Lisa’s bedroom window was, to Lisa, a clear invitation to go sit on the roof.
This day, Lisa seemed only a reflection of herself, tucked into a ball with her arms wrapped around her knees, her expression unguarded and weary, and her hair sporting its unnaturally blue streaks.
“Just tired,” she said to me before I even inquired. “Graduation coming up, finals, yada yada yada.” She hiccupped quietly, and I knew she’d been crying even before she added, “Really tired.”
“Lisa...” I found myself short of words. I understood what drove her thoughts. Her work was lonely and mostly thankless, if only because no one truly understood either the delicate accuracy of her touch or the contained power behind it.
“Oh, I know, I know.” She adopted an overtly scholarly tone. “The consultations provide more than mere income. They allow me to remain familiar with the activity in the area, and increase my proficiency for those rarer moments when a post-living individual needs more significant management.”
So she had been listening after all. “Once you become of age, your situation will ease.”
“Right. No more school, no more house rules.” She glanced at me, and I knew to expect testing. “I could afford to move out right now, if I wanted to. I have an apartment all picked out, you know.”
I knew. I also knew that her aunt provided her with an important connection to the living—to family. “You cannot do this alone.”
She tugged the hair behind her ear and scowled at me. “I’m not doing anything alone. Sometimes I have Lucia. And I’ve got you.”
“Circumstances change,” I said, most gently. But she wasn’t ready to hear that yet, and her scowl only deepened.
She had no way to know that of late I’d seen glimpses of other existences, absorbed hints of unfamiliar energies. They drew at me, tugging me into restlessness.
For now I said only, “Mentoring you is not the same as helping you. Your focus is on reconciling the ills you find, but your energy is finite. You need a support system.”
“A team, you mean.” She still scowled at me. One change too many, perhaps. Or perhaps just another of those times when I might have told her a complete truth and chose not to. “I can’t exactly advertise for that, can I? A woo-woo cattle call?”
“Perhaps not.” I knew better than to push her in this mood. “Take the opportunities when they come, Lisa.”
“Yeah,” she said, resting her chin on her arm where it wrapped around her knees. “Whatever.”
A hot place of dark energies, ebbing and flowing like a living tide. A spicy scent, a flickering glimpse of a gamboling form, a fearful roar from a deep-throated creature—
As I had done before, I resisted looking closer, sitting beside Lisa to offer what comfort I could on this especially weary evening.
But I knew I could not resist forever. And I knew that I would not.
~~~~~
That was a Terrible Idea
Garrie bailed out of her car at Doc Long even as it rocked to a stop, dismayed to see no sign of Rick or his hikers in the nearby picnic shelters. She jammed her head and arm through the satchel strap as Lucia disembarked from the passenger side.
Quinn unfolded himself from the back seat and flipped the back hatch open, hauling out the five-gallon container as if it didn’t hold forty pounds of Secret Recipe. Garrie snatched up her more modest one-gallon sprayer and steeled herself, grabbing her first good look around as she slid sideways into ethereal viewpoint.
Roiling, murky reds and black streaks, surging up in storm surge waves to splash against the ridges and back again, hard edges delineating its glowering boundaries in bold brushstrokes.
“Fark,” she said. “And crap. Farking crap.”
Lucia inched a little closer to her, looking around with worry. “Is it close?”
“It’s not right on us.” Not quite. Garrie squinted up at the dangerously unsettled mass of the kyrokha. For an uneven fog of anger and hatred and resentment, its boundaries seemed stationary enough.
For the moment.
Quinn stood tall, looking south over the rise of terrain. “There they are!”
Garrie moved uphill until she spotted the shelter, close by the forest edge. Rick stood inside, waving at them—a vague form obscured by the haze of the mountain entity, which had dropped down over the shelter.
“Fark,” Garrie said again, grabbing Lucia’s arm when she would have run for them. “And crap. Farking crap.”
Sklayne made a short feline sound that sounded like a curse—still on the car, although he now sat up as though begging for a treat, his front legs hanging at his chest and his attention riveted on the entity.
Garrie asked, “You think you can do this?”
*Try,* he offered, but he didn’t sound certain.
“Gotta know, Sklayne. One way or the other. Or I’ll make the wrong move out there.”
His front feet came lightly down on the car roof; he crouched there, ears flicking uncertainly.
“Not the whole thing,” Garrie said, as it belatedly occurred to her that he might well think in those terms. “Just right in this area. Around the shelter.”
Quinn looked back with impatience. “If he can’t, he can’t. We’d better get with it, Garrie. Rick’s having a tough time keeping those people in there.”
In fact, he was grappling with a young man who’d clearly had enough of the shelter, no matter the very visible birds caught in mid-flight and Rick’s emphatic authority.
Garrie couldn’t quite blame him. Not when the entity was entirely invisible to everyone there but her, and the little bird bones were probably already gone.
But she could fear for him. She kicked it up into a run, perfectly aware of the incongruous and unofficial nature of their little group. “Stay put!” she cried. “Just wait!”
She sprinted to the entity and then backpedaled a careful distance. Lucia came up beside her, giving Rick a worried look as the young man shook off his grip, no longer about to charge forth into the entity.
“Keep an eye on its DefCon state, will you?” Garrie asked her. “But don’t look too close.”
“No worries, chic.” Lucia’s voice was as dry as it ever got; she closed her eyes to concentrate on the entity’s emotional spikes.
Garrie shifted out of ethereal overlay to get a better look at the shelter occupants: three women and two additional men, not to mention the baby and the white mop of a bouncing terrier, a couple of worn daypacks, and a picnic basket. Back into the ethereal, and she couldn’t help a muttered curse. “Rick, keep everyone there. You’re all—well, you’re surrounded.”
“By what?” the young man demanded, his voice cracking slightly at the end. Not a hiker, for sure...more like an unwilling participant in the picnic, to judge by his clothes, his attitude, and the earbuds looped around his neck. “There’s nothing there!”
Sklayne sniffed along the bottom edge of the entity, looking for all the world like a common house cat scenting a bug. *Not attached,* he said. *Can go under.*
Do it. She kept the thought to herself, knowing it faster and simpler. Be careful.
He didn’t waste time hiding the transition—a POOF and mere glimmer of motion and Sklayne slicked beneath the entity to the tune of Rick’s curse and a round of gasps.
And didn’t show up again.
Garrie forgot to breathe. He’d sounded confident—cocky, as usual—but there was so much they didn’t know about this damaged entity. “Sklayne?”
*Here.* His mind voice came muffled—and then the shelter occupants drew back with a communal cry. A thin skin lined the inside of surrounding entity, shimmering with the faint sandy-red color of Sklayne’s natural coat. *Not barrier. Just showing off.*
She got it. He wasn’t protecting them, only giving them something to look at. “Can you?” she asked, pumping up the pressure on the sprayer.
*Not smart.*
She wasn’t sure any of this was smart. “Okay, I hear you.”
“Hear who?” Rick said, and then shook his head. “Never mind. Just never mind. What can we do?”
“Be quiet, that’s what. Be patient. What did you tell them?”
Rick looked a little sheepish. The baby’s mother put a hand on its small downy head, jostling its sling a little more snugly to her body. She glanced at Rick with no little resentment. “He said that there’s an enraged mountain spirit surrounding us. And eating people. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life.”
“That bird—” said the other woman—one of the hikers, a little woman who should have used sunblock instead of a tanning booth.
“There’s nothing there now,” a man said—another hiker, making both daypacks accounted for.
The final woman was younger than the hikers, older than the troublesome young man, and no-nonsense all over her face. “You saying you don’t see that color? Or those sparks?”
Sklayne obligingly sent a rippled sparks around them all, eliciting a curse from the man who’d said nothing was there.
Garrie didn’t waste any time while they were at it. She adjusted the nozzle on the spray to a fine spritz and sent it—oh-so-cautiously—at the bottom edge of the entity. Just enough, she hoped, to make it ease away without any true awareness of her presence. “Well, Rick is right. Or close enough.” She glanced at him, just an instant of attention away from her work. “You told them you saw someone die today because of this thing?”
“No,” he said, exasperation evident as he spoke over the loud reaction of the entrapped group. “I didn’t want to panic anyone, thanks.”
She shrugged, crouching to get a better angle on the spray and thinking it’s working...I think it’s working...oh please be working...
“Is it working?” Quinn asked, thumping the five-gallon container down behind her. “Because you’re going through that Special Recipe pretty fast.”
“Yeah, what’re you doing? Spraying water at the invisible monster?” the young man asked.
Sklayne didn’t wait for Garrie’s response. He stretched out a nearly invisible arrangement of leg and paw and smacked the kid on the cheek with a scattering of dramatic sparks. The young man stumbled back with an inarticulate sound, tripping over a daypack and then into the arms of the hiking man, who righted him.
“Yes,” Garrie told the group, as if none of that had happened. “Sort of. It’s...it’s...” She glanced at Rick again and he raised his brow at her as if to challenge her to do better than he had. “It’s spirit water,” she said finally, and it sounded as lame to her ears as it must have to theirs. “Sort of. A repellent. If I can...well...pry up a tunnel for you...sort of...”
“We can crawl out,” Rick said, understanding it.
“Is that gonna work?” Quinn asked. He unscrewed the cap to the reservoir of Secret Recipe as Garrie’s sprayer petered out.
“It’s already working—I must have gained an inch or so. If I can tickle it on up...”
“Get them out and worry about the kyrokha after.” Quinn hefted the heavy tank as Garrie unscrewed the sprayer lid, filling the sprayer with a tidy finesse.
Back went the lid, and she gave it a series of priming pumps and went to work again. “Exactly,” she said. “And it’s moving away more quickly now—”
“Not too fast,” Lucia said, breaking her silence but not her concentration.
“Definitely not too fast,” Garrie agreed, glad to see the thing rise up another couple of inches with very little prodding. She retreated slightly, misting the area beneath the ethereal form instead of making direct contact. “I know you guys can’t see it, but—it’s working. It’s working great.”
“Yeah, we’ve still got our mojo.” Quinn’s voice was as droll as it came, but she knew him well enough to hear the grin there. They did still have it, when all was said and done.
But oh, that would be too easy. For Lucia whirled, looking behind them—and then looking all around them—frantic and cringing just a little, knowing something was coming but not from which direction. “Garrie—it’s Dana!”
Garrie instantly braced herself, stepping back to locate Dana before he—
Whump!
He hit her full bore, as fully realized as Rhonda Rose had ever been and solid enough to send Garrie sprawling—right into Quinn, who went flailing awkwardly over the jerrycan of Special Recipe.
“No!” Dana shouted, as furious as Garrie had ever heard him and no longer visible. “None of this dangerous shit until you take care of me!”
She rolled up and back on her feet, still crouching low and ready for him to strafe past again. “We just farking talked about this,” she told him, catching the wind he’d knocked out of her. “Wait your turn!”
He swore at her, a resounding rudeness; his sneering voice echoed from all around them, reverberating and bringing with it the same burning rubber-hot metal-thick bloody stench that had inundated them in the closet. “You think you can control me? You can’t. And I’m not standing by while you get your foolish, arrogant ass ripped to pieces by this thing. My turn would never come then, would it? So my turn is now, or I’ll kick this thing in the balls so hard it’ll swallow your friends whole!”
Garrie struggled with her swell of sudden temper, the cold immutable anger that had come with absorbed Keharian energies. No good ever came of handling a ghost through anger. But she could hardly take a time out at the moment.
And she wasn’t certain he was truly a ghost, after all.
So she spoke through gritted teeth, distantly aware of the dismayed and rising voices from inside the shelter and of Quinn climbing to his feet, hauling the jerrycan upright. “Your turn is when I say it is. So back OFF!”
“One kick in the balls, coming up!”
“Garrie,” Lucia said, her voice rising in alarm. “Garrie!”
“I got it,” Garrie said, instantly going just barely into Garrie View—looking down on the area as her body folded neatly into the wild grasses of the picnic area. Sklayne shone brightly around the shelter, a defined bubble of glaringly sharp and fizzy energy, while Lucia and Quinn stood in a spot devoid of ethereal color—Lucia swaying and shocked, Quinn in a football player’s defensive stance.
Easy to see Dana swooping back in at her from the woods, all darkness and blunt hammerhead approach and sharp trailing edges; easy to crouch over herself, braced not for impact but to form an angled shield—one she snapped tight just as he reached her, imbuing the moment with all her precision, all her focused power—
Dana pinballed away, completely out of his own control.
She dove back into herself as his manifestation tumbled, skimming and skipping over the ground until it hit a jagged stump and shot skyward to slam against the mountain entity with unequivocal force.
By then Quinn was hauling her to her very corporeal feet, orienting her straight at the shelter while she staggered with the transition. “Get with it, Garrie! We got trouble.”
“Mow mow mow!” Sklayne’s feline voice echoed warning through the clearing as his thin-stretched sparkle undulated with the movement of the entity.
But Garrie couldn’t quite tear her ethereal gaze from the train wreck of Dana—his impact against the entity, the slow motion recoil of that roiling being...the slow infusion of Dana’s black into the various ugly shades of red.
Lucia lifted her head, looking dazed. “Dana? Is he gone?”
“He’s... He’s something,” Garrie said, finding the sprayer still gripped in one hand, even if she’d dropped the wand. She groped for it, her gaze still on Dana’s impact point. “Gone? I don’t know. I’ve never seen—”
“Lucia!” Rick’s call came sharply from the shelter. “We need some help in here—!”
Only then did Garrie hear the muffled cries of a woman, desperate sounds growing louder. “My foot, my foot!”
Can’t be good.
*Not good,* Sklayne agreed. *Told you maybe. Told you try. Stupid Dana entity. Stupid.*
Definitely not good. Garrie squinted past the entity and the sparkles and the jumble of confusion movement and found exactly what she feared. “Dammit, she’s caught up in the kyrokha.”
“Pull,” Rick said, grabbing the woman from behind, his arms looped under her shoulders and flashing quick annoyance at the others. “Get in here and pull, dammit!”
The woman sobbed. “It burns! God, get me out of here! Help me!”
Garrie gave their tunnel a quick reality check. They’d lost serious ground—half of it or more. But when she pulled the sprayer wand trigger, it emitted only a few drops of Secret Recipe. She swore at it and gave it a few quick pumps, renewing the pressure...but only for a moment.
“It’s cracked—it won’t hold the pressure.” Quinn lifted it from her hand. “I’ll pump, you spray.”
“We’ve got to get in there,” Garrie said. “We’ve got to soak her foot—they’ll never get her free.”
Lucia turned on her in horror. “Chic—!”
But Quinn merely said grimly, “Is there enough room?”
“Commando crawl,” Garrie said. “Sklayne, light up the damned tunnel! Quinn, can you haul the jerrycan?”
He bent for it as Sklayne flowed out to delineate the tunnel. The sky took on a reddish cast, reflecting across the surrounding ridges and emanating from where Dana had slammed into the entity. Quinn froze. “Even I can see that.”
“Chic,” Lucia said, by way of warning, while inside the shelter the two men had joined Rick in his efforts and the woman’s sobs rose to wails and the other two women huddled to protect the baby.
Garrie said, “We can make it if we move now,” because the tunnel was already settling again, a slow jellyfish sort of ooze. She led the way, hampered by the satchel and coat, the sprayer in one hand—crawling low and seeing the tunnel more clearly than any of them.
Lucia followed her, crying “Aieeeee!” all the way through, and Quinn scootched through in an elbow crawl, shoving the jerrycan in front of him.
They burst into the shelter and upright again—the air definitely an eerie reddish cast, Sklayne’s warning sparkle closing in as the entity’s reaction to Dana rippled through its ethereal body.
Garrie pushed through to the trapped woman, giving the cracked sprayer a quick series of pumps. “Hold her still,” she told Rick, ignoring the crowd and the struggles and everything else but soaking the woman’s sock. Quinn pushed in beside her to take the gallon container, pumping it endlessly to keep the pressure up.
So slowly, the entity withdrew. The woman gasped with hope and then, as the entity gave an angry snap of retreat, popped free. The cluster tumbled back onto the picnic table, exclaiming with relief—exclaiming over the welted burns on the woman’s exposed ankle. It took them only moments longer to start in on demands.
Garrie crossed her arms and waited, and eventually they fell silent.
“Rick saved your lives by keeping you here,” she said, “and now we’ll help, too. But a little cooperation would be nice.”
They looked at one another, even the kid with the attitude, and swiftly came to a silent accord. The male hiker spoke for all of them. “What do we need to do?”
“Whatever we say,” Garrie suggested sweetly, through truly not sweetly at all.
Lucia’s hand creeping into Garrie’s revealed her fear, clutching just a little too tightly. Garrie’s temper receded before it. Lucia told the group, “I’m Lucia, and that’s Quinn, and this is Garrie.”
They all looked at Garrie. She looked back. “Hey,” she said, as if they’d just met on the street. They all muttered greetings and then they muttered their names, but she didn’t catch them. Because she’d seen what had no doubt sent Lucia’s hand seeking hers, and it took all her attention.
Their tunnel was gone. And Sklayne’s sparkling thin layer of self had closed in on them more tightly than before, while the entity-stained air had darkened with Dana’s influence. “You’d better shield,” Garrie told Lucia. “I think you’re gonna need it.”
Lucia’s hand only closed tighter.
“Garrie.” Quinn looked down at the jerrycan at his feet—upright now, if listing on the uneven grasses.
Wait. The thing was heavy. It should be settled right down into those grasses. She flicked a glance from the jerrycan to Quinn’s gaze, and caught his brief, dark smile—and knew. “Dana,” she said.
“Yeah. I was screwing the lid on when he knocked us over.” He nodded at her sprayer. “We’ve got maybe an inch in here, and what’s left in yours.”
Garrie looked at the entity settling more heavily around them. It still hovered above the inoculated ground, giving them a mighty inch of starter space to work with. “It’s not enough.”
*Not.*
Rick approached her with a wary look, and it took only a lift of her chin to stop him. “Actually,” she said, “I think we’re going to join you under the shelter.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” he said, and there was no point in keeping his voice low. The others would have heard it all at a whisper.
The woman with the baby jostled it gently, shifting her weight from one foot to the other as it gurgled querulously. “That was crazy. What happened out there?”
The woman who’d placed herself so protectively over the child said, “More importantly, what does it mean for us?”
Keep things simple. Keep them really simple.
“We had a visit from a third party,” Garrie said, setting the sprayer aside—carefully, on the corner of the concrete shelter pad. “He behaved badly. It didn’t turn out so well for him, but...”
“We don’t have as much space as we did before, do we?”
“Not so much,” Garrie said. She ran a hand over the satchel. “We’re gonna need to brainstorm for a few moments. We’re not getting out the way we came in.”
The group would have raised a clamor of questions—they started to—but Rick interposed himself, sending Garrie and Lucia a meaningful glance. He had control of them now, but he didn’t think it would last.
Quinn leaned the jerrycan on the shelter support and joined them, grass stains on his jeans and elbow. Lucia released Garrie’s hand to stand erect—back in control with her shields up, or at least able to fake it.
“If I make direct contact with this thing, we’re likely to get backlash,” Garrie said. “So while I can put up an uber-shield and pry that tunnel back up into place, I think it’s a bad idea. A really bad idea.”
Quinn glanced out to Sklayne’s sparklies. “What about Sklayne? Can he do it?”
*Eats me!*
Garrie made a face. “It’s one of the few beings on Kehar that can absorb the energy of his kind.”
Lucia paled. “He’s not keeping it back? Not at all?”
“He’s not even touching it,” Garrie said.
Quinn’s hands landed low on his hips, a belated defiance. “Tell me why we came in here again?”
“Because Dana put on a light show, pissed off the kyrokha, got someone in trouble, and we thought we had a way back out.” Garrie tipped her head at the group indicating them with a meaningful eye. They’re right here, Quinn. “Look, if I have to push our way out, I will. I just think it’s a really, really bad idea, in a frying pan to fire kind of way.” She rested her hand on the satchel. “Or was I the only one there when we had a conversation about this thing being too big for just me? You know, the part where I wanted to go find Trevarr?”
“Not Sklayne. No Secret Recipe. If not you, then—oh, no. No.” Quinn interrupted himself as he took in the meaning of that satchel. “You can’t mean it. Now?”
Garrie shrugged, not nearly as blasñ as she pretended to be—her heart quite suddenly tripping up into a crazy-fast beat as she realized Yes. Now. Exactly now. She said, “You said it yourself. We don’t have enough Secret Recipe. Sklayne can’t do this. And if I do it, it’ll only make things worse.”
“You’re saying we’re trapped here,” Rick said. “That the only way out is straight through the thing that just tried to eat her leg. The thing that killed my partner.”
“Way to keep ’em calm, Ranger Rick.” Garrie scowled at him. “No, I’m not saying that.”
“You kind of are,” Quinn told her. “You don’t even know if you can get to Kehar from here. You’ve never even tried it!”
“There is no try,” Garrie said. “There is only do.”
“Do or do not,” Quinn snapped at her, instantly correcting the Yoda quote. “There is no try.”
Lucia breathed, “Aiee, dios.”
Garrie made an exasperated sound. “Look, Quinn, either it works or it doesn’t. If it does, then we have Trevarr.”
“Yeah?” Quinn said. “And what happens if you go and you don’t come back? What happens if he’s in no shape to help?”
The protective woman looked at them askance. “Who the hell are you people?” They all three speared her with a look, full of impatience. She held up one hand, brows raised. “No, no—never mind. But if you don’t mind my saying, I think we should be part of this whole what happens next conversation. Because my partner and I don’t want to be stuck here through dinner, never mind if you all leave and don’t come back.”
“Actually,” said the woman with the baby, “even if you do mind her saying it.”
“It’s just me,” Garrie told them. “Who would leave, I mean.”
“But you’re the only one who can...” the protective woman stopped, eyeing the others in the shelter as to see if they were on board. The young guy scowled, the male hiker shrugged, and the woman who’d been stuck looked grim in a way that said she believed it, so the protective woman continued. “...Push us a way out of here.”
“Pretty much I am,” Garrie said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
“Seems better than leaving,” the young guy snorted, hands jammed into the pockets of his baggy denim shorts. “Not that I think you can actually do that.”
Garrie yanked the satchel flap open, reaching reached in for the smooth plastic ovoid shape of the hosiery egg—finding the seam and popping it open to spill out one of the echveria.
Exposed to the day, it made the impact she expected—gathering up and bouncing light around inside itself and scattering it back out into a swirling rainbow intensity. Otherworldly, magical...utterly convincing.
Lucia whispered a rare curse. Quinn took a deep breath, let it out through his mouth. “Garrie. How long—”
“Since San Jose,” she said. And then, “Don’t judge me, Quinn. It’s portal energy— I could hardly leave it rolling around the Winchester House basement. And things happened so fast in Sedona. Even Trevarr didn’t know until—well right before Ghehera took him. I wasn’t hiding things—we were busy.”
“Maybe then,” he said. “But since we got back? Since the kyrokha got here?” He seemed relaxed, hands at his sides—except for the way they were clenched into fists.
She gave him the most even look she could manage. “For some reason,” she said, “not mentioning it seemed the best course to take even when it did finally occur to me. Maybe you can think why that might have been.”
It wasn’t like they hadn’t just had this conversation. The ongoing challenges to her mission to find Trevarr, the escalation that came with Drew’s interference... Quinn’s jaw worked for a brief moment; his hands relaxed. “Okay, yeah. I get it.”
The protective woman said, “So, you can use that to get us out of here?”
“Not that I know of,” Garrie said. “But I can use it to reach someone who can.”
“Except then maybe you don’t come back, right?” The young man shifted, exchanging a meaningful eye with the male hiker—gesturing at Garrie with a lift of his chin that meant we should stop her, and then trying to draw Rick into the silent conversation.
But Rick took a step back, shaking his head. And Garrie took a step forward. “You have a big ugly thought bubble over your head, buddy. You want me to pop that for you? Because if you think you can get this thing away from me, you are ever so welcome to try.”
“Garrie,” Lucia said, haste in her tone. “He’s just frightened.”
He wasn’t the only one. Even Lucia and Quinn...they wanted her here.
They wanted her to get them out.
She closed her hand around the echveria and let it drop to her side. “Fine,” she told them all. “You want me to try the push?”
They nodded with universal enthusiasm.
“This,” she said, “is a terrible, terrible idea.”
*Do or do not,* Sklayne said. *Choose do not.*
But Garrie understood. They believed in her, but they did it on their own terms. They wanted her to do it their way.
She slipped the echveria back into the bag, leaving it free. The duster hung heavily on her shoulders—she left that, too. This wouldn’t take long.
The sparkling thin layer of Sklayne shivered. *Do NOT.*
“Get ready,” she told them, gently testing the available breezes and then doing what she so seldom had cause to do—quietly pulling on her own resources.
As one, they moved closer to her—teetering on the edge of the concrete area. She stopped what she was doing to give them a look. “Get ready,” she said, “means to run away. Which you maybe can’t do in here, but at least you can sort of hunch away, or hide under the picnic table.” She cast a look at Lucia, who watched the entire thing with a sort of helplessness—knowing better, unable to do anything about it.
“Garrie—” Quinn said.
She was having none of it. “You too, Quinn.”
*Choose do NOT!*
Garrie chose do. She extended an unnecessary hand for the visual cue, surrounding it with an invisible nimbus of tightly knit breezes, and slipped that ethereal prybar beneath their former escape tunnel.
The entity erupted. Dana-tinted energies twisted into fury, flailing thick pseudo-limbs. Globs of itself spewed into the air, the red tint scaling up to heated, blazing gold. The ground shook, toppling dead trees along the slopes and sending birds spurting into the air. The entity absorbed them instantly, popping with flashes of extinguished etherea.
A hand grabbed Garrie’s arm and yanked her back under the shelter. Sklayne yowled, his sparkles skewing wildly as he rubber band-snapped away from the entity, flipping back into a smaller shape and coming to rest beside Garrie’s foot as a furious Abyssinian cat. *Terrible, terrible! Do not!*
Garrie reeled, finding her feet again. The close quarters in the shelter reeked of the entity’s acrid anger and the very real scent of human fear. Sklayne’s tail flicked in exaggerated annoyance, eyes narrowed and whiskers bristling; Rick’s arms had found their way around Lucia. Quinn’s arm still wrapped around Garrie’s shoulders, holding her tightly—for his sake or hers, she wasn’t sure. Didn’t matter. She was just as glad to have him there.
“Okay, then,” she said, shaking her hands free of popping, staticky leftover energy. “That was a terrible, terrible idea.”
~~~~~~~~~~