Forests of the Heart (38 page)

“Hunter?” she said.

What in God’s name was going on? Ellie thought as the man by the hood of the van pulled down his handkerchief and she recognized Hunter. She recognized the men chasing him as well. They were Donal’s hard men. But give them long hair, she realized, and they’d be exactly like the group she’d seen on the lawn behind Kellygnow earlier today. Bettina’s spirit men. The only difference was they weren’t barefoot now and they were wearing trench coats over those dark suits of theirs. But the rain didn’t seem to bother them any more than the cold. Maybe they only wore boots and overcoats when they were out on the streets so that they would fit in better. Except that didn’t explain how their hair got longer and shorter.

She had a moment’s hysterical thought. So what? Did people in the spirit-world go around in wigs or something? What was
that
all about?

“Are you certain this is your wish?” the man who’d been holding Hunter asked her in response to her telling him to leave Hunter alone.

All Ellie could do was stare at him. An unsettling sensation of déjá vu worried through her. She could hear Nuala’s voice in her head, what the housekeeper had said when they’d gone to her to ask if she and Chantal could share the studio.

Are you certain this is what you want?

Who
were
these people? Why was what she wanted so important to them?

But though her head was brimming with questions, she had enough of her wits about her to nod in response.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice came out as a croak. They were so scary-looking, these men, spirits, whatever they were. She cleared her throat before adding, “I’m sure.”

The hard man gave her a feral grin and turned away to where Tommy was sitting up, one hand rubbing the back of his head where he must have hit it. She replayed the moment when the man had basically tossed Tommy out of the way and shivered, finally beginning to believe that there was something more than human about these guys.

“All… all of us,” she managed.

“Oh, aye,” the man said. “And is the whole fucking world under your protection?”

“I… I…”

He walked past Tommy, stopping by the black jeep with the broken window. He bent down and hooked the fingers of one hand under the running board. In one sudden movement he lifted the vehicle and heaved it onto its side.

Ellie winced at the sound of the crash, her eyes wide with shock. The small gibbering voice of panic that had been hiding in the back of her head reared in mindless fear and it was all she could do to just stand there and at least pretend to be strong.

“Fair enough,” the man said, still grinning. There was no humor in his eyes. “But remember to fulfill your side of the bargain or I’ll hunt the lot of you down and gut you like the little shites you are.”

Bargain? Ellie thought. What bargain?

But she knew enough to keep her mouth shut and simply nod her head.

The hard man held her gaze for a long moment. Ellie could feel her knees turning to water. Then he finally gave a brusque nod to his companions and turned away. As silently as they’d come, untouched by the weather and unencumbered by the unsteady footing, the men went back the way they’d come.

Ellie collapsed against the side of the van, holding onto the mirror for support.

“Somebody want to tell me what the hell that was all about?”

She glanced over at Tommy to see he was now standing. His hair and shoulders had acquired a thin sheath of ice and his face was dripping. She was getting soaked herself, standing out here in the freezing rain, but he’d landed in a puddle and was far wetter than she was.

“I don’t know,” she told him. Her gaze drifted to the far end of the street where the men were just turning the corner. “Those are Donal’s hard men, but they could be twins to the guys I saw at Kellygnow.”

“M-m-miki says they’re called the Gentry,” Hunter put in.

They both turned to look at him. He was like a wet rat, utterly drenched and shivering, and somewhat ludicrous with the bright yellow rubber gloves he was wearing.

“What’s with the get-up?” Tommy asked him. “You given up selling CDs for some new career as a janitor?”

“C-c-can we take this inside?” Hunter said. “I’m fr-fr-freezing.”

Ellie nodded. She slid open the side door and they all piled in. Too cold and miserable to be shy, Hunter stripped off his sodden clothes and put on dry pants, socks, a shirt, and a sweater that he picked out of the spare clothes they kept in the back for the homeless. When he was dressed, he wrapped himself up with a couple of blankets. It made him look like a derelict—a weird derelict with those rubber gloves. Ellie watched him try to deal with the gloves, but his hands were too numbed from the cold. She helped him peel them off, then handed him a coffee. He cupped his hands around the Styrofoam cup, spilling hot coffee onto fingers, but he didn’t seem to feel the liquid.

Ellie and Tommy used a couple of other blankets to dry themselves off and helped themselves to coffee as well.

“Th-th-thanks,” Hunter said finally. “For everything. For all of this. I mean it. But especially for getting those guys off my back.” He took a sip of the coffee, sloshing more down his chin than he got in his mouth. “How did you do that anyway?”

“Yeah, Ellie,” Tommy said. “What gives? That one guy was talking about some bargain.”

“I don’t know,” she told them. “I’ve seen them in The Harp whenever there’s a session on, but I’ve never talked to them. They’re the ones who beat Donal up awhile back, remember?”

Tommy nodded.

“But the weirdest thing is, give them long hair and they could be the men I saw this morning at Kellygnow, hanging around in the backyard, some of them just in shirtsleeves. Like the cold couldn’t touch them.” She turned to Hunter. “What did you call them?”

“Ge-gentry. They’re some kind of…”

His voice trailed off and he got an embarrassed look on his face.

“Spirits,” Tommy put in.

Hunter gave him a grateful look and nodded. He took another long swallow of coffee, this time drinking more than he spilled. The hot liquid seemed to be helping, since he wasn’t shivering so much and his teeth had finally stopped chattering.

“They trashed Miki’s place earlier this morning,” he went on. “I went out there tonight and thought I’d try to clean things up for her, but then one of those guys showed up and … and …”

He had such an anguished look on his face that Ellie reached over and laid a comforting hand on his arm.

“I think I killed him,” Hunter finished.

“Oh, man,” Tommy said. “No wonder they’re so pissed off at you.”

“They haven’t liked me from the start,” Hunter said. “Ever since—” His gaze went to Ellie. “—that night at the community center when I met you and one of them warned me to stay away from you.”

“What?”

Hunter nodded. “I know. It didn’t make any sense to me either. Donal said he’d figure out what they wanted—what was going on, you know?—but that was before he went all weird.”

“All weird how?” Ellie asked.

Hunter told them then. About the painting Donal had been working on, Donal and Miki’s fight, how she’d thrown him out of the apartment after he’d destroyed his canvas, all the weird things she’d told him, what had happened to her apartment, meeting Donal just before the hard man showed up. It was a long convoluted story that complicated things more than it explained, so far as Ellie was concerned. The more Hunter talked, the more she shook her head in disbelief. None of this made any sense.

“Has the whole world gone insane?” she asked when he was done.

“Is that a rhetorical question,” Tommy asked, “or did you really want an answer?”

“You’ve got an answer?”

He nodded. “The world’s like it always was. You’re just seeing it differently.”

“Oh, great.”

“So what do you think the hard man was talking about?” Hunter asked. “With this bargain, I mean.”

Ellie thought she knew at least that much, though it didn’t explain things any better.

“You said the figure in the painting was wearing a mask?” she asked.

Hunter nodded. “Miki called it a Green Man’s mask. It looks like it’s made of leaves and vines and stuff.”

“I know what it looks like,” Ellie said. “That’s what my commission from Musgrave Wood is. To make a new version of this old wooden mask they have.”

“So that’s the bargain,” Tommy said.

She nodded. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“So now what do we do?” Hunter asked.

“There’s going to be hell to pay if I make this mask, isn’t there?”

“And hell to pay if you don’t,” Tommy put in.

“Thank you for that.”

“Come on, Ellie. I’m not trying to—”

“I know, I know,” she said. “But I’m just so confused about all of this…”

She stared out the front windshield, not that there was anything to see. They had the van’s engine still running, but a coat of ice was already thickening on the glass. Angel really needed to get some new vehicles.

“We need help,” she said. “Expert help.”

“Fiona,” Hunter offered. “One of the women who works for me. She was telling me about these Creek sisters …”

He broke off as Tommy began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“They’re his aunts,” Ellie explained.

“That’s what Fiona called them. The Aunts.”

“I mean they’re literally his aunts.”

Hunter gave Tommy a considering look. “But Fiona made it sound like they were these, I don’t know, supernatural wise women or something.”

“What can I say?” Tommy told him.

“Maybe we
should
talk to them,” Ellie said. “I can’t believe what I just said,” she added in a mutter.

Tommy was kind and made no comment. Nodding, he took out the cell phone and punched in a number. After a few moments, he hit the “End” button and punched in another number, repeating the process a few more times.

“Looks like the phone lines are down on the rez,” he said.

“Then we’re going to have to drive out there,” Ellie said.

Tommy shook his head. “With this rain? I don’t think so. The roads are going to be a mess. I doubt the highway’s even open. We’ll have to wait until the weather clears.”

“That might not be until the end of the week,” Ellie said. “I don’t know if we can wait that long. I’m supposed to be working on this mask, but now we know I can’t because who knows what sort of horrible thing those guys’ll do with it. So what’s going to happen when they figure out I’m stalling?”

No one wanted to put it into words. They’d all seen the hard man lift the jeep like it was no heavier than a cardboard cut-out and flip it over on its side.

“Thing is,” Tommy said. “If they’re so tough, how come just whacking one with a pail of water was enough to kill him?”

“I don’t know,” Hunter told him. “I don’t even know for sure that he is dead.”

“But still.”

Hunter nodded. “And remember what Donal said before he left me: Everything can die. When it comes to these Gentry, I figure he should know.”

“After what you’ve told us,” Tommy said, “I don’t know if I’d trust him on anything.”

Reluctantly, Ellie had to agree. She supposed the most depressing thing about all of this was that she wasn’t particularly surprised by what Hunter had told them. There had always been something about Donal that had made her keep a certain distance between them. It was why she hadn’t been able to reciprocate his love, why even as a friend, his moroseness could sometimes be wearying. It was one thing to tell yourself it was only a mannerism—which is what it had always seemed to her, part of the angsty, Irish-expatriate artist image he liked to project—but when it went on as relentlessly as it did … She hadn’t been able to live with it. And now this.

The mask had been pulled away and who would have guessed what had really been lying there under the façade?

“We’re getting off the topic here,” she said. “Let’s concentrate on getting out to the rez to see Tommy’s aunts.”

“You’re sure you want to do this?” Tommy asked. “If we get stranded halfway there, slide off the road in some godforsaken part of the mountains …” He shook his head. “The cops have probably already closed off the highway.”

“You think?”

He shrugged. “If not yet, then soon.”

“So let’s get out on the road before they do.”

After dinner, Miki pulled one of the dining-room chairs over to the window that overlooked the street below Fiona’s apartment and sat there for the rest of the evening. She watched the sleet come down outside, cradling her old Hohner on her lap. Occasionally she fingered a tune on its keyboard, but since she didn’t work the bellows, the only sound she made was that of the buttons being pressed and released, a series of soft, almost inaudible, hollow clicks. Mostly she smoked her cigarettes and stared out the window. Fiona tried striking up a conversation from time to time, but Miki simply couldn’t muster the energy. The events of last night and this morning, and then having worked to put on a good face about it through the day, had left her too drained.

“It’s not you,” she told Fiona. “Honestly. You’ve been great. But I’ve run out of steam, you know?”

“If you want to go to bed … ?”

Miki shook her head. “No, I’ll just sit here for a while.”

And try not to feel so bloody depressed. But it was hard, and Fiona’s apartment didn’t help.

Fiona had carried the Goth obsession of her wardrobe over into her interior decorating scheme. Between the promo posters of Morrissey, The Cure, Dead Can Dance, Rhea’s Obsession, and the like, and the somber minimalism of the furnishings—really, who put up solid black curtains?—it would be hard to feel cheerful in this room in the best of circumstances. All the furnishings were black, what little of them there were. Entertainment unit holding the stereo and TV. Wooden IKEA couch and chairs that Fiona had repainted, recovering the cushions with black fabric. Coffee table, lamp, and a small bookcase. The chairs and dining-room table in the part of the room where Miki was sitting. Only the mantel was cluttered, draped with black and red lace and holding a fake human skull, an obviously beloved collection of Anne Rice novels, and what looked like two hundred candles. It was enough to make Miki want to slit her wrists.