Widdershins (22 page)

They both stopped, struck by the light.

“Have you ever seen the like?” Gathen murmured.

Rabedy shook his head. But he knew what Gathen was feeling. The light drew at him, too. It flickered in his eyes and went creeping down to the dark places in his heart, promising, promising . . .

Rabedy wasn’t sure what. Something he’d never had, he supposed, but he already knew that he missed it terribly.

“What are you doing?” he whispered when Gathen put his hand on the door knob.

“I want to see what it’s coming from.”

“Big Dan just wants us to get the fiddler.”

“True. But he didn’t say anything about not having a look about before we do.”

Rabedy sighed. Maybe Big Dan hadn’t said it in so many words, but when he’d told them not to screw this up, he’d no doubt meant
just
this kind of thing. The trouble was, Rabedy knew exactly what Gathen was feeling.

The door was locked, but bogans know a hundred spells to convince a security device to open for them. There might as well not have been a lock for all that it stopped Gathen from opening the door. He let it swing all the way open before he stepped inside.

Rabedy hesitated a moment, then sighed and followed him into the room. There were two humans sleeping inside, a man and a woman, each in their own bed. The light came from the woman, a dreamy, yearning glow the warm yellow of a harvest moon, as though she was made of the radiance and her human skin couldn’t quite contain it.

Thrice-blessed, Rabedy remembered Odawa saying, but this light was neither canid nor corbae magic. It was old, old. A light that had been waiting in the dark for the world to be born.

“I didn’t see her shine like this,” Gathen said. “Earlier, in the bar, I mean.”

Rabedy nodded. He hadn’t either.

“Makes you wonder about that pluiking Odawa,” Gathen went on. “How blind is he? Because he saw this.”

“Maybe he sees on some other level than we do.”

“I’d like to shove his head up the crack of his own ass and find out what he can see there.”

“Why do you say that?” Rabedy asked.

“I don’t like him—I don’t care what Big Dan says, or if he’s the boss. I don’t trust that pluiking green-bree, and I don’t like him. There’s something not right about the way he’s gadding about with us. He’s old and he’s powerful—what does he need us for?”

“To be his eyes.”

Gathen shook his head. “He doesn’t need our eyes. He saw this, remember?”

He moved to the woman’s bed as he spoke, one hand stretched out.

Don’t, Rabedy wanted to tell him, but it was too late.

As soon as Gathen touched her, the light flared, blinding them both. When they both stopped blinking, the bed was empty. The light was gone, but so was the woman. Gathen stood by the bed, sucking on the ends of his fingers.

“What happened?” Rabedy whispered.

“Pluiking light burnt me.”

“No, I mean, where did she go?”

“Damned if I know. Guess it has to do with that luck Odawa was on about. She must have been wearing some kind of safeguard spell that we couldn’t see because of the light.”

The man sleeping on the other bed made a grumbling noise in his throat and the two bogans froze in place. They waited for long moments until they were sure he was still sleeping, then crept out of the room, shutting the door softly behind them so as not to wake him and attract his attention. The man had connections to Mother Crone, after all, and there’d be hell to pay if she got involved in any of this. So they were careful now. There was no point in making more of a mess than they already had.

“You okay?” Rabedy asked his companion once they were in the hall.

“Sure. I’m fine.”

But there was something new in his eyes. A resignation. A sense of loss. A sense of yearning.

“Not a word of this to anyone,” Gathen said. “You’re in as deep as I am. If we’re lucky, nothing’ll have happened to the woman. She’ll come back and no one need ever know.”

Rabedy nodded, though from the outset he’d tried to just get on with the task they’d been given. But it was too late now. He was in this the same as his companion, even if he hadn’t had anything to do with Gathen’s touching the woman. That wouldn’t matter to Big Dan.

“Let’s just get this done,” he said.

They moved farther down the hall and, happily, there was no light coming from under the door of the room the fiddler shared with the woman Luren had pushed down the stairs. The lock here opened as easily as had the one in the other room and a moment later they were inside.

“There,” Gathen said. “She’s in the bed by the window.”

The two of them moved forward, careful not to make a sound until they were each on a side of the bed. Then they threw back the covers and grabbed the woman’s arms. Before she could cry out, they had pulled her away.

Out of the world.

Into the between.

And then farther still.

They arrived at a green sward bathed in cool moonlight and surrounded by a forest of ancient beech and oak, landing in a tumble of limbs that almost brought them right up against the tall grey Doonie Stane that stood in the center of the open space. The girl had struggled the whole of the short trip, which was what made for the untidy arrival. She pushed away from them as they hit the ground and both bogans lost their grip on her. Rabedy scrambled to his feet a moment before Gathen, but the girl was already standing, her eyes wide as she tried to take in her surroundings and guard against their next move.

Gathen grinned and held up his hands in a nonthreatening manner.

“Don’t you go worrying your head about nothing,” he told her. “All we were told was to bring you here. Nobody needs to get hurt now unless you do something stupid.”

“Something stupid?” she said. “We’re way past something stupid, you little shit.”

She stood in a defensive position, hands held at the ready in front of her. It was a warrior’s stance, Rabedy realized. She might look like some skinny little useless human girl, standing there barefoot in nothing but a thin T-shirt the length of a dress, but she had backbone. He remembered the way she’d fought at the crossroads. Backbone
and
skill.

“The problem with your kind,” Gathen was saying, “is you don’t know well enough to respect your betters.”

She spat on the grass between them.

Oh, don’t, Rabedy thought. There was no need for anyone to get hurt if she would just back off. But no, she had to get Gathen going.

Gathen shook his head, pretending sorrow. “Bring you here, the boss said, but he didn’t say anything about what condition you needed to be in. I’m thinking you need to be taught a bit of a lesson, you pluiking little cow.”

“Try me, asshole.”

“Let’s just leave it,” Rabedy said, catching hold of Gathen’s arm as the other bogan took a step toward the woman.

Gathen shrugged off his grip and gave him a glare, then turned back to the woman with a grin Rabedy recognized all too well. It was the look Gathen wore when he gave a couple of hard whacks to some miserable little treekin who happened to get in his way. It was the look he had when he cut open a still howling cat and ripped out its intestines to shape one of the runes Odawa had taught them.

Sod it, Rabedy thought. Let him make a mess of this, as well.

He stepped back and folded his arms, refusing to take part in Gathen’s game.

“Oh, I’m so scared of you,” Gathen told the woman.

“You should be,” she told him.

After that, it all happened so fast. Gathen lunged for the woman, but instead of trying to dodge him, she stepped in close, and delivered a powerful straight-armed blow into his solar plexus that stole all the breath from him, dropping him to his knees. She danced out of his fumbling reach, turned gracefully, and kicked him in the throat, delivering this second blow with her full weight behind it.

Rabedy heard an awful popping sound as her foot connected, then Gathen collapsed on the ground. Rabedy realized that she’d crushed his windpipe.

She turned to him, falling back into her warrior’s stance. But Rabedy shook his head and stepped away, into the between and back to the other-world camp where the others waited. His last view of the woman was of her kneeling beside Gathen’s body and pulling his knife from his belt, before she ran off into the forest.

Big Dan sighed when he saw Rabedy returning to the camp on his own. Something was wrong, and it didn’t take a great mind to figure out who’d be to blame. Rabedy was his own nephew, but the little pluiker didn’t have a bogan’s instincts. Not enough backbone. Not enough bogan fierceness. Big Dan had hoped that pairing him on tasks with hard men like Gathen or Straith would awaken the little shite’s natural instincts, but it hadn’t helped so far and obviously nothing had changed tonight.

He didn’t bother to stand up to get Rabedy’s report.

“Where’s Gathen?” he demanded.

“He’s dead,” Rabedy said. He looked at the ground, unwilling or unable to meet Big Dan’s gaze. “The girl killed him. Then she ran away into the woods.”

Lairds help them, Big Dan thought. Did he even realize how preposterous that sounded? A pluiking slip of a girl killed the swaggering Gathen, just like that? Like it had been nothing?

But Big Dan only asked, “What woods? Outside the hotel—in this world?”

Rabedy shook his head. “No, we took her to the Doonie Stane in the Aisling’s Wood like you told us to.”

“So she’s still there.”

“Except she’s run off.”

“She won’t get far,” Odawa said. “Except for a few glades like the one in which the Doonie Stane stands, the forest there is mostly impassable.”

Big Dan frowned. The pluiking green-bree always needed to get in his own penny’s worth. But Big Dan knew he only needed a little more patience and so said nothing. It wouldn’t be long before the green-bree had what he wanted and then he’d have to fulfill his side of the bargain, providing the token that would allow the bogans free passage anywhere they wished to go in the wild and green.

Big Dan had been dubious when Odawa first approached them. “What kind of token?” he’d asked.

“My protection,” the green-bree had explained. “No one will deny you passage.”

“We’ll not swear fealty to you or any other laird.”

“It’s not like that. If you help me, the token is yours in return. We’ll neither of us owe the other any more except for our continued respect and friendship.”

“And what makes you think it will be respected?”

The green-bree had turned those queer blind eyes on him and he felt the shiver of ancient power that Odawa usually kept hidden.

“Oh, it will be respected,” he’d said.

So Big Dan had agreed. He kept the bargain to himself. The token wasn’t anything he meant to share. He’d use it to become a bigger boss. Who wouldn’t follow him if he could go wherever he pleased, extending his protection only to those who swore fealty to him?

Odawa had turned his attention to Rabedy now. “You say she killed your companion?”

Rabedy turned uneasily to face the blind man. Big Dan understood his discomfort. When the green-bree fixed his gaze on you, those sightless eyes seemed to stare straight into your soul.

“Yes, sir,” Rabedy said.

“Exactly
how
did she kill him?” Odawa asked.

“In . . . in combat. She moved like a warrior, hitting Gathen only twice. Once with her fist, then she kicked him in the throat and broke his windpipe.”

Odawa gave a thoughtful nod.

“It appears I’ve misjudged you,” he told Big Dan. “There’s no way some little fiddler girl could have killed a bogan without some sort of magic, and the only magic she could have gotten is from Grey.”

“So he’ll come looking for her,” Big Dan said.

“Yes, I suppose he will. Once he knows she’s missing.” He smiled. “We’ll have to make sure he gets word and ready a welcome for him. But first, I should think, if we’re going to have a hostage, we should at least make certain she’s actually in our safekeeping.”

Geordie

I suppose I should have been surprised
when I woke to find Jilly’s bed empty, but after all the years I’ve known her, there was little Jilly could do to surprise me anymore. Ordinary things like hangovers didn’t apply to her, so it seemed quite natural for her to have woken up without one, gotten bored because I was still sleeping, and decided to go downstairs on her own to have breakfast.

I shaved and had a shower before I went looking for her, but the only person in the restaurant off the bar was Andy. I hadn’t been expecting to see anyone, considering the early hour, but then I remembered him telling me at one point last night how he was cursed with the inability to sleep in, no matter how late he’d stayed up the night before.

“Have you seen Jilly?” I asked as I sat down.

“I haven’t seen anyone until now.”

“She probably went out to look around. She was amazed when we drove in yesterday—at how much the town’s changed since she was last here.”

Andy pushed the coffee thermos over and I poured myself a mug.

“You don’t seem much worse for the wear,” he said.

I smiled at his bloodshot eyes. “You forget—I turned down all of your generous single malt samples except for the first one.”