Reckoner Redeemed

  RECKONER REDEEMED

  Doranna Durgin

  Blue Hound Visions

  Tijeras, NM

  Book III of the Reckoners Trilogy

  About The Reckoners & Storm of Reckoning:

  “It simply amazes me how much action Durgin can pack into so few pages without losing sight of the goal at hand.”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  “Durgin has created a rip-roaring adventure...”

  — SFRevu

  “Heart, adventure, and buckets of wonder.”

  —Julie Czerneda, author of Rift in the Sky

  “Ghosts, aliens, danger, romance, and a non-cat. As Lisa McGarrity might say, what’s not to like?”

  —Anne Bishop, author of the Black Jewels series

  “Durgin takes the reader on a wild ride...”

  —SFRevu

  Copyright & Dedication

  Copyright © 2017 by Doranna Durgin

  ISBN-10: 1611385172

  ISBN-13: 978-1-61138-517-5

  Published by Blue Hound Visions, Tijeras NM, an affiliate of Book View Café

  Cover: Doranna Durgin

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously — and any resemblance to actual persons, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  License Notes:

  Even with a professionally edited book such as this one, typos and other errors can make it through to the finished manuscript. If you notice such an error, kindly bring it to the author’s attention by emailing dmd@changespell.com so that it can be corrected. Thank you!

  The author has provided this ebook to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) so that you can enjoy it on your personal devices. You may not print or post this ebook, or make it publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this ebook, other than to read it on one of your personal devices. If you would like to share, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this efiction and it was not purchased for your use, then you should purchase your own copy.

  ~~~~~

  With thanks to:

  Editor Deborah J. Ross! Thank you!

  The eagle eyes of Jim Hetley, Becky Andrew, Lenita Vaughan, & Adrianne Middleton!

  All the readers who were so patient with my process of getting this book out there!

  Dedication:

  This book couldn’t possibly be dedicated to anyone other than my parents: Mona & Charles Durgin, both of whom understood how much I needed to write this book. I wish more than anything—for all the reasons—they were both still here to see it released. Miss you forever, Mom & Dad.

  Disclaimer Disguised as an Author Note

  Yes, I’m still doing it. I’ve taken an extremely cool actual place — the Sandia Mountains — and let myself play around with it. But all the dorky bits are mine, and all the cool bits are theirs, and all the bits I couldn’t tromp through or research to death, I made up. We do that sometimes. PS: There's a real author note at the end.

  The Reckoners Cast

  Our Heroine: Lisa McGarrity; Garrie. A natural Reckoner, once mentored by a ghost named Rhonda Rose.

  Our Missing Hero: Trevarr, half-human bounty hunter from another dimension. He is not having a festive time.

  Our Hero’s former bond partner: Sklayne, an energy-based creature of curiosity and appetite, often appearing as an Abyssinian cat.

  The Bad Beings: Take your pick. I’m gonna go with the humans of Ghehera, because who can blame the battered kyrokha, really?

  Reckoner Crew:

  Lucia Reyes – spiritual empath

  Quinn Rossiter – researcher & trivia master

  Drew Ely – ethereal historian, now sort of from San Jose

  Guest Location: Sandia Crest and the eastern foothills

  Guest Interesting Person: Enrique Soto, park ranger

  Prologue:

  Anjhela on the Hunt

  Ghehera. The top of the world, ensconced in stone and glyphs and power and the pretense of justice.

  On the world of Kehar, true justice held no sway; there was only what served Ghehera. Often the two overlapped, as enforcers and confessors managed the populace, human and not, that Ghehera’s powerful tribunal would exploit.

  But not always.

  And not often, when they brought Anjhela to bear.

  Now Anjhela prowled the underground containment levels with an ominous grace, captive lumelight gleaming across the faint scale texture of her loam-brown skin. A foul skelpie scrounger darted out of her way with a squeak of fear, flattening itself against the ancient stone hallway; Gheharan stone pressed around her, weighting the air and darkening the shadows of deeply carved glyphs.

  Glyphs of protection...of containment...of pain and oppression.

  Anjhela would earn her own glyph soon. Once she broke her all-important prisoner, the half-breed who refused to betray his powerful companion. Trevarr.

  The enslaved wall lumes felt her mettle and dimmed as she passed. The timid skelpie scuttled away in a diminishing click of chitin and claw, no doubt shedding scales in its wake.

  Anjhela shuttered her tight smile as she passed the first of Ghehera’s tiny, active consolation cells—not that the occupants were in any condition to peer out on her. And not that Trevarr occupied any such cell.

  No, for Trevarr she needed strictest security, far into the Deeps. And she needed room to work.

  Trevarr, the best and the worst of them. Persistently independent; persistently unwilling to accept his place as a half-breed kyrokha.

  And good enough to get away with it.

  Until now.

  Unlike Trevarr, Anjhela knew her place—had always known her place. But then, she’d been here since childhood, absorbing her role for the Tribunal. Training. Excelling.

  Trevarr had come late, far too long hidden and protected by the village that had taken him in. Not that their charity had served them—or Trevarr—in the long run. He’d run unfettered, and he’d been thoroughly corrupted by the illusion of independence from the Tribunal.

  But no man as dangerous as Trevarr ever avoided notice from the bastion of Ghehera. As Trevarr had been, they were hunted, and acquired, and trained. They were absorbed. Or if not, they were eliminated.

  Anjhela reached the cavernous Deeps containment area and thrust her hand against the flat gleam of its locking plate, pushing with finely tuned energy. The solid stone separated into door and wall; the door cracked, ready to slide silently open.

  She stood quietly for a moment—anticipating. Filling herself with who she was.

  Then she shoved the door aside and stalked into the warmth of containment. Sinuous in movement, her beguiling mouth set into a practiced hint of a cool and faintly promising smile.

  Every part of this body was a weapon, and she knew just how to use it. Glyphmaster Shahh had made sure of it.

  Trevarr sat where the drones had left him, beneath sullen lumes at the hump of rock on the far wall. The lumes shone well enough to display the faint tracings of his natural tattoos, the scaled feathers that darkened with emotion. That same light revealed the spread of fine bruises along muscled ribs, and the swollen split along the perfect angle of cheekbone. That eye opened only to a slit, and still the startling pewter gaze of it shone at her.

  Even sitting, he favored one leg. Even chained, he favored his arm.

  But he had never truly favored her, and now he would pay for that.

  “Tell me,” she said, “About your delicious new source of power.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 1

  Meditation on a Sandia
Mountain Trail

  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 energi
es 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.