The Reckoners Read online

  Garrie, head reckoner: trained by her own personal invisible friend from childhood to communicate with and influence spirits of all natures. Lucia, their spiritual empath. Drew, their historian. And Quinn, their memory-gifted researcher, tall and broad-shouldered, eyes a deep clear blue, hair a crisp blond that always fell naturally into whatever style he’d chosen. The three of them were the support team to Garrie’s reckoner muscle, giving her the information she needed to work fast and clean.

  Or not so clean. From out of thin air, a glob of sticky, stinky ghost poop landed on Garrie’s cheek. “Gah,” she said, and swiped it off, flinging it away with the casual skill of long practice. Since her mid-teens, she’d been doing this. And with Rhonda Rose at her side, most of it had been a lot more exciting than...

  Ghost poop.

  “Someone’s mad,” Lucia said.

  “Please don’t tell me you had to use your superpowers to figure that one out.” Garrie moved cautiously into the great room — beamed ceiling far above, corner fireplace way down there somewhere, arching rounded doorways to bedrooms, open into the kitchen. If there was ghost poop, there was anger.

  “This place is phat,” Drew decided, just behind the curve in cool factor as usual. “I bet you could get a deal on it after we clear it.”

  Garrie didn’t answer. She had her own perfectly good condo, smack in the middle of the city’s university area. Everything she could possibly want within walking distance and plenty of eccentric, benign spirits to keep her company. “You guys pulling in any clues?”

  “The whole angry thing,” Lucia offered.

  Drew shook his head. “The history is a muddled mess.”

  Garrie could understand that. “All this new construction material, pulled in from all over the place.” She took a deep breath, inhaling the peculiar scent of disgruntled spirits that only she could perceive. “I know you’re here,” she said out loud, words to focus the unspoken communication she broadcast to the house. “Get real, everyone knows you’re here. Quit throwing spitballs and let’s talk.”

  The straightforward approach. Rarely successful, but always worth a try. This time it netted her a faint but definite spiritual glower, as though impotent pieces of power had mustered righteous offense. No more effective than being hit with pats of soft spiritual butter.

  “Ooh,” she muttered. “Eek.”

  Quinn moved into the room, squinting at the walls — visualizing the structure, running his mind over all the possible connections, all the possible influences. “It’s not all new,” he murmured, touching the textured wall paint. Stepping close.

  Somewhere in the house, a door opened. The reckoners, as one, turned to Garrie. She shrugged. “House, haunted. Right?”

  Lucia frowned. “Feels like a swarm of angry bees.”

  “You’re right,” Garrie realized. “There’s way more than one.” She felt it plainly enough now — the weird fractured pieces, a kaleidoscope of personalities. All of them annoyed, but none of them truly powerful. Disturbed echoes of those who had once lived in the flesh, and they needed her help as much as the man who’d hired her.

  Down the hall, shadows in shadow... something moved.

  Quinn spoke with a frown in his voice. “I think —”

  A screeching yowl cut across his words, a rising wail in the darkness spiraling up to piercing sound.

  Drew jumped, his flashlight painting wild, bobbing patterns of light across the walls and archways. “Shee-it!”

  “Toucheee,” Lucia murmured of him. But she could afford to be complacent. She was always the one who walked away without a single splot of ghost poop on her person.

  The only one.

  Garrie slanted her a silent cut the kid a break, and reached down the hall, pushing out her bubble of awareness to find a spirit with the strength to have made that sound.

  Nothing.

  “Cat,” Quinn said, matter-of-fact — preoccupied with his walls as he gestured down the long, curving hall.

  And there it was. Loitering at the end of the hall, tail held high and undulating smugly enough that even Garrie, the non-cat person, could see its self-satisfaction. “Okay, who let that thing in?”

  Silence from her team. Loud silence.

  A voice not at all familiar to any of them said, “I did.”

  But ghosts didn’t vocalize. The occasional whispery noise, the faintest of moans, conversations for Garrie’s ears alone... not deep, strong voices clear to them all.

  And they didn’t appear at the end of the hallway, solid and tall in the shadows. The cat ran to the new arrival, wound briefly between his ankles, and faded away into a corner.

  Drew swore, and Lucia drew back, and Quinn pulled his attention from the walls, pulling himself up to wariness. Garrie lifted her flashlight so the beam shone directly on the man’s face.

  He can’t be for real.

  Not with a black leather duster over a shirt with leather panels and crisscrossed lacings, pants with front panel styling that might have been stylish a hundred years ago, calf-high boots much scuffed and secured by a row of outside buckles. The light revealed strong features, all line and angle.

  He reacted to the light with a pained squint, a futile effort to fend off the light with one hand. And of course he had half-finger gloves to complete the unlikely picture he made. Of course he had thick straight hair past his shoulders, shorter front strands softening his features with just the right amount of carelessness.

  “Ay-yi-yi,” Lucia murmured, something of awe in her voice.

  But Garrie wasn’t looking for reasons to linger in a house where the dead hosts were already tossing around ghost poo. “This is a private party.”

  He didn’t seem impressed. “The light — ?” he said, an unfamiliar accent in even those few words of request. The cat, invisible in the shadows, yowled.

  It made Garrie’s spine tingle.

  “Garrie,” Lucia said, latching on to Garrie’s arm. Her unspoken words were so clear that Garrie didn’t need to hear them. Garrie, be nice. Garrie, don’t antagonize the hottie until we figure out if he’s good or evil.

  Garrie scowled. “You know damned well it never turns out well when we run into people.”

  Lucia made a face at the truth of this statement, but then her expression brightened. “There was that goth wannabe who thought his gran was possessed. That wasn’t too bad.”

  “Gran had Alzheimer’s. It was tragic. And what about the others? The reporter who made us look like idiots in prime time, the actual idiot who thought he could steal our skills if he just tried hard enough?”

  “I play no games,” the man said, his unreadable expression no reassurance. He was bigger than any of them, quite clearly stronger than any of them, and he held himself like a man who knew it. “I need your help.”

  Okay, then, maybe still a bad guy, but not playing it bad yet. Garrie kept him in her light, neatly sidestepping the mid-air appearance of glop as the mood in the swarming, incoherent spirits shifted for the worse. She sent out a silent mental radar sweep, listening for spiritual pings with half her attention while the other remained on their leather-clad visitor.

  One of the pings came back from the visitor in question. What the — ?

  He hadn’t moved, still squinting against the light. Garrie lowered the beam to his neck and dug into the front pocket of her small canvas backpack, pulling out a careworn business card to flick down the hallway at his feet. “You want to talk business, give me a call. Later. Say, in the daytime. When I’m not in the middle of something.”

  “The fireplace,” Quinn said abruptly, as if their work hadn’t been interrupted by the cat, the man, and the conversation. “It’s adobe, not stucco. Custom made. Old mud.”

  Drew headed instantly for the door to take in the structure as a whole, even as the house subtly shifted. Garrie felt it; Lucia felt it. Even the man looked over at the empty kitchen with a wary eye.

  From outside, Drew called, “Yes! It’s the mud!”


  The house made a noise like someone’s last breath. Silent demands plucked at Garrie’s attention. Irritation at being ignored, promises to up the ante, a crude image or two —

  Lucia gasped. “Garrie —”

  “I feel it,” Garrie said grimly. The interruption had cost them; they were likely to get dirty on this one before it was over.

  “Containment?” Lucia said, slinging her Burberry tote from her shoulder, hand ready to plunge inside.

  “Size large.” Garrie held out her hand without removing her attention from the kitchen. She switched her flashlight off and jammed it into the holder on her cargo belt; she’d need both hands now, and her inner sight was more important than her physical sight anyway.

  Lucia slapped the bag into her hand, flexible and plastic. Easy zipper. Double layered. The plastic gleamed with petroleum jelly, and the grit of their secret blend of eleven herbs and spices prickled against her fingertips, from juniper and lilac to garlic and leek.

  “Go home,” Garrie told the man, no longer much paying attention to him. “Or just go away. But go.” It wasn’t hard, herding minor, fractured spirits into containment with ethereal breezes... but it took concentration. Serious concentration. On invisible, angry entities.

  Drew ran back inside, stopping so short that he skidded on the tile. “Quinn’s thinking flash flood, lots of victims... you contain ’em, and we’ll find their spot.”

  No wonder she sensed only pieces — these people had been scattered across a wide area, with the adobe mud harvesting only a partial presence of each spirit. “I’d be peeved, too.”

  “Everyone’s got a mad on,” Lucia said pointedly, glancing at their interloper. “I’m going outside. What about him?”

  “That’s his problem,” Garrie said. She reached inside herself, opening the door that held in her own inner light. Here, little ghosties...

  “He could get slimed...”

  “I can hear you,” the man said. “And I have no time.”

  “No kidding. Me either. Have you ever smelled ghost poo?” Garrie found the coalescing spirits as dim spots in her inner eye, gathering toward the kitchen. All that wiring, all those appliances... always a favorite spot. Here, little ghosties...

  She lured them in, knowing better than to try to reason with such fragmented entities. Her energies built, spiraling through her as a gentle Escherian swirl. Nothing too intense for these touchy, primordial pieces of the post-living...

  Someone grabbed her arm.

  Lucia made a belated sound of warning from the doorway. Garrie opened her eyes, shocked to feel strong fingers clamping down on her arm, startled to find that even in the darkness that the man’s eyes weren’t quite right.

  She glowered right into that gaze, saw the instant of surprise there as he read her intent — but not before she lost the leading edge of her temper and drew down the already spiraling energy to fling him away, giving him a psychic King Kong shove that was a stupid waste because it only worked on spiritual entities —

  Except damn if it didn’t shove him right back against the nearest wall hard enough to elicit a grunt. And then, even more utterly unexpected, radiated back out from him two-fold, passing right through Garrie and into —

  The kitchen.

  For an instant there was silence. And then Drew said, “Shee-it!”

  And Quinn said, “Garrie!”

  And Lucia’s voice went up half an octave with “Caray! Run! Oh crap!”

  And Garrie felt the spiritual fury raising the hair at the back of her neck and then down her arms and she mouthed her own silent curses as she sprinted for the door —

  Too late. Far, far too late.

  ~~~~~

  Garrie still smelled. She still smelled bad.

  She tugged at the wet hair behind her ear, despairing that she’d ever wash it free of the night’s marinade: equal parts disgruntled spirits and ghost poo.

  It was her own fault. She’d lost her focus on a job that should have been simple. She’d let herself get distracted by the mystery intruder, and they’d all paid for it.

  Damn it, she was losing her edge. Too many easy jobs, too few even of those.

  “I’m getting out,” she said out loud, speaking only to the walls of her condo bedroom. “If you were still here, Rhonda Rose, you would totally agree. You’d say I forgot to check under their skirts. Because I did.” And boy, they’d been angrier than she’d expected. And capable of generating a lot more ethereal poo.

  You should still be here, Rhonda Rose.

  Equal parts nanny and tutor and then companion, Rhonda Rose had known the spirit world from the inside out. With Rhonda Rose, Garrie had been young and fierce, a reckoner to be reckoned with. A reckoner still actively filling the needs of more than just a few isolated spirits who needed help anchoring themselves.

  Most people thought a lingering spirit needed to let go; Garrie knew better. They needed to complete whatever connection they’d lost.

  But she wasn’t the only one who could handle that lightweight work. Plenty of mediums did the same, some who weren’t even quite aware of it. The priests, for instance — she wasn’t sure they’d ever catch on. She sure didn’t plan to clue them in. And she herself didn’t fit the mold.

  Twenty-five and over the hill. Time to get into something different. The university area was a bustle of activity... of service jobs. It could happen.

  She slouched back in a bed way too large for one smallish person, surrounded by squishy pillows and squishy plushies with her laptop balanced against her legs. “Here’s a beautician’s school,” she commented to the plushies. “Think they’d even let me in the door?”

  None of the stuffed animals responded. Just as well. That would be a bit too much even for a reckoner.

  She’d finished dealing with the displaced spirits at the patio home, of course. She’d gone back in and rounded them all up while they were still weakened by the blast of retribution they’d flung all over the house, employing the push-and-tug of ethereal breezes with a surgeon’s precision. Quinn had gone off to research the fireplace artisan and would return the spirits to their proper location come daylight, while Garrie had already severed their ties to the adobe at the patio house.

  There’d been no sign of the man. No sign of the cat. Big surprise.

  And all the while, Lucia apologized for not warning Garrie of the interloper’s intent to grab her — for watching the environment while Garrie managed the ethereal world was one of her tasks. “He was so fast...” she kept muttering.

  But Lucia hadn’t been the only one taken by surprise. They’d all been distracted; they’d all missed the depth of spiritual disgruntlement.

  There’d been only a twelve-foot strip of property between that patio house and its equally chic, equally new neighbors. She wondered if anyone had complained about the pyrotechnics.

  More than likely, no one had noticed at all.

  “If I’m not going to make a real difference,” Garrie told the plushies, “I’d rather paint nails. Or change car oil. Or run the tram up and down Sandia Peak all day long.”

  She threaded her fingers through short, wet, stinky hair and tugged in the frustration of it all.

  The plushies said nothing.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 2

  Albuquerque, a Nice Little Park

  Untidy humors spill everywhere.

  — RRose

  It’s a sticky business.

  — L.M.

  Sklayne stretched his awareness into this new location on this foreign world, sheltered by an unfamiliar spreading bush. It was some community place, with human seating options and nurtured turf and bushes, all still glistening with the fake rain from earlier.

  Green sharp smells, twittering dry feathers, hard glossy beetle —

  A satisfying crunch and swallow, beetle no more.

  “Think cat,” Trevarr said, his tension battering at Sklayne’s edges.

  Sklayne knew cat. Sklayne had done cat in the darkne
ss the night before. Sleek reddish feline, leggy and much with the ears.

  Sklayne held his mind still, pushed; he expanded to encompass everything and anything before abruptly shrinking back to the cat shape. His senses altered, wavered... solidified.

  Then... a full spectrum of energies, absorbed and tasted and seen.

  Now... vision of washed-out colors with sharp edges up close, fuzzy edges across this green expanse of manicured growth. Scents just as sharp, just as stingingly dry — and the recently consumed beetle had left its own aura.

  A prominent needled branch caught Sklayne’s attention; he sniffed, then delicately rubbed his face against it. “Mrow,” he said, an experiment.

  “Very convincing.”

  Not that Trevarr sounded convinced, but when did he ever? At least he spoke familiar words, familiar language — not those learned from a traveler years earlier. He stood tall beside Sklayne’s diminutive and earthbound new form, shaded beneath a pampered cottonwood and squinting with too-bright sunshine from behind newly acquired sunglasses.

  Trevarr in disgrace. Looked much like Trevarr not in disgrace, but felt...

  Tension. Guilt. Determination.

  Trevarr ignored the brush of Sklayne’s thoughts as he eyed the petite human form sitting alone in the middle of the green community place, a large book open on her lap. “Behave yourself. We need to deal with this quickly.”

  “Mrrp,” Sklayne said with his cat-voice, and liked that sound even better than mrow. He, too, eyed their target. No, not very large, and not in the least aware of them. Not showing any signs of being their salvation, or of being anything but prey.

  But Trevarr thought they could use her, so use her they would — and hopefully she wouldn’t break too quickly. He flicked large ears at Trevarr, returning to his natural internal voice with eager satisfaction. ::Tell herrrr.::

  Not unexpected, Trevarr’s snap of temper. “We cannot. You know that.”

  Sklayne did. Or he knew he’d been told it, which wasn’t the same thing. Telling the Garrie person meant she’d know things she shouldn’t. She’d ask questions she shouldn’t. She’d follow her human curiosity into places she shouldn’t, and then Ghehera would know of her in return.