Storm of Reckoning Read online

  He seemed to try... but no, no focus there. He’d found her left ear, perhaps.

  There was, for an instant, silence.

  Until Quinn came bouncing through the door. “Nope, I just can’t get a—”

  He stopped short, his gaze darting from Trevarr to the red-faced woman and the mess and the melted candles, his face scrunched in horror at the ghost stench. “What the hell? Are you kidding me?”

  “Hey,” Garrie said, surly on Trevarr’s account. “She started it.”

  Well. And Ghost Bob. Because truly, Ghost Bob’s timing... totally sucked.

  “Are you kidding me?” Quinn said again, even more incredulous if anything. And then he saw Trevarr’s unshuttered eyes, and his jaw did that weird little thing where it jutted just a little bit sideways, and Garrie knew uh-oh, Quinn had really reached his limit. She did the only absurd thing she could, which was to swiftly cover Trevarr’s eyes with her hands, la la la you don’t see that....

  Yeah. Real grown up, Garrie. So was the defensive tone in her voice. “Can I help it if peeved ghosts come out of the woodwork when I’m around?”

  Lucia cast an annoyed look at the saleswoman. “She did start it. And I was trying to buy something, too.”

  The saleswoman tended her wrist, backed up against the wall behind the counter like a frightened animal. Something of the big-eyed sort, like those in a children’s movie. “Did you say Quinn?”

  Trevarr lifted a hand to pull Garrie’s hand from his eyes. He missed and lurched over to set the bells to jingling in protest beneath him, but still. Progress.

  The woman took a tentative step forward. “Robin mentioned a friend named Quinn.”

  “Exactly,” Lucia said. “And here we are, to buy things and let you know we’re here, because Robin asked for help and then she didn’t meet us at the inn last night.”

  The woman frowned. “I said she mentioned Quinn. She didn’t say anything about a shopping princess or the Terminator or...” She looked at Garrie. “I give up. Or you.”

  Garrie glared back. “Just think of me as the one who can make sure the rest of your stock is melted like those candles if you don’t find a nicer tone.”

  “And what was that thing?” the woman asked, pretty much as if Garrie hadn’t spoken. “That... that... puffer cat.”

  Quinn bent to pick up one of the fallen display trees, leaving half the stock behind. “It doesn’t matter.”

  ::Be sorry if you think not.::

  “Behave,” Garrie muttered. “You and Bob both.”

  Trevarr tried again to remove her hand, batting clumsily at it. She held firm, leaning in to murmur, “Your eyes.”

  That she could resist him at all spoke volumes. Farking hell, he was going to be mad when he pulled himself back together.

  ::Klysar’s farking bloody hell mad,:: Sklayne said, with the air of someone pleased at stringing so many profanities in a row.

  Quinn stepped carefully away from the display he’d righted; it gave a listless, creaky half-turn and he cursed under his breath, and then out loud. “Dammit, we don’t have time for a scene from Scooby Doo. We need to find Robin!”

  The woman took a deep breath, still rubbing her wrist, and gave Garrie a pointed look — gave all the melted candles a pointed look. “Not until I know what this mess is all about.” The pointed look switched to Quinn. “Maybe Robin trusts you. I don’t.”

  Garrie thought that under other circumstances, she might admire this woman. As it was, she found her damned annoying. Explaining ghosts... explaining reckoning...

  Right. Just like that. “What’s your name?”

  The woman hadn’t expected that. She pursed glossy red lips. “Nancy Barber.”

  “All right, Nancy. Try this out for size. You have an unhappy long-term ghost. He recognized that I can perceive him, and he pretty much wet his pants over it. He wants respect. I’m not sure what that means, but given the really wicked cross-drafts you’ve created in this store, my guess is you need to pay a little more attention to your ethereal Feng shui.”

  Nancy Barber looked just as dazed as Trevarr. “My ethereal what?”

  “Feng shui,” Garrie repeated impatiently, daring a peek at Trevarr’s eyes. Not ready yet. Even if his grip did tighten around her wrist. “All of the things — okay, some of the things — in this store are meant to do something. But you’ve got them arranged by the shiny factor and not by how they might affect the space. So maybe you ought to think about that, huh?”

  “I...” Nancy said, looking around the store. Things melted, things overturned, things shoved aside, the sales counter all but cleared of their tidbit displays.

  “Maybe this is for the best,” Lucia told her. “Now you can put it back together right.”

  “You think?” Nancy’s look might possibly been more disbelievingly aghast, but Garrie wasn’t sure how.

  “Hey,” Garrie said. “It’s up to you. You’re the one with a ghost. You can ignore him if you want—”

  The waxy melting blob of Bob emitted a discordant sound.

  “ — but I wouldn’t, because he’s not likely to back down after this.”

  “Do you think we need to get help?” Lucia took a step closer, making it clear — the question wasn’t about Bob or the store at all. Trevarr.

  Garrie shook her head, an absent gesture. “Maybe Sklayne...”

  A small pile of shirts shifted and belched, then groaned, a sound reminiscent of too much Thanksgiving dinner.

  “... Or maybe not. I think just give him another moment.” She peeked again at Trevarr’s eyes, found the dark rims and pewter easing back over bright silver, the slitted, cat-like pupils not yet round but starting to shift. Relieved, she let her hand slide away, pushing back the carelessly short strands of hair that framed his face. His other hand came up, finding her free wrist with unerring accuracy.

  Ah, yes. He was on his way.

  But not quite himself yet. Because there, for that instant, he didn’t hold her wrist — he clung to it. His eyes shone not with hard self-assurance, but need and vulnerability and even yearning. More intensity than she’d thought any one being could carry; more emotion. More need. It swelled up around her like a rising breeze, filling her with eddies of sensation — more than the chilly brisk heat gathering where it would, tightening across her skin in contrasting layers of shivers.

  Much more.

  Garrie broke away with a gasp. A faint wash of energy trickled past her, and when she looked again, he was just as she would have expected to find him — here in the broad daylight, in the exposed open ground of a strange land. Eyes fully camouflaged; expression unreadable.

  At least, unreadable to anyone else. Garrie could see well enough the anger behind it, the awareness that an unfamiliar weapon in expert hands had taken him by surprise.

  The door bells might have jangled warning, had not the door remained jammed open. As it was, Garrie had only the peripheral glimpse of a woman on approach — taller than Garrie, more robust than Garrie, and authority in her every step.

  Not to mention in her husky alto annoyance. “What, if I may say, the everlasting fuck?”

  Quinn startled around, for an instant his expression all naked emotion — an echo of what Garrie had just seen in Trevarr. Need. Vulnerability. Only for that instant, quickly covered by the rest of what Quinn was — a self-confident and handsome guy who knew it. She exchanged a quick glance with Lucia.

  The faint wrinkle on Lucia’s forehead said yes, I saw it too.

  “Robin,” Quinn said, relief still showing. “We’ve been trying to reach you”

  In the back of her mind, Garrie had been expecting Quinn’s usual type — at least, his type not counting her own brief fling with him. But in a flash, she understood that Quinn’s usual type was an attempt to forget this one woman.

  For Robin wasn’t tall and slender and just a little bit artificial, and she definitely wasn’t blond. In fact, she was only a little taller than Garrie, all lush curves encased in sn
ug jeans and an equally snug bodice. Smooth brown hair shone with chunky honey highlights — a casual bob with heavy bangs, casually mussed. She wore her makeup more lightly than her friend... and nothing would have been enough to hide the fatigue and strain on her face.

  She took stock of the chaos in her shop and aimed a look at Quinn. “Quinn.”

  Quinn managed a shrug that looked just as casual as the rest of him. “Ghost tantrum, for starters,” he said, as if Robin was one of their own. “If there’s one at the tipping point and Garrie comes through, sometimes it goes boom.”

  Nancy said, ever so faintly, “I’m really sorry, Robin. I saw him and I thought of — you know—”

  “But we don’t know.” Garrie climbed to her feet, wishing she didn’t bear the imprint of wind chimes in her bare shins. Trevarr rose with stiff awkwardness; she put out a hand to steady him. “So someone has some explaining to do.”

  Lucia joined up with them and held out the pink Taser in two disdainful fingers, enough of an explanation to fill Robin in on the rest of the mess.

  Nancy drew herself up in a defensive stance. “I thought—” she started — but then wisely silenced herself, standing pat on words already spoken.

  “Robin,” Quinn said, “this is my friend Lucia, and this is Garrie. You know. Our team.”

  Damned if Robin’s eyes didn’t widen slightly, as if their names meant something to her. As if she’d known about them all this time, while they hadn’t heard a thing about her. Except she wasn’t familiar with Trevarr — the expression she directed his way said as much.

  “Trevarr,” he told her, with no more welcome in his tone than she’d given in her gaze.

  Lucia said, “We worked together in San Jose.” It sounded moderately lame, so she added — no better—”That’s where we were when Quinn called and said you needed help. So we came.”

  “Did you,” Robin said flatly, and gave Quinn a look as if he might have mentioned such pesky details as an otherworldly bounty hunter who, if not yet introduced as such, nonetheless wasn’t a being normally on the menu.

  “I was going to buy a wind chime,” Lucia added, a final uncharacteristic blurt of words. “It’s around here somewhere.”

  “Find it, and it’s on the house,” Robin said dryly. She looked at Quinn. “Coffee shop and talk?”

  “Talk right here,” Garrie said firmly, taking back the floor. “Right now. We came for Quinn, and for the friend of our friend. But so far we’ve been stood up — that would be by you — and we’ve been accosted, and we’ve been outright attacked. Meanwhile, there’s nothing going on here. Nothing.” Even if that wasn’t entirely true. Not with two ghosts boiling up into temper mode at the catalyst of Garrie’s presence, and not with things being so very quiet in a place known for its activity.

  But she had a point to make. And so she added, “Unless you grab my interest damned farking fast, I believe I’ll make plans to see the Grand Canyon. And oh, right! Sedona isn’t the only place around here with really cool rocks. There’s that old volcano thing up past Flagstaff. Meteor Crater. Who’s with me?”

  Robin’s generous lips thinned. “She always like this?”

  Quinn said gently, “Expecting to be treated like a skilled professional doing you a favor, you mean?”

  Garrie loved him all over again for that. Even Trevarr cast a grateful glance his way. Okay, it read more like a momentary cessation of ever imminent threat, but it was enough.

  Robin’s mouth twisted. “I wasn’t expecting anyone but you.” But before Quinn — or Garrie — could respond, she sighed, pushed her ruffled hair back with one hand, and gestured something that might have been apology. “Things have been stressy around here.”

  Garrie just looked at her. Lucia just looked at her. Even Quinn just looked at her. The customer who came to the doorway behind her and lingered just long enough to see the shop interior, looked at them all, and fled.

  Robin threw her hands up. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. You’re right. It sucks that I wasn’t at the hotel last night. I got caught up in this thing. I — I’m so used to not talking about this...” She took a breath, stepping closer and checking behind herself in a reflexive glance that spoke volumes. “You know how it is here... this place is so full of new age practitioners, all peace and love and vortex energy.”

  “Not you?” Lucia asked.

  Robin shrugged. “I do what I do. But I’ve never seen the need to be cliquish about it. Walk the walk out where it’s hard to do, in real life.”

  Garrie frowned. “Okay, so you think there’s a lot of incestuous peace and love here. Not seeing the problem so far.”

  “The problem,” Robin informed her, “is when some of them — like Greg Huntington’s Sin Nombres — get too literal about it. And when they decide they all want more than their fair share of the action.”

  Garrie thought of the Krevata plasmic portals. She thought of the hot white energies of a star’s heart, pouring through the conduit of her body. She thought of the remaining storage stones full of energy, left behind by the captured Krevata.

  The ones she hadn’t mentioned to Trevarr.

  And while she was doing all that thinking, Robin watched her, and her wary expression slowly eased. “I thought you would laugh.”

  “Robin,” Quinn said, “if you even knew the stuff we deal with...”

  “Ghost poop,” Lucia said glumly. Mad ghosts, emitting the same effluvia that Ghost Bob had threatened.

  “Ghost snakes,” Garrie added. “Aunties who wished they were haunted. Grannies who wished they weren’t. Families who want to dial up the dead to berate them for how they died.” She gave Robin a look. “We don’t, of course.”

  “The sororities!” Lucia said. “Remember that? It’s hell week and we want to make it real.”

  No one said anything about plasmic portals, Krevata, or the Winchester Mystery House now mysteriously cleared of its habitual ghostly population. That was all still a little too real.

  Robin held up her hands in defeat, exchanging an unreadable glance with her friend. “Okay,” she said. “The thing is, whether you think we have a problem. Whether you think what I described can be done.”

  Garrie shrugged. “Maybe two weeks ago, I would have said no. But now I’d say... it depends. But it’s not my thing.”

  Trevarr made a sound. “It is not your thing, atreya, because you don’t need it to be. These people have no sense of your breezes — they feel only the strongest gales.”

  Quinn crossed his arms. “You certainly seem to have picked up a lot about us.” Only the slightest emphasis on us, and the most meaningful look.

  Trevarr said flatly, “If the woman Caryn represents the skilled among you, then I have picked up enough.”

  “There are always exceptions,” Garrie said. “Or I wouldn’t be here. Anyway, I went looking last night.” She glanced at Robin. “It’s this thing I do... a sweep of the area. It was quiet.”

  “Dead quiet,” Lucia added helpfully — and at Garrie’s surprise, shrugged. “Drew would have said it, so someone had to.”

  Robin rolled her eyes. “I never said they were doing the nefarious deed last night. Last night, as it happens, they were plotting their nefarious deeds. Which I know, because I was spying on them. And then I got stuck there, because they decided to celebrate their nefariousness with lots of self-congratulatory sex.” She squinched up her nose. “But they’re not totally crazy — they’re doing something. They’re sucking life out of these red rocks... can you feel it?”

  Garrie eyed her, thumbs hooked in her shorts pockets. “Can you?”

  Robin looked away. “Not so much. But you know... I can see it. So can everyone else — they just think it’s the drought. But last winter was pretty good — the snow didn’t leave the San Francisco Peaks until June.”

  A child of the high desert herself, Garrie well understood the significance of high mountain snow pack. She thought of Sklayne the evening before, tumbling into the dead, brittle
bush... there in Feather’s well-watered landscaping.

  Waxy Bob shuddered, shedding globs of himself. “Truth,” he said, his reverberating voice gone all the more creepy in its thoughtfulness. “Dry wells. Should have melted them all.”

  “Well, thanks for sharing,” Garrie told him. And, in response to Robin’s narrowed eyes, she told them, “Your ghost. Bob. He’s agreeing with you. In his unique way. He meant to do more damage than he did.”

  “Are you quite sure,” Robin said, each word distinct, “that he’s our ghost? Because he didn’t show up until you did.”

  Quinn lifted his gaze to the heavens.

  “So I’m either lying, or I didn’t notice I had a ghost buddy..?” Garrie shook her head. “Yeah. Strike two.”

  And while Robin, startled, tried to form a response, Garrie turned from her. “We need food,” she said, meaning Trevarr needs food. “And I need somewhere to run off this energy.” She didn’t care that Robin and Nancy wouldn’t understand her shorthand.

  Robin, it seemed, didn’t truly need to understand. “Hiking?” she said, eyebrows raising, opportunity seized. “Rugged hiking?”

  “Better than nothing.”

  “Then,” Robin said, “I have just the thing. If you don’t mind stumbling into the fug leftover by the self-congratulatory sex.” She made a face. “Did I say, lots of self-congratulatory sex?”

  Chapter 9

  Hiking the Hard Way

  “Appropriate equipage is paramount.”

  — Rhonda Rose

  “Best invention ever: stain-resistant clothing.”

  — Lisa McGarrity

  “Shoes! It’s all about the shoes!”

  — Lucia Reyes

  Hiking.

  If Lucia had expected some meandering tourist trail along dry desert bluffs, artistically scattered with juniper, cedar, and stunted little scrub brush...

  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  But Robin had said hiking shoes. When Lucia had hesitated, assessing the effect of canvas tennies on her cute little spring outfit, Robin repeated herself in no uncertain terms.

  So Lucia reluctantly changed out of her sandals and into tidy little tennies. And still Robin had given the footwear a hairy eyeball.