Bone Walker (19 page)

“Ah've been known to duck from time to time. Y'all at least gonna let me git somethin' to wear, Miz Lady Warder ma'am?” Elessir's drawl, thick and rich and sweet, was purest melted sugar.

Since he was sounding far more normal, I magnanimously chose to overlook his sarcasm. “There aren't any shoes in the house that'll fit him,” I pointed out, “and he shouldn't have to go out barefoot.”

“Careful, Miss Thompson, a man might think a l'il ol' gal like you might be concerned.”

“Stow it. Do you have some way of getting clothes and shoes that
will
fit you?”

Elessir's attention circled around us all before returning to rest on me. “Magically, no.” The Southern honey slid back out of his voice. While he nodded briefly towards the Warders, his gaze on me turned speculative, thoughtful. “And as I doubt these two have taught you how to change the shape of things, you won't be capable of that yet either.” I must have started, for a smug little grin flashed for a moment across his face. But before I could say anything he went on, “Fortunately for all our needs, I can resort to a more prosaic method: namely, money. Give me five minutes and an Internet connection, and I'll be fit for public consumption in half an hour.”

Millicent, frustratingly, showed no reaction whatsoever to the idea that she might have left something out of my magical training. “Kendis,” she said, “let the boy use your computer. Sonny, you have the half hour. Be ready to go by then, or else I'm dragging you out the door naked if I have to.”

The rest of us made what use we could of those thirty minutes. First and foremost, I called my Aunt Aggie. It was plain why we all had to go find the
nogitsune
, and just as plain that Jude was in no shape to either come with us or be left alone. I took two minutes to summarize for Aggie what was going on and why we needed her. It took her twenty to pack an overnight bag and get to my house. Upon her arrival, she hugged Millicent, Christopher and me, greeted Melisanda with stiff courtesy, and for Elessir mustered nothing more than a grim nod—calling upon her personal ethic of ‘If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.'

I would have invoked that protocol myself, but loaning Elessir my laptop so he could carry out Millicent's directive required at least a minimum of communication. It also required maximum hovering, because while Elessir sleeping in my very own bed in my very own bedroom had bothered me deeply, his hands on my computer's keyboard bothered me even more. Not rational, I know, but trust me when I say that a surefire way to get a geek girl like me nervous is to mess around with her computer.

Mercifully, though, his use of the machine was brief. All it took was one email as well as Millicent's leave to cross the city Wards to bring a dwarfish, stocky-framed goblin to my front porch a scant three minutes after Elessir sent his mail. Whatever portal had delivered him there had closed by the time I answered the doorbell, but wisps of its magic still lingered in the glow thrown off by the porch light, just enough for me to see and sense. The goblin himself was big as goblins went, about three feet high, and he was hanging on to the handle of a black leather wheeled suitcase almost as tall as he was.

“Delivery,” he announced crossly, peering up at me. He had lamp-like pale eyes in a frog-green face, narrowed up hard as he considered me. I figured he was either nearsighted, disgruntled, or both. “Tell a'Natharion this is all he's got left, and he's damned lucky to get it, and I ain't doing this again. Not worth my neck if the Queen catches me hoarding property she's claimed!”

Elessir had come up behind me as I'd answered the door. Before either of us could reply, or before the Unseelie could push past me out onto the porch, the goblin promptly went around to the other side of the suitcase and pushed it at us. With a rude gesture into the air, he opened up a portal just tall enough to accommodate him. Through this he stomped, making one further, ruder gesture back at Elessir as the portal closed behind him.

My eyebrows rose nearly to my hairline, but my curiosity was not to be satisfied. “Bert never did like me,” the Unseelie groused as he hauled the suitcase in and went past me once more. “Even when I've paid him in advance.”

Considering the adversarial relationship he had with his Court, I had to wonder if there were any fey at all who liked him. And then I promptly squelched that thought. Never mind the proverbial ten-foot pole; I didn't want to touch that notion with Hazmat gear. Or the corollary my treacherous brain was trying to propose, i.e., whether I was about to be the first.

Not that we had time for any such thing. Elessir vanished into my bathroom and emerged again clad much the same as the first time I'd laid eyes on him: jeans, a faded denim jacket, and well-worn leather shoes. (I couldn't resist; I had to glance at those shoes. They did indeed have just enough midnight-blue piping on them to qualify as blue suede footwear.) More or less cleaned up and in his own clothes, he looked functional enough, even to Millicent's grudging eye.

“You'll do,” she pronounced. “Now let's get the hell out of here and go get our boys.”

A sentiment with which I was well and thoroughly down.

Melisanda, apparently old-school enough of a Sidhe that she disdained using human technology when she didn't have to, had no phone in which she might have recorded the address we needed to find. Nor had she written it down. I, about as new school a Sidhe as you could possibly get, made her give me that address so I could plug it into my phone and map it out. That she was prepared to recite the directions from memory or physically guide us there, I didn't doubt—but again, not so much with the time to spare.

We left my Aunt Aggie ensconced in my living room with tea, her latest quilt to work on, and the cat. Our transport options weren't great, just Millie's car and the motorcycle Melisanda was using to get around town, but we took them and set off on the hunt for my missing housemates.

And I prayed long and fiercely to any power that might be listening that they'd be okay when we found them.

The address Melisanda had provided was in the International District, a part of Seattle I still didn't know very well even after two months of walking the Wards with Millicent and Christopher. Even on my own, I'd been visiting all the parks in the city, since my faerie-sharpened senses had started driving me to seek out places where I wouldn't be overloaded with noise or smells. I was beginning to need such refuges whenever I was outside for any length of time. Then, too, there was the power. Magic had a way of pooling in the green, growing places. Mine had a way of wanting to find it, even when the magic that infused a place didn't feel familiar, like Sidhe magic or Warder.

Kobe Terrace Park was a place like that. With its lower stretches given over to a community garden, it overflowed with the living energy of every person who planted food in its soil as well as the plants themselves. Its upper terraces, though, were wilder. The cherry trees there had come from Japan before I'd been born, and I'd sensed something the first time I'd walked among them, currents of energy that had been formed somewhere far away, and which had melded with Seattle's own life forces to make something rich and new.

The park was alive with
kami
, Jake had told me once. When I realized that this was where we were going, it didn't surprise me in the least that the
nogitsune
wanted to meet us there.

We parked a few blocks away and came in on foot, with Melisanda gliding soundlessly out of the shadows to join us as we headed up South Washington towards the park. There should have been more light, what with any number of streetlights in close range—but that magic I mentioned, the magic that pools in parks? It has a way of making streetlights flicker and die when it rises.

Like when three Sidhe are out and about in the night.

Yeah
, I admitted nervously to myself,
three.
Christopher and Millicent's footsteps, cautious as they were, still sounded audibly on the asphalt. Nothing in Seattle ever reacted amiss to their passing either. But two streetlights went out when Melisanda and Elessir stole past them, and the bulb of a third exploded as soon as I got near it, showering fragments of glass and wire down upon us. As I swore everyone rounded on me. Millicent swore even louder and shot me an exasperated, “Damnation, girlie, you can shield better than that!”

I could, usually. But I was tired and stressed, and even from a whole block down the hill I could feel magic radiating down towards us. “I'm trying!” I snapped back.

Christopher offered me a hand. I gratefully took it, but even the comfort of his contact helped only somewhat. His magic was riding higher than normal too. “You can do it,” he murmured to me.

“If I may,” Elessir coolly interjected, “you two Warders are out of your depth if you think you can properly teach a Sidhe mage of Miss Thompson's power.”

That got the Warders in question rounding on him in turn. Christopher lunged at him, stopping only when I grabbed hold of his jacket, recognizing a punch about to be thrown when I saw one. But both of us knew better than to get in the way of Millicent Merriweather. She stomped right up to Elessir, and while she didn't actually thrust her shotgun up under his chin—she was far too canny for that—she did give him her most blistering glare.

“Do you think you can do better, sonny?” she asked, in a deceptively mild tone that was code for ‘Butch is about to blow an Unseelie bard's head off.'

“If Miss Thompson will permit me. I do have a bit of experience in the matter of magic of our kind, you know.”

Narrowing my eyes, I reluctantly let go of Christopher, acutely conscious as I did that I'd started—entirely unconsciously—mimicking how Melisanda and Elessir carried themselves when I walked. Hell, I could notice the difference in how we all held ourselves even when we were standing still. “Yours is out of commission,” I pointed out. “What exactly do you think you can do?”

“Give you a better way to shield.” Elessir's voice and expression alike were remote, but a spark of interest lighting his eyes pulled me perilously close to mental images of midnight stars. “Humans block themselves off from their magic when they don't want to use it. You can do better.”

“Hello?
Half human
,” I reminded him.

“Tell that to your magic, darlin'.”

“When do we get to the part where you're helping?”

He grinned at that, a sharp flare of frost-white against the darkness. “When you stop stuffing your magic into a box that can't contain it. Reach out with it to what's around you and see if it doesn't settle right down. Touch your surroundings; don't hide from them. If it doesn't work, I promise I'll shut up.”

“Oh, well, if that's all it takes…” Snarky, sure, but I wasn't in the mood to care, not when Christopher and Millicent were now both watching me with interest—and, on Christopher's part, a hint of dismay. So I took his hand again and said to him, pointedly avoiding the Unseelie's eye, “Let me know what this feels like to you, okay?”

Then I stretched out my power as Elessir had suggested.

I'd done this before, of course. To practice under Millie's guidance, to find Jude, to give Christopher power for his Wards, to fight with the very
nogitsune
we were about to meet—any number of ways. But it was clear Elessir was talking about something different now. And when I relaxed my shields, just enough to let magic flow out into the earth and the air around me, I realized he was right.

Pressure so subtle I hadn't known it was there eased at my temples. There was no wind off Puget Sound to the west, but a breeze-like coolness swept over my skin nonetheless, as if I'd just stepped in among a grove of trees. And oh God, the
trees
. All at once I could feel every one within several hundred feet, especially the great cluster of them ahead of us in the park. When my magic brushed against the nearest ones, in that moment, it was if I'd drawn in the first true breath of my life.

And when I felt that, when I let myself
breathe
, my magic ebbed to a background hum. It wasn't gentle, and neither was it gone; it lurked just beneath my perceptions, kindling stars deep behind my eyes, each one tiny yet almost too bright to behold.

“Kenna,” Christopher whispered, “are you still with me?”

I shuddered and then blinked up at him. “I'm… here. What did it look like to you?”

“Not like me or Millie tapping the earth,” he said, wonder in his voice. “More like you throwing out a net to everything around us. And then it was gone.”

Only marginally less surly now, the older Warder fired a scowl in my direction. “I don't know what the hell you just did, girlie, but you're blending in a lot better with the city now.”

“As she should,” put in Melisanda, “if she begins to use her gifts like one of us.”

The Seelie warrior's tone caught me by surprise, and I might have gotten snide with her too, except that she looked and sounded completely in earnest.
Stay on target
, I commanded myself. Jake and Carson were the important things right now. So I squeezed Christopher's hand, bobbed my head at Millie and said, “I'm good. Let's do this thing.”

“Humph,” was Millie's succinct reply. Then she waggled Butch by way of waving us all on our way and added, “What are you children standing around for? Move it!”

We moved it. As we did, I kept my hand entwined with Christopher's, hanging on to it with a little more strength than strictly required. My magic felt steadier than it ever had before, but just beyond it—or maybe entwined with it—the night was singing. I didn't know if I could bear its sweet, piercing harmony, and my man's contact grounded me and kept me human. Kept me
Kendis
.

All the way up into the park, I refused to look at Elessir. Even in his weakened state, even without his own magic and in his humble mortal clothing, he was the night personified. He was star-shot darkness and the moonlight flashing on the human-wrought buildings and the living branches all around us.