Bone Walker (28 page)

A couple of stifled coughs gave away that I wasn't the only one wondering that very question. Elessir, however, didn't rise to the bait. “Not relevant to this gathering's interests, darlin'.” His tone was cool, though I caught a flash of something—memory, maybe—darkening his expression before he dialed it back hard.

“It's relevant if you're assuming your past relationship will get the bone walker to come to you,” Millicent said. “She already damn near finished you off, son. Are you sure she's going to want to come back to mop up?”

“Very, very sure.” Once again, Elessir's eyes turned feral.

“Then we have to draw her to you.” The Warder woman surveyed the lot of us, swinging her attention around the room, and stopping first on Makiko. “Last I checked, the
kitsune
have no telepathic abilities.”

Makiko had barely moved from where she'd stood during our entire conversation. She did not shift position now. “The
nogitsune
are not so gifted,” she affirmed.

“My empathy's improved,” Jake said, “but it's still limited to detecting physical pain, and then only on contact. I'll still serve us best as a healer.”

Yet
another
thing I'd missed during my absence? I started and gaped over at my housemate, who shot me a modest little smile in reply, but who otherwise offered no clarification. Nor did Millie give him any time to do so as she turned her gimlet regard on the two Sidhe. “And for practical purposes, neither of you count as mages at the moment. Christopher and I can only sense the dragon, and only if she's in our range. No matter how big the boy's has gotten, that still matters.” Finally, she looked at me. “So it really is down to you, honey. You helped find Jude in Bellevue before. You're going to have to do that again, only times ten.”

Okay, that at least I could begin to get my head around. Melorite had nearly gotten into my brain. Even if the others hadn't seen me for a month or more, subjectively, I hadn't had time to shake the revulsion of that. I still remembered all too clearly what her mental contact felt like, and my hands shook a little at the thought. “Right then. When and where?”

“Somewhere away from houses,” said my aunt Aggie, speaking up for the first time in the whole conversation, with the same weary gravity with which she'd greeted me the instant she'd laid eyes on me. “I can't contribute to the defense, but if my Kendie has to put herself at risk, do it somewhere where you won't endanger anyone else, and where you'll have room to—” She caught herself then, and I was certain she'd been about to say ‘protect her'. Instead, she went on, “To help her do what she must.”

“One of the parks,” Jude proposed. “Discovery or Carkeek. They're right on the Sound and they're both plenty big enough.”

Millicent pronounced without batting an eye, “Discovery. It'll give us all the room we need and minimize our chances of being spotted. Which we'll need, because make no mistake, children, this is going to be the biggest fight yet and I'll need every last one of you. Christopher and I will boost the Wards on the park. The bone walker will have to go through us to get anywhere else, and we'll have to shield against the worst of any weather as well. Makiko, Hiroshi, Ryuji, you'll be needed if there's any chance Saeko's spirit survives. Swords, be ready to take down the dragon if we have no other choice. Carson, Jake, and Aggie, you'll be on tap to watch our backs, guard our way out, and patch any of us up if we need it. Elessir and Kendis, we do this when you're ready. Sooner better than later, since the city can't take much more of what's been thrown at it since you vanished.”

I blew out a breath, tightened my grip on Christopher's hand, and bobbed my head.

“Then there's no time to lose. Let's do this thing.”

As it turned out, we had only a few hours to prepare.

Weather warnings were blaring all over the local TV and radio stations, urging citizens to stay undercover, as the next storm was expected to roar through the Seattle area by nightfall. News and weather sites on the Net—at least the ones still reachable through the city's faltering networks—loaded search results for the Puget Sound region in dire, all-caps-laden shades of red. Our various phones buzzed three times through the course of what was left of the day, with texts reinforcing the warnings from all the other sources. When exactly Seattle had activated a citywide emergency texting system, I had no idea. I didn't bother to ask anyone if this was yet another thing I'd missed in my absence. We had too much else to do.

My part in everything, at least at first, wasn't much. I helped pack vehicles with emergency supplies we all thought we'd need: raincoats, flashlights, two first aid kits for anyone who got hurt, and packets of beef jerky for fast infusions of protein for anyone about to hurl around massive amounts of magic. I fed Fortissimo, and even though Carson and Jake had already physically weatherproofed the house against the earlier storms, I made a circuit of every room just to make sure all the hatches were suitably battened. The house brownies would, I suspected, take care of any incidental damage the building sustained. Just in case, nonetheless, I set cookies and milk out for them.

After doing all that, I had to reassure myself that my house, my stuff, and my cat were still all essentially the same, since hi, surprise, away for a month. Especially my violin. The Seelie Queen had fixed the instrument for me after my uncle Malandor had destroyed my house and everything in it—and I was loath to put it at risk again. In the relative quiet of my room, I let myself stop long enough to rest the violin in place upon my shoulder and call “Da Slockit Light” up out of the strings.

I played it slow and soft and sorrowful, more to just feel the instrument's voice resonating up my arm than to hit the actual notes. That subtle vibration, the hum of singing wood, in some ways still meant more to me than the far newer, wilder polyphony of my magic. It grounded me in a way matched by nothing else but Christopher's arms, and made me feel for the first time since Elessir and I had escaped Faerie that I was in fact home.

And home was about to be bulldozed by a dragon-powered cyclone.
My awesome timing
, I told myself,
let me show you it
. What the hell had happened to the whole Go See a Concert With My Boyfriend plan, anyway? I missed that plan. I wanted it back.

So I set my jaw, scowled, and changed tunes, jolting from the wistful D major to a darker, faster E minor, the melody I remembered from the fiddle player on the stage when Christopher and I had been at the show.
Fucking
dragons.
Fucking
interfering fey monarchs.
Fucking
unpredictable bards.
Fucking
wibbly-wobbly flow of time breakage and worrying everybody sick and
no
, damn it, it didn't reassure me that I'd only been gone a month instead of a hundred years. On each angry thought, my bow sliced over the strings with all the force of a striking sword.

I played till the tune blew itself out, a scant precursor to the fury on its way in from the sound. Now I was restless, on edge and ready to take something down.

With hands I had to fight to keep from shaking, I packed the violin away and stowed it safely in my closet. Nor was I surprised to find that Christopher had silently stolen to my bedroom door and had been listening to me play the whole time, watching me with a gaze every bit as stormy as my own roiling mood. I turned to him without a word and pulled him into my arms, hugged him hard, and held him close for a long moment. He responded in kind, and when we both pulled back, we were still grim-eyed.

But now we were ready to go.

We headed out to Discovery Park in waves. Makiko and her sons left first, scouting ahead to make sure we could make it there. Of the rest of us, it seemed only natural and proper that Millicent, Christopher, Elessir, and I take the lead, even if we had to take Millicent's car to do it. I drove since both of the Warders started radiating power out into the air the instant we stepped outside, and neither could spare enough attention to take the wheel. Elessir's senses and reflexes were probably vastly better than mine, but along with the extra sword Melisanda loaned him as she'd promised, he had Melorite's skull. And I had no desire whatsoever to relieve him of the job of carrying it.

All the way there, even through the body of the car, I felt the storm brewing. It wasn't just the smell of it, though the air coming through the car vents was heavy with ozone and the salt-laden tang of ocean-born rain. Pre-magic, I'd never smelled the ocean on any wind in off the sound, not unless I'd been standing right down on the waterfront. But I could smell it now. The rising pressure of what had to be the storm's leading eastern edge pushed against my temples, a headache just waiting to happen. And most importantly, my power spiked up in answer to the magic layered into that wind along with the moisture. There was far too much of it, more than I'd ever sensed in the city before, even kept in relative check by the city's Wards.

Not to mention the city's Warders. Never mind the magic pouring off them so thickly they were almost glowing. One look at Millicent and Christopher's strained faces was all I needed to tell they were working the Wards with everything they had, even on the move.

None of us talked much. No one had mental space for it. Only Millicent broke our joint silence, barking directions for me when I needed them. We all knew where our destination was—but the streets between my place and the westernmost edge of Seattle, where Discovery Park lay sprawling, were a maze of detours, roadblocks, and unexpected traffic snarls as everyone unfortunate enough to still not be under the protection of a roof was hurrying for cover as fast as they possibly could.

The park, once we finally reached it, was closed. But we'd planned for that, with the lot of us converging on one of the less obvious entrances. The Asakuras were waiting for us when we got there. How they'd gotten the gate open for us, I didn't know. Whether it was some
nogitsune
magic, whether they'd brought bolt cutters, or whether one of them actually worked at the park, I had no idea. Nor did it matter. They got us in, which was the important part.

Once we were in past the gate, we had to make it to the wide, open spaces close to the water—and past any number of trees swaying precariously in the wind. Debris from the previous storms that had slammed the city littered the winding boulevard that would normally have provided a leisurely path through this bastion of nature. Tonight, it gave us damning evidence that there were reasons the park had closed to the public during the emergency of the last many days. Halfway in, we found our way blocked by the ruin of a Douglas fir that had tumbled over, the bulk of its lower trunk shattered, yet more than substantial enough to keep our vehicles from advancing another foot.

Which we'd also planned for. There was nothing else to be done for it but for every last one of us to break out gloves and tools from the trunks of our cars and haul the tree out of our way. Even Millicent and Aggie, who might have been excused on the grounds of age, did their part. One glare from Millie out from under the brim of her fedora was enough to quell the objections the rest of us were thinking before we got brave enough to actually voice them.

Much odder than seeing two old women engaged in physical labor was seeing two Sidhe doing it. Makiko and her sons still looked human in their bipedal forms, and they had personal motivation at stake. But Melisanda with her unearthly grace, even disheveled by the gusting breeze and with grubby mortal work gloves protecting her hands, looked almost ridiculous helping haul fir branches out of the road. Elessir looked only marginally less silly, outclassed in size as he was by Christopher and Carson, and even next to Jake and the two Asakura boys, he looked slender and breakable. Yet Seelie and Unseelie alike worked alongside us. And it was strangely reassuring to see that not only could Elessir sweat like us mortals, but that he was specifically willing to.

My goodwill towards him lasted about as long as it took us to clear the road enough so that we could proceed. We found no further obstructions—but all that meant was that once we reached the grasslands out on the point, we had to choose between the dubious shelter of the surrounding trees and the blast of the weather already roaring in from the sound. Thick, dark clouds shot through with lurid splashes of green and yellow massed across the entire western half of the sky. Even from our vantage point the tumult of the waves underneath those clouds was apparent. As we regrouped on the edge of the trees, I could only be grateful we didn't have to leave dry land.

Even if dry was a
very
relative term. Because of course it was raining, in a barrage of cold needles of water blown into sharp angles by the wind. None of us bothered with umbrellas. They would have ripped to shreds by that wind, the moment we tried to open them. We dressed in layers instead, in raincoats or fleece or windbreakers, whatever we had on hand.

Elessir and I had to stride out into the middle of the field, with the West Point Lighthouse a stark white shape in the near distance and tall brown stalks of grass lashing around us at our passing. Christopher was right on our heels, while the others hung back out of the way, giving us space to work—and in Christopher's case, that meant throwing off power that I did in fact start to see the stronger it got. His signature green-golden Warding glow, strangely ethereal and delicate against the stormlight, flared out from us in a wave that didn't do much for the chaos in the sky. But down on the ground, it pushed back hard against the wind and gave us a few vital moments where we could talk without having to scream to be heard.

“So are we doing anything here above and beyond firing off a magical flare gun?” I demanded of Elessir, peering balefully at him out from under the hood of my raincoat. He hadn't bothered with one himself. All he'd added to his country-boy denim look was Melisanda's extra sword, belted around his waist, giving him plenty of room to draw. His hair was soaked through, hopelessly disheveled, yet somehow appropriate. It made him look wild and far more himself than he had in days.