Bone Walker (3 page)

“You're safe. You're in Seattle. Do you know who I am?”

His eyes, dulled to nearly black, focused on my face. “Miss Thompson,” he said after a moment, his voice thin and small.

That name would do as well as any; I wasn't feeling anywhere near charitable enough to let him call me Kendis. “It's me. Can you walk? Christopher and I can get you to a hospital.”

“No!” Panic flooded Elessir's face, and before I could stop him, he burrowed frantically against my chest, trying to cling to me, trying to hide. All that kept me from violently shoving him away were the tremors rattling through his frame and the broken syllables he muttered, slurring in and out of his affected drawl, turning his voice from honey to silver and back again. “Pl-please, darlin'… don't let 'em get me… the healers of the Queen of Air and Darkness heal only what she deems is wrong!”

Shit.
I looked up at Christopher, whose expression was as aghast as mine. He mouthed “phone” down at me nonetheless. As soon as I'd left the voice mail for Millie, I'd shoved my phone into a pocket. I was eager to fish it out again, even one-handed, and thrust it at him so he could try the old Warder woman again. We could handle Elessir—I hoped—but she was going to have to know about this, even if it was liable to make her spit kittens.

What the hell had happened to him anyway? Did I even want to know? As Christopher called I studied the singer, conscious of guilt and more concern than I wanted to admit. I hadn't laid eyes on another Sidhe since the demon incident, which had been just fine with me. The Seelie Court under Queen Amelialoren's orders had left me to my own devices. None of the Unseelie had shown their faces in Seattle either, not with two cranky Warders seeing to its protection. I'd fared well enough, or so I'd told myself, with Millicent helping me get a handle on the magic my mother had passed down to me.

Yet, blessed though Millicent and Christopher were with their Warder talents, they were both human. And as much as I adored them, something restless in my blood locked on to the sight of Elessir and whispered
this one is like me.
I didn't welcome the feeling. I liked the terror in Elessir's eyes even less.

“Hush.” I cradled the Unseelie against me and smoothed tangled hair back from his face. “It's okay. I've got you. You're safe.”

“Do you promise, Miss Thompson?”

I'd heard Elessir a'Natharion bewitch an entire bar, including me, with the strength of his singing. It disturbed me to hear that voice drained of its power now. He sounded like—no, I corrected myself before that thought could finish, not a child. Like a ghost, and a wary one at that, unconvinced that I could call it back to life.

And one who even in the grip of fever could call for my vow, I noted. My skin prickled with disquiet. One of the first things I'd learned about my mother's people was that lying was anathema to them, even the Unseelie. I didn't want to consider what it meant that Elessir could beg for my word now.

Once more I glanced up at Christopher. He'd gotten through to Millicent, for as I met his eyes he was saying into the phone, “Aye, we'll get him to shelter. Come fast, Millie, we're needing you.” While he spoke he nodded at me, just once, with a curtness that belied the concern in his gaze.

“Do you promise?” Elessir repeated, dragging my attention back to him. Fright was laced through that hoarse demand, enough that I was dead sure I didn't want to know what had caused it. Yet I couldn't help but wonder.

“I promise,” I said. Only then did the Sidhe subside, pressing his face against me with a choked and shuddering breath that might as well have been a sob. I could do nothing but hold him, as awkwardly as if he were made of fractured glass, and murmur into his hair, “We'll keep you safe. I promise.”

Now all I had to do was figure out how to make good on my word.

In the end we had to call Jude as well as Millicent, since neither Christopher nor I had a vehicle, and nothing short of the city in flames would induce Millie to get herself and her failing eyesight behind the wheel of her ancient car. Nor did I get an answer when I tried to call back to my place for my housemates Carson and Jake. Lucky for us, Jude was already downtown, even though she'd declined to join us at the concert. She'd already had a dinner date with a woman she'd known in college in town for a conference. Pulling her away from that gave me yet another thing to guilt-trip over for the evening, but we had no other choice. Getting Elessir an ambulance wasn't an option.

Nor was moving him very far, for that matter. Half naked, feverish, and bleeding, he was barely able to stay conscious, much less make it to his feet. Plus he kept shivering in the cool October air, but that at least we did something about—or rather, Christopher did, reaching into my bag to fetch the T-shirt we'd bought him at the concert swag table.

“That's yours,” I protested.

Christopher didn't look my way as he crouched on Elessir's other side and shifted him away from me, making the room he needed to tug the slate-green shirt onto the Unseelie's slack form. “He'll stand out a bit less this way.” His voice was stoic, his motions a trifle too forceful, too controlled. I caught his hand and said his name, and he met my eyes at last.

“I'm sorry,” I said weakly. The last roaring bars of the band's main set finished up from the amphitheater, and a few moments after, the crowd erupted into an exultant three-syllable chant of the band's name, hungry for an encore. This time Christopher kept himself from looking in the show's direction, which gave me a full-on view of his unhappy face.

“They'll come back,” he said.

“We'll see them,” I answered, and that too was a promise.

Jude's truck pulled up at the other end of the alley then, and I'd never been happier to see her leap out of it in all my life. She was dressed a little more upscale than I usually saw her, and at any other time I might have marveled at the sight of her decked out in a colorful print blouse, jewelry, and even a bit of makeup. Not tonight. Nor did she give me time to comment, for the first words out of her mouth were a sharp outburst of Spanish. She bit those back hard, and as she hurried over to join us, she exclaimed instead, “What in God's name is he doing here?”

“Damned if I know,” I said, grabbing hold of the ailing singer so I could hoist him off the ground. Elessir was almost out cold again, and he lolled between Christopher and me, his head drooping as we pulled him more or less upright. “We caught him falling through a portal, and he's out of his head.”

Brown eyes wide, Jude took this in, and then promptly whirled to throw open the passenger door of her truck. “Right then. Where are we taking him?”

“My place. Millicent's meeting us.”

It took some doing to get Elessir into the truck. Though he was slimmer of frame, he was almost as tall as Christopher, and he was just awake enough to feebly resist our efforts to carry him where we needed him to go. Blank-eyed, without a trace of recognition, he struggled against Christopher's grasp in particular. Power rolled between them for an instant, and I couldn't tell from whom. Before it could solidify I tugged hard at Elessir's shoulders, breaking their contact and trying not to lurch as I bore his weight against my own.

“Elessir!” I ordered. “Remember what I said! You're safe!”

Frustration made my voice harsher than it probably should have been, but then again, it worked. Elessir blinked owlishly at me, murmuring in confusion, “Miss Thompson…?”

I didn't want my voice to gentle, not when the Unseelie's arm had curled around my shoulders and Christopher's expression had darkened from stoic to thunderous. It gentled nevertheless. “Go on, get in, okay? Let us get you somewhere you can rest.”

That last word made his brow furrow, as if the very concept were somehow alien to him. His mouth moved, nearly soundlessly. Christopher and Jude, with hearing no more sensitive than any other human's, most likely missed the way he breathed that single syllable, longingly, like a prayer. I caught it, however, and a sharp-edged sympathy rose up to slice at my throat.

“Rest…”

Elessir no longer resisted me, though; that was the important thing. He let me help him into the front seat of Jude's truck and buckle him in, though I had to urge him once more to calm down when the straps confining him at the chest and waist almost set him off all over again. At the sound of my voice he settled, lapsing at last into true unconsciousness. It was with as much trepidation as relief that I closed the truck door on him and followed the others to the vehicle's opposite side.

Christopher held the door open so I could get in first. That this put me behind Elessir didn't escape my notice, but I made a point of ignoring that. As Jude took her place at the wheel and got us going, I reached over and twined my fingers through Christopher's, just to let him know I hadn't forgotten he was there.

Every muscle in his hand was taut. As he wrapped his fingers round mine, they clutched with an almost painful strength, the first real sign of exactly how much disappointment he was trying to suppress. Then, with a sour glance at the inert form up front, he muttered to me, “This had damn well better be worth missing ‘Mari-Mac,' is all I'm saying.”

He said nothing else indeed all the way from downtown to Sand Point, and he stared broodingly out the truck window as Jude drove. Still, he kept his hand in mine. Surely it was a good sign, I asked myself, that he could accept that comfort? It wasn't, after all, just about the music. It was about his having to miss a small taste of a home he could never see again, thanks to the constraints of Warder magic.

Elessir stayed slumped and silent right up until we reached my place, which should have been a comfort, except for the part where we were all excruciatingly aware of the elephant in the room—or in this case, the truck. Just as conscious of Christopher's aggravation, Jude kept her mouth shut and her attention on her driving, though she shot frequent curious looks back at me as well as our unexpected companion. There were a great number of reasons Jude Lawrence was my best friend. Her ability to know when to talk and when to act ranked very, very high among them, and I was grateful for it. I didn't want to have to try to explain tonight's little bombshell more than once, if nothing else because I had no idea what to say, and it was going to be hard enough figuring out what to say to Millicent.

But when we pulled into the driveway of my house and I spotted the old Warder woman on the porch, the beginnings of my explanation vanished completely out of my head—because Millie looked hopping mad. Nor was she alone. Standing beside her, her mouth drawn into a tight line of discontent that broadcast how much she would rather be anywhere else, was the second Sidhe I'd seen in as many months. Though she was unarmed, she bore herself with a warrior's grace, and her sunlight-golden hair and summer-green eyes were a shot in the arm against the growing autumnal bite of October. The only name I had for her was Melisanda, though as I clambered out of the truck in Jude and Christopher's wake, I thought of several more choice monikers I'd have liked to slap her with, not a one of which was repeatable in polite company. Along with Elessir, she'd been in on the attempt to sacrifice Christopher and me to Azganaroth. Cold dread laced with angry frustration flooded me at the sight of her. Two of my uncle's conspirators showing up out of nowhere in one night
surely
couldn't be coincidence.

Millie didn't have her shotgun leveled on her though, and before I could move two steps toward the house, the Warder First of Seattle came stomping forward to intercept me. “Leave the boy to us, girlie,” she sourly advised. “You have a guest.”

“I don't have anything to say to her.”

“Let her talk then, because you're going to want to hear this. It's going to be rich.”

When Millicent Merriweather tells you to do something, it's pretty much best to do it.
That she was nearly eighty-six years old and looked like your prototypical sweet little old lady—that is, if that little old lady had wildly curly white hair and dressed like she'd been caught in a tornado in the wardrobe room of the TARDIS—wasn't the point. The senior Warder of Seattle, on whom Christopher's training and my introduction to the world of the weird depended, was armed with a lifetime's worth of magic. She was also armed with her shotgun, a lavishly tended firearm she'd dubbed Butch, and she didn't scruple to use it on anything that pissed her off.

Right then and there, I was about ready to use it myself.

Scowling, I let Millie barge past me to take charge of Christopher and Jude's efforts to get Elessir out of the truck, and focused instead upon the female standing before my door. Her head jerked up sharply as she realized what the others were doing. That was, I supposed, as good an excuse as any for an opening volley. “Melisanda, right?” I said, not caring that I sounded curt, and jerked a thumb back over my shoulder. “I assume from your reaction that you're about to tell me you didn't have anything to do with that?”

“By the moon and stars and the Oak of the World, I swear I did not.” Melisanda's eyes were round, her brows climbing almost to the line of her shining hair. Okay, granted, the sample set of Sidhe I'd met to date was small and so I wasn't exactly in a position to judge—but she looked genuinely shocked. Affronted as well, as her expression immediately then closed off into a mask of stony resolve. “I don't know what business has brought that Unseelie to your abode, Kendeshel ana'Kirlath, but I haven't come because of him. I've come because of you.”

Kendeshel was the name my mother had given me; ana'Kirlath was her surname, which meant ‘of House Kirlath.' No one had ever called me either of these to my face, and it rattled me to hear Melisanda do it now. “My name is Kendis Thompson,” I snapped as I edged past her to open the front door for the others. “And whatever you came by for, talk fast, because we're really kind of busy here.”