Forests of the Heart (37 page)

But wasn’t that what she’d seen from the window of Kellygnow? Bettina had given it some Spanish name, but it translated into the same thing. The spiritworld. And those men in their broadcloth suits and bare feet had been spirits, she’d said. The reason she could see them and Chantal couldn’t was because she had some kind of magic in her.

Feeling stupid, even though she knew he wouldn’t make fun of her, Ellie related her morning to Tommy—how it turned out that Bettina was supposed to be a witch or something; describing the odd men in the garden, why it was supposed to be that she could see them.

“What kind of thing would wake up magic in a person?” she asked. “I mean, here I’ve gone through my whole life, perfectly normal—”

Tommy snorted.

“Okay. Non-supernaturally inclined. So how come this is happening to me? Why now?”

Tommy shook his head. “How would I know?”

“I thought Native beliefs included that kind of thing.”

“Right,” Tommy said, smiling. “Like Indians are all one universal tribe. It’s not like being Catholic, or a Buddhist, you know. There are hundreds of different tribes on this continent, each with their own language and culture and beliefs. What’s sacred to one group, might be a joke to another.”

“But at that powwow you took me to—”

“Powwows are a culture unto themselves,” Tommy told her. “They’re a mishmash of everything Indian. The name’s borrowed from the Chickasaw. And what do you get at them? Mohawks doing Sioux sun dances. Crees weaving Navajo blankets. Kickaha frying up buffalo burgers. You can’t go to a powwow without smelling sweetgrass, seeing Haida, salmon and raven imagery, grass dancing, Hopi beadwork—doesn’t matter what part of the country it’s in. Remember Chief Morningstar in his big feathered headdress?”

Ellie nodded.

“Not a part of Kickaha culture. But it sure looks cool, right? And how about those dream-catchers? They’re a good-luck charm of the Lakota, but they’re like the symbol of Indian spirituality now, aren’t they? Everybody’s making and selling them. The damn things drive me crazy.”

“You’ve got one hanging from the mirror in your truck.”

“You bet,” Tommy said. “It’s better than the Club. Indian kids aren’t going to boost my pickup because the dream-catcher tells them I’m a blood, too.”

“I thought you liked powwows,” Ellie said.

“I do. But I like going because it’s fun and I get to see a lot of old friends that I wouldn’t see otherwise. Not because it’s some kind of pan-Indian evangelical meeting hall.”

He broke off as they rounded a corner to see some hydro workers removing a tree limb that was dragging down an already overextended power line. Pulling over, he and Ellie got out of the van to hand out a round of coffees and sandwiches to the grateful men. Returning to the van, Tommy took his turn at scraping down the windshield and then they continued on to Angel’s Grasso Street office.

“See,” Tommy said, taking up where the conversation had left off, “for most Indians there’s no mystical mumbo jumbo in our spiritualism, and that’s probably our strongest common ground. What our teachings instruct us to do is to live our lives with truth and honesty and respect. Or as the Aunts say, ‘Our job is to be an awake people, utterly conscious, to attend to the world.’ That lies at the heart of the teachings of most tribes. It’s in the details that we differ, but those differences are what give each tribe its individual identity.”

“Protestant, Catholic, Baptist.”

“Exactly.” He smiled. “If they were tribes.”

“But you and your aunts,” Ellie said. “You all believe in more than that, don’t you?”

“More how?”

“That… these spirits. The spiritworld. That it’s real.”

Tommy nodded. “Oh, it’s real, all right. But we don’t have a particular claim on it. I think it’s like Jilly says. The spirits are out there, but how they appear to us depends on what we bring to them. A shaman might see Old Man Coyote, a priest might see an angel. You might see one of those junkyard faeries that Jilly puts in her paintings.”

“Except,” Ellie said, “Bettina described those men in the garden exactly the way I was seeing them.”

“Hey, I’m no expert. I keep telling you that.”

He fell silent and pulled over so that Ellie could scrape down the windshield once more.

“If you want to know about magic,” he said when she climbed back in, “you should talk to one of my aunts.”

“Well, Sunday seemed nice …”

Tommy laughed. “Meaning she wasn’t this weird old woman who looked like she was going to turn you into a moth or a toad.”

Ellie punched his shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t damage the merchandise.”

“I know, I know,” Ellie said. “Hearts would break everywhere in the world of the supermodels where you are king.”

“I’m like a drug dealer,” Tommy told her. “They just can’t resist what I have to offer.”

“Bountiful humility, for one.”

Tommy shook his head. “No. I sneak them pork chops.”

Ellie went to punch him again, but then out of the corner of her eye she caught movement on the street.

“Look out!” she cried at the same time as Tommy eased on the brakes.

A man had burst out onto the street from between a couple of parked cars, the whites of his eyes reflecting weirdly in the van’s headlights. Ellie had long enough to see he was wearing a handkerchief tied across his face like a bandit’s mask and bright yellow rubber kitchen gloves, before he slipped on the icy street and went down right in front of the van.

“Oh shit,” Tommy muttered.

He braked and the van’s rear end began to fishtail, sliding on the ice before it came to a stop that left it standing broadside in the middle of the street.

“Did we hit him?” Ellie asked as she fumbled with her seatbelt. “I didn’t feel us hit him.”

But Tommy was already out the driver’s door and didn’t answer.

Hunter was about four blocks from Miki’s apartment and breathing hard when he realized he was being followed. The first he knew of it was a pinprick sensation in the nape of his neck, an animal-level warning that resonated up through the levels of his consciousness until it finally registered in the reasoning part of his mind. He turned, sliding on the wet ice underfoot until he was brought up short by a parked car. He caught hold of the car as best he could, rubber gloves finding a grip on the ice sheath that covered the vehicle. He used the hood of the car to support his weight and looked back the way he’d come.

Nothing.

But he knew something was out there. The wet hairs at the back of his neck were still raised like hackles.

He pushed away from the car and continued down the sidewalk, shuffling along rather than lifting his feet since it was easier to keep his balance that way. The freezing rain continued to fall, but it didn’t make that much difference anymore. He was already soaked through and through by the sleet and doubted he could get much wetter. He’d been out in it too long, taken too many falls in icy puddles since he’d fled the apartment.

The apartment. Forget the stink, at least it had been warm. He didn’t feel like he could remember warm and dry anymore. The apartment seemed like hours ago, though he knew it was only minutes. His teeth chattered. Movement, already hampered by the unsteady footing, was made more difficult still with his wet heavy clothes weighing him down.

When he neared a lamppost, he caught hold of its slick metal pole and swung around. This time he caught a glimpse of something moving low to the ground, a dark, quick-moving shape that darted out of sight behind a parked car.

A dog? Something on all fours, at any rate. Too fast, and not enough body mass to be a man.

He waited, but whatever it was didn’t show itself. Nor did he see any others. But he knew it was there, just as he knew it wasn’t alone. Just as visual confirmation wasn’t needed to tell him who it was, no matter what shape it might be wearing at this particular moment. Everything had changed for him. In the long minutes since the hard man had first appeared in the doorway of Miki’s kitchen, he’d been jerked out of his familiar world into some nightmare country. He was stumbling through unknown territory where nothing was the way it should be. Whatever doubts he’d had when Miki was telling her story had all vanished now.

He knew her fairy-tale Gentry were real. Pretending they weren’t didn’t fly for the animal senses that lay just under what he realized now was only a façade of rationality. The animal inside him was alert, alert and terrified.

The Gentry were real and they were after him, it was as simple as that. What was to stop them from taking some kind of animal shape? Who was going to notice a stray dog, or even a pack of them? With this weather people had more pressing concerns on their mind.

Wiping the water from his eyes, he stared at the place where he’d seen the dog vanish.

He thought he knew why it was hiding. It was probably a scout, waiting for the others to catch up before they took him on as a pack. They’d be cautious, thinking he was dangerous, knowing that he’d already killed one of them. What they didn’t know was that it had been no more than blind, dumb luck. That he. was such a terrified mess they could knock him over with the flick of a finger. He was about as likely to hurt another one of them as the original Clash line-up was to launch a new tour.

He set off again, using the parked cars for support as he skidded and slid his way down the sidewalk. The place where the hard man had sucker-punched him the other night was aching again. His chest was tight, his breathing too fast and shallow. Turning suddenly, he caught sight of two low, quick shapes, slipping out of sight, sensed others.

Christ, they could move fast. What were they waiting for?

He pushed himself off the car he was holding onto, sliding to the next one, a fancy black Cherokee jeep, encrusted in ice. He thought his heart would stop when a mechanical voice commanded him to, “Step back from the car.”

He reeled away from the vehicle, flailing his arms for balance.

Car alarm, he thought as he went down in another puddle. That’s all. Just a stupid car alarm.

He crawled back to the Cherokee on his hands and knees and slapped the side of the jeep, ignored the car’s warning, banged against the metal until the warnings were done and the Klaxon wail of the alarm started up. He thought his eardrums would burst, but the pain was worth it. Surely the sound would draw some attention to him.

Look out the window, he willed the vehicle’s owner. Dial 911, for God’s sake. Can’t you see I’m trying to steal your car?

He banged on the door again, denting the metal.

I even look the part, he realized, with this handkerchief tied across his face.

He’d forgotten all about it. Playing Good Samaritan and trying to clean up Miki’s apartment didn’t feel like hours ago anymore, but a lifetime. He started to pull the cloth away from his face, then caught a glimpse of movement back down the street he’d just come down. Those low slinking shapes, darting from the doorways of stores to the parked cars and back again, getting closer with every dash. And then he saw one of the hard men come around the far corner, walking on the sidewalk as though it were bare pavement, not covered with a slick coating of ice.

His sudden appearance seemed to be a signal. The other Gentry rose up from behind the cars, stepped out of the doorways, men now as well, dark haired and dark-eyed, the tails of their trench coats slapping against their legs as they fell in step with the first one. None of them had trouble with the icy footing. They didn’t even seem to be wet.

Hunter wasn’t surprised. Why should the foul weather prove any sort of impediment to them?

The car alarm was making him deaf but he still heard the sound of a car engine above it. He turned to see its approaching lights. A van. He hauled himself to his feet and, using the hood of the jeep as a springboard, propelled himself out from between the vehicles. The van’s headlights caught him as he staggered out into the middle of the street. Then his legs went out from under him. He fell into yet another puddle and came up spluttering in time to see the van skidding on the ice, sliding right at him. He stared wide-eyed, waiting for the impact, but the vehicle slewed to one side, finally stopping with the front fender rearing directly over him.

He couldn’t hear the van’s doors opening over the wail of the car alarm, but he saw the vehicle shift on its springs as whoever was inside disembarked.

Oh, Christ, he thought. The Gentry. Don’t let them hurt these people.

He sat up and smacked his head on the fender, fell back into the puddle. The next thing he knew there was someone bending over him. Dark-haired, dark-eyed. He waited for the killing blow, but it didn’t come. He had long enough to recognize the Native American features of one of his customers before the face was suddenly jerked away.

Too late, Hunter realized. The Gentry had them now.

He was hauled up out of the puddle and onto his feet, the hard man holding him upright effortlessly. Hunter saw the man who’d stopped to help him lying on the street, the breath knocked out of him. As he watched, one of the Gentry smashed the window of the Cherokee with his elbow and reached inside, ripping something out of the jeep. He straightened up from the vehicle with a fistful of wires in his hand. The car alarm stopped and the ensuing silence seemed deafening.

He shouldn’t have been able to do that, Hunter found himself thinking. Who breaks a car window with his elbow?

Goddamn fairy-tale hardcases, that was who.

“I warned you, you pathetic little shite,” the leader of the Gentry said.

But before he could hit Hunter, another voice spoke. A woman’s voice. It was familiar, but so out of context that Hunter couldn’t place it.

“Don’t you hurt him.”

Yeah, Hunter thought. That’s really going to stop these guys.

But the hard man let him go. Hunter started to fall, caught himself on the grill of the van.

“You,” the hard man said, looking to where the woman was standing.

Hunter looked as well.

“Ellie?” he asked.

She gave him a confused look until he remembered the handkerchief tied across his face. He tugged it down.