Forests of the Heart (46 page)

“You said it was broken,” Aunt Nancy said. There was a grim darkness in her voice. “You said it was broken and you hadn’t even started to make a new one.”

“But…it’s true…”

“Then how do you explain this?”

This? Ellie thought. But then it came again, that tearing sensation, and she knew.

“I can feel it,” she said. “It’s like something’s tearing.”

The older woman said nothing.

“I swear,” Ellie told her. “I had nothing to do with whatever’s going on. Not that I know of, anyway.”

“Yet the world has a hole torn in it and the Great Wheel falters.”

“Why?” Ellie asked. “What is it?”

Aunt Nancy regarded her from the doorway for a long moment. The shadowy spider grew wide and tall, spilling into the room.

Please don’t let it touch me, Ellie thought.

She held her breath, waiting, arms wrapped around her knees to stop herself from shaking, until slowly it faded away.

“Something terrible has been born,” Aunt Nancy said in a quieter voice.

“This has to do with the mask?”

The older woman nodded. “Someone has put it on and woken a sleeping monster.”

“But it was broken. Right in two. I saw it. I held the pieces in my own hands.”

“That doesn’t seem to have made much difference.”

“But who did it?” Ellie asked. “Who put it on?”

And if it was so dangerous, why would they be so stupid?

“It must have been your friend,” Aunt Nancy said. “The Irishman.”

“Donal?”

When Aunt Nancy nodded, Ellie slumped, her hands falling to the bed. Of course. Donal could be that stupid. Hadn’t Hunter told them about the painting and what Miki had said, how Donal thought the power of the mask would allow him to get some sort of payback for all the wrongs that had been done to him, imagined and real.

“So now what do we do?” she asked.

“We find him and we stop him.”

“And you know how to do this?”

For a moment she thought Aunt Nancy was going to get all pissed-off again, but then the older woman slowly shook her head.

“No,” she said. “But there are things we can try.”

When Aunt Nancy turned and left the doorway, the room seemed to brighten, as though some of the shadows had followed after her. Ellie tried not to think of that huge spider presence she kept seeing behind Aunt Nancy. She didn’t need this, any of this, the magic and the scariness and the way her whole life seemed to be slowly dissolving into one that belonged to a stranger.

The problem was, no one was listening to her. No one was coming up to her and saying, it’s okay, we’ll take it from here. Instead it was just more and deeper weirdness every time she turned around.

She waited a long heartbeat. No one was calling her, but she knew they were waiting for her all the same.

I don’t have anything except for inexperience and disbelief, she wanted to tell them, but that didn’t cut it anymore. Not with all she’d seen. Not with
manitou
and the powerful Gentry and the spider shadow and this thing inside her, this tearing sensation like an open wound.

Deal with it, she told herself.

Yeah, right.

Slowly she lowered her feet to the floor and got up to follow Aunt Nancy oimgt into the main room of the house.

It was mostly the writers who took up residence in the cabins behind Kellygnow. Bettina wasn’t sure why. Perhaps they felt solitude a closer companion, here under the trees, than it could be in the house itself. Except Penny Angelis stayed in one of the cabins and she seemed to spend most of her time in the house, hanging out in the kitchen, gossiping with the various artists in their studios, writing in the library, so what did that say? That people were different, Bettina supposed.

She and Chantal passed by Penny’s cabin without bothering to check it since the blonde writer was already accounted for, and moved on to the last of the small outbuildings. It stood on the edge of the property, just before the land took its sudden plunge to the city’s streets far below in a tumbling waterfall of granite, hemlocks, and cedar.

“This is August’s cabin, isn’t it?” Chantal said as they drew near.

Bettina nodded. “Though I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks.”

“That’s not saying much.”

It was true. August Walker wasn’t the most sociable of Kellygnow’s residents, but sociability wasn’t exactly a prerequisite. Only talent was. The one slim volume of his work that Bettina had read was astonishing. Tender, wry, lyric, warm. Not one adjective that would have suited the author himself. He was almost as much of a recluse as the mysterious Musgrave Wood.

“It’s funny,” she said, thinking of how she’d kept returning to passages in August’s book, simply to savor their beauty. “You’d never think, from reading him, that he could be so—”

She was unable to finish. A nova flare of white light exploded between her temples and she dropped to her knees as though she’d been physically struck. Chantal immediately crouched in the snow beside her, her knees crunching through the icy crust. She put her arms around Bettina’s shoulders, her gaze darting nervously about.

“Bettina!” she cried. “What is it? What happened?”

Bettina allowed her to help her sit up. For a moment she couldn’t speak. All she could do was look at the house while the intense pain in her head slowly faded to a dull ache.

“Something old and dangerous has been called into the world,” she finally said.

“What are you talking about?”

“In the house,” Bettina said. “Someone has torn through the fabric of the world…”

Someone? Her pulse quickened. Not someone. Donal Greer. So eager to get out of the wet and cold when he had barely seemed to be touched by the weather. Of course. He’d been waiting in the between for an opportunity to get inside the house and commandeer the mask.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” a voice said.

Bettina looked away from the house to find her wolf leaning against the trunk of a tree, his own gaze fixed on Kellygnow. His pose was as languid as ever, but his dark eyes glinted with tension.

“Who’re you?” Chantal asked, obviously disconcerted at his sudden appearance.

“Está bien,”
Bettina said. She rose slowly to her feet, grateful for Chantal’s arm to keep her steady. “It’s okay. He’s a friend … I think.”

“You never answered my question from last night,”
el lobe
said.

“I haven’t had time to think about it with all the trouble this storm has brought.”

“And now it’s too late. They have their monster.”

Bettina shook her head. “This is different. Ellie never finished the mask.”

“Then what was screaming inside my head a few moments ago?”
el lobo
asked.

“A man named Donal Greer.”

“I know him. He’s a puppy. Desperate to run with the pack, but he lacks the
geasan
to be more than a hanger-on.”

By
geasan
Bettina intuited he meant
brujería.
Though he might have meant
cojones.

“Quizá, quizá, no,”
she said. “But all the same he was able to wake some old forest spirit with nothing more than his will and that broken mask.”

El lobo
returned his gaze to the house once more.

“I see,” he said softly.

“Well, I don’t,” Chantal said. “Is anyone going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Where to begin?” Bettina said. “We’ve stumbled into what my
papa
once warned me against, and in no uncertain terms: a struggle between the spirits that has spilled out of
la época del mito
into this world of ours.”

“And this
época de
whatever would be what?”

“The spiritworld.”

“Of course.” Chantal looked from Bettina to
el lobo.
“And you’re the good guys, right?”

Bettina shook her head. “I don’t even want to be involved, but
…so que va.
Here I am in the middle of it all the same.”

“And tall dark here?” Chantal asked.

She left “handsome” unsaid, but
el lobo
stood straighter and smiled all the same.

“He is … related to those on one side of the struggle.”

“Oh, well put,”
el lobo
said. “I am Scathmadra,” he added, bowing slightly to Chantal and offering her his hand. “At your service.”

Chantal shook his hand and introduced herself.

“I know what your name means,” Bettina told him. “Surely you can come up with something better?”

“Than the truth?” he said.

“I am so far out of my depth here,” Chantal began, “that I don’t even—”

She broke off as they heard a great crash from the direction of the house. It was the sound of masonry collapsing, breaking glass, stone blocks tumbling against each other. They turned as one toward Kellygnow.

“¿Qué
…
?”
Bettina said.

She’d thought for a moment that one of the towering oaks had come down upon the house, but she soon saw it was something worse. A great, ragged gap had been pounded out in a portion of the wall facing them. Through it came such a creature that even Bettina, in all she had experienced in her travels through
la época del mito,
had never seen the like of before.

It was tall and broad-shouldered with a man’s shape, but the proportions were not quite right and its skin seemed more like rough bark than human flesh. The mask Bettina remembered from Ellie’s worktable was now a face, fluid, mobile, dark-eyed. Its scraggly hair and beard were a thick tangle of vines. Branches sprouted from its temples like a stag’s antlers. A cloak of bark and leaves and tangled vines fell from its shoulders. Caught up in the folds of the cloak and pushing up out of the creature’s barklike skin were feathers and bits of fur, moss, fungi, and other less recognizable things.

The creature moved awkwardly, as though uncomfortable in, or unused to its body. For a long moment none of them could speak. They watched it lumber into the woods, its gait growing more graceful with each step. By the time it was lost from their sight, it was moving soundlessly, slipping between the trees like a whisper.

“Madre de Dios,”
Bettina murmured finally.

“Indeed,”
el lobo
said. “The Glasduine is woken and won’t this keep the pack busy. There will be no war between them and the local spirits now.”

Bettina gave him a questioning look.

“Think of it,” he told her. “The pack was to be the creature’s master. Now they will be the hunted.”

“Why would it go after them?”

El lobo
shook his head, as though he was dealing with a child.

“Do you think the Glasduine wouldn’t
know
what they had planned for it?” he said. “How they would profane its mystery and glory?”

“Sí,”
Bettina agreed. “If it was only that great spirit on its own. But Donal called it up. His desires will set its emotional balance.”

“If you would know how the pack treated that pup,”
el lobo
said, “then you would know for certain how not one of them is now safe.”

“Sí, pero todavía…”

But
el lobo
was already gone, stepping into
la época del mito.
Bettina heard Chantal gasp beside her. Of course. To her friend it would seem as though the wolf had simply disappeared. She gave Chantal a sympathetic look.

“It can’t be easy,” she said. “So many marvels, all at once.”

Chantal gave a slow nod. “Remember when I was saying I’d like to be able to see the stuff you do? Well, I take it back—okay?”

“It’s too late for that.”

“I kind of thought you’d say something like that.” She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “Okay. I’m going to deal with it. One step at a time—if I get to choose the pace at all.”

“This is new to me as well,” Bettina said. “I can’t promise anything.”

“So what do we do now?”

Bettina pulled her gaze away from where the creature had disappeared to look back at the house.

“We should make sure no one was hurt,” she said.

Chantal nodded and fell into step beside her.

“You know what it looked like?” she said after a moment. “That thing that came out of the house? Like those Green Men from British folklore. You see the image all over the place in England, in churches and the like.”

“Donal said something about that.”

Donal had said a lot, Bettina remembered, that morning when he and Ellie had first come to the house. Much of it, in retrospect, unpleasant. He’d subscribed such hedonistic and shallow impulses to the Glasduine he remembered from his own childhood stories. If those were what he was using to focus its spirit, the creature would indeed be a monster.

“But I don’t remember those Green Men being thought of as evil,” Chantal went on. “They were more like primal forest spirits. Jack-in-the-Green. Robin Hood. Even Shakespeare’s Puck. More like a trickster than something nasty.”

“Old spirits such as they dwell too far away from the world now,” Bettina said. “They live deep in the spiritworld, deeper than most travelers can access. To be able to return, they need a vessel to hold their spirit and that’s usually a man or a woman. The trouble is, the vessel brings his or her own influences into what has been called forth.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you bring something like that into the world,” Bettina explained, “it takes on your characteristics. If you’re kind, it will be a benevolent spirit. But if you are mean-spirited …”

“Oh, I get it,” Chantal said. “And this Donal guy, he’s … ?”

“Very troubled,” Bettina told her. “I saw a lot of unhappiness and darkness in him. There was goodness as well, but it was a servant to the shadows, not its master.”

She put up a hand suddenly and brought Chantal to a stop.

“What… ?”

Bettina put a finger to Chantal’s lips. “Wait,” she said, her voice pitched soft.

Ahead of them they saw the Recluse leave her cabin and stare across the back lawn to where the hole gaped in the side of the house. She began to walk over to it, but then Nuala stepped out of the gap and clambered across the rubble. Nuala met the Recluse halfway across the lawn where an animated argument ensued.