Forests of the Heart (53 page)

“He didn’t need to say you were in danger. Just telling us you were involved was specific enough. Why else would he have bothered?”

“Since when do you listen to him?” Tommy asked.

“I have the utmost respect for Jack Whiteduck,” Aunt Nancy said in a deferential tone of voice that even Ellie could tell was insincere. “Especially when he’s right.”

“They don’t usually get along?” Ellie asked Sunday.

The other woman shrugged. “He doesn’t much care for the Creeks.”

“Why not?”

“Women’s magic versus men’s. He has a problem with it. We don’t.”

“And,” Aunt Nancy put in, showing that she was listening to their conversation as well, “we aren’t so foolish as to ignore his wisdom when it’s sound. Are we, nephew?”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ll stay already. But I don’t like it.”

Hunter cleared his throat. “But I’m coming,” he said.

“You?” Aunt Nancy turned her gaze on him, but Hunter didn’t flinch. “What do you have to offer?”

“Don’t forget, he killed one of the wolves,” Tommy put in,

“Urn, that’s right,” Hunter said. “And … well, Mr. Whiteduck …”

Aunt Nancy smiled. “Mr. Whiteduck. Oh, he’d like that.”

“He didn’t have any warnings about me, did he?”

“He doesn’t even know you,” Ellie said, but Aunt Nancy was already nodding.

“True enough,” she said. “We could use a warrior to watch our backs.” When she turned back to the truck to get a small backpack she’d left there, Ellie touched Hunter’s arm.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“And you do?”

“That’s different. Somehow I managed to get involved and I can’t back out now.”“Me, too,” Hunter told her.

“Remember what I said about seeing this through,” Tommy said.

“I won’t let anybody down,” Hunter said.

Tommy regarded him for a long moment, then nodded.

“I’m glad you’re going,” he said. “Aunt Nancy doesn’t always remember the frailties of human flesh. With two of you going, you’ll keep her honest. Pace yourself, no matter how she tries to shame you otherwise. Don’t forget, she’s lived her whole life in the bush. She can wear out half the Warrior’s society lodge when she gets going.”

He broke off when he saw Aunt Nancy looking at him.

“You Raven boys,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know where you get your sass.”

“Probably from our side of the family,” Sunday said.

Aunt Nancy shook her head, but she was smiling. “Come on, then,” she told Hunter and Ellie.

Hunter fell in step with her, but Ellie paused beside Tommy for a moment.

“Look,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while. I don’t know why it’s important, but it just is. I guess it’s because I’m always feeling guilty about it.”

“Oh-oh. You’re not going to tell me you’ve been badmouthing me to my supermodel girlfriends, are you?”

She punched his arm. “No. It’s just… I want you to know that I don’t have the same background as you or anybody else that works with Angel. I don’t come from a broken home or any kind of a tragedy.”

“I already knew that,” Tommy said.

“You did? How?”

He shrugged. “It’s just something you know as a survivor.”

“It made me feel like such a phony. But I just wanted to help.”

“Ellie,” he said. “Don’t you see? That only makes the time you put in that more precious. I mean for the rest of us, it’s payback. A way for us to say thanks to Angel for how she helped us by helping others.” He grinned. “But you. Not only are you a superhero, but you’re a saint as well.”

“Great. Now I’m a saint.”

“Seriously,” Tommy said. “You’ve nothing to feel guilty about. Go and fight the forest monsters with a clear conscience.”

“Right.”

“And, Ellie?”

She turned back to look at him.

“Be careful, okay?”

“I will,” she said.

Then Aunt Nancy took her and Hunter by the hand. With her leading the way, they passed through the far border of the between and stepped into another world entirely.

Tommy hated feeling so useless. Once Aunt Nancy took Ellie and Hunter away into the spiritworld there was nothing for him to do but sit on the front bumper of the pickup and watch his other two aunts wandering about between the ice-covered trees, casting for spoor like a pair of blue tick hounds.

Funny how your world changes, he thought.

A day ago, the most he had to worry about was whether or not he was doing as much as he could to help Angel’s clients. Were they reaching everyone? How could they raise more money? What other sources could they hit for food and coffee, clothing and blankets? Could he convince the garage on Perry Street to give the van yet one more free tune-up?

Now he was sitting—literally—on the edge of the
manidò-akì,
the spirit-world, hidden in some between place that separated the world of the
manitou
from the one he knew. He was untouched by the freezing rain that continued to drizzle onto the trees all around them, and everything was different.
Manitou
had stepped out of campfire stories into the real world. Some magical forest monster was running amok. Nice, normal Ellie turned out to be carrying some sort of deep well of medicine. And his aunts really did have the spooky powers everybody on the rez had always attributed to them.

That was the real kicker. Maybe if he hadn’t come to the city, looking to count coup in a whiskey bottle, he could have been learning some of this stuff from them. He could be out there with Ellie and Aunt Nancy right now, hunting down this spirit monster, doing something, instead of sitting here twiddling his thumbs. The stoic Indian bit had never been something he could pull off; he just didn’t have the patience. Not like his aunts, who could sit there for hours waiting for whomever had come to them to explain what it was they wanted.

But back then he’d been as interested in shamanism as he’d been in the traditionalism of the Warrior Society, which was not at all. He’d been, and still was, all for Indian rights, but he saw them as something one had to look for in the future, not in the past. In the end, he’d gone looking for them in a bottle. By the time he finally surfaced to some level of rationality once more, he didn’t see himself as an Indian so much as a survivor. Which was why he was sitting here, on the sidelines. If he’d had some knowledge, some experience with all this weird stuff, then Whiteduck probably wouldn’t have given his aunts the warning he had, or if Whiteduck still had, Tommy’s aunts would have ignored it because they’d have known that he could handle himself.

At least Hunter had gone with them. Tommy loved Nancy as much as he did any of his other aunts, but he didn’t entirely trust her. It wasn’t that she was prone to meanness, so much as that she used whatever was at hand to deal with a problem. If she happened to need Ellie’s medicine, she was as likely to take it all. Though what Hunter would actually do if that situation arose …

Hell, Tommy thought. Hunter
had
killed one of the Gentry, hadn’t he? So he just had to trust that, if Hunter had to, he would find a way to deal with Aunt Nancy as well.

Tommy looked up when he heard his aunts returning to the pickup where he was waiting for them.

“Any luck?” he asked.

They shook their heads.

“The spoor is everywhere,” Zulema said. “It’s like a berry dye dissolving in water. It starts out distinctly enough, but give it enough time and your whole bucket takes on the color.”

Sunday nodded.

“Which means?” Tommy asked.

“That we can’t contain the creature in the spiritworld,” Zulema said. “Anytime it wants to come back here, all it has to do is step across.”

“And it will come back,” Sunday said.

“Oh, yes,” Zulema agreed. “Out there it’s a little fish in a big pond. But here … here it can have anything it wants.”

“But if it’s taken on physical form, it can be hurt,” Tommy said. “Right? Like the Gentry.”

His aunts exchanged a glance.

“This is something older and far more dangerous than the simple spirits of a place,” Sunday said.

“Then what’s Nancy going to do with it?” Tommy asked.

“I’m guessing she’ll try to use its own strength against it,” Zulema said.

“Which is easier to do in the spiritworld,” Sunday added.

Zulema nodded.
“And
if its path back here is cut off.”

“But you can’t get a fix on where it went through?” Tommy asked.

“It’s too powerful,” Sunday explained. “Everything reverberates with its presence.”

Tommy looked from one to the other. “So Ellie and the others … they’re on their own? Without any backup?”

“I’m afraid so,” Zulema said.

“Great.”

“We’re not giving up,” Sunday told him. She looked to her sister. “Maybe we can go back to where the creature was first called into the world and work our way out from that point.”

“It’s worth a try,” Zulema said. When Tommy got up, she added, “You might as well stay here—you know, in case the others come back and need something.”

“Sure,” Tommy said.

Right, he thought as he watched them go back towards Kellygnow. Stay here in case the others needed something, translated into keeping out of the way.

Sighing, he opened the door of the cab. He paused as he started to get in, gaze alighting on a crushed cigarette butt that somebody had left on the floor. Picking it up, he looked out toward the trees where his aunts had been searching earlier. After a moment, he leaned into the cab and opened the glove compartment. He took out the matches that he kept there with a couple of candles—emergency heating in case he ever broke down on some back road— and walked around the front of the pickup to where a piece of granite pushed up by the roots of one of the big oaks, protected from most of the freezing rain by the trees’ drooping boughs.

He split open the cigarette butt and made a little pile of the leftover tobacco on the rock, then lit it with a match. Sitting on his heels, he watched the tendril of smoke rise and returned his gaze to the trees.

“Grandfather Thunders,” he said. He had to stop, clear his throat. “Look, I’m not exactly the best example of my people, but I never meant any disrespect, you know. And I’m not asking anything for myself, here, just so’s we understand. But if you could see your way clear to making sure Ellie makes it through this in one piece, I’d be really grateful.”

The tobacco was mostly ash now, smoldering on the rock.

“I know this offering’s pretty puny,” he went on, “but as soon as I can get to a store, I’ll get you a whole pouch of the stuff. And I’ll have the Aunts teach me how to offer it up to you properly, okay?”

He watched the last of the tobacco burn. The thin thread of smoke finally died. He waited a while longer, almost expecting some response, now that he knew that all the campfire stories were true. But there was nothing. He had to laugh at himself as he stood up. Like the
manitou
were suddenly going to come at his beck and call. He’d probably wet himself if one of them actually did show up. But maybe what he’d done would make a difference.

“If you hear me,” he said, “I just want to say, you know, thanks. For listening, I mean.”

He waited a while longer, then returned to his seat on the front bumper. The hardest thing about being useless, he realized, was knowing that you were. And there was not a damn thing you could do about it.

Christ, he could really use a drink. And that was something he hadn’t felt this strongly in a long time.

He was seriously considering going into Kellygnow himself to see if he could cadge one from somebody when he heard a sound, far off in the distance. He lifted his head, waiting for it to be repeated, but it didn’t come again.

Okay, he thought. It’s raining. Big storm. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising. But it was also the middle of winter, and how often did you hear thunder in the winter?

“Thank you,” he said. “Really, I mean it.”

He was still grinning when his aunts returned from Kellygnow with a tall red-headed woman in tow.

El que con lobos anda a aullar se enseña.

He who keeps company with wolves learns to howl.

—M
EXICAN
-A
MERICAN SAYING

T
UESDAY AFTERNOON
, J
ANUARY
20

Wasn’t that just like a man,
Bettina thought as she followed her wolf into
la época del mito.
Where did they learn to keep everything in its own box the way they did? She knew the kiss had meant as much to him as it had to her, yet he was able to put everything aside and carry on with the task at hand as though nothing had happened between them. Which was what they
should
do, she knew. What they must do. But it still made the promise woken from that kiss seem of so much less consequence than she hoped it was.

El lobo
looked back at her when they’d crossed over.

“What’s the matter?’’ he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “No
importa”

“When a woman says, ‘nothing,’“ he said, “she means, ‘everything.’“

“You shouldn’t generalize.”

A flicker of amusement woke in his eyes. “Or I should at least encompass more with my generalizations. Perhaps I should have referred to most people instead.”

Bettina sighed. “My grandmother and Nuala both warned me about keeping company with wolves.
El que con lobos anda a aullar se enseña
Abuela would say.”

“He who keeps company with wolves learns to howl,”
el lobo
translated.

“Literally, perhaps. But it means that bad habits are acquired from bad companions.”

“And what bad habits have you acquired from me?”

“None,” Bettina said. “So far.”

“I like the literal meaning better.”

“Sí.
But you would.”

He nodded, serious now. “Though perhaps not for the reason you think. Sometimes it’s better to cut yourself free from what you know and…” He shrugged. “Howl is as good a word as any. To let loose the constrictions that normally bind your actions and run wild for a time.”

“Only we can’t, can we? We have a duty.”

“Ah, so that’s what this is about.”

Bettina shook her head. “No, I understand that we must first deal with the task at hand. But you seem to put the … other business away so easily.”

“Would you rather I bed you right now, here among the ferns and leaves?”

Sí,
Bettina found herself thinking even as she shook her head again. It was bluntly put—deliberately so, she didn’t doubt, to get a rise out of her—but the thought of it appealed to her all the same, though only if
he
felt what she was feeling…

“I don’t know what to think,” she said. “It’s all very confusing.”

“I know,” he told her. “Don’t doubt that I am any less confused.”

“Truly?”

He nodded.

“That makes it easier for me,” she said.

He shook his head, but then offered her his hand. “Come,” he said, and led her in the direction of the pool where, in this world, an ancient salmon lay sleeping. The forest was different by day, still mysterious with the cathedralling trees rearing above them as they walked, but it felt more welcoming than it had when she’d been here the other night, also in the company of her wolf. The ice storm had vanished, left behind with the winter they’d escaped. Here it felt like late autumn, the air rich with a musky scent of dark earth and secrets. Bettina had almost forgotten why they’d come until they neared the pool and saw the Recluse lying on the grass by its low stone wall.
El lobo
glanced at the body.

“It seems they’ve had a falling-out,” he said, then meant to continue on his way.

Bettina pulled him to a stop. Letting go of his hand, she knelt by the still form. She could tell by the angle of the neck that it was hopeless, but she still felt for a pulse, still called up the healing spirit in her heart and asked for help from the spiritworld to diagnose what might be used to help the hurt woman.

“Bendígame, Virgen. Bendígame. santos, Bendígame, espíritus,”
she murmured.
“Deme la fuerza a ayudar esta pobre alma.”

The blessing rose in her but it was too late. The woman’s death wound was far too grievous, and here in
la época del mito,
spirits were quick to leave their bodies and travel on.

“You’re wasting your time.”

Bettina looked up to
el lobo,
a little disappointed that he would be so callous of one so recently slain.

“I had to try,” she said.

“But why? She is the cause of all our troubles.”

“What do you mean?”

He sighed and crouched beside her, sitting on his ankles. She felt a pang of memory when she looked at him. So her father had sat, he and his
peyoteros,
talking long into the night, smoking their cigarettes. Men unused to chairs, who could find no use for man-made conveniences.

“Until she came along,”
el lobo
said, “the Gentry were no different from Nuala. Content to roam the city, to have a den in the wild acres behind Kel-lygnow. They didn’t need to take anything from the native spirits—they had all they wanted already: a den they could call their own, pubs for drink and the
craíc,
the music. It was she who woke ambition in them, woke the evil we all carry in us, fanned it with admiring words and false promises.”

“You said you didn’t know about the mask.”

“I didn’t. But I still knew there was something, some artifact they sought after, and would, as we’ve seen, eventually find. And all the while the Gentry, their baser instincts awoken, simply grew worse. It was she who encouraged them to be more territorial. To be harder of heart and mean-spirited. To take what they wished, for it was owed to them.”

“Why would she do such a thing?” Bettina asked.

El lobo
shrugged. “To keep them from thinking too much, I suppose. From seeing how she led them about by their noses.”

Bettina looked down at the dead woman.

“What did she get from it?” she asked.

“A longer life. The Gentry showed her a way into the spiritworld, where she spent most of the year.”

Bettina nodded. Time moved differently here and didn’t rest so heavily on the body.

“And for power, of course,”
el lobo
added.

“Power.”

“She meant to use the Glasduine as much as the Gentry did. I don’t doubt she chose both who would wear the mask and who would repair it.”

“Ellie was supposed to make a new one,” Bettina said. “A copy, but infused with her own spirit and creative impulses.”

“To infuse it with her own considerable, if untapped, power, you mean.”

Bettina nodded. It was all so depressing.

“The Recluse should have asked for luck,” she said, remembering a conversation she’d had with Ban, years ago now.

“How so?”

“Luck is sweet. A gift, a loan. When you have made your use of it, it goes on, undiminished. Power is finite and when one has it, it means another doesn’t.”

El lobo
nodded with understanding.

“And now look at her,” Bettina said. “For all the heartache and pain she caused, she has earned nothing but the death that was always waiting for her. What an evil woman.”

“Or a fool.”

Bettina gave her wolf a questioning look.

“There’s often not a great deal of difference between the two,” he said.

He rose easily from his crouch. Turning, he offered Bettina his hand and lifted her to her feet. They paused at the pool, looking down at the sleeping salmon.
El lobo
plucked a cigarette butt from the water and carefully placed it on the stone wall among the other offerings.

“We should go,” he said.

Bettina nodded. But having seen the dead woman made her question once more her own involvement in this hunt.

“¿Y bien?”
she said. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

“To right a wrong.”

“Is that it? I felt the pull of these forests, I left my beloved desert, and for this? To try to heal some monster that will no doubt need to be killed anyway?”

“I don’t think you were called to try to heal any monster,”
el lobo
said. “How could you have been? It didn’t even exist until today.”

“Then who have I been called to heal? You?”

“I think you are here to heal yourself.”

She shook her head.
“No seas tonto.
I don’t need healing.”

“No? Perhaps I’m not so crazy. You’ve been here for months, but to what use have you put your studies beyond some simple charms? Calling on the spirits to help the Gentry’s pet human is the closest you’ve come to being a true
curandera
since you arrived.”

“I have been waiting …”

“Yes, to be healed.”

Bettina frowned at him. He could be so infuriating.

“Healed?” she demanded. “Of what?”

“Shall I make a list of all that troubles you?” her wolf asked.

“Please do.”

He counted the items off on his fingers. “There is the question of your faith, how the spirits confuse your feelings towards the church and cause a rift with your mother. There is your grandmother’s abrupt disappearance from your life. Your sister’s denial of the spiritworld and how she belittles your grandmother’s teachings. The guilt you feel for sending
los cadejos
away after promising them a true home. The confusion of having a father who lives in the desert as a hawk, forgetting he was ever a man. The loneliness that comes from how you long for love, but believe no man will understand you, and no spirit will keep faith. Shall I go on?”

She was too shocked to be angry. “Who are you? How can you know all of this?”

“I am who I have said I am.”

Bettina shook her head. “You know too much about me.”

“I’m a good listener,”
el lobo
said.

“Those are things I’ve not spoken of with anyone. And certainly not here.”

He nodded. “I didn’t hear it from you. I listened to the gossip of the spiritworld. When you first came, I asked after you, and the stories came to me. Of you, your
abuela,
your parents.”

“Why would they speak of me? What could they hope to gain?”

El lobo
laughed. “They would gain nothing. It’s simply the nature of spirits to gossip. Surely you’ve seen by now that they’re worse than humans? If you don’t want to be gossiped about, you must ask them specifically not to.” He shrugged. “But even then they will still talk, couching their stories in riddles and half-truths.”

“Is there anything you
don’t
know about me?” she asked.

“Everything.”

“You can say that after the list you’ve just recited.”

“Those are things that are spoken of about you,” he said. “One can infer a great deal from such, but not what matters most. I don’t know how you truly feel. What your hopes and dreams might be. I have listened to the spirits speak of you; I have yet to hear you speak.”

Bettina turned from the pool with its sleeping salmon and walked away, under the trees.
El lobo
fell in step beside her, quiet now. His gaze, when she glanced his way, held only concern; the teasing humor fled.

“It’s all true,” she said after a while.
“Mas o menos.
I did not specifically send
los cadejos
away, but I have not made them welcome since the night Abuela followed the clown dog into the desert. And my beliefs, Abuela’s teachings. While it’s true they have caused a rift between my mother and sister and myself, I have reconciled my faith with my knowledge of the spirits.” She looked at him again. “I see room for all in God’s world. Perhaps we do not all practice the charity we should to each other, but surely He does.”

“I know nothing of your god,”
el lobo
said.

“Why would you?”

“But I would like to understand this hold he has on his followers.”

She nodded.
“Ése está extraño,”
she said. “The first night you took me to the salmon’s pool, I saw the Recluse there, but she seemed like a mission priest to me. You told me you saw no one.”

“I told you I saw no man.”

“Ah. But why would you keep her a secret from me?”

“Because you weren’t involved,” he said. “If you weren’t a part of what she and the Gentry were up to, why draw you into it?”

They’d walked farther now than Bettina had ever been in this part of
la época del mito.
By now, in the world where Kellygnow stood, their way would have taken them through the neighboring estates. Here, there was only the wild wood, ancient and tall, the immense trees untouched by the lumbermen who had founded so much of Newford.

“I hadn’t known about my father,” she said. “That he had forgotten he was a man. I thought he had abandoned us—out of love,” she added. “That he thought it would hurt us to grow old while he remained forever unchanged.”

“Only he can say.”

She nodded. “When this is done, I will find him and ask him.”

El lobo
hesitated, then said, “It’s not always wise to question the motives of an old spirit such as he.”

“Are you warning me against asking you too many questions?” she asked with a smile.