Out of This World

 

 

 

ALSO BY CHARLES DE LINT

Over My Head
(Book 2 of the Wildlings series)

Seven Wild Sisters
(illustrated by Charles Vess)

The Cats of Tanglewood Forest
(illustrated by Charles Vess)

Under My Skin
(Book 1 of the Wildlings series)

The Painted Boy

Muse and Reverie
(collection)

Eyes Like Leaves

The Mystery of Grace

Dingo

What the Mouse Found
(collection)

Woods and Waters Wild
(collection)

Little (Grrl) Lost

Promises to Keep

Widdershins

Triskell Tales 2
(collection)

The Hour Before Dawn
(collection)

Quicksilver and Shadow
(collection)

The Blue Girl

Medicine Road
(illustrated by Charles Vess)

Spirits in the Wires

A Circle of Cats
(illustrated by Charles Vess)

Tapping the Dream Tree
(collection)

Waifs and Strays
(collection)

A Handful of Coppers
(collection)

The Onion Girl

The Road to Lisdoonvarna

Triskell Tales: 22 Years of Chapbooks
(collection)

Forests of the Heart

Moonlight and Vines
(collection)

Someplace to Be Flying

Trader

Jack of Kinrowan

The Ivory and the Horn
(collection)

Memory and Dream

The Wild Wood

I'll Be Watching You
(as Samuel M. Key)

Into the Green

Dreams Underfoot
(collection)

Spiritwalk

From a Whisper to a Scream
(as Samuel M. Key)

The Little Country

The Dreaming Place

Angel of Darkness
(as Samuel M. Key)

Ghostwood

Drink Down the Moon

The Valley of Thunder

Svaha

Wolf Moon

Greenmantle

Jack, the Giant Killer

Yarrow: An Autumn Tale

Mulengro: A Romany Tale

The Harp of the Grey Rose

Moonheart: A Romance

The Riddle of the Wren

FOR JOHNNY 'S FAIRY DOGMOTHERS,
LINDA GARRETT & KATHY HUGHES

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

—Crowfoot saying

A soft wind's coming in from the ocean as I pick my way from shadow to shadow through the neighbourhood.

Honestly? I'm not expecting to be right. I mean, come on. It's three in the morning. Nobody's going to be out here at this time of night. But I'm still careful. The guys from Black Key Securities gunning for Josh aren't a bunch of kids waiting to beat us up after school. They're military trained and they already took a shot at us yesterday.

Josh is in the otherworld, and if they saw what was left of Vincenzo, they might not even mess with him. But they don't have a clue about that, so I'm doing what any good bro would: making sure things are cool over at his mom's house.

I keep to the shadows, slipping through backyards as I make my way from my house to Josh's. It'd be just my luck to have Santa Feliz's finest happen to swing by on a patrol, but I do my best ninja impression and make it all the way to the Evoras' backyard without raising an alarm. Sidling along the side of their garage, I peer down the street to Josh's house.

I watch the street and yards, listening to the surf where it breaks against the beach at the far end of the street. There's no
movement, not even a pack rat rustling around in the hedges or up in the dead fronds of the palm trees, no one out except for me. Then I remember where the sniper was hiding when he shot at us in the barrio yesterday. I look up, checking the rooflines.

Still clear. Except if he's on a roof, he's not going to pick a house on the same side of the street as Josh's. He's going to be on the opposite side.

So I work my way back around the block, still cutting through yards until I'm in a position to see the rooftops across from Josh's place.

And there the prick is, lying on the flat, tiled roof of the house opposite Josh's.

Sometimes I hate it when I'm right.

All I can see is his head, but I know from experience that he's going to be well armed. The big question is, is he here just for Josh, or is Josh's mom in danger, too?

And what do I do about it?

Okay. It's not like he's a Wildling or some kind of superhero. He's human like me, but no way am I stupid enough to go up against some ex-military guy with a gun.

And then it hits me. If I can break into Josh's house without his mom catching me or the sniper spotting me, I can steal Josh's phone, which the FBI are tracking, then go someplace odd enough that the Feds'll come looking to see what Josh is up to. At that point I fill them in and they can deal with it.

But how to get into the house? If I were the hero from some action flick, I'd blow up a car as a diversion, then slip in and be gone with the phone before anyone was the wiser. Hell, I'd just sneak up on the sniper, beat the crap out of him, then make him
lead me to where the rest of the rogue security detail are hiding and take them all out—problem solved.

As if.

I'd even settle for having Agent Solana's number so I could just call him up right now and hand the mess over to him.

“Whatcha doing?” a girl's voice asks from directly behind me.

I'm so inside my own head that I almost scream, which, dude, would be uncool on so many levels. I never heard a thing until she spoke. As it is, I bang up against the side of the house where I'm hiding, my heart pounding in my chest.

Some ninja I turn out to be.

I look over my shoulder to find a cute, skinny, sun-browned girl around my own age studying me with an amused look. The worst of my panic starts to die down. She's sitting on her haunches and dressed for the beach in raggedy cotton pants cut off at mid-calf and a baggy T that says “Life's a beach.” Her eyes are big in a narrow face surrounded by long dreads that are almost as thick as her slender arms.

I don't know what she's doing out here at this time of night, but I suppose she could ask the same of me.

“Dude,” I whisper. “Give me a heart attack, why don't you?”

“Sorry,” she says. But her eyes and her smile say she isn't.

“Who are you?” I ask, motioning to keep her voice low.

“I'm Donalita, not
dude
.” she says. “Theo said I should keep an eye on you.”

It takes me a moment to realize who she's talking about.

“You mean Chaingang?” I ask her.

She nods. “But his real friends call him Theo.”

“Yeah, well, that's never going to be me. I think I irritate the hell out of him.”

She grins. “Me too, but I call him Theo anyway. Why are you sneaking around in the dark?”

“How long have you been watching me?”

She shrugs. “Only a couple of minutes. You're very good at sneaking. If I wasn't me, I'd probably never have noticed you.”

I put that together with her telling me that Chaingang sent her.

“You're a Wildling, aren't you?” I say.

“Don't be silly. I'm much older than that.”

“So you're one of them—what do you call them—cousins?”

She laughs and says, “I'm me. Why do I have to be something else as well?”

“You need to be quiet,” I remind her.

“I'm very good at that. I'm very good at everything I do.”

“Yeah, that must come in handy.”

“Oh, it does,” she says, either ignoring or oblivious to my sarcasm. “So, what are you doing?”

I ease my head around the corner of the house. The sniper's still there.

“I'm trying to figure out what to do about him,” I tell her, pointing upward and across the street.

She pushes right up beside me to have a look. Up close she smells really good—fruity with a faint undercurrent of musk. It's like having a smoothie at the zoo. She grins, her face inches from my own, before she peers around the corner.

“So is he a bad man?” she asks.

“He wants to kill Josh—you know Josh?”

“I don't
know
know him, but I know who he is.”

“Yeah, well, that guy's with those men that kidnapped Josh a few weeks back. They definitely want to hurt him.”

“But Josh went into the otherworld,” she says, “so he's safe. From them.”

I nod. “Except maybe they're after his mother, too. Maybe even me and Marina.”

“Do you want to kill him?” she asks.

She has an interesting voice—girlish and throaty all at the same time—so it seems a little weird to hear her ask that so matter-of-factly. And then I start thinking about the torn-up remains of Vincenzo that we found earlier tonight. Josh literally ripped the body to shreds while in his Wildling shape.

“Dude,” I say. “Are you all so bloodthirsty?”

She blinks and gives me a blank look.

“Come on,” I say. “You've got to admit it's a little freaky. You look like a cute little rasta girl”—that gets me another grin—“but you sound like Clint Eastwood doing Dirty Harry.”

“Is that a good or a bad thing?” she asks.

“Depends, I guess. For pretend, it's kind of hot. For real, it's kind of scary.”

“But you have to deal with your enemies,” she says.

“Right,” I tell her. “But just killing them is a little too Wild West, dude.”

“Well, what
do
you want to do with that man?”

I feel a little bad ragging on her, considering how I was just running through different violent scenarios myself. But I don't roll like that for real.