The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (16 page)

At the point of no return, his fingertips slipped and he fell into the water like a log, touching bottom and bobbing back up. The bitch was down here somewhere, he thought, as he clasped the airtight waterskin with his pistols inside. He would swim all night if that’s what it took.

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 5 “The Blade and the Bone”

Muffins

I
OPENED MY EYES.
I was in darkness, enveloped in some soft, binding material. Visions of giant spiders and cotton-candy cocoons filled my mind, exacerbated by a terrifying, buzzing, obnoxious screech from somewhere to my right. I threw an arm in that direction and hit something hard.

The screeching stopped. I sat upright.

Weak daylight streamed in around heavy drapes, diffused by diaphanous curtains. I slid out of the bed and ripped the curtains open, revealing another gray day in Blackfield.

The interstate traffic poured past, coursing down the freeway, a river of raw nerves and subsonic steel. The sky was a dark, pendulous iron belly, once again threatening to unleash on the people below.

There was a family in the parking lot loading their minivan for the next leg of their journey, and their youngest, a chubby little girl in pigtails, was screaming her desire for pancakes. I blinked in confusion, unable to form any coherent inner dialogue except for that which came naturally to the front of my mind.
The whole thing was a dream?

I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. I found my cellphone lying on the bedsheet. It was dead. I plugged it into the wall charger, but nothing happened—I couldn’t even turn it on. I thought about using the room phone to call Sawyer, but I couldn’t remember his number without looking at my phone’s contact list.

I stood in the parking lot, my fists on my hips, and sighed. My car was evidently still at the church, because it wasn’t here at the hotel.

How the hell did I get back from the house?

Did we even
go
to Dad’s house?

This was going to be a hell of a walk, especially if it started raining. I went back to the room and got my jacket—no, in case I was gone too long to renew my room, I got all my stuff and took it to—ahh, shit, no car.

I tightened my rucksack’s straps, pulled my hood over my head, and started walking.

_______

Cap’n Pacino’s Coffee Cafe was busy this morning, but not packed. It was a classy place, if a bit kitschy, with booths that resembled the seats in a dinghy and a bar that looked minimally like the bulwark of a galleon, festooned with a faux-aged rope. The whole thing had a sort of art-nouveau nautical theme like a waterfront pirate tavern, if pirates were known to plunder Seattle in the year 2040.

There were sleek white life rings and stylized green anchors on the walls, along with dreary expressionist paintings of storm-tossed seas and lonely lighthouses and riotous scenes of pirate bacchanalia, and everything was done in shades of tan, bottle-green, and driftwood-gray.

There were at least three laptop screens glowing in the booths as I pushed the wooden door open and humped it inside with my over-stuffed rucksack like some kind of backpacker Santa Claus.

I went to the counter and ordered the strongest mocha I could find on the chalkboard over the bar. I was going to need the energy to make it all the way to the Hampton Inn on the other side of town. I was standing around waiting for my coffee when I heard a familiar voice chirp behind me.

“Ross?” It was Noreen Mears. She was sitting by herself in a booth, watching the news on a flatscreen bolted to the wall in the corner, her pull-behind suitcase on the booth seat next to her.

I collected my mocha and crammed my pack into the booth, sitting next to it.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you took off for home.”

“I got about six miles out of town,” she said, and sipped her own drink. I could smell peppermint. “My transmission ate shit. I had to get a tow back here, and I had to sleep in my car overnight because with the repair bill, I didn’t have enough money for another motel room. Can you believe it took the tow truck three hours to get out to me? Is that not some bullshit?”

“I agree. Hey, if you need a place to stay tonight, I’ll spot you.”

“Oh, thank you. I hate to put you out, though.”

“It ain’t no thang,” I said, burning my tongue with my coffee, which had apparently been extracted from the center of the earth. I coughed, making a face, and Noreen chuckled. “Hot?”

I sucked air, and stared at her hands thoughtfully, noticing that she was a nailbiter. Finally, I said, “Something happened last night.”

The girl tilted her head, smirking, her brow furrowed. “That sounds ominous. Do I want to know?”

I gave her a reproachful look and traced the rim of the cardboard sleeve with my thumb. “No, something really,
really
weird happened, and I’m not entirely sure it was even real. Hell, the last few days have been a little bit unreal, to be honest.”

It occurred to me that I’d never said anything to Noreen about the demon I’d seen in the closet, and now had seen in the mysterious millhouse and the gilded mirror. I told her about what had happened that first night, when I’d gone by myself to Ed Brigham’s house and saw the horned man, and, later, Sawyer and I delving into the mystery and coming up empty-handed.

She seemed skeptical. “Maybe you’re just really stressed out from your dad’s funeral. My sister used to see shadow-people when she had throat cancer.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but I think it was because she didn’t get much sleep, with the pain and the chemo making her sick all the time.”

“I believe it. Sleep deprivation can do that,” I said, and scalded myself again with a wince. “But I don’t think that’s the case here. For one thing, Sawyer saw it too. What happened last night, we were side-by-side for. We
saw
some shit.”

I sounded like a Vietnam vet.
We saw some shit, man, it was rough out there, Bubba.

“You’ll have to get a little more specific than ‘shit’,” Noreen said.

“
Crazy
shit.”

“Woah,” she interjected, “Too
much
detail. Just the facts, ma’am.”

I chuckled. “Well, after you left yesterday, me and Sawyer—we went back to my dad’s house to get his laptop, and I ended up dragging the mirror out of the closet so I could look at it.”

“The demon closet?”

“The very same. And then...something happened. I don’t know what. It was like...we were on auto-pilot. Like we’d been hypnotized and we started sleepwalking. I don’t even remember thinking,
we need to take the mirror out of the house,
it just—happened. I was standing there with the mirror, and the next thing I know, we were putting it in the back of my car, and then we were at the church.”

“The church?” asked Noreen. “Walker Memorial?”

“Yeah. And then we were taking it down to the cellar. I don’t know why; it was like the whole thing was our idea, but it
wasn’t,
too. Does that make sense?”

“Not one bit. But continue.”

I recounted how we discovered the mirror door, and the abandoned city beyond.

“You guys know how to get your hands on the good stuff,” said Noreen, with a sardonic smile. “Your dad must have had one hell of a stash.”

I shook my head. “I don’t do drugs, you goon. Anyway, these creepy people—”

“People?” asked Noreen. Her wiseacre skepticism had started to transform into genuine concern.

“I don’t know what they were or if they were even human, but Sawyer said he knew what they were. He said—and I’d swear on a stack of Bibles—that he knew them from my dad’s novels. He called them
Wilders.
”

Noreen’s eyebrows shot straight up.
“Wilders?”

“Yes. We ran from them and there was somebody there chasing us.” I told her about the swordsman chasing us, and the goat-horned man in the grain bin.

“What about Sawyer? Have you talked to him?”

“No,” I said, showing her my dead phone. “I don’t know his number.”

Noreen took out her own phone and dialed Sawyer, then put the phone to her ear and listened. “Hey, sweetie. Call me back when you get this message. Thanks,” she said, and immediately got up out of the booth. I understood without having to be told.

_______

We were marching down the sidewalk a couple blocks from Cap’n Pacino’s, warming our hands with hot coffee cups, when Noreen said, “That person with the sword that you said you saw—I don’t think that was a man.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I demanded, but I knew the answer as soon as the question came out of my mouth.

“Well, you told me that you saw Wilders there, wherever you were. It doesn’t make a bit of sense, but if I completely abandon all remaining semblance of tangible reality here and take what you’ve told me at face value, then according to
Fiddle
lore, the person you saw was a Griever, or a
swordwife
, in the book’s more casual slang.”

“The hell is a Griever?” I asked, stepping onto a redbrick planter-wall built out front of a law office. I tightroped down it beside Noreen as she ate up the sidewalk, walking and talking, pulling her suitcase behind her on noisy wheels.

“You haven’t really read any of the books, have you?” she asked. “They’re kinda like nuns, except they’re like Amazon warriors. Look, in book five,
The Blade and the Bone
, your dad established that certain women are enlisted specially to fight No-Men.”

“Certain women?”

“Widows,” she said. “The House of the Forge sends emissaries around the world of Destin to find and indoctrinate war widows into their culture. The House was established as a way to mobilize those that lost loved ones to the war to rid the world of the ones that killed them. It’s a bit of a cross between a Ladies’ Auxiliary and a kung-fu monastery.”

“That’s crazy as hell,” I said, hopping down off the end of the planter wall.

“Not as crazy as the main subplot of that book. You see, when widows are brought into the fold, they’re trained in the ways of swordsmanship. The only way you can end a No-Man is with a blade. So all the widows are trained in swordfighting and then, at the end of their training, they have to forge their own sword in a ceremony not unlike marriage. Basically, they’re remarried to the sword they create, and they never, ever take another lover for the rest of their lives.

“It’s an unbreakable bond, punishable by imprisonment in the catacombs underneath the House. There are rituals after that, for other things, but the sword ceremony is the true dividing line that you could say separates the girls from the women.”

“So you said the subplot was crazy. What happened?”

“Are you sure you want the spoilers?”

“Yeah.”

Noreen took a deep breath, “Well, in
The Blade and the Bone,
the Kingsmen found out that Ancress Bachelard was secretly ordering the murder of dozens of men in a concerted effort to fill the House’s ranks and create an army she was going to use to overthrow the King.

“She was defeated and killed by Normand Kaliburn’s squire Clayton Rollins at the end of the book, and now they’re all knights-errant, like
ronin
samurai, wandering Destin looking for No-Men to eliminate and killing other horrible things and devious people for pocket money. They’re basically bounty hunters now. After the Ancress’s betrayal, they’re not exactly popular, but they’re treated a hell of a lot better than the Redbirds.”

“I’m starting to wish I’d read the series now,” I admitted.

“I’m starting to wish you’d read it too. I don’t know what’s going on, but regardless of whether you both had a serious mental break, or got baked on some top-shelf grass you found in your dad’s house, or the two of you walked through a magic wardrobe into E. R. Brigham’s dark-fantasy novels, this is some profoundly messed-up shit.”

I heartily concurred that this definitely qualified as quote-unquote
messed-up shit,
although I was a bit offended at the wardrobe jibe. “It was a mirror, not a wardrobe.”