Bone Walker (25 page)

“You'll learn to build them,” Elessir said. He was shrugging out of his jacket, and even as I blinked at him, trying to reorient, he plucked the skull from my hands and wrapped it in denim. “But unless the Queen has already arranged it too, you're going to have to learn something else first.”

“What are you talking about?”

He paused, cocked his head at the silence around us, and then smirked. “As there is a distinct lack of gates opening in our immediate vicinity, and I myself am currently incapable of doing so, it's on you to get us—” For a fraction of an instant, so briefly I wasn't sure I had seen it at all, he caught himself. “To get us out of here.”Had he been about to say ‘home'? Yet another question I didn't want to approach, and he'd thrown the additional and much bigger curveball of gates, anyway. “Wait, what,
me
? Pal, I've never opened a gate before! Do you want to trust it to a newbie? What if I dump us in Saskatchewan or fuck up the timing?” I heard myself getting shrill, but didn't bother to hold it back. The thought of getting home again, only a hundred years later, nearly choked me with a rush of panic.

“I can walk you through it, Miss Thompson.” Elessir cradled the jacket-bundle in the crook of his left arm and then held out his right hand to me. “Can you trust me?”

Speaking of panic. I blinked up at him and then down at his hand. I let out a ragged breath. Touching him again was the worst of bad ideas, but hell, I'd just sworn an indeterminate number of my future years to a vacation in the Unseelie Court. All things considered, Elessir a'Natharion seemed less scary now by comparison. So I took his hand by way of reply, squared my shoulders, and asked, “How do we do this?”

To my relief, his attention stayed focused, and so did mine; there was no return of the wild urge to embrace him. “You need to visualize, as clearly and distinctly as you can, where you want to go. Think of it as a room you want to walk to in another part of your house.”

That part was easy enough. I wanted to be right back in the park we'd just left, with Millicent and Jake and Carson, and oh God, I wanted to hug Christopher until neither of us could breathe, and then I wanted to wrap myself around him and hide somewhere safe for an entire month. But first I had to get back to him, and then we had to do something about the
alokhiu
, and did I mention the part where I was so very, very tired?

Right. Kobe Terrace Park. Christopher.
Focus, girl!

“I got it,” I murmured. I hoped.

Elessir nodded just to the left of us, at the open air between us and another bank of the panels with their unreadable names. “Imagine there's a door or a curtain right there, or a panel just like all the ones here. Beyond it is where you want to take us—so call your power, and open that door, or curtain, or panel. Make it big, so we can both step through.”

As lesson plans went, this one lacked a certain something—like, oh, say, concrete details—and I shot the Unseelie a caustic look. But he stared back at me in utmost earnestness, an uncomfortable indication that this was likely going to be all the detail I was going to get.

When I closed my eyes and reached for my magic, though, the problem became much simpler. Here in this ancient dwelling of the Queen of the Unseelie, surrounded by so much background power, it'd been easy to overlook mine. The moment I actively sought it, it thundered up in response to my one anguished thought: that Christopher was going to be out of his mind with worry. And I might have been in Faerie, a place where the very air was permeated with magic, but I could feel Christopher's missing.

I thought of him, of his oak-strong Warder energy, and I realized with a pang that not once in the last two months had I ever felt its lack. More than anything, more than my house or Seattle's green trees or even my big monster of a cat, Christopher's magic always told me when I was home.

Go home
, I ordered my magic.
Find him
.

Brilliance exploded into being, but not in any cohesive, door-like shape; rather, it engulfed Elessir and me, throwing us both into sharp relief. Reality wavered around us. A massive sense of
pulling
roared up from somewhere deep within me, and because I was clasping his hand, it caught him up in its wake. His eyes went wide, and that was a new surprise, because I'd never seen him look at me with outright awe.

“Miss Thompson,” he blurted, “would I have been so terrible an enticement?”

The question was strangely casual and quiet against the wildfire halo of magic pulling us
somewhere else
. For an instant, surrounded by radiance of my own power's making, I had to wonder what exactly was going through the bard's mind to put such an open, unmasked look upon his face. “No,” I admitted. I paused, then offered him a sheepish little half-grin. “And by the way, you might as well call me Kendis.”

I had just enough time to see him break into a heartbreakingly beautiful smile before we vanished into the light.

When the
pull
released us, when the magic and the light subsided, Elessir and I were in far different surroundings than the ossuary we'd just left.
Where we were, in fact, I had no earthly idea. Trees surrounded us on all sides save for a broad stretch of water immediately to the east—a lake I didn't know. Nor could I tell what time it was, aside from full-on night. The sky overhead was heavy with clouds, through which neither stars nor moon could be seen. Wind whipped along the length of the paved trail where the portal dumped us, hitting our faces with rain as soon as my power let us go.

I had to squint against the glare. But once it was gone and my eyes had adjusted, I quickly realized I hadn't been the only source of light on the trail. A red LED flashed off and on just a few yards ahead of us. That LED was attached to the front of a jacket.

A jacket worn by the crumpled form of Christopher.

Most likely I screamed. I didn't even notice as I leapt forward and threw myself down to my knees at his side, pulling him up into my arms. He was soaked and shivering, and his magic swirled off of him in feeble little tendrils. The greater channel of it, the link that usually tied him to Seattle's earth, was stretched so thin that I feared it was about to break.

But he was alive. My magic sensed it before the rest of me did, for his latched onto it the instant I touched him. Only when I wailed out his name and kissed him, heedless of the falling rain, did he actually stir. And only then did I begin to cry.

“Kenna,” he mumbled, his voice groggy. Between the LED and the roil of power between us, I had more than enough light to get a good look at him, and my heart contracted painfully in my chest. On top of being drenched, he had several days' worth of beard roughening his face, and acute exhaustion shadowed his eyes. He locked a wild, delirious gaze onto my face. He breathed my name once more in disbelief and hope.

Then he sat up and crushed me against his chest, so tightly that I felt him trembling against me. But that frantic burst of energy lasted him only a few seconds. I wailed again as he slumped hard against me.

“Christopher? Oh God, what's wrong? Where the hell are we? Christopher!”

“Miss Thompson, think.” Elessir crouched just behind me, and to my surprise, he laid the denim jacket he'd just been wearing over Christopher, giving him an extra layer of warmth. “He's a Warder. There's not much that can lay a Warder out, but surely you know what can!”

I didn't miss what he'd chosen to call me. Nor did I miss that the surrender of his jacket now meant he was carrying Melorite's skull in his bare hands. But I couldn't spare mental space to care about either problem, not right then. Stroking Christopher's hair and temples, bathing him in all the power I could summon as if that might keep the rain off of us both, I said, “We must not be in Seattle. The city would support him if we were. Goddamnit! Where are we and how'd he get here?”

My phone, at least, could answer the first question. I didn't want to break contact with Christopher in the slightest, but I had to free a hand to fish the phone out of my pocket; asking Elessir to fetch it for me was so very much not an option. That I still had the thing at all was a surprise, and so was its absolute failure to come out of sleep mode when I hit the power button. Bricked. I'd forgotten about the penchant Sidhe magic had for taking out phones, and apparently that included travel by gate.

Right on the heels of that, though, I felt a telltale vibration somewhere on Christopher's body—
his
phone. I let out a strangled little cry and ran my hand under Elessir's jacket, all over his shuddering form, till I found the pocket where he'd stowed the device.

The number on the screen, I saw in a surge of desperate relief, was Millicent's. I nearly dropped the thing in my haste to answer the call. “Oh my God, oh my God, Millie, it's me, help!”

“Girlie, it's about goddamn time you showed up again,” the Warder First's voice barked in my ear. “Is the boy with you? I can't sense him from here!”

“I've got him! We're out on a trail, wait, I don't know where we are.” Since Christopher's phone had signal, I found its map app and narrowed in where we were: somewhere on the eastern shore of Lake Sammamish, which was in turn just east of Bellevue. “We're by Lake Sammamish. He's out cold but I've got him. Elessir is here. What the
hell
happened?”

“Honey,” Millicent advised, all at once sounding very tired, “you'd better check the date on that phone.”

That stopped me cold, above and beyond the chill of the rain and the wind. With shaking fingers, I brought up the calendar on the tiny screen.

The date was almost a month later than it should have been.

My heart in my throat, I showed the screen to Elessir and then whispered back into the phone, “Millie, you… you're going to have to tell me what I missed.”

“Later. Priority one is getting the boy back on our ground, so sit tight. I'm sending Jake and Carson to you.”

Fortunately, we didn't have long to wait.

Carson called Christopher's number within a minute of Millie hanging up, though I had to hand the phone off to Elessir. Christopher clung to me too hard, with his arms and his magic alike, for me to spare much attention for anything else. It turned out that Marymoor Park was just a short walk north along the trail from where we were—or at least, what would have been a short walk under normal circumstances. As it was, it took far longer than it should have done for me to coax Christopher to his feet so that we could get him to the nearest parking lot where the boys could meet us.

Déjà vu much?
That was all the hysteria I allowed myself, with Christopher staggering hard against me as we made our way along the trail. This time, though, I had Elessir to help me prop him up on the other side. And this time, the problem was going to be more easily fixed than a troll-induced concussion.

At least, I hoped.

My housemates were waiting when we reached the parking lot. Both of them looked almost as ragged around the edges as Christopher, though they lit up at the sight of me. I wanted to hug the both of them, panicked as I was at the news that I'd lost almost a month. But my arms were full of Christopher, and I didn't dare let him go.

Once we all made it into the car and Jake got us heading west, I probably should have asked them the same question I'd asked Millie. Elessir beat me to it, and in a numb sort of haze I heard the boys telling him that the
alokhiu
, in Saeko Asakura's body, had gone full-on dragon and had been hurling hurricane-force winds into the coast for the last three weeks. Power had been out through most of Seattle for a week and a half. Warders from Baja California all the way up to British Columbia were on high alert, but since the dragon hadn't come near a Warded city, no one had been able to do a thing against her except batten down the hatches.

Later, I supposed dully, I was going to have to care about that. But right then the only Warder I wanted to think about was the one curled as tightly against me as he could get in the back seat of a car. My magic soaked into him like water into drought-stricken earth. Not until we crossed Lake Washington, though, did I feel him abruptly relax, and hear his breathing ease into restful slumber.

It was only as we reached the other side of the lake that I finally realized exactly how dark the city was. There were no streetlights, and the Mini's headlights stood out wanly at best against the rain that hammered the streets. Ours wasn't the only car out at this hour, but what few vehicles we passed kept to the same cautious speed Jake did. All that kept the gloom around us from being complete were periodic flashes of lightning, bolts of brightness that turned the sky a disturbing shade of green.

Carson advised that we go straight back to our place. I didn't argue, since I wasn't about to let Christopher out of my sight, and I was desperate for my own Warded walls, my cat, and my bed. We made it back without incident. Jake was first to the front door, and first to intercept the startled Fortissimo, who made a beeline for my feet the instant he heard us come in. After a moment's hesitation, Elessir followed Jake and silently held the door open for the rest of us. Carson, as the biggest of the boys, helped me get Christopher into the house. Christopher shuffled blindly where we led him and eventually keeled over onto my bed, all without breaking contact with me.

Out in the living room I heard Jake talking, though I didn't realize that Millicent must have called again until he came to my bedroom door and held out his phone. “Millie wants to talk to you,” he reported.

Of the five of us, four must surely have tripped the city Wards the instant we'd come across Lake Washington, so Millicent's sensing our arrival wasn't the least bit surprising. “Is the boy in bed yet?” she barked as soon as I took the phone.