Forests of the Heart (39 page)

She didn’t blame Fiona. Her co-worker was actually a very sweet woman for all her fixation with the dark and gloomy. She’d cooked a great stir-fry for dinner, kept up a cheerful conversation from when they’d first left the store through when they sat down to dinner, and even put on an Enya CD after the meal, making some comment about how it bridged the gap between Celtic and Goth. Miki didn’t have the heart to tell her that the cloying harmonies and sameness of the disc put her nerves on edge. She’d have preferred some early ‘Trane or Lester Young. A remastered Bird reissue or Wayne Shorter’s new CD. Anything with an edge. She’d even have settled for one of Fiona’s Goth bands, if there actually existed any recordings among them where the tempo changed from one cut to another.

She half-listened to Fiona making some phone calls. One to her friend Andrea, commiserating on the closing of the club where she was supposed to start working that night. Another to Jessica, tracking down a telephone number for the Creek sisters. Passing that information on to Hunter’s answering machine since it seemed he was still out. God, what could he be finding to do on a night as miserable as this?

“What are you looking at?” Fiona asked as she pushed the “End” button on her phone and laid it on the floor by her feet.

Miki turned from the window and shrugged. “Nothing.”

Though that wasn’t true, she realized as she turned back to her vigil. The real reason she was keeping watch was that at any moment she expected to see the Gentry come ambling down the street. The slippery footing wouldn’t bother them and the rain would simply run off their trench coats, if they even bothered to wear them. They’d come stomping up the stairs to Fiona’s place and trash it just as they had hers. But first they’d vent their anger on Fiona and her.

“Whoever wrecked your place isn’t going to find you here,” Fiona said.

Miki turned to look at her again, a little embarrassed that she was being so transparent.

“Is what’s going on inside my head that obvious?” she asked.

Fiona shook her head. “You wouldn’t be normal if you weren’t worried about that. How would they even know to look for you here?”

“These aren’t your run-of-the-mill, intolerant assholes,” Miki said. “Finding someone who’s trying to hide anywhere in this city is the least of their abilities.”

“This have anything to do with why Hunter wants to contact a Native elder?”

“Pretty much.”

Fiona pulled her feet up onto her chair and wrapped her arms around them, looking at Miki over the tops of her knees.

“No offense,” she said, “but neither you nor Hunter seem much inclined to the spiritual.”

Miki wanted to laugh. Spiritual was the last word she would have used to describe the Gentry. They were so wired into base, earthly concerns that the only thing spiritual about them was their love for Guinness and whiskey. Not quite the spirits Fiona had in mind.

“I guess,” she said. “I can’t really speak for Hunter, but the only experiences I’ve ever had with things not quite of this world have been shite.”

Fiona regarded her for a long moment.

“You mean your place got trashed by bad spirits?” she finally asked. “Like some kind of, what? Poltergeists?”

“Oh, no,” Miki told her. “The Gentry have physical presence. Too bloody much of it, as far as I’m concerned.”

“The Gentry?”

Miki sighed. “It’s a long story,” she said. “But to give you the short version, I had a big fight with Donal last night because he was acting like a stupid little self-centered shite—”

“Or, in other words, he was being himself.”

Miki raised an eyebrow.

“Well, really,” Fiona said. “I mean, I’m sorry, he being your brother and all, but he’s never exactly made himself easy to like, has he? At least not for us. What does he call everyone who doesn’t quite match up to his obviously high standards?”

“Punters?”

“Exactly. Sometimes all he has to do is walk into the store and it’s all I can do to not give him a good smack across the head.”

Miki was so used to the way Donal could be that she never really thought all that much about how negatively other people might view him. She supposed it was because she’d always gotten to see the other side of him, the protective older brother capable of great generosity. Gone now. Lost to her in a welter of Gentry lies and promises.

“He’s not all bad,” she said, surprised that she could still defend him after the past twenty-four hours.

“Neither’s getting sick with a really bad cold—I mean, you do get the time off work—but still, who wants one?”

“Anyway,” Miki went on. “We had this fight and that brought me to the attention of these friends of his who ended up trashing my place.”

“Nice friends.”

Miki nodded. “But what makes it complicated is… well, they’re not exactly human.”

“Say what?”

“I know, I know. It sounds ridiculous.”

“Well, that depends,” Fiona said. “Do you mean not human as in they’re such nasty pieces of work we don’t want to claim them as part of the human race, or are you talking
X-Files?”

Miki never watched the show, but you couldn’t have any awareness of contemporary pop culture and not know something about it by now.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Does
The X-Files
deal with
genii loci?
We’re talking immortal earth spirits here, bad-tempered ones with a mean streak a mile wide who can change shape and pull your arms and legs off if they happen to get pissed off with you.”

Fiona gave her a considering look. “You mean for real?”

Miki nodded.

“You’re supposed to tell me you’re kidding now,” Fiona said.

“I’m serious.”

“And that’s what’s scaring me,” Fiona said. “I mean, I like getting spooked as much as the next person. A little Anne Rice. Checking out
Scream
and stuff like that. But then I always have the comfort of knowing that when I close the book, or leave the theater, I’m back in the real world.”

“I’m not going to be able to do that.”

“You’ve actually
seen
these guys?”

“I’ve been on the periphery of them all my life,” Miki told her. “I guess I was just lucky that I didn’t catch their attention until now.”

“And your brother’s connection is?”

“He thinks they’re going to make him immortal, too. That they’ll give him the power to pay back every wrong that’s ever been done to him, imagined or real, and nobody’ll be able to call him on it because he’ll be this supernatural hard man then, too. Just like them. One of the Gentry.”

“Why do you keep calling them that?”

Miki shrugged. “That’s just the way everybody referred to them when I was growing up. Calling them by their real names is supposed to be bad luck— puts their attention on you and you don’t want that because they’ll turn you into a newt or something.”

“Oh, boy.”

“I know,” Miki said. “It’s a lot to swallow. I’m surprised you haven’t laughed me out of the room by now.”

Fiona gave her a funny look. “I guess,” she said after a moment, “it’s because no matter how rational we think we are, we always suspect that there’s more out there than we can see. It’s like the old boogieman under the bed, as if—right? I know he’s not there, not really, but I still don’t sleep with a foot or a hand hanging over the edge of the bed.”

“But it’s just me telling you about it,” Miki said. “You don’t have any proof that any of it’s true.”

“No. But I’ve worked with you for a long time now and the Miki I’ve always known isn’t the same as the Miki who came into the store with Hunter this morning. I knew
something
really weird and serious had happened to you and it wasn’t just your apartment getting trashed. You’ve been through a lot of shit and that kind of thing would only piss you off.”

“I was pissed off.”

“Yeah, but you were scared, too.”

Miki nodded. That was true. It was still true.

“And I guess I’m kind of primed for this sort of thing,” Fiona went on. She waved her hand in the general direction of her Anne Rice books and the skull on her mantle. “For it to be, you know, more than just make-believe.”

They fell silent then. Miki returned her attention to the wet streets outside. The last CD they’d been playing had finished, but Fiona didn’t get up to put on a new one.

“So do you really think they’re going to come after you?” Fiona asked. “That they could track you down here?”

“I don’t know. They’re probably not even thinking about me anymore. I’m no threat to them and they made their point in my apartment this morning.”

“Except you hold grudges, too, don’t you?”

Miki shrugged.

“And if they don’t know it, Donal will.” Fiona shook her head. “I know he’s a self-centered little shit, but I can’t believe he’d take sides against you.”

“Yeah. That… hurts.”

More than she could possibly put into words.

“So maybe we should do something,” Fiona said. “Protect ourselves.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. We could call the number Jessica gave me for the Creek woman and ask her advice.”

“I suppose.”

“Or barricade the door. Or—”

At that moment the power died and they both jumped with fright. A sudden stillness settled over the dark apartment. All the normal murmurings of fridges and clocks and the like were gone. And because of the weather, the streets outside echoed that strange oppressive quiet.

“Do … do you think they had anything to do with this?” Fiona said.

“No, it’s just the weather,” Miki told her, hoping she was right. “Look. They still have power across the street. I guess they’re on a different part of the grid.”

“Why doesn’t this comfort me?”

Miki laid her accordion on the floor and stood up.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s light some of those candles of yours.”

“And make sure the front door is locked.”

Miki hesitated a moment, head cocked to listen, sure for a moment that she heard Gentry boots on the stairs coming up to Fiona’s apartment.

“And make sure the door’s locked,” she agreed.

It was almost midnight before Donal finally made it up to Kellygnow. He never did find his van and it took forever to flag down a cab, mostly because there were none out on the street by the time he left Hunter at Miki’s apartment. Who could blame them? The weather was worse than foul and there were no fares to be had anyway. The whole city was shutting down. Donal trudged past closed restaurants, convenience stores, clubs, theaters, diners. The only people he met were city and hydro workers. The only vehicles belonged to police and other emergency services, so there were no rides to be had. He was happy to keep his distance from the former and wouldn’t have presumed on the latter.

But a cab eventually stopped for him. The driver was off duty, on his way home and heading west anyway. He took pity on Donal, driving him across town and over the river at Lakeside Drive, before finally letting him out at the bottom of Handfast Road. Donal tried to pay for the ride, but the cabbie shook his head.

“Do somebody else a good turn,” he said.

“Thanks, mate,” he told the cabbie. “I will.”

Maybe stick a blade in the guts of one of the Gentry. Rip the smug smirking grin from a hard man’s gob as he felt his life turning to shite and bleeding away on him. That’d make for a good turn wouldn’t it?

“Drive carefully,” he added as he shut the cab door.

He stood in the freezing rain and watched as the vehicle pulled a one-eighty, piece of cake on the icy street, and headed back across the river. Donal was impressed. You had to be a damn fine driver to pull a trick like that in these conditions. When the cab’s taillights finally blinked out behind the hump in the road that rose up in the middle of the bridge, he started up Handfast. And got nowhere.

The road proved impassable. It was so steep and slick with ice that he couldn’t get a foothold. Eventually, he went by the back way, up through the backyards of the big expensive estates, breaking the thick crust of ice on top of the snow with each step. It was just as wet and miserable as being on the street, but Jaysus, at least he had traction. For the first time since he’d left the hotel where he’d woken up earlier this evening, he felt as though he was actually in full command of his own limbs, instead of simply trying to keep his balance. Still, the going was slow.

The night was full of sound as he went. He kept hearing the sharp crack of tree limbs breaking, the thumps of the branches falling, the tinkle like breaking glass as the smaller twigs and bits of broken ice went skittering across the crusted ice.

Halfway up he saw the huge limb of a Manitoba maple split from the main tree trunk and come crashing down on the side of a house, stoving in the roof, walls, windows. The house’s security system kicked in and a shrill alarm began to bleat.

Donal paused, wondering if he should see if anyone needed help, but then shook his head and continued on. The fat buggers in these houses thought they shat roses. Let them have a little taste of real hardship. Do ‘em bloody good.

The alarm followed him up the hill, until it was suddenly turned off. He glanced back, but the place was out of sight by now. His gaze moved on to take in what he could see of the city through the winter-bare trees. The carpet of lights he’d been expecting was present, but there were patches here and there where areas were blacked out. Power failures. As he watched, another section, a few dozen blocks, winked out, just like that.

Jaysus, what a bloody night. It was like magic, more power to it. The whole world feeling a bit of his own misery. Inconvenienced, are you? Power failed and you can’t run out and spend your cash? Well, sod you. Sod on the lot of you.

He was grinning as he finally made it up through the trees behind Kellygnow, soaked to the skin and shivering, legs aching from the hard trek of breaking through the ice crust with each step.

“In a good mood, are we?” a voice asked him from out of the darkness.

“Why not?” he replied. “It’s a fucking beautiful night.”

One of the Gentry stepped out from the trees, a smile flickering on his lips.

“You’re the hard little shite, aren’t you?” he said.