Spiritwalk (36 page)

And if they were growing steadily mentally unstable—Emma said that it was because there was the House and so many of them intruding on the Otherworld that the deterioration was so rapid—they were also cut off from their food supply. The flight up to the second floor had happened so quickly that no one had thought to bring any provisions with them. They had water, courtesy of the washroom just down the hall from the Postman’s Room, but no food. Night was coming and Blue was worried about some of the Otherworld’s creatures getting at the generators and cutting off their light supply as well.

But there was nothing they could do about any of it. They were trapped here on the second floor, hiding behind barricades that they’d hastily erected out of stacked dressers, sideboards and tables to block off the east side of the House’s second story from the rest of the structure. From their vantage points at either end of the north/south corridor on this side of the building, they could see an increasingly varied array of beings and creatures that were wandering through the House:

Some fought among themselves, like the monkeymen he and John had seen earlier and an enormous boar; the monkeymen had won, but only after losing two of their number.

Others tried to breach the barricades to attack them. The bear had been the worst; it had taken all their combined firepower to stop it. Poor sucker wouldn’t normally have come near them, Blue knew, but something had driven it into a frenzy. Blue felt like a shit for having to kill it.

Still others just watched them like the owls that Emma said were manitou, drawn to them by the heavy use of magic it required to maintain the House in this Otherworld.

When Tim came to spell him at the barricade, Blue started wearily back to the Postman’s Room, which had become their command center. He was bone-tired—like most of them, he hadn’t slept for over thirty-six hours—and depressed about the bear. In direct contrast to his depression, the nagging in his head was like a toothache, making him want to just strike out at something. Anything. It was becoming a major effort just to think clearly.

It was okay when he was talking to someone, but as soon as he was alone with his thoughts, the inner jabbering started up like an angry buzz that wouldn’t go away. He knew he wasn’t alone in that. There was a lot of forced conversation going on around him.

They weren’t holding up well, he thought. Sara and Ohn were handling it the best, but then they were used to the Otherworld. His own experience in it was limited, but he figured that part of his own problem was that he’d been messed up before the House ever got shifted into the Otherworld.

That made him think of Emma. Oddly enough, she was hanging in strong as well. In fact, with Esmeralda gone, it was Emma who was holding them together. He guessed that Julianne had been right. He
had
been overly protective with her. Given a chance to show her stuff, she was proving her mettle. She’d just needed the opportunity to draw on that core of iron she had inside her.

Ginny and Julianne were doing pretty well, too: Ginny because she was concentrating so hard on making sense of the computer’s own brand of craziness, while Julianne had been too busy taking care of their own wounded to think of anything else. Richard Fagan had finally stopped freaking enough to drop into a drugged slumber, as had a girl Blue remembered seeing out in the garden doing watercolors before all of this began. Her panic attack had caught everybody off guard; it took three of them to haul her back from the barricade when she started clawing at the heaped furniture, screaming, “Let me out, let me out!”

Then there was one of the Irish students, the one named Barry, who’d dropped his side of a sideboard on his leg and opened up a gash about a foot long that needed to be sewn shut again. A couple of others had been hurt in a tussle with some humanoid creatures that looked like they had iguanas a few generations back in their ancestry.

They were lucky that so few of them had been hurt so far, but Blue knew it wasn’t going to last.

Julianne was sprawled wearily in one of the club chairs when he stepped into the Postman’s Room. Ginny was still at the keyboard, worrying over the flurry of images that were continually flickering past on Memoria’s screen. Emma was with Sara. They were standing by the window looking outside.

Emma looked over her shoulder as he came in. “All that noise earlier,” she said. “Was that the bear?”

Blue nodded. “We had to shoot him. Sonovabitch wouldn’t pay any attention to our warning shots.”

“You left Tim in charge?”

“Yeah. He’s with Cal and a couple of others. Sean’s on the north barricade. We’ve got a bit of a lull. I think all that gunfire freaked them.”

Not to mention the way it left his own ears ringing. Rifles and shotguns were not meant to be fired in enclosed spaces like this.

Blue propped his Remington up against a bookcase and slid down on the floor beside it.

“We’ve got to do something,” he said. “Otherwise, I don’t think we’re going to make it through the night.”

Emma nodded. “Sara’s going back.”

Blue sat up a little straighter. “Back to where?”

“Ottawa. We’ve got to stop the man who’s doing this to us. If we can do that, and if Esmeralda finds Jamie and can bring him back, maybe the House’ll return to where it belongs.”

If, if, Blue thought. His gaze shifted to Sara.

“How’re you planning to do that?” he asked.

He’d thought that they were trapped here, but if Emma and Sara had come up with a way out... Hope rose in him, momentarily quelling the whispers and constant nattering that worried at the edge of his mind.

“With Pukwudji’s help,” Sara said. “Whatever caught me in the glade and kept me there didn’t seem to affect him.

If I can get to the garden where he’s waiting for me, I think he can take me back to Ottawa.”

“And then?” Blue asked.

Sara looked puzzled. “Then what?”

“That’s what I want to know. What are you going to do if you
do
get back? How’re you going to find this guy? Where would you even start to look?”

“He’s tapping into the House, right?”

“I guess.”

At least that’s what the man in the forest had told Emma. Blue wasn’t so ready to put as much faith in what he had to say as Emma was, although he had to admit that the man had been spot on the money so far—especially when it came to how the Otherworld was going to mess up their heads.

“I’m a Tamson,” Sara said. “Just like Jamie and his dad and his granddad. I can feel the connection that Jamie has with the House. I’m hoping to use it, to tap into however the man’s drawing off the House’s energy and following that trail back to where he is.”

“You can do that?”

“Not here—with the forest blocking me—but away from its influence, I think I can.”

It sounded like clutching at straws, Blue thought, but he didn’t have anything better to offer. That brought him around to the other thing that was worrying him.

“Just say you do find this guy,” he said. “He’ll be dangerous—seriously dangerous.”

Sara nodded.

“That’s why we thought you should go with her,” Emma said.

And leave you? Blue thought. If Sara and he
did
manage to return to Ottawa, there was no guarantee that they’d be able to get back here. Thinking of Emma trapped here woke a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

She seemed to sense what he was thinking. Crossing the room, she sat on her heels in front of him and laid her hands on his knees.

“It’s not that I want you to go,” she said.

“You mean that?” he asked.

She leaned forward to kiss him. “We’ve got things to work out, I don’t deny that, but I want to work them out. Before we can do that, though, we’ve got to deal with this.”

“I hear you,” Blue said.

She smiled. “You’re the best we’ve got, so it’s got to be you who goes. I don’t see any alternatives.”

As she rose to her feet, Blue stood up with her. He enfolded her in his arms, marveling—as it seemed he hadn’t had the chance to in ages—at just how perfectly their bodies fit against each other. For all his weariness, he felt renewed. The nattering at the edge of his mind dimmed, faded, and was gone.

When she finally stepped back from his embrace there was a wistful look in her eyes that made Blue’s heart sing. He knew then, as he always had, that he’d do anything for her.

“I’ll be back for you,” he said.

“I know you will.”

He looked over Emma’s shoulder to where Sara stood watching them. She had that scared-but-I’ll-be-brave look in her features that was so familiar to him, but there was a happiness for him there as well.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s figure out how we can get to the garden.”

“It’s funny,” Tim said.

He leaned up against the wall, positioned so that he could look over the barricade and down the length of corridor. His line of sight took in the top of the nearby stairway, where he could see the hindquarters of the bear that they’d been forced to shoot earlier. It lay where it had fallen, gathering flies. Sitting on the banister just above the corpse was one of the owls, wide eyes regarding him with an unblinking gaze.

The birds freaked him, making him happy to be armed. The butt of his shotgun was on the ground by his right foot. He had the barrel in his hand, held against his thigh. The cold smoothness of the metal was comforting against his palm. He glanced at Cal to see if Cal was listening, then returned his gaze to the corridor.

“Used to be,” he went on, “that my biggest problem was whether to write a play in verse or regular dialogue. Now I wonder if I’m still going to be alive this time tomorrow.”

Talking helped ease the weird feeling in his head that came clamoring up through his thoughts each time the conversation lagged. Because it had been quiet for twenty minutes or so, he and Cal had the watch to themselves, allowing the others to get some well-earned rest. He doubted they were sleeping. Tim liked Cal well enough, but he wished he were here with someone else—someone who wasn’t quite so morose.

“So what’s with you and Julianne?” he asked.

That brought a quick response.

“Why?” Cal asked. “What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. It’s just that you’re usually about as close to her as a burr that got snagged on her sweater, but now you’re avoiding her like she’s got the plague or something.”

“Maybe
I’ve
got the plague,” Cal said.

Normally, Tim wasn’t one to pry. But he needed to talk—just to keep the weird feeling in his head at bay—and since he’d exhausted a number of other lines of conversation already with little response from his companion, he decided to just press on. At least he’d gotten some return on this particular subject.

“What?” he asked. “You guys have a fight or something?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

For a long moment he thought he wasn’t going to get an answer, but then Cal sighed. He didn’t look at Tim, just stared down the corridor across the top of his side of the barricade and spoke in a subdued voice.

“When everything first started,” he asked. “When the forest just appeared the way it did—did anything happen to you?”

“Happen to me how?”

“Like inside you,” Cal said. “Did it
change
you?”

Tim considered the emphasis his companion had put on “change.” He remembered being freaked, but then everything started to happen so fast.... He’d also had the benefit of being around Esmeralda and Blue, who seemed not just more together in terms of organization, but used to this kind of thing. That had helped.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, I see things differently, I guess....”

And wasn’t that the understatement of the year? His entire perspective had undergone a jolting shift. Mostly he tried not to think about it because, when he did, the first image that came rolling up behind his eyes was that of three green-skinned children, hanging like dead fruit from the old oak by the fountain. He didn’t think that that was quite what Cal was driving at.

“Something happened to you?” he added.

He glanced at his companion in time to catch him nod.

“Oh, yeah,” Cal said.

And then Cal explained that moment of piercing insight that had come to him, standing there in the hall and looking at Julianne as she seemed to glow with her own inner light. He started out haltingly, obviously embarrassed, but he carried on all the way to the end.

When Cal was done, Tim didn’t say anything for a long moment. He could empathize with Cal to some degree—anyone who didn’t think Julianne was gorgeous really ought to have their hormones checked—but he felt that Cal had blown the whole thing way out of proportion.

“But it’s all part of a game,” he said finally. “The whole courtship thing.”

“You don’t understand,” Cal began.

“No, I do. Really. But think about what you’ve been saying.”

“That’s all I ever do.”

“Try it from a different perspective, then,” Tim said. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with a man finding a woman attractive and fantasizing about her; women find men attractive and do the same thing. You didn’t want to do any weird shit with her, you just wanted to make love with her. There’s nothing wrong or twisted about that.”

Cal shook his head. “It’s the
way
I was coming on to her. I knew she was the kind of woman who always had guys hitting on her, so I deliberately tried to just be her pal, figuring I’d be her friend first and then maybe the other stuff would happen. I was
pretending
, you see? Our whole relationship was based on a lie because while I was being her pal, all I really wanted was her body.”

“So you never liked her.”

“Of course I liked her.”

Tim shook his head. “You’re just screwing yourself up, man. What you should do is talk to her. If she doesn’t want to be your lover, that’s going to be a drag, but maybe you could still be friends.”

Cal didn’t appear to have heard him.

“It’s like there was something missing inside me before,” he said. “Compassion, or empathy. I should have taken the time to see how it would look from her perspective.”