“Great. Now I’m a saint.”
“Seriously,” Tommy said. “You’ve nothing to feel guilty about. Go and fight the forest monsters with a clear conscience.”
“Right.”
“And, Ellie?”
She turned back to look at him.
“Be careful, okay?”
“I will,” she said.
Then Aunt Nancy took her and Hunter by the hand. With her leading the way, they passed through the far border of the between and stepped into another world entirely.
14
Tommy hated feeling so useless. Once Aunt Nancy took Ellie and Hunter away into the spiritworld there was nothing for him to do but sit on the front bumper of the pickup and watch his other two aunts wandering about between the ice-covered trees, casting for spoor like a pair of blue tick hounds.
Funny how your world changes, he thought.
A day ago, the most he had to worry about was whether or not he was doing as much as he could to help Angel’s clients. Were they reaching everyone? How could they raise more money? What other sources could they hit for food and coffee, clothing and blankets? Could he convince the garage on Perry Street to give the van yet one more free tune-up?
Now he was sitting—literally—on the edge of the manidò-aki, the spirit-world, hidden in some between place that separated the world of the manitou from the one he knew. He was untouched by the freezing rain that continued to drizzle onto the trees all around them, and everything was different. Manitou had stepped out of campfire stories into the real world. Some magical forest monster was running amok. Nice, normal Ellie turned out to be carrying some sort of deep well of medicine. And his aunts really did have the spooky powers everybody on the rez had always attributed to them.
That was the real kicker. Maybe if he hadn’t come to the city, looking to count coup in a whiskey bottle, he could have been learning some of this stuff from them. He could be out there with Ellie and Aunt Nancy right now, hunting down this spirit monster, doing something, instead of sitting here twiddling his thumbs. The stoic Indian bit had never been something he could pull off; he just didn’t have the patience. Not like his aunts, who could sit there for hours waiting for whomever had come to them to explain what it was they wanted.
But back then he’d been as interested in shamanism as he’d been in the traditionalism of the Warrior Society, which was not at all. He’d been, and still was, all for Indian rights, but he saw them as something one had to look for in the future, not in the past. In the end, he’d gone looking for them in a bottle. By the time he finally surfaced to some level of rationality once more, he didn’t see himself as an Indian so much as a survivor. Which was why he was sitting here, on the sidelines. If he’d had some knowledge, some experience with all this weird stuff, then Whiteduck probably wouldn’t have given his aunts the warning he had, or if Whiteduck still had, Tommy’s aunts would have ignored it because they’d have known that he could handle himself.
At least Hunter had gone with them. Tommy loved Nancy as much as he did any of his other aunts, but he didn’t entirely trust her. It wasn’t that she was prone to meanness, so much as that she used whatever was at hand to deal with a problem. If she happened to need Ellie’s medicine, she was as likely to take it all. Though what Hunter would actually do if that situation arose…
Hell, Tommy thought. Hunter had killed one of the Gentry, hadn’t he? So he just had to trust that, if Hunter had to, he would find a way to deal with Aunt Nancy as well. Tommy looked up when he heard his aunts returning to the pickup where he was waiting for them.
“Any luck?” he asked.
They shook their heads.
“The spoor is everywhere,” Zulema said. “It’s like a berry dye dissolving in water. It starts out distinctly enough, but give it enough time and your whole bucket takes on the color.”
Sunday nodded.
“Which means?” Tommy asked.
“That we can’t contain the creature in the spiritworld,” Zulema said. “Anytime it wants to come back here, all it has to do is step across.”
“And it will come back,” Sunday said.
“Oh, yes,” Zulema agreed. “Out there it’s a little fish in a big pond. But here… here it can have anything it wants.”
“But if it’s taken on physical form, it can be hurt,” Tommy said. “Right? Like the Gentry.”
His aunts exchanged a glance.
“This is something older and far more dangerous than the simple spirits of a place,” Sunday said.
“Then what’s Nancy going to do with it?” Tommy asked.
“I’m guessing she’ll try to use its own strength against it,” Zulema said.
“Which is easier to do in the spiritworld,” Sunday added.
Zulema nodded. “And if its path back here is cut off.”
“But you can’t get a fix on where it went through?” Tommy asked.
“It’s too powerful,” Sunday explained. “Everything reverberates with its presence.”
Tommy looked from one to the other. “So Ellie and the others… they’re on their own? Without any backup?”
“I’m afraid so,” Zulema said.
“Great.”
“We’re not giving up,” Sunday told him. She looked to her sister. “Maybe we can go back to where the creature was first called into the world and work our way out from that point.”
“It’s worth a try,” Zulema said. When Tommy got up, she added, “You might as well stay here—you know, in case the others come back and need something.”
“Sure,” Tommy said.
Right, he thought as he watched them go back towards Kellygnow. Stay here in case the others needed something, translated into keeping out of the way.
Sighing, he opened the door of the cab. He paused as he started to get in, gaze alighting on a crushed cigarette butt that somebody had left on the floor. Picking it up, he looked out toward the trees where his aunts had been searching earlier. After a moment, he leaned into the cab and opened the glove compartment. He took out the matches that he kept there with a couple of candles—emergency heating in case he ever broke down on some back roadand walked around the front of the pickup to where a piece of granite pushed up by the roots of one of the big oaks, protected from most of the freezing rain by the trees’ drooping boughs.
He split open the cigarette butt and made a little pile of the leftover tobacco on the rock, then lit it with a match. Sitting on his heels, he watched the tendril of smoke rise and returned his gaze to the trees.
“Grandfather Thunders,” he said. He had to stop, clear his throat. “Look, I’m not exactly the best example of my people, but I never meant any disrespect, you know. And I’m not asking anything for myself, here, just so’s we understand. But if you could see your way clear to making sure Ellie makes it through this in one piece, I’d be really grateful.”
The tobacco was mostly ash now, smoldering on the rock.
“I know this offering’s pretty puny,” he went on, “but as soon as I can get to a store, I’ll get you a whole pouch of the stuff. And I’ll have the Aunts teach me how to offer it up to you properly, okay?”
He watched the last of the tobacco burn. The thin thread of smoke finally died. He waited a while longer, almost expecting some response, now that he knew that all the campfire stories were true. But there was nothing. He had to laugh at himself as he stood up. Like the manitou were suddenly going to come at his beck and call. He’d probably wet himself if one of them actually did show up. But maybe what he’d done would make a difference.