“See,” Tommy said, taking up where the conversation had left off, “for most Indians there’s no mystical mumbo jumbo in our spiritualism, and that’s probably our strongest common ground. What our teachings instruct us to do is to live our lives with truth and honesty and respect. Or as the Aunts say, ‘Our job is to be an awake people, utterly conscious, to attend to the world.’ That lies at the heart of the teachings of most tribes. It’s in the details that we differ, but those differences are what give each tribe its individual identity.”
“Protestant, Catholic, Baptist.”
“Exactly.” He smiled. “If they were tribes.”
“But you and your aunts,” Ellie said. “You all believe in more than that, don’t you?”
“More how?”
“That… these spirits. The spiritworld. That it’s real.”
Tommy nodded. “Oh, it’s real, all right. But we don’t have a particular claim on it. I think it’s like Jilly says. The spirits are out there, but how they appear to us depends on what we bring to them. A shaman might see Old Man Coyote, a priest might see an angel. You might see one of those junkyard faeries that Jilly puts in her paintings.”
“Except,” Ellie said, “Bettina described those men in the garden exactly the way I was seeing them.”
“Hey, I’m no expert. I keep telling you that.”
He fell silent and pulled over so that Ellie could scrape down the windshield once more.
“If you want to know about magic,” he said when she climbed back in, “you should talk to one of my aunts.”
“Well, Sunday seemed nice…”
Tommy laughed. “Meaning she wasn’t this weird old woman who looked like she was going to turn you into a moth or a toad.”
Ellie punched his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t damage the merchandise.”
“I know, I know,” Ellie said. “Hearts would break everywhere in the world of the supermodels where you are king.”
“I’m like a drug dealer,” Tommy told her. “They just can’t resist what I have to offer.”
“Bountiful humility, for one.”
Tommy shook his head. “No. I sneak them pork chops.”
Eilie went to punch him again, but then out of the corner of her eye she caught movement on the street.
“Look out!” she cried at the same time as Tommy eased on the brakes.
A man had burst out onto the street from between a couple of parked cars, the whites of his eyes reflecting weirdly in the van’s headlights. Ellie had long enough to see he was wearing a handkerchief tied across his face like a bandit’s mask and bright yellow rubber kitchen gloves, before he slipped on the icy street and went down right in front of the van.
“Oh shit,” Tommy muttered.
He braked and the van’s rear end began to fishtail, sliding on the ice before it came to a stop that left it standing broadside in the middle of the street.
“Did we hit him?” Ellie asked as she fumbled with her seatbelt. “I didn’t feel us hit him.”
But Tommy was already out the driver’s door and didn’t answer.
11
Hunter was about four blocks from Miki’s apartment and breathing hard when he realized he was being followed. The first he knew of it was a pinprick sensation in the nape of his neck, an animal-level warning that resonated up through the levels of his consciousness until it finally registered in the reasoning part of his mind. He turned, sliding on the wet ice underfoot until he was brought up short by a parked car. He caught hold of the car as best he could, rubber gloves finding a grip on the ice sheath that covered the vehicle. He used the hood of the car to support his weight and looked back the way he’d come.
Nothing.
But he knew something was out there. The wet hairs at the back of his neck were still raised like hackles.
He pushed away from the car and continued down the sidewalk, shuffling along rather than lifting his feet since it was easier to keep his balance that way. The freezing rain continued to fall, but it didn’t make that much difference anymore. He was already soaked through and through by the sleet and doubted he could get much wetter. He’d been out in it too long, taken too many falls in icy puddles since he’d fled the apartment.
The apartment. Forget the stink, at least it had been warm. He didn’t feel like he could remember warm and dry anymore. The apartment seemed like hours ago, though he knew it was only minutes. His teeth chattered. Movement, already hampered by the unsteady footing, was made more difficult still with his wet heavy clothes weighing him down.
When he neared a lamppost, he caught hold of its slick metal pole and swung around. This time he caught a glimpse of something moving low to the ground, a dark, quick-moving shape that darted out of sight behind a parked car.
A dog? Something on all fours, at any rate. Too fast, and not enough body mass to be a man.
He waited, but whatever it was didn’t show itself. Nor did he see any others. But he knew it was there, just as he knew it wasn’t alone. Just as visual confinnation wasn’t needed to tell him who it was, no matter what shape it might be wearing at this particular moment. Everything had changed for him. In the long minutes since the hard man had first appeared in the doorway of Miki’s kitchen, he’d been jerked out of his familiar world into some nightmare country. He was stumbling through unknown territory where nothing was the way it should be. Whatever doubts he’d had when Miki was telling her story had all vanished now.
He knew her fairy-tale Gentry were real. Pretending they weren’t didn’t fly for the animal senses that lay just under what he realized now was only a facade of rationality. The animal inside him was alert, alert and terrified.
The Gentry were real and they were after him, it was as simple as that. What was to stop them from taking some kind of animal shape? Who was going to notice a stray dog, or even a pack of them? With this weather people had more pressing concerns on their mind.
Wiping the water from his eyes, he stared at the place where he’d seen the dog vanish.
He thought he knew why it was hiding. It was probably a scout, waiting for the others to catch up before they took him on as a pack. They’d be cautious, thinking he was dangerous, knowing that he’d already killed one of them. What they didn’t know was that it had been no more than blind, dumb luck. That he was such a terrified mess they could knock him over with the flick of a finger. He was about as likely to hurt another one of them as the original Clash line-up was to launch a new tour.
He set off again, using the parked cars for support as he skidded and slid his way down the sidewalk. The place where the hard man had sucker-punched him the other night was aching again. His chest was tight, his breathing too fast and shallow. Turning suddenly, he caught sight of two low, quick shapes, slipping out of sight, sensed others.
Christ, they could move fast. What were they waiting for?
He pushed himself off the car he was holding onto, sliding to the next one, a fancy black Cherokee jeep, encrusted in ice. He thought his heart would stop when a mechanical voice commanded him to, “Step back from the car.”
He reeled away from the vehicle, flailing his arms for balance.
Car alarm, he thought as he went down in another puddle. That’s all. Just a stupid car alarm.
He crawled back to the Cherokee on his hands and knees and slapped the side of the jeep, ignored the car’s warning, banged against the metal until the warnings were done and the Klaxon wail of the alarm started up. He thought his eardrums would burst, but the pain was worth it. Surely the sound would draw some attention to him.