“M-m-miki says they’re called the Gentry,” Hunter put in.
They both turned to look at him. He was like a wet rat, utterly drenched and shivering, and somewhat ludicrous with the bright yellow rubber gloves he was wearing.
“What’s with the get-up?” Tommy asked him. “You given up selling CDs for some new career as a janitor?”
“C-c-can we take this inside?” Hunter said. “I’m fr-fr-freezing.”
Ellie nodded. She slid open the side door and they all piled in. Too cold and miserable to be shy, Hunter stripped off his sodden clothes and put on dry pants, socks, a shirt, and a sweater that he picked out of the spare clothes they kept in the back for the homeless. When he was dressed, he wrapped himself up with a couple of blankets. It made him look like a derelict—a weird derelict with those rubber gloves. Ellie watched him try to deal with the gloves, but his hands were too numbed from the cold. She helped him peel them off, then handed him a coffee. He cupped his hands around the Styrofoam cup, spilling hot coffee onto fingers, but he didn’t seem to feel the liquid.
Ellie and Tommy used a couple of other blankets to dry themselves off and helped themselves to coffee as well.
“Th-th-thanks,” Hunter said finally. “For everything. For all of this. I mean it. But especially for getting those guys off my back.” He took a sip of the coffee, sloshing more down his chin than he got in his mouth. “How did you do that anyway?”
“Yeah, Ellie,” Tommy said. “What gives? That one guy was talking about some bargain.”
“I don’t know,” she told them. “I’ve seen them in The Harp whenever there’s a session on, but I’ve never talked to them. They’re the ones who beat Donal up awhile back, remember?”
Tommy nodded.
“But the weirdest thing is, give them long hair and they could be the men I saw this morning at Kellygnow, hanging around in the backyard, some of them just in shirtsleeves. Like the cold couldn’t touch them.” She turned to Hunter. “What did you call them?”
“Ge-gentry. They’re some kind of…”
His voice trailed off and he got an embarrassed look on his face.
“Spirits,” Tommy put in.
Hunter gave him a grateful look and nodded. He took another long swallow of coffee, this time drinking more than he spilled. The hot liquid seemed to be helping, since he wasn’t shivering so much and his teeth had finally stopped chattering.
“They trashed Miki’s place earlier this morning,” he went on. “I went out there tonight and thought I’d try to clean things up for her, but then one of those guys showed up and… and…”
He had such an anguished look on his face that Ellie reached over and laid a comforting hand on his arm.
“I think I killed him,” Hunter finished.
“Oh, man,” Tommy said. “No wonder they’re so pissed off at you.”
“They haven’t liked me from the start,” Hunter said. “Ever since—” His gaze went to Ellie. “—that night at the community center when I met you and one of them warned me to stay away from you.”
“What?”
Hunter nodded. “I know. It didn’t make any sense to me either. Donal said he’d figure out what they wanted—what was going on, you know?—but that was before he went all weird.”
“All weird how?” Ellie asked.
Hunter told them then. About the painting Donal had been working on, Donal and Miki’s fight, how she’d thrown him out of the apartment after he’d destroyed his canvas, all the weird things she’d told him, what had happened to her apartment, meeting Donal just before the hard man showed up. It was a long convoluted story that complicated things more than it explained, so far as Ellie was concerned. The more Hunter talked, the more she shook her head in disbelief. None of this made any sense.
“Has the whole world gone insane?” she asked when he was done.
“Is that a rhetorical question,” Tommy asked, “or did you really want an answer?”
“You’ve got an answer?”
He nodded. “The world’s like it always was. You’re just seeing it differently.”
“Oh, great.”
“So what do you think the hard man was talking about?” Hunter asked. “With this bargain, I mean.”
Ellie thought she knew at least that much, though it didn’t explain things any better.
“You said the figure in the painting was wearing a mask?” she asked.
Hunter nodded. “Miki called it a Green Man’s mask. It looks like it’s made of leaves and vines and stuff.”
“I know what it looks like,” Ellie said. “That’s what my commission from Musgrave Wood is. To make a new version of this old wooden mask they have.”
“So that’s the bargain,” Tommy said.
She nodded. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“So now what do we do?” Hunter asked.
“There’s going to be hell to pay if I make this mask, isn’t there?”
“And hell to pay if you don’t,” Tommy put in.
“Thank you for that.”
“Come on, Ellie. I’m not trying to—”
“I know, I know,” she said. “But I’m just so confused about all of this…”
She stared out the front windshield, not that there was anything to see. They had the van’s engine still running, but a coat of ice was already thickening on the glass. Angel really needed to get some new vehicles.
“We need help,” she said. “Expert help.”
“Fiona,” Hunter offered. “One of the women who works for me. She was telling me about these Creek sisters…”
He broke off as Tommy began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“They’re his aunts,” Ellie explained.
“That’s what Fiona called them. The Aunts.”
“I mean they’re literally his aunts.”
Hunter gave Tommy a considering look. “But Fiona made it sound like they were these, I don’t know, supernatural wise women or something.”
“What can I say?” Tommy told him.
“Maybe we should talk to them,” Ellie said. “I can’t believe what I just said,” she added in a mutter.
Tommy was kind and made no comment. Nodding, he took out the cell phone and punched in a number. After a few moments, he hit the “End” button and punched in another number, repeating the process a few more times.
“Looks like the phone lines are down on the rez,” he said.
“Then we’re going to have to drive out there,” Ellie said.
Tommy shook his head. “With this rain? I don’t think so. The roads are going to be a mess. I doubt the highway’s even open. We’ll have to wait until the weather clears.”
“That might not be until the end of the week,” Ellie said. “I don’t know if we can wait that long. I’m supposed to be working on this mask, but now we know I can’t because who knows what sort of horrible thing those guys’ll do with it. So what’s going to happen when they figure out I’m stalling?”
No one wanted to put it into words. They’d all seen the hard man lift the jeep like it was no heavier than a cardboard cut-out and flip it over on its side.
“Thing is,” Tommy said. “If they’re so tough, how come just whacking one with a pail of water was enough to kill him?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter told him. “I don’t even know for sure that he is dead.”
“But still.”
Hunter nodded. “And remember what Donal said before he left me: Everything can die. When it comes to these Gentry, I figure he should know.”
“After what you’ve told us,” Tommy said, “I don’t know if I’d trust him on anything.”