“I knew there were kids who went AWOL,” I say, “but I just thought they were runaways, or that you guys grabbed them.”
“We don’t grab people,” Matteson says. “Believe it or not, we’ve been trying to help these kids. The whole world is watching this shit go down. Half the press thinks this whole Wildlings thing is some elaborate scam created with special effects, but they’re still on our chief like flies on shit. We couldn’t kidnap kids even if we wanted to.”
“But you keep them locked up on the old air base like research monkeys.”
Matteson’s finger is pointed straight at my face before I can even blink.
“Don’t you ever equate us with those sick freaks at ValentiCorp—you got me?”
“Those kids on the base came to us,” Solana says. “They had full amenities—TV, Internet, games. They were being tutored, their parents could come see them whenever they wanted.”
“Until one of you broke them out,” Matteson adds. “And you know what? Most of them came back to us of their own free will. We’re keeping them off the streets for their safety as much as the public’s. If Josh had come to us, a lot of his problems would never have happened. And we could have contained the Black Key assholes gunning for him.”
“Speaking of Black Key,” I say. “Have you rounded them all up now?”
Solana shakes his head. “We’ve still got two more on the loose. Kelvin Barrett and Santos Morris. We’ve got good leads on both.”
“Why do you want to know?” Matteson asks. “You sure Wildlings aren’t killing those Black Key guys—maybe sending dogs after them?”
“Like the one we nabbed going after Josh’s mother?” Solana adds.
So they did take care of her. I hope they blew the bastard away like we did the others.
I shake my head. “It’s nobody I know. Maybe Auntie Min can tell you more.”
“Auntie Min,” Matteson says with a sigh. “That old lady really have that much mojo?”
Both Solana and I nod.
“What, exactly, does she want us to do?” Solana asks.
I shrug. “Like I said, stop the congressman from dying—not that I give a shit. But she thinks if someone offs him at his rally, he’ll become a big martyr, and then everybody’s going to be out for Wildlings.”
“You said Vincenzo’s dead,” Matteson says. “So what are you not telling me? Who wants to off Householder?”
“Vincenzo is dead, but he’s got pissed-off brothers. And apparently they’re all working for someone bigger and badder— with a real hard-on for Wildlings.”
“But they’re Wildlings, so they hate themselves?”
I shake my head. “They hate the new ones—kids who changed here in the last six months.”
“Even if he kills you all,” Solana says, “the fact that you existed won’t go away.”
I don’t reply. I just want this conversation to be over.
“So when can we meet with Auntie Min?” Matteson asks.
“Let’s go. I’ll take you to her right now.”
Matteson nods. “All right,” he says. Then his finger is back in my face. “But if you’re yanking our chain—playing some kind of angle—let me tell you, Washington, you’re going to be all kinds of sorry when I’m done with you.”
I get up from my seat.
“Are you kidding me?” I say. “I’m already all kinds of sorry we ever even met.”
I don’t wait for a reply. I just head for my bike and roll on out of there, making them scramble to get back to their car to follow me.
He comes around the corner of the road and stops when he sees me. I feel a faint tickle touch me and I realize he’s reading me. It’s weird—and creepy. Cousins have been reading me for months, but I’ve never felt anything like that before.
After a moment, he continues to approach.
He’s not much taller than me, but with much darker skin and a shaved head. At first I’d thought he was wearing white cottons like the de Padillas, but I see now that it’s a white suit tailored to his slender frame, with a black shirt and a thin white tie. Very sharp looking, if you like the hipster look, but totally incongruous on a dirt road in the middle of a forest. And then I notice his feet are bare. What’s up with that?
“Hey,” I say when he’s just a few paces away. “Nice to see someone out here in the middle of nowhere. My name’s Josh.”
His eyes narrow.
“I should punch you in the face,” he says.
“What?”
I take a step back. Okay, wasn’t expecting that.
“What makes you think I want the burden of your name?” he goes on.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I tell him. “I was just being friendly.”
“Giving me your name without my asking for it is not friendly.”
“Yeah? Well, it is where I come from.”
“Where you come from,” he repeats in a mocking tone.
His eyes focus sharply on me and I feel that tingle again. He looks disgusted.
“I thought as much,” he says. “You’re one of them—the unborn.”
“Excuse me?”
“You were made into your skin, not born into it.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So,” he says, leaning into the word, “you have no clan affiliation and are only bound to attract trouble.”
“I’m not here to cause trouble.”
He nods. “Yet you will still attract it. The cousins argue constantly about your kind: are the unborn miracles or monsters? Are you to be welcomed or shunned? Do you upset the balance of the world or are you here to set it right? Pissant little cousins can’t feel the balance shift, but I do. You don’t fool me.”
I raise my hands, palms up. “Dude, I have no idea what you’re—”
“Exactly,” he cuts in. “You have no idea, yet you appear in the land under my care, without even the courtesy of paying your respects to the spirits who make this place their home.”
My hands have dropped and are now clenched fists at my side. The mountain lion stirs, but I ignore the urge to bite this jerk’s head off.
“Well, first of all, I didn’t know that was the deal here,” I tell him, “and secondly, I’m just passing through. If I hadn’t stopped to talk to you, I’d already be gone.”
“Then go.”
“You know, we have a name for people like you where I come from.”
His brow creases in even more displeasure. “I’m sure you do. And we have name for you as well—meddler. Now go.”
He’s got the little-guy macho of angry hummingbirds jockeying for position at a feeder. I can almost hear the buzz of his wings, except he’s using words instead of dive-bombing me.
I remember his opening line.
I should punch you in the face.
I feel like doing that to him right now, but I’m not going to play into his negativity any more than I already have.
Instead I just say, “I’m gone,” and let my body fall back into the earth.
The look on his face is priceless as my spirit rises up above the road. I guess he sees a hawk, which has got to be totally throwing him off because earlier he had to have read me as a mountain lion.
But that’s his problem.
I call up my maps, focus on the de Padillas’ trail, and head into the next world.
I find myself on a vast plain. There’s no road, just grass for as far as I can see, with a vague trail running through it. The sun’s a lot higher here. I let the map of this place expand and detect nothing but rodents and birds.
I follow the scent of the de Padillas until it disappears, then go through my whole process again.
When I call up my body from the earth, I’m standing on a ridge overlooking the ocean. I could almost be back in So-Cal. Between the ridge and the shoreline is a scattering of adobe buildings.
It’s midmorning here and my map’s showing lots of people and animals. Not wanting a repeat of what I went through with the humming
bird cousin, I return to spirit shape and drift down the slope, still following the de Padillas’ trail. It leads me to one of the houses. An adobe wall spreads from the back of the house, penning a cow and a handful of goats. A cat sleeps on the top of the wall. A dog is stretched out on the dirt by a table near the back door.
Manuel and Lara sit at the table, the remains of a recent meal between them. As I drift down toward them, the cat opens an eye to look at me. The dog stands up and whines, its gaze on me as well. Manuel looks up, shading his eyes.
“Redtail,” he says. “A big one.”
I’d like to talk to them, but I’ve got what I came for. I was able to track and find them across the worlds, and now I’ve got five maps in my head that I can access as I need to.
I mentally line up those maps until I can see both the beginning and the end of the trail that brought me here, then I will myself directly back to my starting point.
If I had features, I’d be grinning from ear to ear as the nowfamiliar ponderosa pines rear up around me.
“Cool,” I say as I rise up in my physical shape once more.
Then I turn around because my maps show me I’m not alone.
“Dude, this is so cool.”
The words pop out of my mouth before I can edit them. I know I’m geeking out like—well, the geek I am. But I can’t help it.
We’ve stepped from the dusty yard behind the Avers’ clubhouse into what feels like some kind of rainforest. I can almost feel the pores of my skin open up with the humidity in the air. The trees rise up forever, long, hanging branches dripping water and vines. There are ferns everywhere, taller than us. Birds that I can’t see make a racket in the boughs above. And all it took was one step to get here from So-Cal. Just like that.
I freaking love magic.
Cory and Donalita smile at each other.
“Are we going to meet elves?” I ask them. “I mean, the tall, Peter Jackson kind, not little Tinkerbells—though I guess they’d be cool, too.”
“Sure,” Cory says. “And unicorns and dragons.”
“Really?”
He gives me the same wry look my friends did when I still believed in Santa Claus and they were all so over it.
“What do you think?” he asks.
Donalita elbows him. “This was all new to you once, too,” she tells him. “You’re just no fun anymore.”
Cory’s eyes darken. “Maybe that’s because somebody put a binding on my brothers so they can’t control what they’re doing, but gangbangers like Chaingang are slaughtering them all the same.”
“Dude,” I say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
He waves off my apology before I can finish. “We’re here to do a job,” he says. “Let’s just get it done.”
I’m thinking he was pretty harsh to the dogs that treed Donalita and me, but then I realize it’s true. He just talked to them. He didn’t lure them into an ambush and blow all their brains out.
“What can I do to help?” I ask.
“Nothing for the moment. Let me see what I can pick up on my own first.” He starts to walk off through the rainforest.
I go to follow him, but Donalita puts a hand on my arm. “Give him a little space,” she says.
“What’s he doing?”
“Trying to hone in on Marina. If he can’t do it on his own, then he’ll use you.”
I’m not sure I like the sound of that.
“What’s that going to involve?”
She shrugs. “He’s Coyote Clan. I don’t know how they think or what they do to make things happen. But dude,” she adds, letting her eyes go big. “It’ll probably hurt. A lot.”
Her face splits into a grin at the look on my face.
“Kidding,” she says with a chuckle.
She slips her hand into the crook of my arm and steers me in the direction that Cory took, but at a much slower pace. We catch up with him at the lip of a large pool of clear, still water. Though the trees rear up impossibly tall on all sides, here on the flat stones by the water, we can see the sky. A cloud drifting by is echoed on the surface of the pool. Cory’s sitting on his haunches. He dips his hand into the water and stares down as the ripples spread.
“Any luck?” Donalita asks.
He shakes his head. “I’ve got a knack for finding the thread of a person’s passage through the otherworld and then following it to where they are. But not today.”
“You can’t find any sign of her?”
“That’s the funny thing,” he says. “I can find her thread, but it doesn’t lead me anywhere. It just fades into a dead end.”
“So isn’t that where we should go?” I ask. “The place where it ends? Won’t we find her there?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” he says. “None of us are dead ends. Wherever we are, we’re connected to where we’ve been and where we can go. It’s a huge web of history and possibilities. But her thread doesn’t go forward.”
I swallow hard, feeling like a piece of lead just dropped into my belly. “You’re not … Are you saying …”
“I’m saying I don’t know. I don’t think she’s dead, or at least I haven’t seen or felt anything to make me think she is. But I can’t find her, either.
“You see,” he goes on, standing up and wiping his hand on his jeans, “the otherworld is capricious, at best. You have to either be someone like me, who can figure out the patterns, or have a sense of direction that works in at least five dimensions. Past, present and future all take place at the same time here. Dreams—hell, anything you can imagine, and a lot you can’t— exist here somewhere. But not in any way you can map.
“Everything’s on top or underneath, or a step sideways, and it shifts around so that just because you found your way once, doesn’t mean you’ll find it again. Or that you can see how to get out. And if you’re a five-fingered being, you might be a whole somebody else when you do return to your own world.”
Great—thanks for the warning, I think.
“Is that what they mean about fairyland?” I ask. “You know how in the stories, if a mortal goes there, they come back either a poet or mad?”
“Maybe. But the more I live among you people, the more I believe that you’re already all out of your minds. The things you do to each other.” He shakes his head.
“Oh yeah?” I tell him. “Dude, what about …”
I’m about to bring up how heavy Vincenzo was, but I let it go because he’s right. We humans don’t need psycho cousins to bring hurt down on us. We already do that to ourselves. And dude, that’s a sobering thought.
“You were saying?” he asks when I trail off.
“Nothing. So what now?”
He shrugs. “We find her the hard way.”
I swallow again and try not to let my nervousness show. Whatever happens here, I tell myself, I’m doing it for Marina. She and Josh would do the same for me. I just hope I’m the same me when I get back.
“So, what?” I say. “You take a walk around inside my head and somehow that leads you to her?”
“Something like that. Just fill your mind with her. Think of all the things she means to you—the good and the bad. Let the memories come and keep filling in details. I’ll do the rest.”
“Dude, tell me first. What will you do?”
“It’s a coyote thing,” Donalita says. “You know how you let a bloodhound smell a piece of clothing that belongs to the person you want him to track?”
“Sure, but—”
“This isn’t any different, except you’re giving him a taste of all the things that make Marina who she is. It’s like you’re laying down a scent trail, and that long nose of his will lead us to her.”
Cory nods. “That’s a good way to put it. And it works best with someone who knows her really well.”
“So I just think about her.”
“More than that,” he says. “Close your eyes and try to make her real inside your head—so real that if you opened your eyes, you’d expect her to b
e standing right here in front of you.”
“Dude,” Donalita says, punching me lightly on the shoulder. “You can so do this.”
“I know.” Though honestly? I’m not so sure.
“You’re not going to stab me are you?” I ask Cory, thinking of how I heard he did that to Chaingang.
Cory flashes that coyote grin of his, obviously aware of what I’ve been thinking.
“If I do, it’ll only feel real,” he says.
Donalita kicks him in the shin.
“Ow!” he cries and steps out of range, almost falling into the water. “It was a joke,” he adds from a safer distance.
She glares at him and points a finger. “Well, don’t be such a Big Stupid. How’s Des supposed to know that?”
Girls. Didn’t she just play the same kind of joke on me?
“Okay, okay.” He rubs his shin and looks at me. “Word of warning—don’t ever get on the wrong side of a coati girl.”
I hold up my hands. “I’m not stupid, dude.”
Donalita laughs, then turns serious. “I’m going to make things easier for you,” she tells Cory. “You’ll only have to worry about bringing Des along.”
“Wait,” I say. “You’re not coming?”
“Did I say that?” she says. Then adds, “Catch!”
She jumps toward me, shifting into a pebble in mid-air. I’m so unprepared that my fingers only close around air. But hours of playing hacky sack with Josh pay off with an instinctive save. I tap the stone with my heel before it can hit the ground, and this time I catch it.
“Man,” Cory says, “would I like to figure out how she does that trick.”
“I thought it was something all you tricksters can do.”
Cory shakes his head. “I can look like someone else, but I can’t actually become something else.”
I look down at the pebble in my hand and see Donalita curled up, superimposed on the pebble. I can only feel a pebble, but just like back at Sunny Hill, I can see them both.
“Don’t drop her,” Cory says, “or who knows where she’ll end up.”
I nod and stick the pebble in my pocket. “But what did she mean about making things easier for you?”
“Now I only have to concentrate on bringing you along.”