Trickster's Girl: The Raven Duet Book #1

CHAPTER 4


SHE WASN’T GOING ALL THE way to Alaska. Kelsa made that clear to Raven again when they parted that night—after she had found a narrow bathroom window that wasn’t linked to the alarm system and bruised every inch of her body squirming through it.

“Remember, I’m only going to do that first nexus.” She’d pulled over at a corner near her house to drop him off. Where was he staying? A hotel? A nest in a tree?
“Why say that so firmly?” Raven swung off the bike and removed his helmet. The half-flattened, half-spiked hair would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. “You don’t even know where the second nexus is. Once you’ve done the first, you might want—”
“I don’t make many promises,” Kelsa told him. “Because if I promise, if I start something, I’ll finish it. So I’m careful about commitments.”
He raised his brows at the grim certainty in her voice. “It’s your decision. I can’t make you do anything. If nothing else, it would be against the rules.”
“What are these rules of yours, anyway?” Kelsa asked. “You said they were magical? Like laws of magic?”
“No, I didn’t,” Raven said. “I said they were ‘or something.’”
“So what are they?”
“I’d like to tell you, but it’s against—”
“The rules,” Kelsa interposed dryly. “Why am I not surprised.”
She was beginning to suspect he was making up those rules as he went along, and his smug smile was really starting to get on her nerves. But she wouldn’t be dealing with him for much longer, so it hardly mattered. Because Kelsa finally knew what she wanted to do next.
***

She set the alarm to wake her half an hour early, and in the morning she went down to talk with her mother while she fixed breakfast. They both agreed that it would be good for Kelsa to go away for a while.

“Start your vacation with a vacation!” The forced perkiness in her mother’s voice put Kelsa’s teeth on edge.
A board call to Aunt Sarabeth’s apartment caught her aunt dressed in a sleek suit on her way to work. She looked a bit startled, but hesitated only a second before saying that of course she’d be delighted to have Kelsa stay with her for several weeks. For the whole summer if she wanted to.
Kelsa gave her full points—the dismay hardly showed at all.
They settled on Kelsa’s departure date, June fourth, just four days from now. She still had two days of school spirit activities to get through, but that proved less boring than she’d expected because she could slip away from the basketball game, or the vid club’s presentation of “2093–94 in West Springville High,” and find a vacant deskcomp to do some research.
There were plenty of myths about Raven, stretching from Northern California through most of Canada and into Alaska. Had this ley he was so concerned about been his? Or in his territory?
But the Native American myths were clearly myths, not history. Kelsa might have been forced to wrap her mind around shapeshifting—although if matter couldn’t be created or destroyed, then how did something the size of a teenage boy shrink into something the size of a very large bird? And how did it become not denser, but light enough to fly?
But even if Kelsa accepted some form of magic, there was no way Raven could have found the sun—which had been hidden by gods, giants, or evil chiefs—and swallowed it to return it to the sky.
That part was clearly myth. But some of the rest … If the stories were even half true, then Raven lied a lot. But so did the rest of the spirits. What was it he’d said about Crow Mother?
She hasn’t yet made up her mind…
Kelsa shivered. At least Raven had helped the humans he encountered, most of the time. And that couldn’t be said of some of the other spirits.
In truth, the Native American spirits reminded Kelsa of the ancient Greek gods—quarrelsome, selfish, greedy, and jealous. Way too “human” for comfort, if you were forced to admit they might not only exist but really have some kind of supernatural power.
She also tried to research leys and promptly found herself deep in the nut-net. If Raven wanted her to sacrifice a rabbit and examine its entrails, he was going to get a very rude refusal.
But she did find some sort of reference to magical currents flowing through the world in almost every human culture. So maybe those leys of his really did exist.
Her foray into the nut-net destroyed any impulse she might have had to talk about this to Carmina or Andi or any of her old friends. If she started sounding like the people whose sites she’d seen … well, she wouldn’t have any sane friends, that was certain.
Wasn’t isolating their victims from others one of the techniques abusers used to control them?
She wasn’t a victim, Kelsa told herself firmly. She was going to run up to Idaho, do what Raven wanted with the first nexus, then take two weeks to camp in the wilderness her father had loved.
She hadn’t realized how exhausted, how drained she’d become until the possibility of two weeks’ camping on her own had occurred to her. Now that it had, she craved the healing peace of the open places like a drought-stricken plain craved water. Peace to mend her tattered heart. Peace to say goodbye.
After she got home, Kelsa waited till her mother had gone to bed, then she went on the airline’s site and canceled her ticket. Transferring the money into her own debit account took a bit of work, but her account was a subset of the family’s master account. She had all her mother’s account numbers and knew the answers to all her security questions, even the name of her first pet.
Her father’s com pod was still in the box of his possessions the hospice had packed for them. Neither Kelsa or her mother had wanted to deal with it, but she needed a pod—and explaining how hers had ended up at the bottom of the river was way too complicated.
Her father’s pod was a bit big, and the matte black finish too masculine. It took only a few moments’ work on the house com board to make sure all calls sent to her pod would now come to this one, though changing her father’s ID to her own made her heart ache. After a moment’s hesitation, Kelsa clipped her father’s pod onto the cord that held the medicine pouch, which Raven had insisted she wear. Two talismans, one of which she might even be able to keep.
Next morning she made a board call to Aunt Sarabeth’s office from school. Kelsa managed to catch her aunt between meetings on the second try, but Sarabeth was clearly in work mode and a bit distracted—just as Kelsa had hoped.
She managed to sound genuinely disappointed when Kelsa said she’d changed her mind, that it was too soon for her to leave her mother and Joby now.
The genuine sympathy in her face when Kelsa said that her mother wasn’t up to dealing with her late husband’s family right now made Kelsa feel guilty—but not guilty enough for her not to cancel the trip to visit her aunt.
She had two days to pretend to pack everything she’d need for a trip to Chicago, while really packing for solo camping in the wilderness.
If her mother hadn’t been avoiding her it would have been a lot harder, so Kelsa did nothing to ease the stiff formality between them.
She still couldn’t talk her mother out of driving her to the airport.
“I can get on a plane by myself.” She got out of the levcar and dragged her bag off the back seat.
“All right.” Her mother got out and came around to the curb.
She looked like she wanted to hug her daughter, but didn’t quite know how.
Kelsa’s throat tightened. “I’ll be fine.”
She picked up her bag, holding it between them, and her mother’s arms fell back to her sides. “All right. Take care. And say hi to Sarabeth for me.”
Her mother and her father’s sister had never been close.
“I’ll be fine.” Kelsa turned to go.
“Kel … All you can do is the best you can do. You can’t do more. No one can.”
Was that an offer of forgiveness? Or a plea for it? Either way, Kelsa couldn’t deal with it now. “I’ll call you when I get in.”
She went into the terminal, and her mother got into the car and drove away.
She ate lunch in the airport and spent an hour trying to read some of the zine flimsies scattered around the waiting area. Then she put her bag into a locker, paid for a month, and boarded a shuttle bus headed home.
Her timing was perfect. As the bus pulled up to her stop she saw her mother in her car, taking Joby to his play date with the son of one of her closest friends. Her mother didn’t even glance at the bus as she drove by.
Kelsa entered the house and went up to her room to fetch her pack. The empty silence was soothing, and she’d be home again in a few weeks.
She went into the garage and pulled her bike out from under the storage shelves where she’d parked it. Then she maneuvered her father’s bike, which had been parked behind hers, forward so her bike’s absence wouldn’t be obvious unless someone looked closely.
Her mother paid no attention to the bikes, anyway. It was her father who’d taken Kelsa up the wilderness trails to camp as soon as she was old enough. Her father who’d taught her to drive his bike before it was strictly legal, helped her get her probationary permit, helped her buy her own bike—used, but still serviceable—the day she turned fifteen.
“I’ll take Joby,” she promised him aloud. “As soon as he’s old enough to enjoy it. We won’t forget. Either of—”
“Who are you talking to?” Raven’s voice made her jump.
“How did you get in?”
“The door was open.” He looked around the garage curiously.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“It wasn’t locked. Are you ready to leave?”
“Yes.” Kelsa unplugged the charge cord, and it coiled back into its socket. “Are you riding with me? I thought you’d … I don’t know. Fly?”
“Flying for a long distance at the speed your bike travels would be very tiring. And if I travel with you, there’s less chance we’ll be separated.”
And less chance she’d change her mind?
“I don’t mind your coming along,” she said. “But my tent’s not big enough for two.”
It had been big enough, barely, for her and her father. It wasn’t big enough for her and a strange boy. A too-good-looking boy, who according to the old myths had no scruples about seducing human women.
“That won’t be a problem.” Raven’s face was grave, but a cocky smirk lurked in his eyes.
Kelsa handed him his helmet. “Then let’s ride.”
***

Just passing through the greater Salt Lake metro area, which extended from south of Springville to Ogden, took the rest of the afternoon.

It was dinnertime, and the bike’s charge was running low, when she pulled into a flash charge center.
“This will take about twenty minutes,” she told Raven, running her account card over the scanner, then pulling out the retractable plug. “We’ll have plenty of time to go to the bathroom and see what kind of flash food they’ve got for dinner.”
She nodded toward the service center—she could see signs for only McPlanet and Go-food. Her favorite flash food was Green Machine, but she didn’t spot their swirling logo on the building’s ad run.
“It doesn’t seem to take other vehicles that long.” Raven gestured to a levcar that was now pulling out.
“They have a different kind of battery,” Kelsa told him. “It’s faster, but if they run out of juice they can’t fill it with a solar charger, like I can.”
The ability to take a solar charge was optional in off-road vehicles, especially the older ones, and her father had insisted on it.
“A solar charge,” said Raven slowly. “If you can run it on sunlight, why pay here?”
Kelsa, who’d been about to explain what a solar charge was, took a second to change gears. He might be ignorant about some aspects of modern technology, like silent alarms, but he wasn’t stupid.
“It takes about eight hours, on a very sunny day, to get a quarter charge,” she told him. “If it’s cloudy, forget it. A solar charger is for emergencies, if you get stranded. Or you can use it to keep your charge topped up if you’re spending the day in camp. But when you’re traveling long distances it’s not practical.”
The big trucks’ stabilizing jets buffeted them as they went into the service center. Raven, Kelsa was interested to note, headed straight for the bathroom. So he did have some human weaknesses.
She needed to go too, but she could wait for a few more minutes. She didn’t want him interrupting this.
She chose her backdrop carefully. A rack of zine flimsies and small bags of candy and nuts. Enough like an airport that no one would be suspicious.
She’d hoped her mother wouldn’t be home, that she could leave a message, but her mother’s face appeared in the pod’s small screen seconds after the first chime.
“Kelsa! Are you in Chicago?”
“Landed safe and sound,” Kelsa confirmed. “Aunt Sarabeth wanted to hit the bathroom before we leave for her place, but she said to say hi, and I thought I might as well check in now.”
“That’s great. Are you—” The oven buzzed, and her mother’s head turned toward it.
“I’ll let you go,” Kelsa said swiftly. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, anyway. Bye!”
She cut the connection and headed for the ladies’ room. In a few hours she’d have to change her com pod’s ID to match her aunt’s, and text her mom a message that Kelsa had arrived and that Sarabeth had lots of plans to keep her busy. Her aunt often communicated by text, so it wouldn’t arouse suspicion.
Then, after she’d taken care of Raven’s first nexus, whatever that entailed, Kelsa would have the better part of two weeks all to herself. The ache in her soul eased a bit at the thought.
***

The sun was setting as they approached Honeyville, and Kelsa stopped at a commercial campground. She winced at the fee—fifty dollars for one night.

Between her own meager balance and the refunded round-trip ticket, she had more than six hundred dollars in her account, but after the charge, dinner, and tonight’s camping, she’d spent over eighty dollars in her first day on the road. Of course, camping in the national monument would be cheaper, and this campground included a slow charge port as part of the site services, so she’d save a bit there.
She resolved to ask Raven if he had any money, but by the time she got out of the office he had vanished.
Kelsa snorted. He wouldn’t get out of it that easily.
***

“Do you have any money?” Kelsa demanded when he sauntered up to her camp next morning. Her tent had just deflated, and she smoothed the rest of the air out of its ribs as she folded it into a compact bundle to stow on the bike.

“I can get some if you need it,” he said. “But it won’t last long. Why?”
Get some? It wouldn’t last long? And how had he been getting food and clothing without it?
“Not yet.” Kelsa would be rid of him in a few more days. She didn’t need to know. Especially if knowing made her an accessory after the fact. “We’ll reach the Idaho border before lunchtime. Earlier if we don’t waste any more time getting on the road. You’ve got your PID card ready to show at the border, right?”
The curious expression that was becoming all too familiar swept over his face. “Pee-idy card?”
“Personal identification card,” Kelsa told him grimly. She should have known. “They’ll check it at the border and at any hotel we stay at. If the police stop us—and they’d better not!—they’ll also check our DNA against the card strip and our record to be certain the cards are really ours.”
Raven’s mystified expression deepened. “What does all of that mean?”
“It means you’re flying across the border,” Kelsa told him. “I’ll stop and let you off several miles before we get there.”
***

She had to pull off on a back road that led into the low hills to find privacy for him to change without being seen—by her, as well as the traffic.

He made his way into the low scrubby pines till he couldn’t be seen.
“Where can we meet?” Kelsa asked.
“I’ll find you.” His helmet came flying over the brush. “I’ve got a clear enough feel for Atahalne’s magic by now. I could probably sense it anywhere within fifty miles. More if I concentrate.” The bushes rustled and his jeans and shirt followed the helmet.
“Is that how you found the pouch in the museum?” Kelsa asked. “By sensing its magic?”
“Sort of.” Shoes, with socks and briefs rolled neatly inside, sailed out of the bushes. “Before I knew what I was looking for it was a lot harder.”
Then he stopped talking.
As Kelsa packed his clothes hastily in the bike’s saddlebags, she heard the rush of flapping wings and looked up in time to see him flapping off to the north. This was too weird!
She was glad to be alone on the bike as she got back onto the highway and weaved through the low hills that took her up to the border station. There was too much wind to talk while the bike was moving, so he hadn’t bothered her much, but it wasn’t the same as being alone.
On the other hand, it would have been nice to have a chance to ask some questions.
She’d been through this station once or twice, and through the stations between Utah and Colorado and between Utah and Arizona or Nevada more times than she could count.
She waited patiently in the vehicle line while the levcars ahead of her paid the crossing tax and drove slowly through the scanners. The only thing she carried that was at all suspicious was a single set of boy’s clothes, which weren’t all that different from hers and wouldn’t show up on a scanner anyway.
The line for trucks, which were not only scanned but visually inspected, was a lot longer. The shortest line was for walkovers—people who crossed without a vehicle to avoid the tax.
When her turn finally came, Kelsa handed the guard her PID and waited while he scanned it, making a record of the fact that Kelsa Phillips crossed into Idaho at that date and time—i f anyone cared. At least the charge for taking a bike across was minimal. He also checked her probationary license to be certain she was old enough to drive legally. Soon after that she was on her way through the green agricultural valley between two mountain ridges, which ultimately emptied into the drier upland plains of southern Idaho.
She’d gone only a few miles when a huge black bird swooped across the road in front of her.
Kelsa turned off at the next side road, and kept going till a low hill concealed her from the highway’s teeming traffic.
There were no trees nearby.
Raven flapped down and perched on the bike’s handlebars. His beady black gaze was too intelligent for a bird. He was almost two feet long from tail tip to beak, and his talons looked sharp and formidable.
“This is too weird,” Kelsa told him.
He let out a squawk, which could have meant anything, and hopped down to the ground.
Kelsa unpacked his clothes, peeking surreptitiously as the black form began to grow in ungainly bulges and spurts. The feathers flattened, melting into oily-looking skin that slowly faded from black to warm tan. The strong beak receded into a lipless gaping mouth before the lips ballooned and a human nose sprouted above them.
By the time the transformation was complete goose flesh had broken out all over Kelsa’s body. “I’ve got to stop watching that. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Not much. It’s not pleasant though, and it takes a lot of energy.” He picked up his clothing and began to put it on.
Distracted from trying not to notice his body, Kelsa saw that the golden skin was paler than usual, and there was a hint of strain around his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll try to avoid making you do that in the future. But unless you can get a PID, which you can’t—”
“Don’t worry about it.” The charming smile flashed. “You do your part. I’ll take care of everything else.”
“Sure you will. How does this magic of yours work, anyway?”
“It’s different from yours,” Raven told her. “Do you have anything to eat in that pack?”
“I don’t have any magic at all. Different how?”
“I’m not sure I could explain it,” Raven said. “It’s like … like a cat trying to tell you how to purr. You don’t have the ability to do it, so—”
“That doesn’t mean I couldn’t understand what it … Wait a minute. Have you been a cat?”
“I can be,” he said. “But one thing I can tell you about magic is that it uses energy. So I really hope you packed something to eat, because I’m starving!”
***

They ate breakfast there, breaking into Kelsa’s packed supply of apples, crackers, and peanut butter, then returned to the main road. They reached Pocatello too early for lunch, but stopped and ate anyway, and on Raven’s advice picked up some sandwiches and energy bars for dinner.

Kelsa saw his point when they turned off the highway onto the state road. She’d been on many roads like it, and food and charge ports were few and far between.
“This used to be near the Shoshone-Bannock Reservation, didn’t it?” Raven half shouted over the wind of their passage.
Since there wasn’t anyone behind her, Kelsa slowed the bike to answer him. “I don’t know. The reservations were disbanded about twenty years ago.”
“They were?”
He sounded startled. It had probably been a big deal, back when he was learning words like tarnation.
“The government said it was time for Native Americans to become first-class citizens,” she told him. “The Native Americans called it the final land grab, and are still furious about it, even though the government did pay them for the land. My father said it was because the casinos were making so much money, the government wanted to tax them.”
Raven asked no more questions, so after a moment she kicked the bike back up to speed.
Away from the bustle of the highway, the silence of the empty places began to seep into her soul, soothing the raw anguish that had been with her, she realized, ever since the doctor had pronounced her father’s illness incurable. It wrapped her in a fragile bubble of peace that wasn’t disturbed even when the huge motor homes lurched past, though the wash from their jets made the bike swerve, and Raven’s arms tightened around her waist.
They were nearing the monument, the long dark snakes of lava ridges disrupting the flatness of the plains, when an old-fashioned painted sign with a boxy building a few blocks behind it caught her attention.
“ERB-1?” Kelsa let the bike slow to a crawl so she wouldn’t whisk past the sign before she could read the smaller print. “What’s ERB … Oh.”
ERB-1 had been the first nuclear power plant built in North America. The arms around her waist fell away, but Kelsa could feel the angry stiffness in Raven’s body.
“You people really are lousy stewards.” His voice was calm and very cold. “Only a handful of miles from a major nexus too.”
“They’re all shut down now,” Kelsa said defensively. “Even in Europe, finally.”
It was a hard thing to defend. Her father had described nuclear waste as “an ecological catastrophe in the making that would make global warming look like a child’s prank.”
“The ice sheets are beginning to refreeze,” she added. “They say that in as little as a century the Florida islands might be land again. But you’re right. We were lousy … Wait. Is this why the first nexus to be healed has to be here? Because of that?” She gestured to the utilitarian building and the chunky machines crouched beside it.
“In part. A large part. It will be late for the nexus ritual by the time we get in. You’ll have to camp there tonight.”
The angry tension had left his body, and Kelsa decided to take the hint and set her bike in motion.
Soon the winding lava ridges drew closer to the road, and a volcanic cone loomed off to the left. The sun was getting low when she entered the monument, and she decided to pick out a campsite first, but at the campground entrance Kelsa stopped the bike to stare.
“This is surreal.”
Everything was black. The flowing stone had crumpled and cracked like drying mud, breaking into ragged heaps and plates and piles. The campsites had been carved out of the bends in the stone’s flow, each site a separate alcove with walls of stone that were often higher than Kelsa’s head.
Blotches of lichen discolored the dark basalt, but it was also being colonized by the hardy desert scrub and a few gallant pines.
“Does it bother you?” Raven asked. “It makes a lot of people nervous.”
“I’m not sure,” Kelsa admitted, gazing over the blasted landscape. “But … I know it’s Saturday, but the parking lot by the ranger station was almost full. Isn’t this an awfully public place for a nexus?”
“A lot of them are,” Raven told her. “The power of a nexus sometimes manifests itself in natural phenomena. The old shamans considered many of them sacred sites and made sure their beauty was protected.”
Kelsa laughed. “That’s pretty much what the Park Service does.”
About half of the campsites were occupied. Kelsa chose a site, and after unpacking her gear she rode the bike back to the ranger station to pay for the night and to plug her bike into one of the slow charge ports available in the lot behind the building.
The trails tempted her. This ecosystem was unlike anything she’d ever seen. But by the time she got her tent inflated and camp set up, the sun was going down, and she had no desire to risk those rocks in the dark.
The unearthly landscape still looked strange to her, but her subconscious must have known that there was nothing to hurt or threaten her in this sea of twisted stone. She slept peacefully, until the light of the rising sun on the walls of her tent teased her awake.
Raven rejoined her for another breakfast of peanut-butter crackers, then they went back to the ranger station and picked up a trail map.
“This is a nexus of earth.” Raven sounded like he was trying not to seem nervous. “You’ll have to be completely surrounded by earth for the magic to work. That’s what makes these lava tunnels so perfect.”
An older woman coming out of the restroom stared at him, and Kelsa took his arm and dragged him out of the building. “Keep your voice down. I can’t believe there are this many people here at nine thirty!”
“They aren’t kidding about your needing a flashlight either,” Raven went on. “It’s going to be dark down there.”
Leading him around the building to the charging rack, Kelsa checked to make sure there was no one within earshot before asking, “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what I’m supposed to be doing?”
“It’s simple,” said Raven. “All you have to do is go into one of the lava caves till you’re completely surrounded by earth, then drop a pinch of dust from the medicine bag and say the words that will activate the interaction between its magic and the ley.”
Kelsa blinked. “You couldn’t have done that?”
“I told you, a human—”
“I know, I know.” She unplugged her bike and punched in the start code. “A human has to fix it. That’s the rule, right?”
He swung himself onto the bike behind her. “It’s more than that. The dust in that pouch is your magic, not ours. I’m not even sure I could activate it.”
“Activate.” Kelsa swung them out of the parking lot and started back to her camp. “You sound more like a scientist than a … what are you, anyway?”
“Raven.”
She waited.
“That’s the truth, as much as you can understand it. I’ve never lied to you.”
She wondered if he heard the unspoken “yet” as clearly as she did.
By the time she packed up her tent and biked out to the lava field that held the tunnels, there were even more tourists.
“This is crazy.” Kelsa stared at the clumps of people wandering around the asphalt paths that covered the ragged dark rock. “A … a magical ritual should take place in the wilderness. In private.”
It was Sunday morning, but three school buses were parked at the far end of the lot. A church group? Kelsa wondered if she was more afraid of being reported to the park police, or of looking like a total idiot.
“Not many of them will go down into the caves,” said Raven. “You’ll manage.”
“The kids will go in the caves,” Kelsa told him. But she set off down the trail, anyway.
The black asphalt blended perfectly with the black basalt, and the informative signs weren’t obvious. The wind was chilly, but the sun was bright. If Raven hadn’t been so tense about the whole thing, she would have enjoyed it.
Shortly after they left the parking lot, the trail split into two branches.
“Which way?” Kelsa asked. “Indian Tunnel’s that way, the other two are down there.” She gestured to the longer of the two paths that twisted across the lava field.
“I don’t know,” said Raven. “Whichever way works best for you.”
“All three caves are linked to the nexus?”
“In a sense,” said Raven, “every cave near this ley is linked. But it has to be a cave that you can use.”
“So which way do we go?”
Raven shrugged, which was even more unhelpful than usual. His shoulders were hunched against the cold breeze, though Kelsa had offered to loan him her jacket. His expression was indrawn, and for once, unreadable.
Kelsa, perfectly comfortable in long-sleeved therma knit, looked at the flock of kids scattered along the longer trail and took the path that led to Indian Tunnel.
Most of the tourists they passed were retired couples, but there were a few families with toddlers in tow. Indian Tunnel, when they reached it, was accessed through a rugged break where the rock plate had collapsed into the tunnel beneath. A party of adults was climbing up the combination of rock and concrete steps, with a hand rail to assist them. The steps went down at least twenty feet, and probably more.
Kelsa and Raven waited till the tourists had climbed up before they started down, and at the bottom Kelsa strode eagerly into the cave. It was much larger than she’d expected a lava tunnel to be, and rounder. The crumpled flowstone of the floor was amazingly level for a natural surface, but it was by no means smooth—a sprained ankle begging to happen. Kelsa kept her eyes on the ground when she was walking and stopped to look around.
Ragged holes in the ceiling, almost thirty feet above her head, lit piles of rubble below them. They’d gone several hundred yards down the tunnel when they confronted a rock pile more than twice Kelsa’s height that completely filled the lower half of the cave. No one else was in sight.
“How about here?” Kelsa asked. “We’re certainly surrounded by earth.”
Raven shook his head. “It’s too open. There’s too much of the world above.”
Kelsa looked around. She could hear pigeons cooing in a crack in the basalt where they’d nested. Water dripped. Although the light had dimmed in the middle of the tunnel, she hadn’t turned on her flashlight—her night vision had more than compensated for the darkness.
“Onward, then.”
Sunlight poured over the collapsed rock, showing the slightly worn places where other people had climbed the barrier. Kelsa chose a path and worked her way up the rock fall without much difficulty.
“I can see the exit from here,” she told Raven, who was clambering up behind her. “It gets even more open.”
“One of the other caves then.”
By the time they scrambled up the final slope and out the exit, Kelsa was feeling the pull in her calf muscles.
“This is fun!”
Raven scowled at her.
“Oh, come on, there’s no reason not to enjoy this. I’m on vacation!”
She led him back to the fork in the trail. Hiking out the other branch, they passed several groups of children being herded back toward the buses by harried adults. Only a handful of tourists remained.
“That helps,” Raven commented. “A little bit.”
“What are you so nervous about?” Kelsa demanded.
“Nothing. I’m certain this will work.”
He didn’t sound certain. She raised her brows and waited.
“Almost certain,” he admitted. “This is more important than you know.”
“Well, that makes me feel better.” In truth, she didn’t much care. She would drop a pinch of dust, say the words he told her to say, and then he could go find another human to finish what’s-his-name’s quest. Preferably an adult who had the whole summer off and enough money to travel all the way to Alaska.
The much narrower collapse of stone that led down into Boy Scout Cave was blocked with a neat sign, Closed Due to Ice/Snow Hazard.
“Lovely,” Kelsa said blankly. The brochure on the back of the trail map said that ice remained in some caves all year long, but this was the beginning of June!
“We’ll try the next cave” was all Raven said.
Several hundred yards later the trail ended at the entrance to Beauty Cave. The opening was huge, but unlike the entrance to Indian Tunnel, there were no steps. And when Kelsa made her way to the bottom of the rock fall, there was no light in the tunnel beyond.
“Better?” she asked.
“We’ll see.”
Kelsa wasn’t ten yards into the tunnel when she switched on her flashlight. The cold made her grateful for therma knit. The tunnel was huge, the walls and ceiling beyond the reach of Kelsa’s lolar-charged light. Without enhanced night vision, she could barely have seen the floor.
She’d been in caves before, and should have expected it. Still…“This is dark.”
“According to the map, the tunnel curves up ahead.” Raven’s voice was hushed, as if he didn’t want to disrupt the cave’s stillness. “If we go around the bend, we shouldn’t even be able to see the entrance.”
“Wonderful.”
Kelsa moved onward, both her light and her attention fixed on the rough floor. The glitter of crystals around its edge warned her about the first ice patch, but she slipped a little anyway.
“To the right,” Raven murmured. “The floor rises. There’s no ice there.”
They picked their way between the frozen puddles for another dozen yards before a long stretch of floor coated with a thin gleaming skin brought Kelsa to a stop.
“I can’t see any way around it.”
“We haven’t passed the bend yet,” Raven protested. “We can still see light from the entrance.”
Kelsa looked back. The white circle behind them looked plenty far to her.
“This is deep enough.”
Raven stirred restlessly, but made no further protest.
Kelsa pulled the medicine bag out from under her shirt. Warm from the heat of her body, it felt as if it belonged to her—which was probably why Raven had insisted she wear it.
She sat the flashlight carefully on the floor and began untying the cord that closed the bag. “All right. What do I say?”
She only hoped she could say it in English instead of Navajo, though if it had to be Navajo he could probably coach her through it.
“You’ll have to figure that out,” said Raven. “It’s your magic.”
“What? You said all I had to do was drop a pinch of dust and say the incantation to activate it.”
“That’s exactly what you have to do.” Raven’s tone was utterly reasonable, though his teeth were beginning to chatter.
“But I don’t know any incantations! This is crazy! You—”
“Don’t get upset,” Raven snapped, “or you won’t be able to focus, and this is important! You were reaching out to the tree spirit when we first met. That’s how I knew you could do this. Just reach out to the earth in the same way and tell it, persuade it, to heal!”
He sounded all too serious. Kelsa gazed around in exasperation. Even with her night vision and the flashlight, she couldn’t make out more than a small portion of the floor and a bit of the wall beside her. But she could sense the space around her and the rock enclosing it, old and solid. The bones of the earth itself.
She didn’t need to see. This wasn’t a place of seeing.
Taking care not to spill the pouch, Kelsa sank down to sit on the cave floor. The stone was rough and cold under her butt—not at all comfortable. But that was part of this place too.
She let the cave seep into her senses: silent blackness and the scent of damp stone. It had a different aliveness from that of the trees, from anything in the world above. He’d been right. They hadn’t been deep enough before.
She took some time to assemble all the words, but they felt right. Real.
“Bones of the earth, flowing liquid to the surface, crumbling to form the flesh of the world. You are so strong, nothing but time defeats you. Be strong now. Strong enough to forgive.” ERB-1 loomed in her mind, in her heart. She’d been calling it dust, but what the pouch really held was sand, gritty between her fingers. Her father’s ashes were mixed in with them. “Be strong enough to heal. Be strong!”
She scattered a pinch of sand over the cave floor as she spoke. The moment of stillness that followed was just long enough for her to feel monumentally silly—then all thought was wiped away by a shattering blow that set every bone in her body vibrating like a mallet-struck gong. The vibration went on and on, receding into darkness, pulling her with it.
Kelsa was lying on the tunnel floor when thought returned, lumps of stone pressing into ribs, hip, temple, and one sore knee. Her head ached fiercely.
“Ow! What the hell was that? Did you hit me?”
“No.” Raven sat cross-legged beside her, looking far too comfortable on the hard stone. “You had a good connection to the ley, and some of the power lashed back through you. You were right. We were deep enough.”
The smug smile was back.
“Frack you.” She picked up the light, pulled herself to her feet, and started unsteadily out of the cave. Her headache lessened with each step, which it wouldn’t if he’d hit her hard enough to knock her out. She was done with him, anyway.
Kelsa felt almost normal by the time she climbed back to the surface of the lava field, more shaken and angry than hurt. It took her several moments to notice that no one was on the trail anymore. The tourists were milling around the parking lot, waving their arms as they talked.
“What’s going on?”
“I told you that nexus power frequently has physical manifestations.” Raven was retying the cord around the medicine bag’s neck.
She glared at him, then started back to the parking lot.
“Did you feel it! Biggest I ever—”
“Thought it would knock me right off my feet,” an elderly woman was saying. “Would have, if I hadn’t had my walking stick.”
“I wonder if it did any damage.”
“I wonder how big it was, on the Richter scale. Must have been at least a two.”
Kelsa stared at the chattering crowd. Then she turned and waited for Raven. He was only a moment behind her.
“There was an earthquake? While we were in the cave? Why didn’t I feel it?”
“You more than felt it.” He took her arm and led her over to a picnic table. “Sit down. You’re still pale.”
“Did I … Did we … You’re kidding!”
“I doubt it did much damage,” Raven said. “Healing magic almost never does.”
“But that’s crazy!”
“You know, one of the main symptoms of crazy is denying or ignoring what your senses perceive. You can hardly deny you perceived that.”
She couldn’t deny it. Any more than she could deny she’d seen him shapeshift. Which meant…
“I could heal the tree plague? For real?”
“Not heal it,” Raven admitted. “That will take a lot of people doing the same thing you’re doing all over the planet.”
“Is that what the other shapeshifters are doing?” Kelsa asked curiously. She had a lot of questions about shapeshifters, and he’d evaded most of them.
“No,” Raven told her. “This is our first attempt. In fact, this is the first proof we’ve had that humans can heal the leys at all! But if you can strengthen and open this ley, all along its length, when the plague reaches the forests of the Northwest it will stop. And then, maybe, we can start pushing it back. If you succeed, your scientists will probably claim the bacterium couldn’t survive outside the tropics. But if this ley isn’t healed, strengthened, if the power doesn’t flow along it like it does now in the nexus point you just blew open, then that plague will move out of the tropics.”
“So.” He held out the medicine pouch, dangling from the cord around his fingers. “For the final time, Kelsa Phillips, will you take up Atahalne’s quest and finish the healing he started?”
She didn’t have enough money to travel to Alaska. She didn’t have time to get there and back before her mother missed her. She was only fifteen…
“Yes.” Kelsa took the medicine bag and hung it around her neck once more. It felt right there. “But first, you’re going to answer some questions.”