Trickster's Girl: The Raven Duet Book #1

CHAPTER 9


THERE WAS A TRAIN IN Jasper. It was a bigger town than Lake Louise, and even more beautiful, but once a late lunch had satisfied his teen-boy appetite, Raven was interested only in leaving.

“It’s perfect,” he told Kelsa. “We can take the train all the way to”—he peered at the schedule board—“Prince Rupert. It’s the last thing they’d expect us to do because all that steel and the magnetic current will take us out of contact with both nature and the ley.”
“We can’t take the train,” Kelsa said. “Even in Canada they’ll check our PID cards before they sell us a ticket. A PID that, in case you haven’t noticed, you don’t have. And officially, I’m not even in this country!”
“I know.” He sounded insufferably smug. “That’s why I picked this up.”
He held out a Canadian ID card belonging to Robert Winslow, who judging by the photo, was a heavyset man in his forties.
“You stole…” Of course he’d stolen it. And it wouldn’t do any good to protest, because he wouldn’t care. “But you don’t look…” And that didn’t matter either. He’d look just like Robert Winslow when he bought the ticket. “What will you do when Robert reports his card stolen? The police can stop this train, and there you’ll be, stuck.”
He could abandon her and fly, but she’d prefer not to be abandoned now that his enemies knew where she was. The bikers might not be able to get here for several days, but who knew what other human tools they could use.
“He won’t report it stolen until it disappears,” Raven said. “If he tried to use it, the scanner strip wouldn’t work. It only looks like it should, which is why I kept the real card. But Robert Winslow lives here, so he won’t have to use it. We’ve got three or four days before it vanishes, and by that time—”
“We’ll be in Prince Rupert. But what about me?”
“Robert can buy a ticket for his niece, as well.”
Kelsa scowled. In the U.S. that wouldn’t work, but Canadians were so casual about security that here it might.
“I can’t afford it,” Kelsa told him. “No matter what the tickets cost. Not to mention shipping my bike along with us.”
“I can.” Raven pulled out his wad of bills. “This will last a few more days, and when it goes I’ll make more.”
“But that’s…” Kelsa didn’t want to use the counterfeit money herself. Even if it only hurt some bank that could easily take the loss, it was stealing.
But her debit account was almost empty. If she was going to reach Alaska, she had to use Raven’s money. Surely healing the planet, preventing the tree plague’s destruction of the northern forests, was more important?
Her father had hated that kind of argument. He’d said that worse evils were committed by people who believed that the end justified the means than by people who were flat-out evil.
Kelsa’s father was dead. Dead of a growing cancer epidemic that the doctors couldn’t explain. If healing the leys kept that from happening again, to anyone, then she didn’t give a damn about some bank’s balance sheet.
She let Raven purchase her ticket and shipping for her bike in silence.
While he ducked into a men’s room to change back into himself, Kelsa stowed her bike in the baggage compartment, strapping it to the rack the porter showed her. Then she went to find their seats, claiming the window before Raven returned. The seats in this car were intended for overnight occupation—wide, comfortable, and fully reclining. Looking at her ticket Kelsa saw that they would reach Prince Rupert at midafternoon tomorrow.
“You should have told me we’d be on the train all night. I’d have gotten my toothbrush off the bike, and some other things too.”
“You’ll survive,” Raven said. The train car shuddered and began to move. “And this will throw anyone trying to trace us by magic completely off our trail. By human means as well,” he added. “Though it should take some time before your bikers can catch up with us.”
Kelsa glanced around. There weren’t many other passengers, and no one was sitting near them. Still…
“You might not want to use that m-word quite so freely. And they’re not my bikers. I can’t believe the clerk didn’t insist on seeing my PID at the ticket center. Or at the province border, or even when—”
Her com pod chirped. Kelsa jumped and pulled it out of her shirt, along with the medicine bag.
Her home com address. Her mother. Kelsa hadn’t checked in for … how long now? Thank goodness her mother hadn’t called Aunt Sarabeth’s apartment! She might yet if Kelsa didn’t pick up.
She cast a furious glance behind her. A train was a train, and her aunt was always talking about taking Chicago’s famous L. Kelsa narrowed the focus so her mother wouldn’t be able to see much except her face and opened on the fifth chirp.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Kelsa!” Her mother’s face appeared on the small screen. She looked tidy and relaxed, better than she had when Kelsa had seen her last. Her life probably was easier, since she didn’t have to fight with her daughter all the time.
“How are you doing with Sarabeth?” her mother asked. “Are you having a good time?”
“I’m doing better than I expected,” Kelsa said truthfully—sort of. “It’s been interesting.”
Her mother squinted. “Are you on a bus? It doesn’t—”
“The L,” Kelsa said, abandoning the truth. “I’m going downtown to meet Aunt Sarabeth, and she’s going to take me around some museums. Art and … and stuff.”
She knew Chicago had an art museum. It was another of the things her aunt had talked about.
“That doesn’t sound like something you’d care for,” her mother said curiously. “But you look good. Better than when you left.”
“I’m checking out the city lifestyle,” Kelsa said uncomfortably. “It’s different, but interesting. Museums are part of it. Or at least, that’s what Aunt’S. says.”
Her mother was squinting again. “What’s that around your neck? It doesn’t look like something Sarabeth would buy you.”
Kelsa’s hand rose guiltily toward the medicine pouch, and she forced it down. “There was a folk art show when we first got here. I … uh, my stop’s coming up. I’ll call you in a week or so. I’d like to stay here longer, if that’s OK?”
“Of course. I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself.”
Was that relief flashing over her mother’s face?
“I am,” Kelsa told her. “I’ll call you again in a few days. Say hi to Joby for me. Bye.”
Her mother barely had time to say “Bye” before Kelsa cut the connection. Her stomach was quaking. Her heart ached too. Someday, she and her mother would have to get past this … this wall between them. Because even now, lying to her mother made her feel worse than defrauding the bank.
“Excellent,” said Raven, who’d had the sense to keep silent. “You’ll need at least another two weeks to finish the healing.”
“Yeah,” said Kelsa grimly. “I’m doing great. I’m lying to my family. I’m in Canada…” There had to be some security in the train cars, even in Canada, and illegally was the kind of word security computers screened for. “And a bunch of angry people are chasing me. I’m fabulous.”
“You’re also helping to save your planet, making up for centuries of human folly. Doesn’t that matter more?”
“Yes.” But her heart still ached.
The train had left the town behind while she talked to her mother, and Kelsa gazed out the window as a curving mountain canyon gave way to a long straight river canyon, and eventually to rolling hills.
The new forests, replacing those that had been destroyed in the beetle epidemics at the beginning of the century, teemed with life. Kelsa spotted five bears grazing on the grasses and roots that grew beside the tracks, and deer, and a pair of geese trailed by half a dozen fluffy goslings.
Lakes, no longer full of glacial silt, glowed royal blue. The flatter land between the hills was covered with meadows and hay fields.
“This is the area where I’d intended for you to call on water,” Raven told her. “As you see, there are plenty of lakes.”
Had he been here before? His expression, as he gazed at the sunset glow reflected on the shimmering waves, showed only appreciation for its beauty. No nostalgia. No regret.
“What was the Native name for this area?” Kelsa asked.
“In which language? There were a dozen names, though several of them translated to something like Land of Waters. Not very imaginative. What do they call it now?”
Kelsa pulled out her com pod and brought up a map. “The Lake District.”
Raven laughed.
It never got completely dark. Unaccustomed to sleeping on a train, Kelsa kept waking to look out the window. Even at 2 a.m. a dim gray light suffused the landscape.
The sun rose as early as it had set late, and she woke with it, rumpled, stiff, and even more annoyed that she hadn’t been warned to get her toothbrush out of her pack.
“Excellent,” said Raven, as she moved her seatback upright and glared at him. “We’re almost there.”
Kelsa looked out the window. Snowcapped peaks reared up to the west and north. It didn’t look like they were approaching the sea. Besides…“The ticket says we’re not supposed to reach Prince Rupert till two thirty in the afternoon. It’s only—”
“It’s Smithers,” said Raven. “We’re getting off here.”
***

Kelsa was still furious when they got the bike out of the luggage compartment. “I understand that you bought tickets for Prince Rupert to confuse anyone who tries to check up on us, but you should have told me.”

The compartment reeked of cheap perfume, as if someone had recently broken a full bottle. The strong scent made Kelsa sneeze, and Raven broke into a coughing fit and backed out of the car, leaving her to remove the bike on her own. Typical.
“I realize that the truth means nothing to you,” Kelsa went on grimly. “But I need to know where we’re going. In case we get separated, if nothing else. Not to mention trust, or honesty, or respec—”
“Can I drive?” Raven was breathing deeply in the fresh air. A single towering peak loomed over Smithers, and the sun gleamed on his dark hair.
In his black biker gear, he could have posed for the cover of a teen-girl flimsy, and despite all she knew about him Kelsa’s will began to soften. “Do your powers give you the ability to do something without having to learn how?”
He cocked one eyebrow. “Powers?”
“You know what I mean. Do you have some magical way to know how to do something without learning to do it?”
“I like that. Powers.”
Kelsa waited.
“No,” he admitted. “But I’m tired of—”
“Under no circumstances are you driving.”
***

The road north from Smithers took them up the deep-carved granite of the Buckley River Gorge. The place where Kelsa pulled over so they could eat breakfast perched above a spot where several fallen boulders compressed the river into a rushing cataract.

She brought out the peanut butter. “Next time we’re going to remember to stop in town, and spend some of your counterfeit money on rolls and a sausage.”
Raven gazed down at the rocky platform with an odd, remembering expression.
“The people who once lived here, they fished for salmon off those rocks. It was a huge gathering, drawing tribes, families, from miles around. They’d work like mad all day, catching, gutting, and curing fish, then feast and party around the fires.”
Kelsa looked down at the tumble of boulders. She could almost see a crowd of dark-haired people working there. People her cultural ancestors had wiped out.
A pang of collective guilt struck her, and she sighed. “They were better guardians of the planet than we were.”
“Not really,” said Raven. “They just didn’t have enough technology to do serious damage. Humans are all—”
He stopped, but it was too late.
“Children? Idiots? I’m getting tired of this attitude of yours. I’ll concede that we didn’t do a great job taking care of things, but we had no way to know the leys existed! And your people did nothing to help. Instead of frolicking around, pretending to be spirits and saints and things, you should have—”
“It’s not our job to take care of your world.” His face darkened with real anger—and maybe a hint of the same kind of guilt Kelsa had just been feeling? “You’re the ones who had to half destroy this world’s climate before you woke up and realized you could die too!”
“And you,” Kelsa shot back, “treated this world as your … I was going to say playground, but playpen is more like it! You’d come here and get drunk, and get worshiped—Yes, I figured out that you’ve been gods as well. And that any legendary artifact that mysteriously vanished was probably your doing. So you got worshiped, and got laid, and played with us like toys, and never bothered to tell us about things that you could see and we couldn’t! So don’t give me any carpo about how inferior humans are, you irresponsible jerk!”
They quarreled about responsibility and lies all through breakfast, and the rain that started falling as they neared the beginning of the Cassiar Highway put the cap on Kelsa’s bad mood.
She turned off at the junction, then stopped to read the running neon script of the road sign: “Cassiar Hwy. repaving for magneto-electric drive. Off-road vehicles only, between Iskut and Good Hope Lake.”
“Wonderful,” Kelsa muttered.
“We’re driving, no, you’re driving an off-road vehicle,” said Raven coldly. “What’s the problem?”
He had been crazy enough to compare his people’s failure to teach humanity about the leys to her trivial—and justified!—refusal to teach him to drive the bike. And he evidently wasn’t prepared to let it go. Which was fine with Kelsa.
“You’ve never been on a road they’re repaving, have you? It’ll be a mess.”
Raven shrugged. “This is the only road that runs anywhere near the ley.” He sounded as if he blamed her for that too.
“All right.” Kelsa sighed. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
***

The first section of the Cassiar Highway was newly paved, and it would have been gorgeous if the rain had lifted enough for them to see the mountains that surrounded them.

“Are you sure this rain wasn’t sent by your enemies?” Kelsa slowed for a curve that gleamed with water, even in the dim light.
“Look at the vegetation.” The words you idiot hung in the air between them. “It rains here most of the time.”
It was probably true. The lush forest around her was full of moss and ferns, more like the coastal rain forests of Washington and Oregon than the dry woods of the Rockies.
They rode on and on, stopping for lunch at a pullout overlooking a lake whose water was the limpid blue of a tropical lagoon, even under cloudy skies.
Soon after they passed Iskut and started up to Gnat Pass, the drizzle began to let up, the forest grew drier … and the road disintegrated. The smooth surface of magneto-repellant asphalt gave way to a patchwork of repaved and unpaved potholes—and even that was better than the places where the road had been taken up to lay the charge bars that would keep the surface live once they were installed. Now, stretches of rock-strewn dirt appeared every few hundred yards—usually right after a blind curve, so Kelsa didn’t have time to slow down for them.
She reduced her speed to a crawl, but the bike still kicked and lurched beneath her, and Raven’s arms were tight around her waist. At least he’d stopped asking to drive.
Gnat Pass, 1,241 feet according to the sign, felt like timberline back home. The scattered pines were stunted and twisted. Kelsa slowed to look at them, and when the road needed all her attention, brought the bike to a stop. There wasn’t enough traffic to worry about.
“The tree plague hasn’t made it this far north, has it?”
Some things were more important than offended pride.
“No.” Raven’s voice was calmer too. “A thousand feet is pretty high, this far north.”
Kelsa remembered the map she’d looked at on the train. Gnat Pass…“We’re almost to the Yukon.” Her voice was hushed with awe. She’d never expected to get that far, not really. She set the bike in motion once more.
“You sound surprised,” Raven said critically. “You’ve driven almost every foot of—”
Perhaps it was fortunate that at that moment the bike heaved up like a bucking bull. Kelsa’s teeth slammed together, but she managed to stay on her seat and keep the bike upright as they rolled to a stop. She kicked down the stand and looked.
“Carp.” She could see where the tire had ruptured, a long split in the groove of the tread. “There’s no way to patch that. We need a new tire.”
They had to walk the bike for over an hour before an old-fashioned pickup truck pulled up behind them, though on closer inspection, it wasn’t so much old-fashioned as simply old. The driver’s broad, high-cheekboned face looked like a mature version of Raven’s, but when Raven spoke to the driver in some rippling tongue, the man looked blank and answered in English.
He was very kind, not only offering them a ride but helping them drag the bike up onto his truck, a process that left Kelsa exhausted and all of them smeared with mud. The driver not only took them all the way to Deese Lake, but also dropped them off at Charlie’s Garage and Salvage Yard, and called Charlie on his own com pod to bring him out to make the repairs—even though the garage had closed over an hour ago.
“I don’t mind coming in.” Charlie was a hard-muscled man in his fifties, with pale eyes and the weathered skin of a man who mostly worked outdoors. “I was just watching d-vid, and I can always use the business.”
To Kelsa it looked like everyone in Deese Lake needed business. The town advertised itself as a resort for off-roaders, but it appeared to be a bit too far off the road. Almost a quarter of the buildings along the main street were closed, and those that were open had the rough, untidy look of a town on the edge. At least a town that could be reached only by off-road vehicles had a wide selection of tires.
Charlie plugged her bike into a flash charger while he replaced the shattered tire with a new one, and he was balancing it when the charge finished. When the bike was back on the ground, good as new, he wiped his hands and said, “That comes to $217.58, with tax.”
Raven had already reached into his pocket, and Kelsa saw the blank expression sweep over his face. He controlled it before it turned to panic, but she knew what had happened. His counterfeit money had poofed, just like he’d said it would.
Kelsa’s heart began to pound, but her mind was clear. She was already reaching for her charge card, but she had less than a hundred dollars left in her account. Raven had some real money, but it wouldn’t be nearly enough. Charlie might be willing to leave his d-vid to help them, but he wouldn’t let them abandon a bill that large half paid.
He would call the police.
Kelsa met Raven’s eyes. She pulled her hand out of her pocket, empty, and he nodded. Charlie would call the police, and Raven had another man’s ID in his pocket and no way to shapeshift to match that card. Kelsa was in this country illegally, a fact the police would certainly check, no matter how slack Canadian security seemed to her.
“I’ll have to charge it.” Raven’s smile, the charming one, flashed at Charlie. “Where’s your reader?”
Kelsa knew what she had to do, but regret pulsed through her as Raven pulled Charlie toward the back of the shop, and she quietly straddled the bike and rolled it out of the repair bay.
It was a rotten way to repay Charlie for helping them, and guilt clutched at her as she keyed the motor to life. Charlie’s startled shout rang in her ears as the bike sped off into the northern dusk.
She would pay him back, eventually. She’d borrow the cash from her mother and spend the rest of her life working it off if she had to. With interest.
A shapeshifter could always get out of jail, and Kelsa couldn’t.
If she was arrested, the healing would end. Even if Raven could find someone else to help him, the police would confiscate something as unusual as her medicine bag, and probably destroy its contents making sure it really was dirt, and not some new illegal drug.
Kelsa was doing the right thing. It only felt like theft, and abandoning a partner in trouble.
Sometimes towns like Deese Lake weren’t even part of the security grid, but Kelsa got well outside it before she pulled off the road into a picnic area, and then into a deep grove where no one could see her from either the road or the air.
Raven could find her; she had no doubt about that. He would sense the magic of the medicine bag or her presence through the ley, or find her the same way ravens located their prey. Then they’d cut across country to avoid the roadblocks the police would set up ahead of them.
All Kelsa had to do was wait. She didn’t expect him to show up before morning, at the earliest. But only a few hours later the bushes rustled, and a large otter waddled into the glade and began to change, broadening, thickening, till a naked elderly woman raised her graying head and regarded Kelsa with dancing brown eyes.
This wasn’t Raven. Kelsa was reaching for a rock when the woman’s laugh pealed out, warm and merry.
“I shouldn’t laugh. You’re right to be wary, my girl. But I’m the one who’s going to help you heal the ley between here and the Alaska border. Because it’s going to be hard for that reckless boy to travel in Canada for a while, now isn’t it?”