Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

He was talking about Ellie, Miki realized, clueing in to the sculptor reference, but otherwise she didn’t know what he was on about with this protection business. Still, she knew who’d been hurt. Hunter had told her last night about the dead Gentry he’d left in her apartment, how the others had chased him through the streets until he’d managed to run into Tommy and Ellie.

“So that leaves you lot to pay,” one of the other hard men said.

“Miki… ?” Adam began.

He turned, looking to her for direction. But she had nothing to say. What could she say? Her own fear had already banished any bravado she might have been able to muster. Yesterday’s red anger at what they’d done to her apartment was somebody else’s memory, somebody else’s raw emotion. All she could do was hold onto the edge of the counter and pray for some miracle that wasn’t going to come.

Kellygnow, like the other estates on the hill, had lost its power and phone services overnight, but Bettina had already been asleep when the lines went down. She didn’t know anything about it until she woke to a cold room the next morning and suspected the worst. Shivering, she dressed and made her way down to the kitchen where she found Nuala and a number of the other residents gathered around the big cast-iron stove that stood in one corner of the room. Bettina had never seen the stove lit before. She hadn’t even known it actually worked. But she was glad of it now. The warmth of the kitchen was like a welcoming embrace as she came in from the cold hall.

“What happened?” she asked Chantal.

“The lines are all down. Penny was just listening to her Walkman and they say we might not get our power back for three or four days.”

Bettina glanced at the small, blonde writer Chantal had mentioned, then turned her attention to the window.

“And it’s still raining,” she said.

Chantal nodded. “Which is only making things worse. They get a line back up on one part of a block, only to have the weight of the ice bring a tree down across it again a little farther down the street.”

“Half the city’s blacked out,” Penny said, lifting one of her earphones away from ear. “And most of the outlying regions. You know that line of big hydro towers that you can see from Highway 14? They came toppling down this morning, one after the other, falling like dominoes. And the worst thing is the weather office is calling for the freezing rain to continue through to the end of the week.”

“When a cold front’ll probably move in,” someone else offered, “and then we’ll really be screwed.”

Nuala appeared at Bettina’s elbow, offering her a cup of coffee and a plate with a fresh blueberry muffin on it. Bettina smiled her thanks and accepted them gratefully.

“This is serious,” she said.

“Very much so,” the housekeeper replied. “We have a generator to keep the freezer going and the pipes from freezing if the temperature should drop, and we can heat many of the rooms with their fireplaces, but others in the city aren’t going to be so well prepared.”

“We’ll have to help them.”

“We will do what we can,” Nuala agreed. “But first we need to take a head count to make sure everyone here is accounted for. Has anyone seen Franklin or Ellie?”

There was a general shaking of heads, with one person asking, “Who’s Ellie?”

Bettina shook her head. “I just got up.”

“How about James?” Nuala asked.

“I don’t think Ellie came back last night,” Chantal said. “We were going to share a room, remember, but she wasn’t back by the time I went to sleep and her bed hasn’t been slept in.”

“If she was out last night,” Lisette said, “she’d never make it back up Handfast Road again. It’s got to be a skating rink, except—” She tilted her hand at a forty-five-degree angle. “It won’t exactly be flat.”

“Are the phones working?” Bettina asked.

Nuala shook her head.

Bettina sighed. “I hope Salvador and his family are all right.”

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Nuala said.

Taking charge, Nuala divided them up then, sending them off in pairs to go through the house for the head count. Bettina and Chantal were given the cottage detail. Chantal gave Bettina a look of mock horror and mouthed the words “the Recluse.”

Qué suerte, Bettina thought, remembering the unfriendly woman from the other day. How lucky for them.

But she was curious to go outside.

They put on coats and boots and headed out the door, where Bettina found last night’s wonderland transformed into this morning’s dismal prospect. Water dripped everywhere, as though the world had come down with a bad cold overnight and woke with a runny nose. Everything was depressingly gray. Even the evergreens, coated as they were with ice and drooping, had been leached of most of their color. There were puddles the size of small ponds in the lower parts of the lawn and at least an inch of water lay on top of the ice at the bottom of the stairs and along the walk. The smaller trees were bent almost in two, the boughs of the larger ones dipped alarmingly. Everywhere she looked there was a clutter of fallen branches.

“God, what a miserable day,” Chantal said, the gloomy view penetrating even her usual good humor, if only for a moment. “Still it could be worse.”

“It can always be worse,” Bettina agreed.

“Yeah. We could be mailmen, or meter-readers. Imagine having to make rounds on a day like this. Though maybe it’d be considered a, what? A rain day, I guess, and they’d get the day off, so actually it would be good to be a mailman today.”

Bettina laughed. “I don’t think Nuala will give us a rain day,” she said and started down the stairs.

Her feet went out from under her as soon as she stepped on the ice at the bottom of the stairs. She grabbed for Chantal and they both would have gone down if Chantal hadn’t managed to catch hold of the end of the banister and steady them. They grinned at each other.

“Well, now,” Chantal said. “If they start considering synchronized falling for the Olympics, we’d be a shoo-in.”

Bettina thought of simply taking Chantal into the between where they’d have neither ice nor rain to contend with, but she knew it wouldn’t be a good idea. Most people found the sensation of that place between this world and la epoca del mito as disorienting as la epoca del mito itself.

“You’re knocking on the Recluse’s door,” Chantal said as they edged their way toward the lawn where at least they could break the crust of ice on top of the snow and get some steadier footing.

“No, no,” Bettina told her. “It’ll have to be you.”

“I don’t want her snapping at me the way she did with you the other day.”

“Your smile will win her over.”

“Oh, right.”

They reached the snow and Bettina immediately felt better with the surer footing. They started across the lawn towards the cottages, only stopping when a man’s voice hailed them.

“Bettina! Wait up there!”

Turning, they found a wet Donal slogging across the lawn towards them. Bettina regarded him suspiciously. He was wet, but not as wet as he should be. It was more as if he’d been hiding in one of the sheds, waiting to make his presence known.

“Do you know him?” Chantal asked as they waited for him to join them.

“He’s Ellie’s friend.”

“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph,” Donal said as he reached them. “Can you believe this shite for weather? I’m Donal,” he added, offering his hand to Chantal.

Bettina introduced Chantal, then asked, “What brings you up here?”

“I’m looking for Ellie. Is she inside?”