“You can’t come in,” I whispered.
It was impossible to stare into those brown eyes and not be drawn closer; his lips tempted me; his hands reminded me of the kind of work they could do. But he was not Vai. He was an opia, the spirit of a dead man.
“Open the door,” he whispered, “and yee shall have what yee so badly desire.”
The hot look in his eyes drowned me. Next thing I knew, my hand was touching the key. I jerked away my hand and fixed it around the hilt of my sword.
“Cat?” The drape rustled away from me.
I jolted back as Kofi joined me. He looked into the courtyard with its dense shadows and a night wind trawling through the branches of the ceiba tree. The nearest branches of the tree waved twenty strides or more from the glass-paned doors. Of branch, bat, or male figure I saw no sign, although a small frog hopped along the paving stones along the side of the building.
“I reckon yee shall step back from there,” Kofi said. “That tree have a powerful spirit.”
Shapes were climbing in the tree, some grappling up and some slipping down. The movement made me dizzy.
“Do you see them?” I whispered.
Instead of answering, Kofi pulled me back, let the drapes cover the view, and settled me on the blankets beside Luce. I dozed off.
A mosquito buzzed by my ear, and I kept swatting it away and it kept coming back, until I opened my eyes. Both Luce and Kofi slept soundly. But Rory was gone.
One of the glass doors was open, its key fallen to the floor.
With my ghost-sword in hand, I ran out into the courtyard. It was so late I heard not a breath of sound from anyone living.
The soporific aroma of overripe guava drenched the air. As on a gust of wind, a cloud of bats poured down over the roofs that surrounded the courtyard. Their tiny bodies battered me. I drew my sword out of the spirit world where the blade resided and slashed at them, but they darted past into the shadow of the ceiba tree. A hundred ratlike rodents were hauling Rory up the trunk of the ceiba tree, calling to each other with whistling chirps and chortling barks.
I sheathed my sword and ran back into the chamber.
“Kofi! Luce!” No matter how I shook them, they did not wake. They slept the heavy sleep of the enchanted.
I dressed in skirt and sandals and grabbed the two flasks Uncle Joe had given me, as well as trousers, sandals, and a singlet from Vai’s chest. Then I raced back out. I could still hear them climbing. The scent of the spirit world breathed down over me. I tasted its dry chaff and a kick of dust, as if I had walked into a mown hayfield baking under a late summer sun. The massive trunk was covered with big blunt thorns. Even had I been able to reach the lowest branch, I would have torn my skin to ribbons and bled all over the tree.
Yet wasn’t blood the gate? I surveyed the courtyard: stone sculpture, cistern, tree. In the spirit world, stone, well, and tree set the three points of a triangle to create warded ground. Warded ground had the property of reaching into the mortal world, as if the touch of the mortal world anchored the wards in the ever-changing spirit world. I had crossed into and out of the spirit world through stone. I had crossed into and out of the spirit world through water. Why not through the tree?
The chortles of the thieves faded. I pressed my right arm onto the stinging tip of a thorn. It pierced my flesh with an almost audible groan. My blood trickled down the bark. Beneath my hand the tree smeared to shadow as the trunk became a ladderlike stair leading up into darkness. I tucked up my skirts to keep them out of the way, and I climbed.
8
I climbed up the central pillar of the tree toward a smoky abyss studded with lights. Desperation gave me strength and speed. Perhaps the little creatures were at a disadvantage, them being so many and so small and having to coordinate a large limp weight, for I sensed I was gaining on them.
The canopy of leaves faded into smoke, just as it had in my dream. A sleeting wind cut my face, numbing my lips and then my fingers. With my next step, I kicked out over a gulf of air. Nothingness yawned around me as the tree dissolved. Falling, I flailed desperately.
My sandals caught the rim of a ledge. A bucketing motion beneath and around me made me sway as though I had landed on a moving object. Just before I tumbled off, my hand fastened over a metal door latch. I tried to open it, but it was locked.
“Hsst!” a thin voice whispered. “Quiet! Look through my eyes into those of my sibling inside.”
The latch bit me, two pinprick points of pain. Blood slicked the metal. Like a scraping file, its tongue rasped away the moisture.
I shut my eyes. Only then did I realize where I was. A coachman and his coach served the Master of the Wild Hunt. Gremlin spirits inhabited the latches of the coach’s doors, one facing in and one facing out. Four days ago, as time passed in the mortal world, my sire had thrown me out of this very coach. Again I pushed on the latch, but it did not budge.
