The world stretched out, sunny and clear, beyond the Cutlass’s hood. When it misted or rained, the ruddy ground looked like old wet blood and it took him forever to hose the mud off the car.
Adam contemplated his options. He could head south, take the slower route through Texas and New Mexico, but now that he’d committed, he wanted it over and done. He’d go through Kansas with its farms floating like islands on the sea of switchgrass.
Flying would have been faster, and possibly cheaper when he pondered the Cutlass’s shitty mileage, but Adam needed time to think.
Adam was going to see his brother.
He’d imagined the confrontation more than a few times, and more often than not the daydream ended with Adam laying Bobby out with a punch.
But their reunion wouldn’t be that simple. Or that satisfying. Nothing was with magic involved. He had to remember that it wasn’t about them or their past.
It was about helping Annie, finding out what haunted her. If Adam was lucky, it would be a ghost, and he could drive it off with some cedar incense and a ward strong enough to keep it away from the house.
A bigger problem might be beyond him. That meant visiting a watchtower. That meant Guardians.
With a sigh, he let the Sight drift over his eyes. Adam couldn’t see the future, not like Sue, but his vision of the spirit world was sharper than most.
It didn’t give him headaches anymore, seeing it overlay the mortal landscape like a ghostly painting atop the real world.
In the distance, the watchtowers spiraled out of the ground. Ruled by the Guardians, gods and entities of such might that Adam wanted nothing to do with them, the towers marked the map’s cardinal points. Whatever had Annie couldn’t be that big or bad, or the Guardians would have intervened. That meant it fell beneath their notice, into Adam’s range.
And yet Bobby had seen something. Perhaps he’d just been spooked, and it would be simple, but Adam’s instincts didn’t say so.
He stared at the Watchtower of the North, a lonely frozen tree, and felt cold despite the sunny day in the mortal realm. Adam had avoided the Guardian races since Liberty House, after his first adventures in spirit walking. He’d lay in his room, fantasizing about escape, wanting out—and then he was. He stepped into a realm of color and light. Fireflies swarmed, leaving trails of light. The moon, so much larger than in the mortal realm, shone full and green above him.
Plains of grass and mud were fields of singing flowers in the spirit. For a while, he thought that maybe Bobby was right, that he had lost his mind.
Then he’d met Perak. Beautiful, clever Perak. The elf had looked his own age, but you could never be certain with immortals.
Perak had taught Adam how to control his spirit walking. Perak was his first, best teacher at magic, his first at so many things. Then he’d vanished.
The sun would go out before Adam trusted an elf again.
Driving now, the memory of lying together, moving together, brought a fresh ache to Adam’s heart. There’d been a few guys since, but none he’d let get closer than kissing or a one-night stand. Once things went south of the border, Adam found a reason to not call them back. Kissing was great. Sex was nice, but he craved something else, something he didn’t have a name for.
*****
Adam could have pushed through with more coffee, but he started drifting off somewhere past Colby, Kansas, near the Colorado line. He didn’t want to roll up to Bobby’s at 3:00 a.m. looking like a crackhead, so he pulled over, tugged off his shirt and pulled an old crocheted afghan over himself. It still smelled a bit like Aunt Sue.
Eased into the darkness, he dreamt of home, his first home, the trailer in the woods. In spring the oak leaves were so green, so bright against their gray-black bark. He dreamt of storms filling the autumn sky, and how the trailer shook on its jacks when the wind blew hard enough to signal tornado warnings—not that they had sirens out in the country.
The rain hit the ground so hard the mud slashed and splashed the tree trunks, dyeing them red.
Adam dreamt of his mom, smoking and shaking her head, saying no when he asked if his Dad was ever coming home. Adam almost couldn’t remember her smile. As far back as he could recall, she’d only ever frowned. When he dreamt of Bobby, they were walking together, exploring the woods that had seemed so tall.
He woke with the gauzy memory of his father, a looming bear of a man turned to hazy shadow. Finding a butter knife in the spoon slot of the silverware sorter, he threw it hard enough that a fork jutted from the linoleum floor.
Adam snapped awake, the black-and-red memory of rage scalding him into consciousness. He lay curled in the Cutlass’s back seat, cramped and a little cold. His heart raced, and he took several long breaths to slow it.
It took him several moments to untangle his feelings from his father’s. Adam’s sensitivity, his particular type of magic, left him like an open door. Strong emotions from another person could walk in and set up house. He could guard himself now, thanks to Perak and years of practice, but monsters lingered from before.
Adam shook a little as he climbed out of the car to pee and brush his teeth. He rinsed with the bottle of water he refilled whenever he stopped for gas. Calmed, he climbed back in and checked himself in the rearview mirror.
Adam knew what Bobby would see. Adam’s skin reddened too easily, and his hair flipped in weird directions if it got longer than his pinkie. Most of the time he kept it short, a sandy bristle. Right now it was a little longer.
The switchgrass plains of Kansas gave way to the drier grass of Colorado. Checking the spirit realm, Adam watched the watchtowers change their forms. They shifted whenever the landscape changed. A giant tree morphed into a rocky spire. A clay urn, several stories tall, became an anthill. Even at this distance, Adam could see the orange fire lighting the ants’ abdomens.
He felt power, magic, scattered across the plains in whorls and spikes, creatures and practitioners native to the area.
“Only passing through,” he said, voice raspy from lack of speech. He sent it out like a broadcast. “Not worth your time.”
He hoped whatever was out there heard him. A small player in the game of magic, Adam wasn’t cocky enough to think he could win in a fight against anything higher up the food chain.
To have a chance he’d have to make a pact with a power, a god, a demon—or worse, an elf. The spectrum was full of such votaries, practitioners who put themselves in debt and traded their freedom for more magic. He’d always avoided that road. The only time he’d been tempted had been during his stay in Liberty House, but he’d waited it out, checking himself out the day he turned eighteen. His life was too short to pay such debts, and he’d had enough of elves to last three lifetimes.
Denver appeared, a pool of sprawl ringing a downtown cluster of taller buildings. He got closer, past the airport, and the mountains loomed.