Would it be like that with O’olish Amaneh?
“When will this happen?” she asked, her voice tight and small.
“When it is time. Perhaps it will not happen at all. Perhaps the spirits of my people will not have me.”
“Perhaps they’ll throw you back when they find out you talk in riddles all the time!” Pick snapped.
Two Bears’ laughter boomed through the empty woods. “Perhaps if they do, I will have to come live with you, Mr. Pick!” He glanced at Nest. “Come, walk with me some more.”
They retraced their steps down the ravine toward the bayou, then along the river bank where the woods hugged the shoreline, the dark, skeletal limbs crisscrossing the graying skies. The air was crisp and cold, but there was a fresh dampness as well, the smell of incoming snow, thick and heavy. The Rock was frozen solid below the toboggan run, and there would be sleds on the ice by nightfall.
When they reached the edge of the woods and were in sight of the wooden chute where it opened onto the ice, Two Bears stopped.
“Even when I am with my people, you may see me again, little bird’s Nest,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose. “Like a ghost?”
“Perhaps. Are you afraid of what that might mean?”
She gave him a look. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Always.”
“Then I have no reason to be afraid.”
He shook his head in contradiction. “If I come to you, I will do so as my ancestors did for me in the park fifteen years ago—in dreams. They came to you as well that night. Do you remember?”
She did. Fifteen years ago, her dreams of the Sinnissippi had shown Gran as a young girl, running with a demon in the park, feeders chasing after her, a wild, reckless look in her dark eyes. They had revealed truths that had changed everything.
“There is always cause to be afraid of what our dreams will show us,” he whispered. One hand lifted to touch her face gently. “Speak my name once more.”
“O’olish Amaneh,” she said.
“No one will ever say it and give me greater pleasure. The winds bear your words to the heavens and scatter them as stars.”
He gestured skyward, and her eyes responded to the gesture, searching obediently.
When she looked back again, he was gone.
“Just tell me this,” Pick said after a long moment of silence. “Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”
-=O=-***-=O=-
John Ross came down the hallway to the living room and found Bennett Scott sitting in a chair reading a Sports Illustrated while Harper colored paper on the floor. The gypsy morph knelt on the couch and stared out the window as if turned to stone.
Bennett looked up, and he asked, “Where’s Nest?”
She shrugged. “Out in the park, talking with some Indian.”
A cold space settled in the pit of his stomach. Two Bears. He leaned heavily on his staff, thinking that it was all going to happen again, a new confrontation between the Word and the Void, another battle in an endless war. What was expected of him this time? To unlock the secret of the morph, he knew. But if he failed…
He brushed his thoughts aside, finding they spiraled down into a darkness he didn’t care to approach. He thought back suddenly to the Fairy Glen and the Lady, to his last visit there, and to the secret he had discovered and could never share with anyone. Thinking on it made him suddenly weary of his life.
“Are you all right?” Bennett Scott asked him.
He almost laughed, thinking that he would never be all right, thinking the question strange coming from her. “Yes,” he said, and walked into the kitchen.
He had poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and was halfway through it when the doorbell rang. When it rang a second time, he walked to the kitchen entry and looked into the living room. Harper was in her mother’s lap, a storybook in her hands. Bennett glanced up and shrugged indifferently, so Ross limped down the hallway instead.
When he opened the front door, Josie Jackson was waiting.