“Beside herself,” came the rolling voice of Sisiutl.
I shot a glance back at the zeqwa. It merely blinked innocently. Then it grinned with all its sparkling teeth, the forked tongues of its snake heads flickering.
It chuckled as we retreated but stayed where I had ordered it. Trickster.
We rushed out of the block, careful to check before bursting out of the door to the street. A rush and flutter of wings swished into the air as we emerged, making crow shadows on the sidewalk beneath the waking streetlamps.
The crowd we’d left behind had grown—natives and ghosts, human and animal.
They stood in the new-fallen night and watched us with patient eyes. Then they fell into step behind us as we began to walk.
“Beside herself…?” Quinton muttered.
Ogress, eater of children, nightmare bringer… Tsonoqua was also an ogress.
Fish had said Qamaits went by many names. Maybe one half-goddess, half-ogress would cleave to another… I knew where she was.
CHAPTER 22
The temperature had dropped with the sun. A pair of trash fires sent out yellow light at each end of Occidental Park and carved the shadows into broken, moving shapes. There were few people in the park and those were gathered around the heat and flicker from the burning cans. When Quinton and I entered the avenue of plane trees, the bizarre parade that had come to Grandpa Dan’s beckoning had tripled and followed us from the Cadillac Hotel to Oxy Park.
Lass had begun to stir again as we crossed Main, but I ignored him, peering into the jigsaw darkness toward the giant totems at the far end. In the erratic light, the black wooden statue of Tsonoqua—Nightmare Bringer—seemed to breathe and move, spreading her arms farther than usual to hold an oil-slick-edged hole in the air. The shape of the world seemed a bit warped at that spot.
I headed straight for it, confirmed in my opinion that Qamaits and Tsonoqua were, like Sisiutl and Cerberus, just different names for the same thing. As we got closer, I could see a large, dark shape at the feet of Tsonoqua, bulking even larger with eerie shadows that moved independently of their object.
I stepped over the low rail that separated the totems from the walkway and stopped, facing the massive carving of Tsonoqua, whose arms reached out as if to pull me into an embrace—the better to eat me I supposed. The face, highlighted with red and green paint, pursed its lips as if to kiss, while a darkling gleam played in the hooded eyes. Another pair of dark eyes looked up from the face of the huge woman seated at the carving’s feet.
The Grey was more present around the totems and I didn’t bother to hold on to normal. Whatever happened next would take place in the thin space between the worlds. But as I let go, little changed, and I found Quinton still beside me and the strange audience of ghosts and humans, spreading around us in a circle, still visible in the Grey. The shimmering edges of the hole in the totems hands seemed to spread and hold the worlds together in the presence of the gathered spirits, animal and Indian. The real Indians and the birds were there as well, watching, encircling us and completing the sphere of magic that contained us all.
“I want to return your pet,” I started, “and the man you lent him to needs to account for his actions.”
Qamaits laughed, showing needle teeth in her spirit form, and shook her head.
“No dog.”
“I didn’t say it was a dog. I don’t think your gods will be pleased that Sisiutl’s been killing people who never threatened them on the whim of this man you gave his leash to. I only want to send the man up the stairs to account for it and return Sisiutl to his post—neither of you should be in the human world.” Lass shrieked in my head and I winced as he began to claw and fight to escape.
Qamaits noticed and her laugh was dismissive. “I like it here. Sisiutl shares his meat. I do not have to hunt or gather food. It is cold, but I have many blankets and the people do not chase me away. Why should I go?”
“You have a duty,” I said, sickened, knowing the people Sisiutl had netted must have gone down the maw of this creature, too. “The man has done wrong and Sisiutl is tainted with it. I only ask you to show me the stair so the man can answer for that.”
As she considered, I looked at her collection of eclectic trash: the colorful blankets, discarded children’s toys, fancy liquor bottles…
She stood up, easily three times my bulk and a hair shorter, yet she loomed, double-shadowed. She stared at me with odd eyes that gleamed yellow and red and shook her head, baring her pointed teeth. “If Sisiutl goes back to the realm between, I must go, too. Why should I?”
“You have a duty to the gods and you don’t belong in the human world,” I repeated as I threaded the pheasant feather into my buttonholes to free my hands. “You must go back.”
Qamaits recoiled at the sight of the feather, her eyes staring. Then she roared and swelled even larger than her looming totem, the double shadows behind her filling and solidifying into a hulking shape from nightmare: wide and black and seemingly made of teeth and claws. “Meat!” she shrieked. “I eat you all!”
I jumped back, dragging Quinton with me and jerking on Sisiutl’s leash, calling for the serpent-headed creature. The double-ended monster rushed into the park, casting a wave of color through the Grey and screeching as it came.
The crowd shuddered, gasping or muttering strange words and issuing angry animal cries. The huge sea serpent stopped between Qamaits and me and glared at each of us with a different head. Qamaits drew up short, glowering.
“Who will it answer—me or you?” I asked, feeling weak-kneed and anguished as Lass battered against me in terror. “It says its hungry. Want to find out which of us it prefers for dinner?”
I wasn’t certain how much longer I could stand up, let alone bluff on instinct alone. I felt sure I was bleeding inside and tearing apart like a rag doll with ripped seams. It wasn’t as bad as being beaten to death had been, but it was bad enough.
Qamaits moved back half a step, teetering on the edge of the hole in the worlds.
Her glare shifted back and forth between me and Sisiutl and she gnawed her lip until blood flowed over her chin.
“Show us the stairs,” I demanded, forcing my old dance-gypsy bravado to the surface.
Sisiutl grinned and snapped one snake head at the ogress. It would have been as glad to snap at me, I imagined.
Keeping a wary eye on me, Qamaits dug into her cart of discarded treasures and pulled out a strangely folded thing of plastic and cardboard, coated in filthy, torn, and peeling pink vinyl. She unfolded it: a dollhouse.
I heard Quinton snort beside me, but I wasn’t about to cast stones—I was holding a legendary monster by a piece of frayed string and arguing with an ogress who looked like a homeless woman. Belief and appearances were only nodding acquaintances, it seemed. Qamaits lifted the house so it passed through the ring of oily gleam between her effigy’s hands, and as she brought it down the ring expanded, the world rippling and warping to accommodate the house. Even Lass grew still as we were enclosed in the second bubble of Qamaits’s realm.
The dollhouse grew and the ring of some sort of dimensional rift flowed out to encompass the park, which became the yard. It unfolded until the house had become full-sized, its open front leaving the interior revealed and raw. The smell of water lilies and black mud rose into the frosty air as a pool formed from a puddle at my feet, a sturdy stone needle rising from its shore nearby. I walked unsteadily to the post and tied the piece of string through the eye of the needle.
Sisiutl rolled in the grass where bricks had been a moment before, snorting with delight. Then it stopped and slithered across the ground, back and forth, as if pacing in some strange, reptilian way. Qamaits stood aside and watched me with narrowed eyes.