Trailer Park Trickster, page 3
Maybe Jodi had caused the explosion. Maybe Noreen, but it had come so close on the heels of the druid’s appearance.
Stretching, Adam twisted his head side to side to loosen his neck up as he searched the house for signs of two-footed intruders.
Senses extended, feeling for anything out of the ordinary, he opened the door to the room he’d shared with Bobby and found it unchanged. Adam’s back ached to see their old bunk bed still standing, taking up most of the little room.
He crossed the trailer, going to the other end. Adam didn’t want to enter his mother’s room, her private space, but he had to check.
The bed was made. Everything was orderly, prepped for her long sabbatical to Denver.
Bobby had taken their dad’s pistol to Denver and lost it. Mom’s shotgun was under the bed, loaded and ready to go.
Adam could still feel the boom of the shot that Vic had taken for him, so loud it had rattled his teeth. The thunder, the roar, still echoed in his memory. It probably always would.
Vic.
Adam should call. He should text, but he had no service when he looked at his phone.
What would he say anyway, that Sue was dead, that Adam was being haunted by her cat?
“I should have been there,” he said.
She’d been there for him when no one else had. She’d taken him in without question. Adam hated to think of her dying, of her being alone in that moment. The weight of it, the sense that he’d failed her, pressed him down as he moved back to the center of the trailer into its little kitchen.
The fridge was dark and empty. His mom had unplugged it to save electricity.
Adam checked the cabinets and found a cardboard can of instant oatmeal and microwaved a coffee cup full of water.
His mother was nothing if not consistent. The oatmeal and the peanut butter he spooned into it were the store brand. It was an uninteresting breakfast, but food was food. Adam chewed, staring out the back window and tasting the bit of grit from the well water.
You could go see.
The unbidden thought didn’t surprise him. Adam was curious, had been since Bobby had told him the truth.
He knew the spot, the unmarked grave where his father lay buried. He’d walked by it a hundred times, never thinking that the pile of rocks meant anything at all.
He’d climbed it once, playing king of the mountain, until his mother had yelled at him to get off of it. He’d been ten and confused at why she was shaking. Now he understood the lance of fear that he’d felt from her.
And he understood why his mother wouldn’t leave these woods.
Adam understood Bobby, Robert, now. That didn’t mean Adam liked his older brother, but he made a bit more sense. So many of his actions in the years since Robert Senior’s disappearance slid into place now that Adam knew the truth.
Bobby was haunted by what he’d done, and he’d run as far away as he could, but it hadn’t been far enough.
And then there was the druid, and Adam’s binding promise to stop him. He’d never quite settled the question if the druid was his father or not. Their magic was similar, even more so now that Adam had turned warlock.
He had to go and see. He didn’t want to. The idea of grimy bones did not appeal.
So he’d go in spirit.
His Sight had always been strong, almost too strong. It could come over him without warning, leave him dazed and seeing spirits. The Other Side always called to him. Never far, it lurked, whispering, tugging at his attention. Adam didn’t have the power to bring his body across, but he had magic enough to send his spirit. He’d had better control of his power since the business in Denver.
Every living thing had some magic, even if they didn’t know it. Most people accessed the Other Side through dreams. People with a little more power, usually from their bloodline, might have visions. Others bargained with things best left alone.
As one of his teachers, Sue had taught Adam the rules, repeating them, drilling them into him, even when he didn’t want to listen. The scariest rule was not to summon what you couldn’t put down.
Summonings were tricky spells, and Adam was glad he didn’t have the magic to cast one.
Mostly he just had a lot of visions, so many that he had to actively work at not letting little pieces of the Other Side leak through the veil.
Sometimes the pull was too strong, and he’d exhaust himself to keep the Other Side from bleeding into his normal sight.
Adam’s first love had taught him to control it, how to safely spirit walk, and how to talk to immortals and avoid their deals and traps. Sue had taught him how to sharpen his gifts, doing her best as two generations of mixing in other bloodlines had weakened the family talents. Unlike her, Adam only saw the future in flashes, in bits and images.
He opened the thin door to his and Bobby’s old room. It smelled like the old moldy carpet and a bit like heated plastic, the scent of the glue that held the walls together.
Adam would ask his mother why she hadn’t changed any-
thing when he next saw her but doubted she’d give him a real answer.
Bringing his backpack, Adam climbed to the top bunk of the bed their dad had built from plywood and two-by-fours. They’d stained it dark brown, though any gloss was long worn away. Just a tiny bit of that oily tang lingered. Perhaps it and the odor of glue were just his memory.
The lines he’d scratched with a pocketknife still showed on the bed’s rail.
Adam couldn’t even remember what he’d meant by them, only that he’d needed to do something, take out what he’d felt on an object.
His dad had beaten Adam over something, a broken toy, a dropped bit of food, something small. It had always been something small that at the time had felt so important, so massive, like dropping his fork would end his world. Now he could see, with the distance of age, that his father had always been looking for an excuse. It didn’t really matter what Adam did, how he messed up, or that he spent every waking moment walking on eggshells. He was going to get a beating. That had been that.
Adam sighed. It didn’t matter right now. He pushed the stinging memory of his slapped face aside. Sitting cross-legged, he took his tarot cards out of the backpack. They’d been Sue’s last gift to him, and though she’d left him without a home, they were the most precious thing she could have given him. Noreen would probably have just pawned them.
They were old, passed from Binder to Binder, witch to witch.
Adam shuffled. He wanted to search for the druid first, for answers, but his thoughts kept drifting to Vic and the silence he felt when he reached across the connection between them.
Adam drew a card.
Three of Wands reversed.
“Great,” Adam muttered.
The card meant uncertainty, unexpected delays.
Adam had expected it, but he didn’t like it.
He shuffled again, focusing on Jodi, on setting aside his dislike of her.
Three of Wands. Reversed.
Again.
This was the tarot equivalent of file not found.
Perhaps he was just too distracted, too worried about Vic, to get a reading.
“Fine,” he said aloud. “No more putting it off.”
He lay down, positioned his body like he might be walking forward, and reached out a hand to clasp the bed rail like he would hold a staff.
The Other Side was close, so close, and Adam was there almost the instant he closed his eyes.
He’d crossed often from Sue’s, but never his mom’s. Spirit walking had come to him at Liberty House, the asylum Bobby had sent him to in high school.
Adam was over it, mostly, but cinder block walls and menacing orderlies still lingered at the corners of his nightmares. They likely always would.
Here, the scrub oaks where Mom had set her trailer loomed around him, far taller than in the real world. He lay on its flat roof and sat up.
The usual moon, a crescent, hung low here, casting rays of green through the dark-barked branches.
Adam looked behind the trailer and saw something like a storm cloud at ground level. It moved through the air like a whirlpool, black and purple, twisting and smoky.
Adam had never seen something like it but had no trouble knowing what it marked. This was where they’d buried his dad, where his mother and brother had dragged the body and piled rocks atop it. Adam had seen death. He’d seen Mercy kill people, and shuddered to remember it, but this was new.
“What is that?” he muttered aloud.
“We call it a stain,” a voice said. It didn’t sound disgusted, more like the speaker was a little impressed. “It’s left over from bad deeds—murder, usually. You should see a battlefield.”
Adam whirled and found himself facing an elven boy he didn’t know.
He lifted his defenses, pulling his will around him like armor.
“Easy, warlock,” the elf said, lifting slender hands. “There’s no need for that.”
He was the opposite of Silver or Argent. Where they were pale, cast in shades of the metal for which they’d been named, this elf had sloe-colored hair, black with an edge of blue. His skin had a bit of that same tinge. His eyes were dark, like pools of ink. His fingernails matched them.
Adam had seen plenty of strange beings, but the crown gave him pause.
Filigree, woven of ebon wire and shards of what looked like sea glass, the crown sat tilted on the boy’s head. He looked young, little more than a teenager, but appearances could be deceiving, especially when immortals were involved.
“I’m Vran,” the elf said, smiling as he freely gave his name. “You must be Adam.”
Adam had made himself known in Denver, and this was exactly the sort of consequence he’d wanted to avoid.
“I don’t know you,” Adam replied, back straightening. He could flee back to his body, retreat behind his sad little wards, but they wouldn’t keep an elf out—not even a young one.
“Sure you do,” Vran said, a smile teasing at his lips.
He was wearing cobalt lipstick a shade lighter than his eyes. His clothes were fine, black silk. He looked like a goth prince, the exact kind of boy Adam had idolized in his early teens. Adam’s gaze flicked to the long, slender sword at the boy’s hip. It wasn’t metal, but some kind of bone. The hilt shimmered like the inside of a seashell. Beautiful as it was, Adam knew it was deadly. He had no weapons of his own, no way to defend himself.
“What do you want?” Adam asked.
“So hostile,” Vran said, shaking his head.
Adam didn’t move. He didn’t know Vran, but he knew elves. He was no match for the least of them, and if Vran were royalty, then he was far too powerful for Adam to mess with.
“And so hesitant,” Vran said. He sounded hurt. “So ready to run. I thought you liked my kind.”
“I don’t know your kind,” Adam said, trying to keep his voice even, to not cause any offense.
“Liar,” Vran said. He held up a finger, pointed playfully. “They’ve marked you, my winter cousins.”
“Them, I know,” Adam said. “But you’re nothing like them.”
“Same species,” Vran said with a shrug. “Different house.”
“And which house is that?” Adam asked.
“Can’t you guess?”
The side of Vran’s mouth rose in a smirk.
Adam could sense the murky power seeping from the boy. Argent and Silver were cold but glittering. They were winter. Air. Swords.
“I’d rather not,” Adam clenched his fists. He could run. He really should run, but this couldn’t be a coincidence. The maelstrom and the emo elf had to fit together somehow.
Unless Vran really had just come to taunt him. After all, if he was an elf, he was a prick. Adam considered Silver and Argent pricks and he liked them.
Vran pursed his lips into a pout. “If you’re not going to play, Adam Binder, then I’m not going to stay.”
“So go,” Adam said.
Vran smiled. He had sharp teeth, like a TV vampire, like a cat.
“You sure you want that? There’s a lot I could tell you about what you’re facing.”
“In exchange for what?” Adam asked. Nothing was free in magic, especially when immortals were involved.
“I’ll have to ponder that,” Vran said, looking thoughtful. “Just remember, it’s always darkest right before it goes pitch black.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Adam demanded.
“It means I know what’s coming,” Vran said. “It means you’d be smart to have more friends.”
Grinning, he stepped backward and was gone.
“Elves,” Adam growled. They were drama queens with far too much magic and time on their hands. He wondered how many wars their boredom had caused.
The scent of Vran’s magic, like brine and cold blood, answered which house he hailed from.
Water, Adam thought, turning back and forth, half expecting the elf to pop up behind him. Vran’s house was water. Silver was the Knight of Swords; Argent, the Queen of Swords.
So Vran was a Cup, though Adam did not know which title.
The crown meant he had one, that he was at least the page, at worst the king.
Vran might look around fifteen, but that was no measure of his true power or his true form. He could be ancient. He could be in disguise.
Adam didn’t have much power but he was hard to fool. That was his specialty, flying under the radar and being able to spot the things hiding there.
He turned back toward the stain and knew instantly that approaching it from this side wasn’t the best idea.
The energy leaking from it felt sickening, like the smell of rancid meat on hot asphalt. It almost flipped Adam’s stomach. It felt familiar too, reminding him of the deaths he’d seen in Denver, but this wasn’t the druid’s magic.
Yep. The term “stain” covered it.
Adam couldn’t consider what his mother and brother had done to be a bad thing. His dad had beaten Adam, again, and according to Bobby had planned to kill him.
He couldn’t remember the specifics of that day, just the terror, the pain, and guilt. His and his family’s emotions were tangled up inside him like a beaver dam. A lot of it, the sticky red, was his father’s rage. It was always building, a pressure inside him that needed to be vented, usually on Adam, but on Bobby or Tilla too. At some point the explosion would have proved lethal to someone.
Maybe it wouldn’t have happened that day, but it had been coming. Robert Senior must have never expected that he’d be the one to die.
Adam took a breath, opened his eyes, and ended the spirit walk. He lay back in the little bed, his feet sticking off the end. Usually it took time for him to recover, but he didn’t feel the lag now. His power was changing, possibly growing. He’d take it. He needed any help he could get against the druid.
Well, almost any. Adam had turned down Vran’s offer without a second thought.
He wrapped the tarot cards back in their bit of leather and climbed out of the bed.
He showered, scrubbed off the road funk, the sleep, and the last of the smoke from the night before.
He hadn’t brought any clothes. He had the jeans he wore and a few pairs of Dickies in the trunk of the Cutlass for working at the garage.
What he had with him would have to be good enough for today, for seeing her one last time, for saying goodbye.
5
Vic
The oil in his car hadn’t been a priority, not with getting shot and saving the world, but Jesse would give Vic no end of grief if he didn’t change it before a road trip.
Vic drove to Jesse’s shop. It was near their mom’s house, and it would give him the chance to get his hands dirty and work off a little of the knot gathering between his shoulders. Walking inside, he cracked his neck.
“Jesse?” he called.
The shop was open but abandoned, with several cars on the lifts or parked in the secure spaces. It wasn’t like Jesse to leave the place unattended.
A muttered curse led him to a classic bottle-green convertible and a pair of legs in greasy coveralls sticking out from under it.
“Hey,” Vic called. “Jesse around?”
The mechanic wheeled out from under the car. A familiar, angular face grinned up at Vic.
“He’s on the Other Side,” she said, waving a wrench.
“Argent,” Vic said.
He looked behind him. The sky had gone purple. Something, a pterodactyl maybe, flew by. Vic squeezed his eyes shut for a breath. He hadn’t even felt the shift, the slip from the real to the surreal, to the Other Side.
“You could have just called,” he said, looking back to the elven queen in coveralls.
“This is easier,” she said, standing.
“Easier, or just more dramatic?” Vic asked.
“More fun,” she admitted.
Vic had to smile. He liked the elf, far more than he liked her brother, but he still knew not to trust her.
The Queen of Swords was powerful in ways Vic didn’t understand and he knew better than to prod with too many questions. Adam liked her and respected her, but that came with a healthy dose of caution—and Adam was one of the bravest people Vic knew.
“You’re here about Adam?” she asked, wiping her hands on an oil-soaked rag.
Vic narrowed his eyes at her, his instincts telling him to be wary.
“Basically. What do you know?”
“I know that his great-aunt died,” she said, voice sad. “And I know that it must hurt him a great deal.”
“I’m going to the funeral,” Vic said. “I just came by to change my oil.”
“It’s always nice to meet another grease monkey,” Argent said.
Vic raised a hand and shook it in a so-so gesture. “Jesse taught me the basics, but I’m guessing you didn’t bring me across to talk about cars.”
