Sympathy for the Devil - By Tim Pratt Page 0,21

it again, shut out whatever’s chasing Mr. Rabbitskin here.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“Well, I’ve got to call him something,” she says. “Anyway, so I got back to playing my fiddle, concentrating on this whole business like I’ve never done before. You know, being purposeful about this opening doors business.”

“And?” I ask when she falls silent.

“I think I made it worse. I think I let that something right out.”

“You keep saying ‘you think.’ Are you just going on feelings here, or did you actually see something?”

“Oh, I saw something, no question there. Don’t know what it was, but it came sliding out of nowhere, like there was a door I couldn’t see standing smack in the middle of the meadow and it could just step through, easy as you please. It looked like some cross between a big cat and a wolf, I guess.”

“What happened to it?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I don’t know that either. It ran off into the forest. I guess maybe it was confused about how it got to be here, and maybe even where here is and all. But I don’t think it’s going to stay confused. I got only the one look at its eyes and what I saw there was smart, you know? Not just human smart, but college professor smart.”

“And so you came here,” I say.

She nods. “I didn’t know what else to do. I just packed my knapsack and stuck old Mr. Rabbitskin here in a bag. Grabbed my fiddle and we lit a shuck. I kept expecting that thing to come out of the woods while we were making our way down to the highway, but it left us alone. Then, when we got to the black top, we were lucky and hitched a ride with a trucker all the way down to the city.”

She falls quiet again. I nod slowly as I look from her to the rabbit.

“Now don’t get me wrong,” I say, “because I’m willing to help, but I can’t help but wonder why you picked me to come to.”

“Well,” she says. “I figured rabbit-boy here’s the only one can explain what’s what. So first we’ve got to shift him back into his human skin.”

“I’m no hoodoo man,” I tell her.

“No, but you knew Malicorne maybe better than any of us.”

“Malicorne,” I say softly.

Staley’s story notwithstanding, Malicorne had to be about the damnedest thing I ever ran across in this world. She used to squat in the Tombs with the rest of us, a tall horsey-faced woman with—and I swear this is true—a great big horn growing out of the centre of her forehead. You’ve never seen such a thing. Fact is, most people didn’t, even when she was standing right smack there in front of them. There was something about that horn that made your attention slide away from it.

“I haven’t seen her in a long time,” I tell Staley. “Not since we saw her and Jake walk off into the night.”

Through one of those doors that Staley and the crows called up. And we didn’t so much see them go, as hear them, their footsteps changing into the sounds of hoofbeats that slowly faded away. Which is what Staley’s getting at here, I realize. Malicorne had some kind of healing magic about her, but she was also one of those skinwalkers who change from something mostly human into something not even close.

“I just thought maybe you’d heard from her,” Staley said. “Or you’d know how to get a hold of her.”

I shake my head. “There’s nobody you can talk to about it out there on the rez?”

She looks a little embarrassed.

“I was hoping I could avoid that,” she says. “See, I’m pretty much just a guest myself, living out there where I do. It doesn’t seem polite to make a mess like I’ve done and not clean it up on my own.”

I see through what she’s saying pretty quick.

“You figure they’ll be pissed,” I say.

“Well, wouldn’t you be? What if they kicked me off the rez? I love living up there in the deep woods. What would I do if I had to leave?”

I can see her point, though I’m thinking that friends might be more forgiving than she thinks they’ll be. ’Course, I don’t know how close she is to the folks living up there.

I look down at the rabbit who still seems to be following the conversation like he understands what’s going on. There’s a nervous look in those big brown eyes of his,