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  Old Woman harrumphed, but when Jared chanced a glance, thoughts and expressions chased across her face. The dead Wielders that composed the Sword Spirit were arguing.

  Good.

  He hid a smile. This could prove to be an interesting experiment.

  ASH AND COOPER

  When the suspension towers of the Mackinac Bridge appeared in the distance like toothpicks sticking out of white pudding, Cooper pulled into a rest stop. “Time to stretch our legs and unload that soda,” he said with a grimace. “Also, time for you to decide whether you want to enjoy the bridge as a driver, or as a passenger.”

  They made use of the facilities. Ash walked back out into the brisk, dry air. The snow was all tints of white and purple, with long shadows dipping into blue now that the sun was ten degrees from sinking beyond the horizon. He could feel the lake’s pull from several miles away.

  So much water. So much personality, too.

  Ash extended his senses to explore the presence under the barely-visible bridge.

  Few moments later, familiar arms steadied him from behind.

  “You okay, Ash?”

  Ash shook himself off as though to make something go of him, and turned into Cooper’s light embrace. “I’m good.”

  “You almost fell, babe.” Cooper didn’t quite chide.

  “I, uh... I felt the lake.”

  Their eyes met. Cooper’s concerned gaze just about embraced him, feeling warmer and tighter than the casual touch of his large hands on the sleeves of Ash’s leather jacket. “That’s a big lake,” Cooper said with a nod. “I imagine I’d feel that way with active rock.”

  “A volcano, maybe?” Ash said with a weak grin. Of course, with a volcano. Like when the power node had melted the otherwise inert sedimentary rock in the Allegheny River’s flood plane. He still remembered Coopers startled, inward-focused gaze as he tried to work with the unusual, the exotic. The dangerous.

  And the lake was, without a doubt, a dangerous entity. Not like “his” river that he knew and loved. A river that knew him back, and perhaps would, someday, extend a smidgeon of affection in his direction.

  Gods were strange that way.

  “I think I better drive,” Cooper said gently. “And that way, you can watch the sun set over the lake. Our timing should be just about spot-on.”

  ASH SAT PERFECTLY still in the passenger seat as they moved toward the fifth longest suspension bridge in the world. Its impressive supports rose into the darkening sky like abstract sculptures, sharing load-bearing cables with the surface they were about to mount. The bridge itself domed into a hill ahead of them, both for structural reasons, and to allow for ship traffic underneath. It was a beauty, anchored into the earth that lay deep under both the water and the layers of sediment and half-petrified mudstone.

  This much water had always disconcerted Cooper. When he had been a teen and his gift was nowhere in evidence, he’d had nothing to rely on when faced with the vast, intimidating expanse of a small, freshwater inland sea.

  Lake Superior, indeed.

  Now, though, he did feel the earth through the supports of the bridge. Once he extended his earth sense far enough, he tasted the ancient, burnt metamorphic rock of the pre-cambrian Canadian Shield. It was ancient, and dormant, and it held secrets of its own.

  “What do you feel?” he asked Ash, both to find out, and to refocus on the four lanes of traffic that snaked across the waters ahead of him.

  “It’s amazing,” Ash breathed. “And the sun – I wish there was no traffic so you could stop and look!”

  Cooper glanced to what had once been a familiar sight of the sun setting over the strait. “We used to drive back this way from visiting relatives,” he said. “My parents live near Ann Arbor. There’s a small private college there where they teach. A nice town, pretty rural, lots of space. There’re woods, and a creek...” he thought back to his boyhood haunts. “We’re headed for the Hiawatha forest, which is a national park. We’ll be camping on private land right outside the park, though. That way we can do our thing.”

  “Would the rangers mind us camping in the park proper?”

  “Yeah.” Cooper switched lanes to pass a truck halfway across the five-mile bridge. The maneuver also gave Ash better view. “A few of my distant relatives work for the park service, and they’re pretty adamant about following the rules. You know, use proper toilets instead of digging jacks. Don’t wreck the land with fire pits, pack out what you brought in – the works. And building all those tents and lodges would leave quite a scar on the Earth. Even with the snow underfoot, you could see somebody’s been camping there on a regular basis when the snow melted in the spring.”

  Ash tore his eyes away from the pastel orange reflection on the water. “So your group does this every year?”

  “Several times a year, but the New Years are the biggest. Some people show up eight times a year, others just once or twice. A lot depends on the distance and their work schedules. They’ve built up quite an infrastructure, from what I hear.” Except he had only heard. He had never been, and the knowledge stung. Had Grandma Olga seen the future differently... had she not tried to protect him... but that was all bygones now.

  Ash read something different into his sudden silence. “Are you worried about your folks having an issue with me?”

  “No.” Cooper decided to use Ash’s question as a welcome opportunity to change his train of thought. “What I’m worried about is that my weirdo family will freak you out, and that you’ll freeze your tender ass off, camping in the snow.”

  ASH TOOK THE wheel after another pit stop. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or the U.P. as the locals called it, was bigger in person than it had seemed on the map. They had three more hours to go, driving past communities that were more villages than towns in scale.

  “Everybody’s passing me and I’m going seventy,” he said, feeling tense on the salt-gray road. “I mean, I don’t see any ice patches, and I don’t feel anything untoward ahead, but still. Do people always drive like this up here?”

  “Kind of?” Cooper gave a uneasy laugh. “It’s been a while since I’ve been back home, y’know. It’s... it’s not like I did a lot of driving here, but I know the distances stretch longer than you’d expect. Let me scan ahead, just in case.”

  He reached into the well between the second-row seats, and pulled out a long object wrapped in an oil cloth. He untied the strings, careful not to jostle Ash’s elbow. “Slow down if you want. It’s not like there’s a minimum speed limit.”

  The trees flashed past them a bit slower now, and to his pleasure, he felt Ash relax. “Not used to snow driving, are you?” Cooper said casually.

  “Not at these speeds. I keep thinking, suppose a deer jumps in. Or suppose there’s an ice runoff from one of the country roads intersecting this one, and the car can’t stop.”

  “Pessimist,” Cooper said fondly. Slowly, reverently, he pulled out the sheathed sword that was Jared, lifted it as much as the car’s confines allowed, and bowed his head in greeting. “Hey Jared,” he whispered. “I need a peek ahead, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  He grasped the hilt, aimed the sheathed sword toward the road between his legs, and slid the scabbard down two inches. He knew he might easily cut the seat, but with a car this old he didn’t care all that much about worn fabric and tired foam. He cared about his legs – and he cared about Jared not getting dropped or chipped.

  As Ash drove on in supportive silence, Cooper closed his eyes to ground and center. Doing so in a moving vehicle was at least three skill levels harder than when he sat on the old concrete dock by the river. He had had practice, though. They had mapped a whole section of Pittsburgh’s downtown for ley lines and nodes not too long ago like this, either driving or walking. Surely sitting up front instead of in the back should make zero difference.

  The familiar hum of the katana’s energy tingled his palms. He fancied it being a greeting of sorts, and sent a gentle pulse of his own energy into the blade in
return.

  The colors hit him hard this time.

  Urgency, speed, and flashing lights.

  He gasped, but slowed his mind down to check that there still was a lake to their right, a river they had just crossed, and the curious, web-like network of ley lines that converged in a node up by the shore. Yellow and green, mostly.

  Not much red. The few tiny dots of animal energy in the woods flashed by like so much confetti.

  And then ahead, a red splotch bristled with unexpected violence. Soon a menacing darkness began to grow around its edges.

  A jolt stung his palm, as though his cousin Paul’s bioelectric field had just stung him by accident, except the blade had never done that before. “Oww!”

  “What?” Ash flipped the hazard lights on and slowed down. “You okay? Did you cut yourself?”

  “Trouble ahead.” Cooper felt their pain now, gasping with effort, hyperventilating to suck down the icy air he shouldn’t have been tasting inside the car. “Accident. Injuries.”

  “Thank Jared, put him away, and call the police,” Ash said calmly as he cruised ahead at a conservative speed.

  It took them three minutes to traverse the two miles to the site of the accident. It was dark now, and their old headlights, yellowed by age, didn’t shine as far as the LED ones of newer vehicles. They were the only ones here, though. It would have to do.

  Once Cooper called the accident in, he hung up and fumbled for the sword again. “I can’t see it in the dark,” he said. “And I can’t tell the police that only the sword can see it.”

  “Okay.” The steady voice of Ash calmed him. “Just tell me when to slow down some more.”

  He saw it with his mind’s eye before Ash had accidentally missed the country road hidden by trees. They turned in and pulled over past the intersection with the engine running, both for warmth and to keep the lights on without draining the battery.

  Ash leaned over and pulled a small tactical light out of his glove compartment. “Watch your eyes,” he said as he aimed it through Cooper’s passenger side window.

  A beam of bright white light spilled onto tableau of a broad sedan, the nose of which was plowed into the back of a pick-up truck. Lights of both vehicles were still on.

  Cooper checked with Jared. “I see two heat sources. That’s probably the engines. There’s a... I think a dead guy. His aura is very dim. Hard to tell. Plus two more.”

  He heard Ash give their exact coordinates to the dispatcher. There wasn’t anyone around, and if a semi-conscious person spotted him with a katana in his hand, he would call them shocked and confused, he decided as he brought the sword with him. “You got the first aid kit?” he asked Ash, who only grunted his assent as he bent to plant an emergency flare to mark the intersection. Then he followed Cooper at a trot.

  A guilty thought crossed Cooper’s mind. So far, Ash’s foray into his ancestral neck of the woods had been anything but boring.

  CHAPTER 3

  JARED

  Jared sat on the wooden porch of the guest house. His feet dangled from its overhang. If he stepped out onto the carefully positioned rocks, he could dip his bare feet into the thin, bubbling brook and refresh himself, except that meant facing the oppressive sun.

  Maybe later, he thought as he turned his attention to the Old Woman again.

  She had a little table set up just two feet away from him. Today, she wore an old cotton kimono and a pair of peasant pants. “No sense ruining silk with ink,” she had said at the time.

  Two hours later, she was still at it, marking up a sheet of paper with ink. The shapes had been made with a black-tipped brush she had produced out of nowhere. They started out as circles and swooshes and lines, an untidy pile she had scrapped with a wave of her hand. A warm-up, she’d said.

  Now she had painted an outline of a city scape, all black and gray and smoky. It looked familiar, like a silhouette from a post card. Jared thought hard. His friend had sent him one like it two years ago. “Is that the London Bridge?”

  She didn’t bother looking up. “Yes. London could be pretty, if it wasn’t for all that smoke and dirt.”

  “The smoke is gone,” Jared said, thinking back to a Travel Channel documentary. “They use clean energy now. Electricity, and wind mills, and such.”

  “Wind mills?” She scoffed. “Ridiculous. They use those in Holland.”

  He shrugged. “You may read my mind if you want to see for yourself.”

  “Really?” Her wrinkled face lifted now, lit up like that of a curious girl she must have been once, countless decades ago.

  Half an hour later, they sat side by side on the shaded porch. She held his hand in her wrinkled one with her slightely gnarled fingers that ended in neatly trimmed nails. “Interesting,” she breathed. “Very interesting. And look at all those women wearing pants! I’ve caused scandals doing that in my day.”

  Jared felt her light, polite touch on the memories he offered freely. This wasn’t bad at all. Not invasive, not threatening. She wasn’t taking what was not freely offered.

  He felt her smile in delight as he offered a memory of an airport, and heard her unvoiced wonder at the size of the big, metal birds and of the casual acceptance of bored and irritated air travel passengers.

  Cooper touched the sword just then. The draw of his power banished the images of take-offs and landings in favor of a snowy, frozen wasteland.

  “What does he want now?” Old Woman didn’t bother masking the irritation in her voice.

  “Information. Something happened...” Jared tuned in to what he could read of Cooper. “An accident, I think.”

  His hand was still in the Old Woman’s firm grasp. Suddenly he knew that she could see what he saw, all filtered through Cooper’s eyes. Red flare flashing in the dark, the helpless panic of a car that wouldn’t start, the outpouring of energy to save a man who was struck by another vehicle as he was securing his son’s snowmobile in the back of the pickup truck.

  He was reading his mind.

  “What’s a snowmobile?” he heard multiple voices ask in their dissonant curiosity.

  “Why not just let him die?” An old, raspy voice grumbled in a language Jared understood, but didn’t recognize.

  “Idiot,” Old Woman scoffed. “There’s a child involved. Of course he won’t just leave him... oh.”

  Cooper’s pull on the sword’s reserves made Jared reel. Even the old woman stilled. The reality of the house around him wavered. For the first time, Jared wondered whether it was possible for Cooper to take enough power to kill them all.

  ASH AND COOPER

  ASH FELT THE water of the deep snow that piled by the sides of the road as though it formed a solid wall in his mind. The road surface itself, all tarmac and salt, showed as a dark, dry line. Just thirty feet ahead, he felt three small bodies of water.

  They were consistent with people in shape and size. He wished he could see auras more reliably, but that particular ability was prone to stress interference and this was no time to sit his ass in the middle of the road and meditate.

  The crashed sedan was pale in the dark. It’s color was indeterminate, and it didn’t matter. He would leave those kinds of details to the police.

  A body lay on the ground under the front of the sedan. A dark stain spilled in the beam of his flashlight, seeping into the salt, draining life away.

  “You see him, Ash?”

  “Yep.” They shouldn’t pull him out, but they couldn’t very well leave the man bleed to death on the frozen road. “Let’s move that sedan back a bit,” Ash suggested.

  Except the driver of that vehicle was still behind the wheel, fighting with his air bag.

  “Got it,” Cooper said. He opened the door. “Stop moving. Just stop, okay? I’m here to help you.”

  The arms stopped flailing and the head in its knit hat stilled against the back rest. Muffled, incomprehensible words tried to make their way though.

  “Hold still. I’ll cut you out.” Cooper drew his sword. When
he sliced through the air bag, stabbing in and cutting up, the thing deflated and hung limp from the steering wheel. “Can you unbuckle?” he asked gently.

  The man’s hands shook with adrenaline and shock. “Here, I got it,” Cooper said. He sheathed Jared, slipped the sword between his leather belt and his jeans, and bent over. Soon, they were helping the driver from behind the driver’s seat, and into the back of his own car. “I have to move this car back so we can help that other person,” Cooper explained.

  The car wouldn’t start. Naturally. The front was damaged and bent, its lights spilling out.

  “Put it in neutral and we’ll push,” Ash suggested.

  “Its automatic. It won’t budge.” An insane thought occurred to Cooper, however. “You still have 911 on the line?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s their ETA?” he asked.

  Ash checked. “Fifteen minutes. The distances here are a killer.”

  “Let’s see if we can push some energy his way,” Cooper whispered. “It might work.”

  Which is how Cooper ended up kneeling on the ground, touching the gravely injured man with a half-ruined antique katana, when the emergency vehicles began to arrive. Ash stood behind him, feeding him copious amounts of his own power.

  “Move away. Sir, we need you to move away. Who called the 911?” The state trooper loomed tall in his warm parka and padded pants, and Ash realized they looked like a bunch of city slickers in their REI hiking boots, jeans, and technical thermal fleece tops.

  “I did. And he’s in shock,” Ash nodded to the sedan. “We got the driver out and moved him into the back seat, trying to move the car back, but it won’t start.”

  “Is it just these two here?” The trooper looked around, assessing.

  As though waking from a dream, Cooper said from where he was still kneeling with his sword, “I felt another life sign in the cab of the pickup truck.”