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15

My world, a swirl of cherry red and midnight blue. The cherry red flowing clockwise. The midnight blue, anticlockwise.

Sounds in my ears. Buzzing. Like a small swarm of bees on each side of my head, flitting about and trying to convey some message that I didn’t have the pheromone receptors to pick up.

The smell was hyacinth. Everywhere. So strong in my nose, it was as though I’d fallen into a field of hyacinths face first. Sweet and subtle?

Not in this case.

In this case, it was sweet and overwhelming. Drove away the taste of that Denver omelet breakfast I’d had, along with any remaining hints of my blackberry tea.

No wet chill in the air though. If I was, in fact, feeling any air. I certainly felt no breeze.

Instead, just a steady warmth. Like an 80 degree day under a cloudless sky, when the wind just seemed to give up.

All of this was information. All of it was relevant.

I just had to figure out how.

The answer would lie in those swirls of red and blue.

Counterpoint, they flowed. Speeds varying. Breadth of each bar varying. Sometimes the red would flow so wide and thick that the blue seemed to vanish.

Other times, the blue seemed to swallow up the red, leaving not so much as a trace.

And all of this was information. I just needed to know if…

No.

No questions. Not now.

No questions. No opinions.

I needed to become a passive reflector of what I perceived. A mirror, onto which the past seventy-two hours could shine out their history, as related to this portal.

I would draw a centering breath, but I had no breath to focus on. I could not feel my lungs, or my nose. I could not even feel the surge of power I’d pulled up from the Underworld. Not now. Not here.

Oh, I could stretch for those feelings, if I chose. But that would have been a choice.

And right now, I needed only to observe.

So I watched. And smelled. I listened. And felt.

I even tasted the air, if that was air, to determine if I could get any character to the hyacinth fragrance, beyond what my nostrils were picking up.

If I was really picking up anything through my nostrils. It might have all been coming in through my mind.

I wasn’t clear on that part. Seeking the answer right now would only have been a distraction.

So I perceived and waited. Allowed the patterns to establish themselves.

And, over time, understanding grew within me.

The hyacinth smell. It was the scent of the energies of this particular portal. And that it seemed to carry no undersmell, that meant that no magics had been performed on it that might modify it in any way.

I almost lost focus there. The idea of something modifying a portal without the Locksmiths knowing — and Vasco would have told me if he’d known of this portal being modified recently — that was a scary idea.

But it wasn’t what happened.

Back to figuring out what did happen.

I needed a moment to clear my mind again. To let the impressions flow over me once more, without my mind stressing over things that had not occured.

The portal had not been modified. That was good, useful information.

The sound of the buzzing. That was the energies of this portal, and how they interacted with this part of our universe.

I thought they felt unchanged. Normal, more or less. I couldn’t detect any variations that might have indicated something as wrong.

But, this was my first experience with this portal. And experience, as I’d said, was different from information.

Still, I thought that the energies of the portal seemed to be interacting normally with the universe.

So nothing had happened to warp the portal, as it related to the fabric of the universe.

Yes, that sounded a lot like the information I got from the scent, but it wasn’t quite the same thing. The portal itself could be modified, without modifying how it interacted with the fabric of reality.

The obverse was true as well. For example, it might have been possible to move a portal.

Oh, it would take immense amounts of power, and draw lots of attention, but it was the most obvious example I could think of for how the portal’s relationship with reality could be modified without otherwise affecting the portal’s magic.

So, what mattered here was that nothing in the sound or smell told me that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

That much, as least, was good.

It might have been expected, if I’d allowed myself expectations.

Instead, I focused on the feel of the temperature.

It felt a little warm to me.

That meant something.

I had to slam my thoughts shut quick before speculation came over me.

I did my level best, instead, to focus on the sensation of that temperature.

Warm, but not hot. Warm, but not tepid.

Warm, but still…

No. The stillness was not at issue here. The feel had to be still because the scent and sound indicated no attempts to modify the portal or its relationship with reality.

Had there been an attempt, I would have felt motion, giving me a greater sense of what and how.

So the temperature was what mattered.

Warm…

The answer flooded back out of my training memories.

Warm meant the portal had been used within the past seventy-two hours.

Finally! Something…

No. No conclusions. No opinions. Not yet.

The portal had been used. Not heavily used. That would have been hot, not warm.

Still, someone or something had used this portal recently.

And any more information would come down to sight.

Somewhere within those swirling reds and blues was the answer to who or what had used the portal, and what they’d done with it.

I stared into the swirling colors. Allowed the rhythm of their flow wash over me. I might have begun to sway with that rhythm. I can’t be sure.

The pulses of color that shifted the breadth of each bar of cherry red and midnight blue, they had meaning.

The pulses. The breadth. They told a story…

That story, it was of the portal opening twice…

The first time. Two and a half days ago.

Yes! Now that I’d given myself over to the flow of the colors, I could feel them show me when and how the portal had been used.

Sixty hours ago. Give or take.

Late afternoon sun. Heavy clouds rushing past far overhead.

A leprechaun stepped through the portal. Only as tall as my knee. The shock of his coppery hair and beard a stark contrast to the black of his suit with its greenish trim.

Stocky, this leprechaun. And old, despite the color of his hair.

Glasses. Pince-nez. Gold rimmed.

He carried something. Cackled his glee.

He carried a stone. Greenish gray. Needed both hands to do it. Rounded and smooth, this stone, but flat. Flat enough it almost had an edge.

He tossed that stone onto the waters of the Willamette, where it floated.

The leprechaun jumped onto it like a surfboard.

The leprechaun faded from my mind. Too distant now. His further actions unrelated to the portal.

I thought the leprechaun looked to be heading east toward Selwood, but I wasn’t sure.

Back into the swirl of colors.

They shifted with time, I understood now. Ebbing and flowing their pace between this location and the other end of the portal’s natural link.

The other end, I knew, was known to Locksmiths as Gehnach. a place of sand and darkness. Heat. Fires in the night sky, and erupting from the sands themselves.

But that didn’t matter. Not right now.

My mind flowed forward with the swirl of the portal. Followed its period of inactivity, that harmonized with the buzzing in my ears.

Felt cooler, those periods of inactivity. And the time that the leprechaun had come through, the portal had warmed further, though my attention had been on sight, and I’d missed…

Now.

Again, something using the portal.

Twenty-four hours ago.

Rain in the air, but fading with the dawn. Fading with the slight misting of the night before.

Gentle morning wind. Gentler than today’s.

Portal activated from this end.

A person standing in front of the portal.

Tall and slender. Cloaked and hooded. Boots that came to the knee, a dark leather of some kind.

Couldn’t tell male or female, so I defaulted again to the Hrissasstii pronoun hris.

This person had hris left hand forward. Completed a gesture much like the one I would have used to activate the portal.

Long, slender fingers. A little long to be human, which meant I couldn’t guess what the slenderness might mean.

Skin looked pretty close to human though. Pale end of Caucasian, it looked to me. Certainly made me look tan.

Suddenly the cloaked person stood straight. Hris shoulders came up.

Elegant hands reached out wide. Called together hot energy. Energy that felt baked in the sun on hot concrete. Or was that the smell?

Those hands came together…

Something slapped my face hard enough to make my ears ring.

I was standing once more on the rocky stem of Banana Island. I mean Toe Island. Facing the rock that held the portal, which was now closed.

I could smell the Willamette River. Feel tension sing through my body.

The lovely relaxed energy I’d tapped from the Underworld? Gone.

In its place, a discombobulation. Uncertainty. Was I standing here? Or was I still in my kitchen? Eating an omelet. Drinking my tea…

The shock of the slap once more. Not the sensation. My cheek still sang with that. No, but the shock of the blow. Or its echo.

I staggered backward.

Might have fallen in the water, except that Vasco’s strong hand grabbed my arm and stopped me.

“Let me see,” he said, leaning in and pushing my left hand away from my face.

My face was still hot, stinging.

My ears rang. I could hear my blood rushing as well. Underneath that, if I tried — which I did by a reflex that was new to me — I could hear the rushing wind and the distant noise of traffic. The muttering of Vasco. The worried whine of Magellan.

More concerning to me was the heavy pounding of my heart.

“Bleeding,” Magellan barked.

“Obviously,” Vasco said, voice distant. He slung down his duffel bag. Rummaged through it while frowning at my face.

“What do you mean I’m bleeding?”

“Bleeding,” Magellan barked again. He sounded worried. Pawed back and forth in the dirt behind me.

“Magellan means someone managed to slap you down during your investigation.”

“Literally,” I said. “Wasn’t a move I recognized. Not even now that I’ve had a moment for memories to come back to me.”

“Wait,” Vasco said.

He slathered a little smelly green paste on my cheek, then started rubbing it vigorously.

Hot pain made me cry out before I could stop myself.

“Quit whining,” Vasco said, voice a little distant with focus.

Whining, he called it. My face felt like he was pressing an inch of hot solder to my cheek.

I clenched my teeth and breathed through my mouth. Helped with the rank herbal odor of the goop.

Didn’t help with the hot pain. That was just…

…gone?

I blinked at Vasco, and he chuckled and tucked a small jar back into his duffel bag.

“What was…” I stopped.

Vasco didn’t answer. Just let my memories tell me.

That was a healing concoction known as Serpent’s Kiss, because its main ingredient was a poisonous venom. Well treated with other herbs, but still.

Nothing better for cuts. Forced the skin to reknit at breakneck speeds. Hurt like hell, but did the job.

I’d had lessons in alchemy?

“So what did you pick up?” Vasco leaned back against the big rock, just to my left of the portal zone.

I told him, starting with the leprechaun and finishing with the gesture.

“Go over the second activation again. Every detail you can remember.”

I did. Didn’t say anything differently from the first recitation, which made Vasco frown.

“You lost focus,” he said. “Made comparisons to your own skin. That was how she noticed you.”

“She? You know who this is?”

“I do.” Vasco frowned through a slow breath that flared his nostrils. “And it’s not good.”

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