Spiritwalk Read Online Free PDF Page B

place?”
    “Just the garage where I keep my bikes and tools. The place belongs to friends of mine and I’m just sort of looking after it...” The strangeness of finding her, of the bone disc and her lack of a shadow, dissolved under a flood of memory. He couldn’t stop the look of pain that crossed his features. “On a permanent basis, looks like. Come on. I’ll show you where you can crash.”
    He led her out of the garage into a long hallway that just seemed to go on forever.
    “It’s huge,” Button said.
    Blue nodded. “Takes up a whole block. It’s called Tamson House after... after the guy that owned it. But he’s been—”
    Button stumbled and Blue put an arm around her to help keep her on her feet. He was just as happy not going into why things were the way they were. He glanced back at his lone shadow following them up the hall, half surprised that there was any substance to her at all. He thought of the late-night movies he loved. Vampires didn’t cast a shadow—not in the old Hammer flicks anyway—but he told himself to can that shit. Besides, it was reflections in a mirror, not shadows. And you didn’t find vampires flaked out on the side of the Gatineau Parkway. You didn’t find vampires, period, except when he thought of some of the weird shit he
had
seen go down....
    With Button leaning heavily against him, he took her upstairs to one of the bedrooms and tucked her in, dressed as she was. All he took off were her running shoes. She was asleep before he drew the comforter up to her chin.
    Blue sighed as he looked down at her. He put his hand in his pocket and withdrew the small bone disc she’d been clutching when he’d found her. No shadow. No memories. Something was brewing, no doubt about that. He wondered if bringing her here had been such a good idea. He couldn’t have just left her there, but after what happened the last time he saw one of these little bone discs...
    He sighed again. There was going to be shit to pay, no doubt about it. Trouble was, he didn’t know if he was up to it—not on his own.
    “But what’ve you got to lose this time?” he asked softly. The room swallowed the words and Button stirred in her sleep. What with one thing and another, he’d pretty well lost it all before.
    Shoving the disc back into his jeans, he left the room, closing the door softly behind him. A few doors down the hall, he turned in to what had been Jamie’s study—the room they’d called the Postman’s Room after the mailman who’d hung out there all through one long mail strike. Jamie’s computer sat on the desk, the green screen glowing like a cyclops’s eye in the dark room. A small green cursor pulsed in one corner. Jamie had called the computer Memoria, but Blue had another name for it.
    There were no messages on the screen as Blue sat down in front of it.
    4
    Button slept deeply, nesting in the flannel sheet and comforter like a cat. All around her, the vast building that was Tamson House stirred and creaked. At another time, the curious building, the strange bed, the unfamiliar noises might have kept her awake. But tonight they lulled her sleeping mind, allowing a crack in the wall that hid her memories from her to open ever so slightly.
    She remembered herself as a teenager and a meeting she had one day with another girl the same age as she was—sixteen going on forty. They bumped into each other as she was coming out of the Classics Bookshop in the National Arts Centre building and the other girl was coming in. Mumbled “excuse me’s” died in their throats as something sparked between their gazes.
    Button was an outgoing personality, but it was all surface. She hung around with the other kids at school, doing her best to fit in, though all the while a different set of values from dates and proms and boyfriends filled her head. She read Yeats and Dylan Thomas and K. M. Briggs, paying only lip service to whatever bands were currently popular with her peers. She read the