Briarpatch by Tim Pratt by Tim Pratt Read Free Book Online Page A

fired.
    Ismael heard the incredibly loud crash of gunfire, and then the world swirled and dipped. He fell in every direction at once as dark and light streaked interchangeably past his eyes, and then he was upright again, leaning against a dirty shelf, and, of course, utterly unharmed. As always, when death or even serious injury seemed imminent, some secret reflex kicked in, shunting him through the briarpatch to safety. A spider scuttled over his hand—probably something poisonous, not that it mattered—and he realized where he was. Ismael kicked at the wooden door, which swung open, and stepped out into his backyard.
    Echo stood, shaking her hand vigorously back and forth. It was probably numb from the recoil. “Hey, you didn’t go far at all this time.”
    “Yes,” Ismael said. When Echo had attempted to set him on fire the week before, Ismael had fled deep into the briarpatch, and emerged nearly two miles away beneath an overpass, perhaps because there was a chance the fire would fill the whole back yard, making closer re-entry too dangerous? Or was that ascribing thought and consciousness to what he believed was mere mindless instinctual self-preservation? Perhaps the places where he re-emerged were simply random. This time he’d been dumped right back into the baseline world, but other times he’d had to journey for a while in the briarpatch to find his way out again, and there seemed no reason or pattern to the nature of his escapes. He’d had a long time, and many brushes with death, to look for such a pattern, even before Echo came along and started trading attempted murder for her services. “Are you satisfied, now?” he asked her.
    “Sure. Want me to call Nicholas and set this up?”
    “Not just yet. Go to Darrin, find out how he’s doing. Perhaps he’s overwrought enough already, and further steps are unnecessary. You don’t mind playing the concerned girlfriend, do you?”
    “Nah,” Echo said. “I like Darrin.”
    Ismael believed her. Echo was entirely capable of simultaneously liking someone and betraying them. There was no distance between her whims and her actions. She was the most alive and thriving person Ismael had ever known, though she was more like a cancer than a flower. When he’d first met her a year ago, he’d thought she was a good candidate for suicide, but she was wholly immune to despair despite the dire straits she’d been in back then, and seemed oblivious to the influence of Ismael’s depressive aura. She had better uses than dying, anyway. She wasn’t exactly his Renfield—Nicholas fit
that
description better—nor his Dr. Watson, nor his faithful companion. He wasn’t sure there
was
a shorthand to describe his relationship with Echo. She would help him, for as long as he kept her entertained, and she seemed to find him very entertaining. “Go on, then,” he said. “And let me know what you think of Darrin’s mental state.”
    Echo blew him a kiss, dropping the shotgun on the ground—she got bored with her toys easily—and strolled around the side of the house toward the gate. Ismael considered picking up the shotgun, but didn’t bother. Let it rust.
    2
    The wheelchair moved, so Orville supposed the dead woman must be pushing him, and his legs moved too as the chair shifted, which caused distant pulses of pain deep in his bones, or what was left of them.
    “I’m hurt bad, huh?” he said, throat dry.
    “Not as bad as me.”
    “Wait.” Thinking was like swimming through honey, but he tried hard, and things got a little clearer. “If you’re dead. A ghost. How can you push me in a wheelchair?”
    She sighed, pausing in their forward motion. “I just
can
. I don’t know how. It’s not like there’s a Frequently Asked Questions file I can refer to here—there’s no user guide to being dead. All I know so far is that nobody except you seems to see or hear me, and I can move things around, though it feels weird when I do, and takes a lot of