Spiritwalk by Charles De Lint Read Free Book Online

the block-long structure that was Tamson House one more time before getting into the Mustang. That’s one fucking monster of a place, he thought. You could hide an army in there. It might be smart if he renegotiated their fee—upped it to where they could hire some more muscle without it having to come out of what they were already getting.
    “Who do you know that’s looking for some work?” he asked Joey as he slid into the passenger’s seat.
    Two
    1
    “Esmeralda,” Button said as she came into the kitchen.
    Blue turned from the stove where he was frying up chopped vegetables for an omelet. The kitchen had a name, like most of the rooms in Tamson House. It was called the Silkwater Kitchen, but Blue never could remember why. It was a bright sunny room, with an old Coca-Cola clock over the door and a cassette player up on top of one of the cupboards. An Ian Tamblyn song was currently spilling from the pair of Braun speakers on either side of the tape machine.
    “Esmeralda?” Blue asked. “What’s that—your name?”
    Button shook her head. “I just woke up with it in my head. It’s someone I know... I think.”
    “Does she live in town?”
    “I seem to remember letters....”
    Blue signed and turned to give the vegetables another stir. If it was a friend who lived in town, a first name wasn’t much to go on. And if it was a correspondent... well, the world was a big place.
    “Don’t be mad,” Button said softly from the table in the nook. She was sitting with her feet up on a chair, hugging her knees.
    “Mad?” Blue took the frying pan off the burner and came to sit with her at the table. “I’m not mad, Button. What makes you say that?”
    She gave a little shrug. “I don’t know. You just seem mad.”
    “Frustrated, yeah—but
for
you, not at you. I just want to figure out a way to find out who you are.”
    “Me, too.”
    Before he realized what he was doing, Blue covered one of her hands with his own. “I know, Button,” he said.
    She clutched his hand tightly, a desperate look in her eyes. The intimacy of the moment stirred Blue’s own needs again. He wanted to fold her into his arms, but instead he gently disengaged their hands and stood up to return to the stove.
    “So—are you hungry?” he asked in a voice that was a little too bright.
    He scraped the vegetables into a bowl. Pouring a stirred egg, herbs and milk mixture into the frying pan, he waited until it was half-cooked, dumped the vegetables on top of it, then folded the omelet over. By the time he had their breakfast on the table, a steaming cup of coffee beside each plate, he had his own feelings under better control. When he looked at Button, something deep and warm lay waiting in her gaze for him, but she seemed to know enough to talk of other things.
    “Do you live here all alone?” she asked. “Sort of like a caretaker?”
    Blue shook his head. “I guess you could call me a caretaker, but I don’t live here alone. There’s just no one around this weekend. See, Tamson House is a strange sort of a place. It draws people to it—but only the right kind of people. They’re the kind of people who are a little different. They don’t always fit the norm, at least not in the outside world, and that can get a little hairy. Everybody needs a bit of a quiet space once in a while, a place they can just be themselves, and like Jamie always says, ’This is a place where difference is the norm,’ so nobody has to try and fit in here because everything fits in.”
    “Jamie’s the man who owns the House?”
    “No, he’s... “ Ever since he’d discovered that Jamie’s spirit was a part of the House still, that they could talk to each other through the computer, Blue couldn’t say the simple words “he’s dead.” He didn’t know what it was that Jamie was, but it wasn’t dead no matter what anybody—Jamie included—had to say about it.
    “The House belongs to Sara Kendell,” Blue said finally. “She’s Jamie’s