"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Skeleton Key" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

"And, Lord, I want to hurt them."
"It will pass," he said after a little while, gripping my hand gently.
"Is it wrong for me to want that?"
"You must want what you want," he said. "I can help you with some things. Vengeance is not one of
my attributes. If it is in your heart to search out and punish all who have harmed you..." He looked away.
"I can grant you certain powers. Then you will have to use them as you deem best."


We stood in front of my parents' house. Something in me had called me Home, here, not to my
apartment, where I had only lived six months. His hands lay on my shoulders, warm, comforting. I could
feel strength flowing from them. "Tess," he murmured. "You need never be alone now. When you are
ready to travel, call me and I'll come for you."
"What if I'm not ready but I just...need you?"
"Call." He turned me. He embraced me. He faded away.
I clutched the key he had given me. I wanted to be three places at once:
I wanted to be alive and walking up the path to my parents' house, so I could knock on the door
and Mom would answer and I could fall into her arms.
I wanted to be with Sasha, telling her that we had been right all along, that there really was a force,
that it heard us when we spoke to it.
I wanted to be in the abandoned church.
I wanted to be alive and terrible in the church, slicing all those people open, shedding their blood in
the name of my Lord, making him stronger at their expense.
Though when I really thought about it, I knew that wouldn't work, any more than their sacrifice of
me had worked; I was already promised to Another. They, too, had made their choice.
The wind rose, carrying papers down the street. I felt it against my hair, the faintest tickle of breath.
I walked up the path to my parents' sleeping house.
The curtains to most of the rooms were closed, but through a gap in the living room curtains I saw
Dad's recliner with sections of newspaper scattered near it, left the way he had dropped them earlier as
he searched out Mom's byline, and Mom's recliner with a stack of blue books on the table next to it, one
opened: she had been reading the work of Dad's high school students. They spent their evenings talking
about work. I had heard it all my life, the excitement Dad felt finding a story in the paper Mom hadn't told
him she was working on, his patient suspense as she searched through a stack of exercise papers for the
one he thought was a gem. Often she saw things in his students' work that didn't impress him until she
pointed them out to him. Sometimes he men-tioned an angle she hadn't thought of in her search for story,
and she would address it in the follow-up story. They both valued the fresh eyes of each other.
I wondered how they would see me.
I stood on the porch, thinking about walking through walls the way I had seen ghosts in movies do,
wondering. I put my hand on the door and pushed. There was initial resistance. I pushed harder, felt the
door against my palm: not solid, really; like water on the verge of freezing, without the cold. I leaned
against the door and gradually it parted somehow, its matter moved to either side, and I was in the front
hall.
"That takes too long," I muttered. I turned back and jumped at the door. I bumped my chin and
scuffed my palms and bounced back into the front hall. "Ouch! Hermes help me!"
"What is it?" he asked, standing beside me.
"Oh. Excuse me. Why is it so hard to walk through things?"
"Did you ask first?"
"What?"
"Everything has its own spirit, Tess. Homes especially, where people sleep; their dreams soak into
the walls, investing the dwellings with living energy, for good or ill. Have you asked this dwelling if you
could enter?"