Ghostcountry's Wrath (3 page)

He broke off, scowling, and unhooked a small, mud-colored leather bag from a peg by the door and slipped the thin cord over his head. It thumped against his chest and lodged against a glassy, palm-sized object wrapped in copper wire and depending from a wet and obviously brand-new rawhide thong. First things first, David noted: mojo before modesty.

“'Cause why?” he prompted.

“The door can be locked,” Alec added. “Runner-man's out of it, and Aik'll forgive us—eventually.”

“Poor Aik.” David sighed, shaking his head.

“You guys still haven't told him?” From Calvin.

“Not much,” David grunted. “'Course we don't know everything either,” he added pointedly.

“Start with the tattoo,” Alec suggested.

Calvin fingered the vitreous ornament between his pecs. “I…was gonna say that I bet it's faded 'cause of all the shapeshifting I've been doin' lately.”

Alec looked stricken—as he usually did when such topics arose. David shot him a glare and gnawed his lip. “I thought you didn't like doing that,” he ventured at last.

Calvin fished a pair of flowered boxer shorts from a battered khaki knapsack. “Not likin' something and not doin' something are two different somethings,” he observed as he slipped them on. “But like I said, I've been doin' a lot of shapeshiftin'—and I guess every time I do, the tattoo loses something. I mean, it's not part of
me,
really. Like—”

“Oh,
I
see!” David broke in eagerly. “When you change back to human, your body has to reconstruct you according to your genetic blueprint. Only the tattoo's not part of it, so it has to make do as best it can.”

Calvin nodded. “And when you turn into something with scales—which I, to my regret, have lately done—it's kinda hard for a few grains of pigment to figure out where to go, 'cause there aren't any analogous structures. Like, rattlesnakes don't even have hipbones, much less asses!”

Both David's brows shot up.
“Rattlesnakes?”

“A matter of necessity. I don't recommend the experience.”

“Which is very interesting,” Alec inserted. “But which doesn't explain why you're late—or all that B.S. on the phone. I mean, you called right after we discovered…
it.
And at the last possible moment before we had to split for the bachelor party. Five minutes later, and you'd have missed us.”

Calvin stepped into a pair of jeans. “Sorry 'bout that,” he mumbled. “Sorry I had to be so vague, too, but I didn't trust the phone not to be tapped.”

“By whom?” David asked.

“By the police in Whidden, Georgia, for one; by the G.B.I., for another. Probably the feds as well. Shoot, for all I know, they're snoopin' now!”

“I would think it highly unlikely that this room's bugged,” Alec intoned sarcastically. “And I'm not sure
anything
can snoop through solid log walls.”

David folded his arms across his chest. “It's time you talked, Fargo.”

“Okay, okay.” Calvin sighed. “Well, to give you the quick and dirty version: I'm sure you remember our, uh, adventures of last week….”

“How could we forget?” David snorted. “World-hopping like crazy, shapeshifting, daring rescues, Faery naval battles, you name it.”

“There's something you don't know, though.”

“What?”

Calvin took a deep breath. “You remember that night in Jackson County when I conjured up that fog, so I could summon Awi Usdi, the Little Deer, so he could call a
real
deer for me to get blood from? So I could use it to empower Alec's ulunsuti to open a gate to that place those guys were holdin' Finno?”

“Okay…”

“Well, I got something else as well,” Calvin whispered shakily. “Or something answered, anyway. “Guys, I…I called
Spearfinger
!”

“Shit!”

Calvin nodded grimly. “The lady—if you can call her that—herself. Seems she'd been followin' us—you, in particular—ever since the first time we went to Galunlati. And when I opened the gate between Worlds for Awi Usdi, she sneaked through as well.”

David's face was very pale. “And…you've had to deal with her.”

Again Calvin nodded. “And she's
killed,
Dave! She…she even killed my dad!”

David sat down with a thud. “Oh, Jesus!”

An even grimmer nod. “And a woman and a couple of kids.”

Silence.

“I killed her, though—I hope.”

“You
hope
?”

A shrug this time. “She's a supernatural creature not native to this world. I'm not sure what to believe. But I saw her die. In
this
world I saw her die.”

“Let's see,” Alec mused. “She's that shapechanging, liver-eating ogress from Galunlati, right? The one with power over stone—”

A knock rattled the door, jerking David back to the present. “What're you guys doin' in there?” Aikin demanded. “Tonto's lady just drove up—and I'm stuck out here with a sot!”

“Tough,” David called through the door, even as he moved to open it. “I'm in here with a Cherokee sorcerer!”

*

“I hope you know what a lucky son-of-a-bitch you are,” David muttered to Calvin twenty seconds later, as they and Alec neatly sidestepped the resigned Aikin and the reeling Darrell (who had somehow achieved the porch) and bounded down the split-log steps into the sparse stand of pines that comprised the cabin's front yard. A laurel hell fenced it upslope to the right, beyond which the Enotah National Forest began in earnest. To the left, a narrow rutted road snaked up the wooded mountainside from MacTyrie three miles away. A motorcycle and two cars crouched near the porch. Cal's BMW bike, Aikin's old brown Nova, and the battered red '66 Mustang David called the Mustang-of-Death (as of the previous weekend, closer to simply a dead Mustang, he thought dully).

But a newish red-and-black Ford Bronco had joined them, knobby tires straddling the terminal ruts. Silver mylar on all side windows wrapped the interior with mystery and obscured the occupants, if any. “Now that raises an interesting question,” Alec smirked, when they stopped beside it. “Is it an insult to call a shapechanger a son-of-a-bitch?”

“Only if he hasn't eaten dog,” a new voice volunteered: low and musical, with a soft Carolina drawl—and definitely female. David whirled around, cheeks aflame with a mix of irritation and embarrassment. He'd seen no sign of Sandy, and then suddenly there she was: five feet away and grinning like a 'possum. She'd apparently been lying in wait behind the nearest pine.

“Hey!” David laughed, stepping forward to enfold Calvin's lady in the properly hearty hug he hadn't had time for at the wedding because of preoccupation; or at the reception, where he'd had his hands full overseeing the degradation of Gary's getaway car. Now, though, he'd finally got a good look at her, and he liked what he saw.

Though a high school physics teacher in her middle-twenties, Sandy Fairfax looked little older than his own girlfriend, Liz Hughes, who had just turned eighteen. She was tallish and slim, with serious features, a gently arching nose, and a waist-length sweep of straight, sun-bleached hair that was presently confined in a ponytail, though she'd let it down for the wedding. She'd worn a flouncy spring green cotton dress, then, with a belt of linked silver dogwood blossoms. Now she was attired more typically: jeans, white Reeboks, and a scarlet T-shirt hyping a locally produced educational film called
Voices in the Wind.
She wore no makeup, but a pair of tiny dream catchers depended from her ears. Yeah, David thought, Calvin was a
damned
lucky S.O.B.

“Liz saw a bird she wanted to get a shot of,” Sandy explained, in response to a concern David had not yet realized himself. “You're lookin' good,” she added with an exaggerated twang, as she released him. “Not as good as a couple hours ago, though. Ain't nothin' like handsome lads in tuxes.”

Calvin slid an arm around her waist and grinned. “Actually,” he confided, “what she really means is there's nothin' like a handsome
man
in his birthday suit!”

“The operative word being
man
,”
Sandy countered smartly.

David grinned obligingly, then checked his watch and craned his neck, his gaze combing the woods.

Sandy saw him. “I don't suppose you'd be willing to fill in your part of this little conundrum while we wait for your gal, would you?” she ventured brightly.

“Liz didn't tell you?” David replied, surprised. “She hasn't seen…
it
either, but she does know about it, 'cause I told her.”

“Called her in the middle of the bachelor party!” Alec confided to Calvin, sounding disgusted. “I—”

They were spared further digression by the emergence of a slender red-haired girl from behind the Bronco. Like Sandy, Liz Hughes was wearing jeans and a T-shirt (hers was dull burgundy), which to David looked exactly as smashing as the complex lime-sherbet bridesmaid dress she'd sported in the wedding.

“Sorry,” she panted as she jogged up to join them, pausing to give David a perfunctory peck on the cheek. “I thought it was a red-tail, but then I realized it was a
peregrine,
which are really rare, and—” She broke off, looked at David with frank openness. “You're in a hurry, aren't you?”

“'Fraid so,” he admitted, and turned to give Aikin a silent farewell salute before steering Alec toward the Mustang. Aikin nodded sketchily, stuffed a shoulder under Darrell's armpit, and dragged him inside. “Catch you later,” he grunted from the door.

“Yeah, thanks,” David yelled back. “As for hurrying,” he added to Liz, “well, it's a pretty big deal, at least to me, even if it's not a matter of life or death.”

“Which it's not,” Calvin agreed. “At least I hope not. But a couple days ago, it was a very big deal indeed.” He did not add, David noted, that affairs still might not be settled—if Liz had really seen what she'd claimed. The peregrine was Cal's totem. And to see one anytime, especially so far inland, was cause for concern.

“You lead,” Sandy told David, fishing in her pocket for her keys. “Me and Liz'll follow, in case we can't keep up.”

“Yeah,” Alec muttered, “and maybe old Cal'll finally set us straight about
his
mystery.”

“They
are
related,” Calvin told him. “But like I said, I don't wanta get into it until I can lay out the whole tale without interruptions. And I don't wanta do that till I've got a look at
your
surprise.”

“Which we'll never do, if we spend all day jawing,” Liz concluded practically. “Come on folks, let's travel!”

*

Thirty minutes later, Calvin, Alec, David, Liz, and Sandy were standing in a semicircle before a truck-sized outcrop of dark granite that thrust from a wooded slope behind David's parents' barn. Beyond rose forested mountains; behind was the farm proper, dipping to the Sullivan Cove Road, with, across it, another ridge. The highway slashed through the river bottom a hundred yards to their left.

But it was the rock face itself that focused their attention—something
in
the rock face, more precisely. Specifically, it was a life-sized simulacrum of David—wrought entirely of rounded pebbles and poised as if frozen in the act of striding from the stone: left foot and right arm extended, expression one of alarm or surprise. Little more was obvious, save that the naked (and, to David's embarrassment, excruciatingly anatomically correct) effigy was patently no work of nature—which, given what Calvin had said earlier about Spearfinger's mastery over stone, was not comforting at all.

“Well, it's a good likeness, anyway!” Calvin opined at last. “Even better than I remember, actually.”

“I'm pleased you approve,” David growled acidly. “Now, do you happen to have any idea what it's doing behind our burning dump?”

“Weatherin' away slowly,” Calvin replied promptly, but his expression belied his flippancy.

Sandy eased forward to inspect the effigy more closely. “Hmmm,” she murmured, “I see two weird things right off—not counting how it happens to look like Dave, of course.”

“Of course,” David grumbled through his teeth.

Sandy probed the juncture of figure and cliff with a finger. “Yeah, well, the first thing is that it really does look like it walked right out of the stone,” she observed, as if addressing her physics students. “See, if you look closely you can see how the granite matrix follows the contour of every pebble interface precisely—which means this wasn't just made and stuck on.”