“Wha…? Huh? Another what?”
“Another friggin’ Straight Track, Alec. That’s
four
we’ve crossed since we left Valdosta. Four—and I shouldn’t even be able to see
one
!”
David’s eyes began to water and he blinked them furiously. A soft white glow flickered briefly through his shirt from the silver ring that lay upon his chest. Almost before it was visible it was gone.
Alec twisted around in his seat, squinting out the back window at nothing. “Not even with the Sight?”
David shook his head. “Negative. I shouldn’t be able to see them at all unless the Sidhe are using them. And Nuada told me that the Sidhe don’t use the Tracks down in south Georgia much. They only use them anyway when they need to get somewhere in a hurry, and who’d want to rush to Macon? Mortals don’t, why should the Sidhe?” His brow furrowed. “This doesn’t fit at all.”
Alec looked perplexed. “Nothing Nuada or Oisin told you any help?”
David shrugged. “’Fraid not. Most of what we’ve talked about is cosmology—the difference between the Worlds, and all that. A bit about the different realms of Faerie. Some history, the line between myth and reality. Lady Gregory was awfully muddled, for instance. And Kirk was even worse.
The Secret Common-Wealth’s
as full of holes as one of my old T-shirts…I’ve got to get that back to the fortuneteller at the fair this year, too: Xerox myself a copy and return the original.”
Alec made no reply, but he regarded David thoughtfully.
David noticed that stare, though he pretended not to. He knew perfectly well that Alec could see right through his flimsy efforts at redirecting the conversation, but he knew, as well, that Alec would abide by the ancient conventions of their friendship and not press him—yet. If the topic came up again, though, Alec would spare him no quarter. He’d have no choice but to admit that the sudden visibility of the Tracks was bothering him more than he was letting on.
Should have kept your big mouth shut to start with, Sullivan,
he told himself.
David expertly shunted the Mustang around a sharp uphill right.
Once around it, the treetops dropped away to their left, suddenly revealing the gut-wrenching swoop of a steep-sided valley filled with lumps of trees that looked like the lichen and moss replicas made for model railroads. It took Alec’s breath, and made David’s stomach flip-flop. Heights gave him problems, sometimes.
A long straight followed, them a left, a right, and another left.
David slowed. Ahead was the worst turn on the mountain, a true ninety-degree right-hander, totally blind. Beyond it was one final straight and then the gap. He began to brake for the turn, pulling the wheel hard as he downshifted into second. The tires shrilled their protest.
They rounded the curve, entered deep shadow.
“Look out, Sullivan!” Alec yelled abruptly.
“Damn!”
There was something in the middle of the road ahead, something huge and alive and extravagantly antlered.
And it wasn’t moving.
The ring awoke, sent pain stabbing into David’s chest—there and gone too quickly, almost, for him to notice.
He braked hard—too hard. The brakes locked; unlocked; locked again. The steering wheel tore from his grip, spinning wildly. He grabbed at it, felt it bucking against his fingers.
Beside him he glimpsed Alec bracing one arm against the dash, his legs pressing hard on the floorboards.
The car lurched sideways.
David grabbed the wheel—twisted—
And spun.
Rocks—too close.
Too
close.
The galvanized steel guardrail swept by in that strangely attenuated time that accompanies the sudden onslaught of panic. Someone had pasted a smiley face there.
And then it was the road again. A dotted white line atop a long gray surface that had narrowed to a flat plane of fear.
He was sliding now:
The tires screamed a counterpoint to the howling of Jim Dunning’s piping.
Sliding—straight for the rocks.
“Oh, shit!” Alec cried.
Impact.
Metal shrieked.
David’s head jerked back and forth. From somewhere a pain came into his wrist.
The car listed to the right…stopped.
The engine coughed and quit.
“I just wrecked my car,” David whispered into the suddenly heavy quiet. “I just wrecked my goddamn, friggin’ car!”
Alec was twisting his head from side to side, fingering it gingerly. David noticed his movements. “You okay?” he asked.
Alec nodded, wincing as he did. “Think so.
Did you see the rack on that thing?”
David rolled his eyes. “Not really. Just the guardrail. Just the cliffs. Hard things to bounce off of. No time to play boy naturalist.”
“Well, we’d better bounce out of here, if we don’t want to get rear-ended. One wreck a day’s enough for me, thank you.”
David ignored him. He bowed his head onto the steering wheel, pounded his hands on his thighs. Tears burned in his eyes.
“I wrecked my goddamn, friggin’ car,” he repeated. “And all because of some goddamn, friggin’ deer.” He looked up, snarled through the windshield—unbroken, he was relieved to note. “If I get my hands on that goddamn deer, Alec, season or no season, there’s gonna be venison on the Sullivan supper table!”
Alec poked him forcefully on the shoulder. “You don’t get out of this car, there’s gonna be Sullivan on the coroner’s table, with a side order of squashed McLean. We could get snagged from behind any minute just sitting here. All we need’s a semi to come charging round that corner and knock us all to Kingdom Come.”
Still David hesitated.
Alec raised an inquiring eyebrow. “I mean I appreciate you waiting for me to go first and all, Davy, but I’d kinda have to move a mountain—either that or cut a hole in your roof, and I
know
you wouldn’t like that.”
David sighed and reached back to unlock the door. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Now get your ass out.”
“Shit,” David grunted as he pushed at the door. The Mustang had come to rest hard against the rock face with its right side wheels in the ditch. David thus had to fight gravity to open the door. Finally he wormed his way through. “Window’d probably have been easier,” he observed as Alec joined him a moment later, after first tangling himself in the shift lever and then pausing to turn off the tape player, which had, perhaps appropriately, begun the first heartrending bars of “Flowers of the Forest.”
“Whew!” Alec breathed, casting furtive glances up and down the mountainside.
The deer was nowhere in sight.
David stomped around to the front of the car and stepped purposefully into the shallow ditch, oblivious to the stagnant water slopping into his new white Reeboks. He squatted to examine the damage.
“Well, it could be worse, I guess,” he muttered. “Lost the headlight. Fender’s pushed into the tire, but it doesn’t look like any suspension damage. Side’s probably scraped all to hell, though. Definitely have to be repainted.”
“Reckon Gary can fix it?”
“Oh sure, if I’m willing to pay him enough.”
“He
is
a friend, after all. Maybe he won’t stick it to you too badly.”
“
He
wouldn’t. But his old man would. Man trying to sell Bimmers in a county with three thousand people’s bound to need a little extra. There aren’t that many rich Atlantans up here—and,” David added pointedly, “some of
them
drive Volvos.”
He knelt in the ditch and began to probe around the curve of the tire, feeling for any contact with the fender.
“Shit!” he muttered after a moment, then,
“Damn!”
as a finger snagged a piece of jagged metal. He yanked it out, saw blood, and stuck it hastily into his mouth.
“For God’s sake, Sullivan,” Alec cried, stuffing a wadded handkerchief into David’s good hand, “you’ve tried being a werewolf to no good effect, so what’re you doing now? Making a start on vampire?”
David wrapped the cloth around the wound, then knelt again and stuck his other hand back under the car.
“Uh, Davy…”
“Take it easy, kid. I’ve
got
to find out if the fender’s slashed the tire.”
“David—”
He felt a tug at the back of his jersey.
“David!”
Alec whispered insistently.
The hair on David’s neck prickled unaccountably. “What
is
it, McLean? I’d like to get home sometime this year!”
“Uh, David, I hate to tell you this, but…it’s back.”
David extracted his hand and twisted around in the ditch. “What’s back?” he snapped. “The tire’s—”
And then he saw it, standing pale and magnificent in the exact center of the road not thirty yards uphill from them:
A monstrous stag, the size of a small horse; light reddish gray, with a vast backward-sweeping rack half as wide as the Mustang. Its legs were long and thickly muscled, its chest deep, its narrow head arrogant. Its eyes were black and moist—and looking right at them.
Intelligence showed there—intelligence or madness, David could not tell which.
Even more disquieting was the way David’s eyes were beginning to tingle as the ring put forth its warning in stabbing bursts of heat and radiance. Magic was afoot.
“That’s not a deer,” Alec gasped, “it’s an elk—a friggin’ elk!”
“No,” David whispered. “I don’t think it’s either one.”
“Huh? What’re you talking about, Sullivan?” Alec froze. “You don’t mean it’s…one of
Them
?”
David nodded. “I’m pretty sure.”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s huge—and it’s looking straight at us, Davy!”
The creature took a step forward.
“Oh, God, it’s gonna charge!”
David grabbed Alec’s arm and dragged him toward the front of the Mustang. “Quick. Onto the car. It can’t touch us there if it’s one of them—steel and all.”
Alec stared dubiously back and forth between the car and the animal. “What if it’s
not
one of them?”
‘Then we’re in trouble. Now
come on!”
They backed up quickly and scrambled onto the Mustang’s hood. The elk took another step, lowered its head so that its outstretched antlers seemed to reach toward them like a cage of silver spikes. Fire blazed in its eyes. Steam—or smoke?—vented from its nostrils.
“David?”
David’s face was contorted in pain. The ring was a point of fire above his heart; his eyes felt as though they were blazing.
The image before him swam, shifted in endless cycle: a horse—a deer—a man. Over and over.
It was too much, not like any manifestation of the Sight he had ever had. It was
most
like the changeling that Ailill had once left in place of Little Billy. That had been one of the Sidhe shape-shifted and wrapped in the substance of the Mortal World. Yet even then he had been able to discern a sort of shadow form upon it that revealed its true configuration—as if he had looked-on a memory of a shape. But this was more complex, as though all three strove for some arcane ascendency.
In confirmation of his fears, the burning in his eyes and the ring hot on his chest pulsed out their own dire warnings: Power afoot, dangerous Power. The Power of the Sidhe.
David felt behind him, began to inch his way back up the hood, slipping up the windshield to sit on the roof.
The elk pawed at the pavement, lowered its head farther, antlers pointed straight for the front of the car.
And began to run.
There was a rumble behind them, suddenly loud—a squeal of brakes, a blast of horn.
David’s gaze darted to the left, just in time to see a dark green Jeep Cherokee swish by. Yellow markings were emblazoned on its side: FOREST SERVICE. It swung wide to miss the crippled Mustang and headed straight for the charging elk.
The beasts’s head jerked up; its steps faltered.
The driver was good, David handed him that, especially in such an ungainly vehicle. The tail broke loose but he caught it, flicked the wheel, and was beside the animal. Another flick, and the back end snapped smartly sideways—a little too wide, so that a ragged corner of the Cherokee’s left rear fender flare snagged the creature along its lower thigh. An angry red slash darkened the pale hair.
The creature leapt straight into the air—ten feet or more, David was certain—crossed the road in two bounds, and disappeared down the side of the mountain to their left.
The burning in David’s eyes, the light and heat of the ring ceased abruptly.
The rangers’ Jeep shuddered to a halt at a scenic overlook a little farther up the mountain. The driver killed the motor and opened the door. A muscular middle-aged man with black hair and a lined and weathered face stepped down, followed a moment later by a shorter, younger man whose hair was only slightly darker than David’s.
Somewhat self-consciously, David and Alec slid off the car and walked up to meet them.
“Hell of a place to put a deer—if that’s what it was,” the older man said when he came into easy speaking range. “You boys okay?” He indicated the Mustang. “That your car?”
David grimaced sheepishly. “Uh, yeah, ’fraid so. Ran off the road—was run off, actually. Deer ran in front of me. Same one you just missed.”