Liz regarded him seriously. “I hope so, ’cause I truly wouldn’t want anything to happen to that friendship. Besides, I’d like to know somebody’s keeping an eye on you while I’m gone.”
David ventured a smile. “Back to that, huh?”
A countersmile. “You can’t convince me.”
David’s only response was to twine his strong, tanned fingers around Liz’s fine-boned freckled ones. This was it; he’d wagered as much as he dared; it was time to play his ace in the hole. He brought her up short by a section of split-rail fence that marked the northern limit of the fairground. Beyond was only forest. It was cooler there, and shady. “Okay,” he sighed, “I won’t say another word about it. But please at least try to see my side, and
maybe…
maybe I’ll try a little harder to see yours, too. Maybe we can talk it over one more time at Uncle Dale’s party.”
“I’m looking forward to that.”
David glanced up hopefully. “You mean you’ll—”
Liz poked him in the tummy. “Not to bringing it up again, foolish boy; to the party!”
“That’s goooood,” David whined nasally in his best Peter Lone imitation. “’Cause I’ve got a surprise for you after.”
Liz released his hand and hugged him, which shocked him considerably since it wasn’t at all the response he’d expected—especially not when it turned into a lingering kiss right there in front of God and somebody’s Chevy.
Rustle-rustle-rustle:
a sound in the thick leaves above their heads.
David ignored it. He was letting his hands curve around a denim-clad fanny, and Liz seemed to have similar inclinations.
The noise again, louder probably a squirrel.
“Message!” a harsh voice croaked loudly right in his ear.
David jumped about three feet and lost hold of his sweetie. “Jesus! Talk about crappy timing!”
“Message,” the voice repeated implacably.
David squinted into the branches beside his head and saw a large white raven perched there. “Go ahead and spill it, then,” he growled, eyeing it distrustfully.
“Summoned!” cried the bird. “Summoned you are, to the Track as quick as can happen. Nuada Silverhand wants you.”
“Damn,” David grunted. “I don’t suppose he bothered to say what for.”
“Play,” the bird replied dumbly—evidently not one of Silverhand’s first-rate messengers, to judge by its awkward English.
David frowned uncertainly. “That doesn’t make a bit of sense!”
“Message!” squawked the bird, and flew away. In a moment it was lost in the blue glare of heaven.
“I guess you gotta go,” Liz groaned.
David grimaced sourly and pounded the splintery wood beneath him. “I guess so. But why
now
?
Why can’t the bloody Sidhe just leave me alone?”
“Would you really want that?”
“I’d like to at least give it a try! It’s not even been two weeks since I saved their collective heinies.”
“Yeah, and it’s only been a year since you’d have died to get a chance to talk to them.”
“I
did
almost die, if you remember.”
Liz propped her chin atop his shoulder. “You might as well go. They’ll keep at you until you do.”
He nuzzled her hair. “Yeah, I reckon. At least it’s a friend this time, anyway—if you can call Nuada a friend.”
“I think you can.”
“But Jesus God, girl, why does it have to be
today
?”
“
That,” Liz whispered, “is something you’ll have to find out from them.”
“If I ever see that raven again, I’m gonna have something to say about its timing, though.”
“You may have to race me for that.” Liz giggled and pinched his bottom.
Hands stuffed in each other’s back pockets, they made their way past the school building, which housed most of the craft and commercial exhibits, and entered the hot, dusty chaos of the midway. Sensory overload engulfed them: the sticky smell of cotton candy and the prickly odor of stale sawdust; the din of conversation and the shouts of barkers and the heavy rumble of machinery that was a descant to the screams of the riders on Tilt-A-Whirl and Trabant and Octopus—all encompassed by the glint of gaudily painted metal and the frantic shimmer of bright summer clothing on ten-thousand hot, sweaty tourists. David found himself searching in vain for the fortuneteller’s tent that had been present the previous summer. A lady there had told him something valuable—and had given him something far more precious in the form of a certain rare volume called
The Secret Common-Wealth.
He had meant to return it this year, but the woman had not been back. No one seemed to know when she had left the carnival.
He was still musing about her whereabouts when a tug of Liz’s hand brought them beneath the overhang of the tent that marked the fair’s entrance, where they joined the exit queue—far fewer folks going out than coming in. David stood on tiptoes to survey the masses jostling in the other way.
The sea of faces spun and shifted, and eventually cast up a figure he knew: blandly handsome beneath dark, spiky hair; tall, slender body neatly dressed in a black R.E.M. T-shirt, winter camouflage fatigues belted with a length of chrome chain, and black sneakers. A ghost of moustache stained the upper lip; a silver cross on a chain hung from the left earlobe.
“Alec!” David cried over the din of the mob. The boy glanced around, gray eyes questing until they found David and stabilized. His face lit in a grin David realized he had seen all too rarely lately. But then the gaze slid toward Liz, and the joy dimmed minutely, shadowed by lowered brows.
“Come up for a burger,” Alec called. “I’m on duty for the next three hours.”
David shook his head in a reluctant abdication. “Can’t! Got a blessed
appointment
.”
He gave the word a peculiar intonation.
Alec’s grin faded completely.
“I’ve gotta
go
!”
David added quickly.
A final vague, sorrowful nod from Alec, and Liz was pulling him onward. David slipped her grasp and dashed sideways, scanning the crowd, but his friend was already gone, swept away beyond the metal fence that separated
out
from
in.
Once David thought he saw his dark head bobbing along near the Ferris wheel, but could not be certain. Suddenly he wanted to talk to Alec, to reassure his best buddy all was well. But he couldn’t.
Not when he had a summons he dared not ignore.
*
A stab of brakes, a jerk of steering wheel hard right, and David swung the Mustang of Death (as Alec called his lately battered pride and joy) into the loose gravel of the Sullivan Cove road. The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” thundering from the radio was a frantic counterpoint to the stones that spat and crunched beneath his tires as he momentarily lost it.
Better slow it down, kid; you know what can happen when you get crazy.
He did for a fact; a quick glance to where the right front fender
wasn’t
was proof enough of that. Little more than a week had passed since he’d stuffed the Mustang into the bank up on Franks Gap, though so much had happened in between it felt far longer. There’d been extenuating circumstances, of course, and magical ones at that, but the damage was real enough. This had been door week: three days from sunup to sundown in his father’s sorghum fields to pay for the used (and hideously incongruous blue) door that replaced the pristine red one he’d shredded on rocks. Half a week before that for the tire; most of September still to come for the new fender, grill, and bumper. It would be a long time before Mad David Sullivan and the Mustang of Death roamed the night again.
The rightward glance made him notice something else too: an empty bucket seat. He was startled at that, surprised to realize how rarely that position was unoccupied anymore. But where before it had been Alec occasionally riding shotgun
(
cowering
was more like it, considering David’s driving), now it was Liz practically every day. As for the nights, she drove then, in Morgan, her little black Ford EXP, the tiny two-seater with the nice long cargo deck that was good for a lot more than hauling.
A couple of bounces further, hard left this time, and he was scrabbling up the steep, rutted slope of the narrow logging road that did duty as the family driveway before continuing on its way up the imposing mountain on the lumpy roots of which squatted Sullivan Manor (his name for the family homestead), whitewashed and agglutinated within its arc of barns and stables. Beyond it was the long straightaway he had just turned off of, one end leading back to Enotah and eventually to Liz and Alec, the other onward to Atlanta. There were
other
roads nearby, too, but them it was best not to mention—not that he could have, even had he wished. The Ban of Lugh forbade it: that magical prohibition laid on him and his partners-in-secrets by the King of the American Faeries himself, which literally froze their tongues against any mention of Faerie except to one another.
The Faeries!
Damn
them!
He parked the car in the dusty side yard, glanced at his watch, and frowned: It wouldn’t do to keep Silverhand waiting. And he still had to come up with some kind of ruse to fool his pa, though he already had a good idea what that would be.
A tinny slam of door, and he sprinted across the yard, leaping three unaware chickens before pounding up the rickety back steps. His mother was in the kitchen—baking, which was unusual, and (more predictably) with three half-read romance novels stashed around the counters and a fourth on the kitchen table. His father was nowhere to be seen, nor was his brother, the cursedly savvy and obnoxiously pestiferous Little Billy.
(Three most troublesome relatives: his ready to start- first-grade and therefore full of himself brother; his religiously unimaginative and ineffectually overbearing pa, and his dithering herself into apoplexy so as to avoid thinking about what was really bothering her ma.)
“Have a good time?” his mother called as he passed. She did not turn down the Alabama tape on her Walkman, nor did she look up from the dough she was rolling. Her shoulders alternately tensed and slackened beneath a red Clifton Precision Softball jersey on which was emblazoned JOANNE.
“Uh, yeah, sure.” He paused, grinning in silent amusement. A thick strand of blond hair had escaped from her ponytail and was threatening to invade the incipient baking. “But, hey, I gotta go!”
Eyes blue as his and bluer than her faded jeans, snapped around, flashing sudden fire above a mouth gone thin and hard.
“It’s one of
those
situations, Ma,” he called as he broke that uncomfortable contact and trotted down the hall toward his room.
“David, I don’t like—”
Her words were cut off by the closing of the door.
No time to talk,
he told himself; no time for the same old story: how she didn’t like anything she didn’t understand, nor believe things she had actually seen, hard to accept though they might be.
“Caught ya!” a child’s voice crowed behind him.
Already half undressed, David spun around and leapt across the room to sweep the small, blond boy who had been hiding in the closet corner high into the air, invert him, then cross to his bed (one of a set of twins that bracketed opposite walls) and gently (but not
too
gently, no sense spoiling the brat) plop him down atop it, tickling him all the while.
“You’re goin’ off to see the Shiny People, ain’t ya, Davy?” Little Billy gasped as soon as he stopped gi
g
glin
g
. His blue eyes glittered, but whether with glee or dread, David could not determine.
“’Fraid so, kid,” David replied, turning to his chest of drawers. Still wondering exactly what the raven had meant by
play
,
he stripped, tugged on a jockstrap, and replaced his cutoffs and T-shirt with a pair of burgundy Enotah County High gym shorts and a matching de-sleeved sweatshirt from the neckhole of which a winsome-looking appliquéd possum hung by its tail, clutching a football to its furry chest. He had just finished tying his running shoes when his brother piped up again.
“Can I go?”
“Do you
want
to? You’ve always been scared of ’em.”
“Yeah,” Little Billy replied solemnly, “but the Thundercats say you’re supposed to face what you’re ’fraid of. So I thought if I went with you, I
could…you know…
?”
“Yeah, I know, punk,” David said, reaching over to ruffle the little boy’s fair hair before banding his own, scarcely darker locks into a stubby ponytail and knotting a red bandanna around the lot. “But no, you can’t go, not this time. I don’t know what I’m gettin’ into exactly, so I don’t want you mixed up in it.”
“But someday?”
“Maybe,” as he darted into the hall, with his brother a small shadow behind him.
He reentered the kitchen just as his mother was setting a tray of hot oatmeal cookies on the table. The smell (cinnamon and walnuts) took his breath—there was nothing in the world he liked more than hot cookies. Automatically, he reached out to snag a handful—seconds ahead of his brother—only to receive a sharp smack on the wrist from a spatula.