“Not even one!” JoAnne admonished. “These’re for the party. I swear, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to make it, I got so much to do.”
David paused by the door. “Well, Uncle Dale doesn’t turn seventy every day!”
“And Aunt Katie’s leavin’,” Little Billy added, skirting around behind his mother to claim the batter bowl. David wished he had time to contest it.
“And about time, too,” JoAnne snorted.
“Ma!”
She stuck a floury hand on her hip and fixed David with a put-upon scowl. “It ain’t that I don’t like her, she’s done a lot for us, for Dale, and all; but—”
“Yeah,” David interrupted, wishing he could wind this down, but knowing that if he humored her he might be able to beg at least a couple of the sacred goodies. “She sure has.”
“But it’s just scandalous, them living together like that.”
David couldn’t help sniggering when he thought of the old Irish lady who had moved in with his great-uncle after last week’s adventures. She had at least ten years on the guy, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything—as his mother was oh-so-quick to point out. But still, he felt compelled to come to the defense of his favorite relative. “We didn’t have room, he did.”
“We’ve got the
attic
!
We could have put you up there and her in your room.”
“We offered.”
“And she refused. Said Dale needed a woman around to keep him straight. Hmmmph! Straight my hind end!”
“Stiff, anyway.” David chuckled, and winked at her.
She looked sharply at him, then turned back to her baking. Little Billy stole three cookies and snuck one to David, who hid it behind his back as he edged toward the door. “I ain’t told you the worst part,” JoAnne added over her shoulder.
“What?”
“Uncle Dick’s coming tomorrow.” She snapped her fingers contemptuously. “Just like that! Whole passel of ’em. No notice a’tall.”
“Oh Lord,” David groaned. “Not the Terror Twins. I really will have to hide out upstairs.”
“An’ that yucky girl,” Little Billy opined through a mouthful of contraband.
“God, you’re right! The Dread Cousin Amy!”
(Three most obnoxious younger cousins…)
“Yeah. Yucky, yucky, yucky.”
“
What’s
yucky?” his father’s voice rumbled through the screen behind him. David hopped out of the way as Big Billy Sullivan shouldered in, briefly filling the whole doorway with his ruddy, red-haired, Levied form. He snagged a dishrag from a nearby hanger, mopped his face and bare chest, and tossed the sodden mass atop the washing machine, then sauntered to the refrigerator to grab a Bud and help himself to a handful of cookies, oblivious to his wife’s sharp protests. Eventually his eyes fell on David. “So where’re
you
off to?”
“Goin’ runnin’, Pa; gotta get in shape for school. Gonna try to make the track team again.” It was a lie, and he hated it; but there was no way he could tell the truth, not with the blessed Ban in effect. Besides, he
was
going running—sort of.
“You’re too short,” Big Billy grumbled, wiping his forehead with a meaty hand. “I done told you that.”
“I’m faster than Gary, who’s on the team. Besides, it’s all I’m good for. Softball’s dull as dishwater; so’s football. I’m
really
too short for basketball, and we don’t have swimming or wrestling—or gymnastics, which is what I’m built for.”
“Seems to me you got enough to waste your time on already, anyway. ’Sides, I’m gonna need you every minute come harvest time.”
“He’s got a girl, Bill,” JoAnne cautioned.
“His fine young butt’s still mine long as the sun’s shining, though; and it’s shinin’ mighty late these days.”
David was bouncing from foot to foot with impatience. “Uh, look, folks, I
really
gotta go. But, hey, Pa, thanks for lettin’ me off today. The music was really excellent.”
“No big deal,” Big Billy mumbled awkwardly. “I got by. But come next week when that little gal gets gone, whooee, we gonna see how much you can sweat.”
“When you gonna be back?” his mother wondered. She stared at him, and he found it hard to meet her gaze. She knew what he was really about, he was certain of it—knew a lot, as a matter of fact, had seen things no woman of her background should have. They had spoken of it once or twice, but not in the last couple of days. It was as if she was denying, as if her newfound knowledge was too much for her mind—or her faith—to accept. David understood. It had taken a lot for
him
to acknowledge the fact that his everyday reality was not the only one.
And his
pa…
Big Billy did not know either, yet even he was sharp enough to know something was wrong; that reality was ever so slightly out of kilter around Sullivan Cove. He would have had to be a fool to miss the troubled glances, veiled references, and sudden silences that passed between his sons and his wife. And Big Billy Sullivan was no fool.
“Back around supper’s all I can say,” David called, and was out the door.
As soon as David was an eighth-mile up the logging road, he stopped running. Big Billy would have seen him head up the mountain and assumed he was following one of his several cross-country courses. But he was safe now, so he slowed to a steady walk up the rutted path, letting the last tin and shingle rooftops of the farm fall away behind as he settled himself into the woods. Trees closed around him: dark pines or bright-leafed maples. Laurel and rhododendron crept in from either side—the road had got so rough this year the forest service had not bothered clearing the ditch beside it. Another year or two of similar neglect and it really would be a trail—which would suit him just dandy.
Another half mile he climbed, into wilder territory, nerves keying up in anticipation—or dread. Did he really want to do what he was about? Should he have agreed to such an ill-timed summons? As if to answer his unvoiced fear, the trees slipped in closer, became oak and ash advising
no, no, no,
even as the laurel thrust out slick leaves to restrain him.
He paused and looked back. This was probably far enough; it was time to begin his
real
journey. What would it be this time? he wondered, as he began to focus his senses, feeling the brush of wind against bare legs, arms, and belly, the heat of sunlight on his hair beneath its ruddy confinement; smelling damp soil and distant pines, and the ticklish scents of a thousand pollens; hearing the wind sigh and hiss past leaves. But most of all he centered on his vision, ever alert, searching…searching…
He became aware of a noise from the dense foliage to his right: the soft, precise crunch of dry moss trod by hooves. A peculiar tingle that was not quite pain eased into his eyes, and then he caught a head-high flash of white among the branches. An instant later his guide pushed its mighty chest and shoulders through the laurel.
A stag, it was, and totally white from its delicate hooves to its extravagant antlers. Only its eyes held color: the green of still forest water. A toss of the beast’s head surely meant he was to follow, so he thrust aside the thick shrubbery and entered the wild.
Not yet a mile from home, he might already have been in another World, to judge from the tall, straight trunks that rose about him, the hush of wind on sun-dappled branches. But he had no time for aesthetic appreciation, for the stag was trotting away, its ivory hooves eerily silent upon the leaves, leaving him no choice but to jog noisily along behind.
It did not take long at all to reach it: a thin screen of blackberry briars along a strip of ground that glittered more than it should where the sun slashed across it from the crown of a lightning-shattered oak; a faint depression where nothing grew beneath the dusting of leaves but thick, dark moss. Looking at it made David’s eyes itch and burn. The stag paused at its margin and lowered its head until its antlers barely skimmed the earth.
David gasped at the sudden burst of pain that briefly filled his eyes as light flared into being there: a golden strip wide as his outstretched arms and extending out of sight along the ridge to either side. Straight Tracks they were called, and straight they were, as arrows. They were the roads of the Sidhe.
The stag stepped onto the Track and once more inclined its head to have him follow. Taking a deep breath, David closed his still-smarting eyes and stepped onto it, then walked five full paces along its length before opening them again.
He exhaled quickly. Good, he had done it right, he was no longer in his World—not quite; a subtle difference in the light told him as much. A shudder raced through him. Did he really want to finish what he had started?
Of course!
In his heart of hearts there was no doubt. But did fear and wonder have to keep such close company as they had done in recent days? He hoped not. Still, not everyone in Georgia had the Second Sight, which was what had allowed him to see the Track in the first place; in fact, as far as he knew he was the only one, though Alec and Liz seemed to be growing increasingly sensitive lately as well—due, no doubt, to ever more frequent exposure. But did there have to be such a high price for something he had not asked for? Something that was a lot more trouble than it was worth; that had stolen precious moments from his lady?
Yet Silverhand had called him, and that had happened but once since that amazing Sunday morning nearly two weeks gone when two enemies had died and a would-be friend had rejoined the living. That, he supposed, was enough. The last time, David had shown his immortal mentor a cheap hologram pendant he had bought in a Valdosta flea market. The Faery lord had been so intrigued David had given it to him. And now this summons. What did it imply?
The stag tossed its head impatiently. David sighed and trotted after, trying not to pay too close attention as the landscape around him slowly altered. Briars were everywhere, of course, totem plants of the Sidhe—yellow ones, this time, spiraling in and out among the gold-trunked trees like the interlaced borders of an illu
min
ated manuscript. But then boulders began to dot the spaces between the trunks and gradually replaced them, so that David eventually discovered he was jogging down a file of rough-hewn, house-high monoliths that emptied at last into a rock-girt clearing. The Track faded abruptly, and he found himself in the center of an empty circle of those same rustic pillars, above the heavy capstones of which loomed the topmost branches of a fog-shrouded forest. The breeze, when it found him, was cool. The stag was nowhere in sight.
“Took you long enough, foolish Mortal!” a clear male voice hissed in strangely lilted English in his ear—just as David found his arms prisoned from behind and felt something hard and cold and very sharp press against his jugular.
Chapter II: Threats
(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer
—
late afternoon)
Lugh Samildinach, High King of the Daoine Sidhe in Tir-Nan-Og, let the thin golden chain slide once more through his slender fingers and flipped the crystal disk on the end so that it spun and put forth its own, paler shimmer—a gold that was no match for the heavy cast panels on the limestone walls, the sun-in-splendor inlaid in the wooden table before him, or, beyond it, the circlet on his closest friend’s hair. In the tall, arched window behind him a gilt-silver wind chime tinkled in a rising breeze, sending ghosts of its own reflected yellow flittng across the airy chamber. That wind was warm and held a thin, nervous tingle; the westering sun was a hot topaz a hand’s breadth above the mountains.
His friend—Nuada Airgetlam: his warlord and the nearest of the four at the table—stretched a gleaming hand toward him in a whisper of well-wrought joints. Of silver that appendage was, for he had lost his fleshly arm to a blade of cursed Iron in the Battle of Mag Tuired. But it moved no differently—and with no less speed or finesse—than the real one beneath his white tunic.
Lugh snatched the spinning bauble away, barely in time, grinning slyly beneath a moustache black as his shoulder-long hair and little shorter. “Oh no, Silverhand, this trinket is mine, for did you not give it to me?”
Nuada frowned slightly, then lifted a slanted eyebrow, dark eyes flashing with cheerful wickedness. “I
lent
it to you to examine. The boy gave it to me because I liked
it—a
small thing to him, and not costly; a curiosity of his people, really—but a gift nevertheless, and also his first one.”
“A fine thing, this,” Lugh chided, “that a man begrudge his king the gifts of Mortals!”
Nuada snorted amiably and cast his glance round the chamber. “Mortals made all this, or most; certainly the finer portions.”
“Aye,” muttered the red-clad woman whose face was hard as the beak of the crow that reached up from her shoulder to peck at the circlet of stylized skulls binding her inky tresses. “Mortality does have its virtues. Fear of death is a mighty incentive, and the desire to be remembered after perhaps even greater.”
The grizzled-looking man to Lugh’s left scratched his thin chest through his robe of moonlight gray. “Either that, or the promise of immortality, which you cannot deliver though your Mortal wrights desire it—not, at least, as they would have it.”
“Right you are, Oisin—as usual.” Lugh chuckled, casting his eye toward the speaker: the one alone among them who showed any signs of age. And well he should, for Oisin had himself been born a Mortal. His own willfulness had been his downfall; blindness and eternal decrepitude the legacy. But he was wise in the ways of more Worlds than Faerie, and there were things he knew and magics he could work that were beyond the ken of any present. Lately he had become Lugh’s Seer.