by Tom Deitz
“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.”
“Stood in front of you, you mean,” Alec amended.
“Stood in front of you?” The man’s mouth hardened to a thin line. He looked thoughtful, almost troubled.
“Yeah, I know it must sound funny,” David said. “But that’s what happened. I rounded that corner just like you did, and there it was, just standing right there in the middle of the highway.”
The ranger’s face clouded. “Anything . . . special about this deer?” he asked carefully.
Dave glanced first at Alec, then at the ranger. “You saw it: you tell me.”
The older man’s nose twitched; he shot a troubled glance at his partner. “Uh, yeah . . . Look, if I tell you boys something fairly confidential, can you keep it quiet? Nothing really bad, we hope, but it don’t hurt to be careful. It wouldn’t do to upset folks right at the start of tourist season.”
“Sure thing,” David replied, though he personally would have been glad to see something upset tourist season.
The older ranger took a breath. “Yeah. Well, I think it was what we’ve started calling the Crazy Deer—if it even is a deer—looked more like an elk to me. Anyway, there’ve been a number of . . . encounters, you might say—most pretty much like ours. Animal appears virtually out of nowhere. Runs across the road sometimes, but most often just stands there and stares down cars, almost . . . almost like it was trying to wreck them. That’s what unnerves folks: that strange behavior—even more than the size and that funny-looking rack. Doesn’t seem scared of people at all, or cars either. Even chased a bunch of picnickers off over near Hiawassee.”
“That far?” David whispered incredulously.
The ranger nodded. “Been seen all over.”
“Hey, Benj, look here,” the younger ranger called from the other side of the road. They all followed him to the soft dirt beyond the shoulder, almost at the guardr
ail. There, amid the stray leaves and bottle caps, was a single cloven hoofprint almost as large as a man’s outstretched hand. A few inches away a solitary splatter of dark blood gleamed atop a chunk of schist.
Benj’s eyes widened. “Look at the size of that thing! Maybe it was an elk. Ralph, you check down the bank a ways and see if you can see anything, then I guess you’d better go on down to that curve and try to warn anybody you see coming this way. I’ll see about getting these boys out. Can’t leave that car there.” He headed back to the Cherokee as David and Alec returned to the Mustang.
“I live just over the ridge,” David called. “ ’Bout three miles. You couldn’t give me a tow home, could you?”
Benj shook his head. “ ’Fraid not, son. Insurance won’t allow it. But let’s get you outta there and then decide. Looks to me like you might be able to drive her.”
While the younger ranger kept an eye out for approaching traffic, Benj wheeled the Jeep directly in front of the Mustang.
David looked dubiously first at the Jeep, then at the disabled car, but gamely helped the ranger set a hook on the front cross-member before sliding back into the driver’s seat. The winch whined, the cable tightened, and the Jeep began to inch slowly backward. There was a jolt and an agonizing grinding sound, and then the Mustang rested again on level pavement. Alec climbed in while the older man disconnected the hook.
David tried the engine—and it caught. He put the car into first and eased down on the gas, slowly releasing the clutch. The car began to creep forward, but there was a hideous squeaking from the right front, and the wheel shuddered in David’s hands. He frowned and gritted his teeth, but continued grimly on. The squeaking became louder, much worse as he tugged the wheel to negotiate a slight kink in the highway.
Ahead lay Franks Gap, guarded now by the Valley View Restaurant. Only completed the previous spring, the Valley View was a low-slung series of stonework shelves and glass planes artfully merged with the surrounding landscape by virtue of the rock and heavy timber from which it was constructed. It also had a very large parking lot—mostly empty now.
A hundred feet before he got there, David heard a loud, muffled pop, and more thumping. The right front corner of the car sagged and the steering wheel jerked hard, bruising the inside of his fingers. The last fifty feet were the worst, as the tortured tire shredded itself from the wheel and he had to continue on the rim, a shower of sparks marking his passage.
“Just hope it doesn’t get down to the brake disc,” David muttered.
He eased the car into the Valley View parking lot, and was relieved to see the rangers turn in behind him.
“Didn’t make it, huh?” Benj said. “Well, there ought to be a phone in the restaurant. Anything else we can do?”
David shook his head. “I guess not. Thanks for the help, though.”
“Our pleasure—but keep quiet about the Crazy Deer, okay?”
“Right . . . uh, what do you guys think about it, anyway?”
The rangers exchanged glances again. “To be honest, son, we don’t know what to think. Sure didn’t look like your regular old Georgia whitetail, though. Nor like any deer I ever saw, to tell the truth—not moose, not elk, not even caribou.”
“Well, if we see it again, we’ll give you a holler,” David called as the men headed back to their vehicle.
Benj paused with his hand on the door handle. “You do that, son. You keep a close eye out.”
Chapter VII: Lugh’s Stables
(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer)
In the cold, dim light of early morning, Tir-Nan-Og seemed an island shrouded by a veil of mist. The sun had not yet risen, and fog hung among the trees like ghostly tapestries. The empty plains were silent, the forest tracks yet sleeping. The wind was still. Even the great dome-shelled Watchers relaxed their vigilance, their tiny brains awash with dreams of darkness.
In all Lugh’s realm, in fact, three minds alone were fully conscious, and only one of them was sapient.
Locked in a stall of pure white marble in the sprawl of the High King’s palace, Fionna had not slept for the three days that had passed in Tir-Nan-Og (nor the nine that had lapsed in the Lands of Men) since Morwyn had trapped her in horse shape.
The first day she had been too angry either to think or to take any action. The second she had spent in consideration of her circumstances. On the third day she was ready.
Taken by themselves, the fourfold shaping spells she had drawn upon herself would have been no problem to escape. She had touched them before and knew their form and structure.
But Morwyn’s binding had complicated her plans considerably, for it had insinuated itself through the layered sorceries and locked them tight around her. It had taken her a long time to find the gaps, but the enchantments Caitlin had contrived, and to which Lugh and Nuada and the Morrigu had each applied their Power, had been set to hold another body and to drown another memory. Thus they did not fit her quite precisely.
It therefore took Fionna the better part of a day to twist her thought through the innermost entrapment. It was subtle work and painful, so she worked carefully, removing the substance of the bindings a thread at a time, as one might unravel fabric and yet preserve the pattern. The first shape-spell she broke this way; the second followed quickly. The third was far more trouble, for the weaving there was tighter, yet it she breached as well, straining her Power through like water through fine linen. The fourth was easiest of all, for by then almost nothing remained of horse-thought to distract her.
By dawn Morwyn’s spell alone retained its substance, like a hard layer of lacquer casing the fragile filaments of the other four. That one had been made for her and fitted her much better, yet it too had a weakness. In her final desperation, Fionna had sent a Shaping arrowing toward Ailill, and though Morwyn had broken off that contact, the way of its passage had left a frayed spot in her sorcery. It was a tiny thing, that thinning, yet Fionna found it, and poured her Power through.
Part of her was free now, though not corporeal. A moment later there was more. She split her Power then, and applied it to her bindings both from outside and within. There was resistance at first, but then a weakening that became more obvious as she put forth greater effort.
Suddenly Morwyn’s spell collapsed, and with it the other four pooled away to nothing, like melted ice. One moment Fionna was a black horse; a moment later a fair-skinned, black-haired woman.
She smiled her exultation.
“Morwyn, your head is mine!” she whispered. “As soon as I find my brother.”
Fionna studied the entrance of her prison. Statues of rampant stallions carved from jet-black marble flanked the opening; the double doors of the gates were a grillwork of cast brass, their junctures bridged by four hand-sized knotwork medallions wrought of gold-wound iron—human work that, and very dangerous. Those locks did not daunt her, though, for she had learned something of their workings in that part of Froech’s mind she had seen when she bespelled him, and she had passed long hours since then surveying them more closely. It would be a simple matter of Power applied to the golden wire alone: just so—and the first lock tumbled open—and so, and so, and so . . .
The four magic locks were even simpler, for their pattern too she had stolen from Froech and carefully remembered. So, and so, and so, and so . . .
But what form, she wondered, when she had finished, would make her escape most certain? Not the perilous human nakedness that now enwrapped her, though clothing it would be no problem. No, it must be another shape, possessed both of subtlety and cunning, for Fionna knew that she had spent too long in a skin of other-seeming to change again so quickly and expect to retain control. No, whatever shape she chose must be able to sustain its own survival.
She cast her gaze about the stables, fixing it at last upon a disk of gold-chased silver that had snapped from some bit of harness and rolled against the stone wall opposite.
The very thing! she rejoiced, when she saw the creature graven there, and s
o she caused it to happen.
Her body drew in upon itself, shrank once more onto all fours, put forth again a tail. Red fur cloaked her skin, black hair marked her feet and nose and ear tufts. In ten short breaths, Fionna nic Bobh became a vixen.
She slipped through the open gates and entered the arched corridor beyond the stalls, nostrils twitching warily, seeking such odors as might presage some danger. But no scents rode the air in the High King’s stables save the normal ones of horse and dung and fodder, metal, stone, and leather. Nothing told of danger, but the fresher air came from the right, and so she turned that way.
But in spite of her precautions, Fionna did not escape unnoticed, for as she picked her wary way among the scalloped shadows, two other sets of eyes espied her. She had not sensed their owners, for they had been bespelled to aid their watching. They were also the only other beings in all of Tir-Nan-Og who were fully conscious.
Silently they paced her: creatures scarcely taller than herself, with lean, dark bodies, steel-strong feline hindquarters, and heads the same as her own. One thing more there was about them, though, that gave their shadows strangeness, and that was the feathered forelegs that sprouted from their shoulders and ended in red-clawed talons more cruel than any eagle’s.
Chapter VIII: Home
(Enotah County, Georgia)
It was with considerable relief that David saw the battered old Ford pickup truck chug around the last curve below the gap. He’d called home from the Valley View, filled at once with a vague, nervous excitement and considerable trepidation. There was always a chance Big Billy might answer the phone, and he was not quite ready to confront his father with news of his accident, regardless of its origin. Big Billy’s response to crises was unpredictable, and he had been known to react to almost identical situations in entirely different ways. News of the wreck might send him into a rage (or what was almost worse, into a tirade about David’s driving), or it might not faze him at all. But to David’s intense relief, it had been Uncle Dale who had picked up the receiver in the Sullivans’ kitchen and who’d said he’d be right over.