"My name is Morgan," she said as her hand closed around his on the seat. "Don't be shy. You really are quite cute."
Dobie didn't know what he liked most, the part about being cute, or the fact that she didn't even comment on his seven fingers, which she could not have missed when she clasped it. His hands had felt like enormous, awkward clubs, but caressed by her delicate one, they felt normal for the first time in his life. Her hand lingered there, then traced a curve over his palm. She held it up, as if reading it.
"You will be glorious in this life," she said, then giggled at his heightened confusion. In explanation, she added, "I studied palmistry in college."
He sat there, staring at her, wondering for the first time if she was playing him for a fool.
"What does palmistry have to say about seven fingers?" he asked, and he regretted how cross it must have sounded coming out.
She shrugged vaguely, and brought his fingers to her face, holding them against her cheek, and his big, clunky seven fingered hand felt like a silken, feather pillow. Then, taking his index finger into her mouth, she sucked on it, expertly lapping her tongue around his knuckles.
Dobie's gulp echoed in the loading bay.
She released the finger, winking as she said, "Well, you know what they say about men with seven fingers." Morgan opened her door and got out. "Let me show you the arena. Then we'll go for a drive."
He was more interested in going for that drive now, before considering what a tour of the arena might involve. As he followed her lithe, curvy, incredibly sexy body into a dimly lit hallway, he also wondered who said what about men with seven fingers. It sounded like something he should know.
At the hallway's end he found himself in the front lobby he had been spying on only a few minutes before. The lighting rose subtly as they entered, and Dobie figured everything, from the Corvette's passenger door to the lights, was on a big omniscient computer that could see everything they did. On the walls were airbrushed murals of scenes from a fantasy land. The smell of new paint was overpowering, and the place had that brand-new, never before inhabited feel.
"The arena is in here," she said, entering another door, which had been decorated with bits of junk and metal, circuit boards and a big valve handle, giving the impression of an entrance to a spaceship. In the darkness, black lights cast a purple glow on orange fluorescent. Lined up on racks along the walls were numerous futuristic vests, each with a holstered ray gun.
"We can run up to ninety players in a game," she explained.
She held up a small black object, that was either a VCR remote or a cell phone. "With this I can run the computer and set up a round."
"How do you play?" he asked, intrigued.
"I'll show you," she said, lifting one of the vests off the rack. He felt her warmth, and her breath against his face, as she lowered the vest over him. "I'll activate a game."
She did something to the VCR remote thing and a panel against the wall flashed to life. Red, blue and yellow lights on the vests blinked and flashed in unison. Morgan put a vest on, pulled the gun out and checked something over the grip where the hammer on a revolver would be. Dobie glanced at his and found a tiny computer screen with a full color graphic that said Lazerwarz.
"My pack is in test mode," she said, firing the gun at him. A ruby-red line of light discharged from the barrel's end, with a loud ray gun report straight out of Terminator. "You can fire as many times as you like. When I hit a target on your vest, I score points."
"Do you ever die in the game?"
The severe look she gave him turned his blood to ice. "You never die."
Dobie pulled the somewhat bulky gun from the holster, finding it rather light. It had a good feel to it; his hand fit the contours of the grip perfectly, as if it were made specifically for him. The game hadn't started yet, but already he was feeling a change come over him, a rather exuberant, aggressive feel. He wanted to kick ass. While attempting football in school, he had seen the same change in others, but never in himself; he was lousy at sports. Is this a sport I can actually be good at?
Morgan was eying him in that exhilarating if disconcerting way, as if she knew what he was experiencing.
"You just gained about three inches in height," she said, and he realized he was standing up, straight up, proudly. "Now let me show you the arena."
Dobie looked around him. "This isn't it?"
"Don't be silly," she said, and another smaller garage door rolled up on his left. "This is the arena."
His first impression was that of great space, though he couldn't see very far through a thick, soupy mist. Dissonant techno music thump thump thumped through the gloom, and he found himself on the outskirts of a vast maze. Hallways and tunnels branched off in every direction at wild, chaotic angles, and deeper in the maze was an upper level looking down on the first. It would have been impossible to see without the array of black lights spaced randomly throughout the interior; patterns and whirls painted in orange and pink fluorescent paint blinked back, giving some sense of distance.
Wordlessly Morgan walked into the mist and vanished.
A moment later, a beam of laser shot from the mist, tagging his main chest target; his pack made a horrible dying sound, then went dark. A moment later, it came back up.
"What are you waiting for?" he heard her say from the mist.
Somewhat humiliated, he fired back, but she had already moved. Now he was getting the idea. Feeling a bit like a commando he ventured into the maze, gun forward, then caught a glimpse of red-blue-yellow target lights ducking behind a wall. Over the weird electronic music he heard her stiletto pumps clicking through the maze.
Then, through a hole in one of the walls, he saw her targets, and fired. Her pack squawked and went down.
"Touché!" she shouted. He moved back, but too late, the second she was back up she tagged his shoulder targets. The game of hide and seek went on like that, tagging back and forth as they moved throughout the lower level. Dobie began to see how big the arena was, and they hadn't even found the way to the upper level yet. At least half the mall had been transformed into this strange and darkened netherworld. Then Dobie's confidence soared. After all, she was in heels. He had the advantage.
And she thinks I'm cute.
Then suddenly, the game was over. The pack went down, and stayed dark, while a cluster of white strobe lights flashed high on the wall over the entrance.
"Not bad for a first game," she said, suddenly beside him. Her abrupt appearance startled him. How can she move like that in those shoes? Or in anything. I didn't even see her. "Now. How about that drive?"
* * *
Morgan looked absolutely glorious with her hair in the wind, Dobie observed when he could pry his eyes away from the oncoming road, which was rushing under them at a terrifying rate of speed. He regretted not buckling in, and if he did now he would only look like a wimp. She seemed completely unalarmed at their speed, which reached 100 mph and more, or by the relatively slow-moving traffic, which had became a slalom course. Conversation was impossible; he could hardly hear himself think over the wind and the roar of the Corvette's V8.
The wind was making his eyes water. Through the lens of his tears Morgan's outline morphed into an old warty hag, something that would ride a broom on a cheap Halloween door decoration. He wiped his eyes, and saw the Morgan he wanted to see, and now wanted. His erection, trapped in an uncomfortable knot of underwear and pubic hair, strained for release.
The strangeness of the situation weighed heavily on him as the Corvette's nose pierced the hot, humid night. Indignant honks, Dopplering behind them, saluted their passage. The other motorists were all lesser beings now, bugs to be squashed underfoot . . . Morgan's foot. Dobie had never felt this way before, a ruler in the kingdom of darkness, in a glorious red chariot with a lovely maiden at the helm. Life was suddenly much better than it had been just a few short hours before.
Who is this creature, who came charging into my life without warning? A tiny vo
ice in the back of his mind told him that to ask too many questions might be a mistake, might break the delicate spell a benevolent witch had cast on his existence. Speeding through the evening seemed like fun for the sake of itself, and until they pulled up in front of the expensive Doubletree Hotel he hadn't seriously thought they had a destination. A valet appeared from nowhere and whisked the Corvette away. Dobie's jaw dropped when he saw her tip him a hundred dollar bill.
He thought they might have attracted more attention. A cheesy teenaged kid in a fast-food uniform and a gorgeous woman, dressed to kill. Hell, they probably figure me for her little brother. But no one seemed to see them. The walls and columns were either gold, chrome, or mirrored, and a vast landscape of carefully nurtured philodendrons and lilies, mulched with cedar, cascaded around them. They moved though the cold, air-conditioned lobby as if they owned it. A glass elevator injected them into a world Dobie had never seen before, a land where only the wealthy and privileged dared to enter. She opened two enormous, solid wood doors on a suite.
"Make yourself comfortable," she said, as she flipped on a light.
An expensively decorated living room invited them in, and the heavy wooden doors closed behind them like a palace gate. A balcony overlooked downtown Tulsa, the night skyline looking like that of Los Angeles or New York to Dobie's unworldly eye. For the first time in his life, Dobie felt kind of glamorous.
"Would you like a drink?" Morgan said, and poured two glasses of whiskey from a lead crystal decanter at a bar in one corner.
"Yeah, sure," he said nervously, now suddenly aware that he reeked of onions and pine cleaner and sweat. Morgan handed him two fingers of Jack Daniels in a tumbler. The whiskey had a bite he was more or less expecting; he managed to get it down without asphyxiating.
"We're going to have sex, you know," She said over the edge of the glass. "Would you like that?"
Dobie nearly dropped the tumbler. He nodded, and stammered out, "Yeah, uh, can I like, uh, take a shower?"
"Suit yourself," she said, with a smile. "Don't bother getting dressed when you're through."
Their eyes locked, and Dobie saw that indeed, this was not a dream, he was actually going to get laid by a wealthy, gorgeous woman driving a sports car. Any doubt to the contrary evaporated in the pungent fumes of Jack Daniels. He turned towards the bathroom as a smile threatened to rip his face apart. About five seconds later he emerged, scrubbed pink with Neutrogena bar soap. As per instructions, he left his Mega Burger uniform on the floor, but had to at least wear a towel around his waist. All the while he was astounded at his sudden fortune. Having seven fingers on each hand had never worked out for him like this before.
Morgan was nowhere to be seen in the suite, but from an open door near the bar flowed soothing harp music . . . and the scent of an exotic incense.
"In here," he heard Morgan call from the bedroom.
The incense was much stronger now as he stood in the bedroom doorway. A completely naked Morgan sat up in a bed the size of Texas, her red hair cascading around her shoulders but not quite concealing her marvelous, rounded breasts. She patted the empty space on the bed next to her. "I saved you a spot," she said.
The towel fell from Dobie's waist, but did not fall to the floor.
Chapter Four
The ride in the oversized Chevy Caprice brought back memories of Dallas, where King Aedham had grown up disguised as a human. Was it really that long ago? he wondered, watching Tulsa's late afternoon traffic go by as Sammi drove. I was only eighteen summers when fate dropped the responsibility of Avalon on my shoulders. When Avalon fell he knew precisely who the enemy was (Zeldan Dhu) and what the enemy wanted (his head on a stick). Once he had identified the problem it had become a matter of gathering the resources, and the courage, to defeat the Unseleighe.
Avalon's rebuilding had been much more difficult. Still, with the help of neighboring elfhames he reconstructed the palace in the fork of two mighty rivers, kenning the hardest granite possible for its construction. Aedham's teacher, Marbann, had embarked on a diplomatic campaign to reestablish ties with the other elfhames near and far. If they had to face an Unseleighe threat again, they would do so in an impenetrable fortress and a united Seleighe front.
Now the situation was not so well defined. He and Sammi were against an unidentified something which was probably more powerful than all the Unseleighe combined, and the threat to Underhill, if any, was unknown.
If we only knew what this was before walking into it!
The elven King remembered how to be a human . . . and a part of him would remain human. For this mission they had reassumed their human names, and had worn their casual clothing, jeans and T-shirts, so as not to attract attention. The glamories they wore to conceal their elven features would easily fool humans, but might not pass inspection by an expert, such as an Unseleighe Mage.
Sammi would never have asked for help unless she was certain she was in over her head. When Adam saw the stones towering in the shopping mall parking lot, he wondered if they were both in over their heads.
"The crowds have thinned somewhat," Sammi observed, and began looking for a parking space. "But the interest is still there."
Cops had cordoned off a large portion of the lot to isolate the stones, but since the mall was mostly unoccupied there was plenty of parking. A crowd of bystanders lingered around the Henge while official academic types took pictures, measurements, and soil samples.
It was the same scene Adam witnessed earlier on cable TV from Sammi's room, where he'd gone to recover from the gating, which had for reasons unknown been harsher to the senses than usual. On CNN the British government had confirmed that Stonehenge had indeed been inexplicably stolen, but had stopped short of accusing the United States of the theft. News agencies had speculated openly that the stones which had appeared here were one and the same. The Mayor of Tulsa, Susan Savage, had issued a statement that the incident was still under investigation. The owners of the property insisted they had nothing to do with it, and pointed out the publicity, not to mention the stones themselves, would get in the way of planned-for development. The Lazerwarz manager denied any involvement as well, in spite of heated accusations that the timing was suspicious. The Henge had appeared two days before the arena was about to open.
Meanwhile caravans of New Age groups, UFOlogists, psychics, fundamentalists preachers, anyone with an axe to grind, a statement to make, or a view to air in the international media were en route to what was once a quiet, mid-sized, Midwest city.
It's going to get really weird around here, Adam thought as he took in the scene. Or weirder. It made less sense now than it did before—the stones were directly in front of the arena. Why attract so much attention, and a horde of bizarre human tribes, to their base of operations?
"Let's swing by the stones," Adam said as he shut the Caprice's door. "Everyone else is. Let's blend in."
On their way to the site Sammi regarded the arena with calm detachment. Then her face registered recognition; she turned to Adam. "Just like the rest of the Lazerwarz arenas. Security cameras everywhere."
Adam saw at least five cameras mounted on the eaves and walls of the large concrete structure. Pseudo-Greek columns adorned the front walk, where hedges had been recently chopped into shape. Multicolored tile formed a rough approximation of a landscape across the facade. The only indication that this was no longer a '70s vintage department store was the large purple and yellow neon sign which spelled out Lazerwarz.
"I wonder how many kids are going to disappear in that place," she said sadly. Her pessimistic outlook surprised Adam. She's already counting the victims, and the place has been open for only a few hours.
"None, if we can help it," he said resolutely. They had come to inspect the arena first hand, to probe for and, if detected, stop whatever was stealing the children. Also, it was part of their duty as the sidhe to maintain Underhill's secrecy, and the King was painfully aware that his activities among the humans had blown Avalon's cov
er more than once. Perhaps they could accomplish both goals today; the notion seemed reasonable in Underhill, but now Adam wondered if they were being too optimistic of their abilities, or of their luck.
They drew closer to the crowd at the stones, where a shrill middle-aged woman was talking to a police officer. "So is this Stonehenge or isn't it?" she demanded. In the intense summer heat the officer was sweating profusely, and had a look of extreme irritation. He simply shrugged.
"They're going to be hearing a lot of that," Sammi observed. "I wonder what kind of evidence they would need."
"And who is going to make the announcement," Adam pointed out. "Jurisdiction may be a bit tricky."
Parked at the site were police cars, vans from neighboring universities, and an uplink truck from CNN. The off-camera reporter was withering under the heat, taking surreptitious sips from a cold beer. The crew was panning across the site and the assembled crowd.
"Time to see the arena," Adam said, "Too much scrutiny here."
"Did you come up with a code name yet?"
"Yeah, I was thinking something like, 'Elf.' "
Sammi gave him a sour look. "Maybe something less obvious?"
"Oh, all right. How about, 'Dallas'?"
"Better."
A banner announcing the "Grand Opening" had wilted over the glass doors. A young kid in a purple Lazerwarz shirt handed out pink passes as people entered.
"A free pass," Sammi said, taking hers. "The Bureau gave me several."
"We might need them," Adam said, glancing sideways at the kid, a plump teenager with no magical traces about him whatsoever. An icy blast of cold air nearly knocked them over when he opened the glass doors; inside lighting was subdued, but elven eyes adjust quickly to darkness.
"This is it," Sammi said. "Looks pretty much like the other arenas." The lobby, seething with young humanity, reminded him of the arcade in the West End Marketplace, but was darker, cooler, and louder. An airbrushed alien landscape incorporating Tulsa's skyline covered the walls, and in one corner was a big screen TV showing a demo of the game. An island of benches spray painted with fake granite faintly resembled the Henge outside. All around the lobby were riveted metal panels, airplane parts and industrial junk, either painted, polished, or wired with a blanket of flashing LED lights. Behind the main counter a severe-looking youth gazed into a computer screen.
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