The Otherworld

by Mercedes Lackey

  It felt like the start of a wonderful day.

  Of course, any day that started out with room service and a maid couldn't go too far wrong. Maclyn approved of room service.

  He lolled in bed, not quite ready to plunge into the pounding spray of a shower, when he noticed a flash of blue and a dull gleam of gold on the other side of the open door that led to his usually-dull-beige suite living room. Curious, he crawled out of the bed and went to take a look.

  :Not a very early riser, are you?: The Mindspeech was female, frosty—condescending, too.

  Felouen—beautiful, irritating Felouen—lounged on his couch. She wore a cobalt blue silk Court jerkin heavily embroidered with gold over a soft, pale-blue silk blouse. Gold-and-sapphire chains draped around her neck and wove through her pale amber hair. Her long legs—in matching blue trews—were thrown indecorously over one of the couch's overstuffed arms. She hadn't bothered to take off her knee-high blue leather boots. She lay her head back on a cushion and stretched, sending a languorous, sexy smile in his direction.

  "A little overdressed for the area, aren't you?" Mac remarked.

  :And you're a little underdressed.:

  It was a legitimate comment. Mac was stark naked. "You didn't make an appointment. You don't let me know you're coming, you take your chances."

  She smiled. :And this time I won.:

  Mac refused to be amused or flattered. "I have plans for the day, Felouen. Go home."

  :I have plans for the day, too, Mac. I want you to come Home with me.:

  He glared at her. "What is this? You can't get me to play warrior for the Court by guilt, so you fake lust? I don't believe you, dear."

  She laughed out loud, delighted. :Fake lust! You'd suspect that, with every other elvish maiden sighing after your broad retreating back? My bonny lad, I needn't fake lust.:

  She sat up. :But the Unseleighe Court—:

  He blanked out her Mindspeech and turned his back on her. "I won't play defender of the lands with you, Felouen. The lands don't need a defender."

  Unable to continue her conversation in the more compelling Mindspeech, she shifted with bad grace to physical speech. "It isn't play," she snapped. "The minions of the Unseleighe Court surround you, even now."

  "Ooooh, minions," he mimicked. "I'm terrified." He crossed his arms over his chest. "They don't bother me, I don't bother them."

  If anything, her voice grew colder. She sounded like his old sword-instructor, Siobhan: deadly, deathly serious. "You know evil doesn't work that way, Maclyn. The Unseleighe Court grows stronger with every back that's turned to it. The darkness has spread to our corner of Underhill—the filth is leaking through even there. Soon enough, it will be able to conquer even the strongest and best of those who could have defended against it. If you don't face it now, you will face it later—on its terms."

  There was a knock at the door. "Room service," someone called.

  "Yeah—just a minute." Mac pointed into the bedroom. :Get in there—then vanish:, he told the elven warrior. He pulled his bathrobe off of its hook on the coatrack, put it on, and opened the door.

  A smiling busboy pushed the cart into the room. "Mornin', Mr. Lynn," he said. "All ready for the race Saturday?"

  "You bet, Sam. You gonna be there?"

  "Nah." The young man shook his head, disgusted. "Cain't. I'm scheduled to work. I'm pulling for you, though."

  "Thanks." He signed for the food—on the Fairgrove account, of course—and grinned as the busboy left. But the grin vanished with the closing of the door. Mac turned and stalked into his bedroom, expecting to find Felouen waiting for him.

  She was gone. Good, he thought. The day is looking up.

  But the feeling of Presence hadn't abated—

  On his bed, gold gleamed. He could feel it. He didn't need a closer look. He knew exactly what she'd left.

  Shit. The day is looking down.

  Mac felt pretty much the way someone who'd just found a leaking radioactive canister in his house would feel. He stared at the lovely gold circle and swore creatively.

  Finally, he picked it up. Uh-huh. I should have known she'd pull something like this. One of the Rings. He pulled a scrap of silk out of a drawer, and carefully wrapped the bit of jewelry in its insulating folds. Then he shoved it into the leather pouch he kept with him. Well . . . maybe D.D. will take it off my hands.

  * * *

  In spite of Mr. Race-Driver's machismo, he doesn't drive so damn-all fast. That stupid shit yesterday must have been to impress me. Ooooh, ooooh, I was so impressed. Gonad-brained jerk-off!

  Mac Lynn's '57 Chevy with its custom colors was about as easy to keep track of in traffic as if it sported strobe-lights. She'd always been good at tailing—this was so simple it was dull.

  My commission is the same whether I have it hard or easy. I guess I shouldn't knock it.

  Belinda downshifted and slipped in behind a pickup as her target slowed and turned into the elementary school parking lot. She chose an unobtrusive spot about a hundred yards down the road, U-turned, and parked. Then she settled back with a bottle of mineral water and a packet of fresh sliced vegetables to wait Mac out.

  Her old partner in the Berkeley P.D. had given her endless grief on her choice of stake-out munchies. Ed had hated rabbit food. His idea of stake-out rations was a cold Philly steak sandwich, a stack of Domino's pizzas, and a carton of Mountain Dews. Of course, Ed had given her good-natured hell about almost everything. Sometimes she even missed him.

  She missed him at that moment. He would have loved trailing a race-driver with a classic car. He would have known Mac's racing stats and would have tried endlessly to get her to be interested in them. They could have had a wonderful argument about racing, and what it did to the environment. That argument would have segued into solar versus fossil fuel, and Middle Eastern politics, and even—she grinned thinking about it—psychic phenomena. Ed wouldn't have believed the accident yesterday was anything but an accident. He would have argued until his last breath—in spite of her neat gizmo, in spite of the lack of casualties, in spite of everything. Ed had loved to argue.

  Debate, he'd called it.

  She bit her lip, and glared out the window.

  In the end, he had died arguing—debating. He'd had a lot of practice, and he was very convincing, too. She'd wanted to believe him. But he hadn't had as much practice lying as he had at arguing. He'd caught her with the dead mark in the alley, taking her cut to look the other way, and no matter what he said, old Honest Ed could not have meant it when he said he wouldn't turn her in.

  She'd hated killing him.

  The job wasn't the same after that—it was ruined for her.

  She bit viciously at the carrot stick.

  Damn Ed, anyway!

  She could have been happy in the police department for years.

  * * *

  It was Moonchange, tide change, sea ebb at Fayetteville's Loyd E. Auman Elementary, where the thundering outrush of the pounding surf of children battered against the lone swimmer-to-shore, who was Mac Lynn, Mighty Racecar Driver—

  Or maybe it's more like the charge of the lemmings, Mac thought, as he watched small children trample all over each other in their race to leave.

  Fascinated, he stopped to watch.

  Teachers bellowed and directed and commanded in voices that would have done a drill sergeant proud—Mac wondered how many of them joined the Marines following a few years of teaching so they could get a vacation. Parents leaned out car windows and screamed for their youngsters to hurry up. Kids shrieked and yelled insults and questions and promises to call each other, fighting to be heard over the general uproar. The school bus engines rumbled bass counterpoint.

  The odors of asphalt and bus fumes and new-mown rye grass mingled with the smells of books and stale baloney sandwiches and sweaty gym clothes. Noise, commotion, odors: all were overpowering. For a moment, he wished he was Underhill.

  But if I went there right after all of this, it would feel
like someone had plugged my ears and my nose, muffled my brain in silk, and put dark glasses on me. It would be too subtle, like that awful French food.

  There was rarely anything subtle about the world of humans.

  The buses filled slowly, then, abruptly pulled away—little pockets of traveling riot. Parents drove off with their young, the few walkers vanished into the distance—and quiet returned suddenly, like the descent of the theater curtain. Mac watched as teachers sagged with relief against the building or their cars, or turned with slow and tired steps to head back inside.

  He went inside after them.

  * * *

  Lianne's head rested on her desk. Her eyes were closed and her hands were locked over the back of her neck. To Mac, she looked pale.

  "Bad day, huh?"

  The teacher looked up at him, blearily, too exhausted to register surprise at his appearance. "Hell day."

  Mac grimaced by way of showing sympathy. "I'm sorry. You want a back rub? Or maybe you'd prefer that I drive you home?"

  Lianne buried her head in her hands again. "I want to crawl into my bed and die."

  Mac shook his head. "The first part of that idea doesn't sound too bad. Tell you what. We'll go over to your place and crawl into bed, and I'll bet I can get you to change your mind about dying."

  "I doubt it," Lianne groaned. She sounded sincere. She sounded frightened.

  Mac leaned his palms on her desk and waited until she looked up, then stared intently into her eyes. "It can't be that bad. What's wrong?"

  Lianne pushed away from her desk and started gathering up her things. She turned her back to him. There was a long pause, filled mostly with the sounds of her stacking papers and breathing rapidly. Finally, she said, in a small, hesitant voice, "Mostly, it seems that my classroom is haunted."

  Mac started to laugh, but stopped himself when he noted the tension in her shoulders. "You aren't kidding."

  "God, Mac, I wish I were." She sighed and turned, and he could see the brightness of impending tears in her eyes. "You're—you're going to think I'm crazy, but it happened! All the kids were so scared—"

  And so were you—"Tell me," he urged. "Lianne, I've seen plenty of things that seemed crazy at the time." He grinned at her, the lopsided, very Celtic grin that always won women's trust. "I may not hang crystals in my car like Bill Gatlin, but I'll go along with Will Shakespeare."

  " `There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy'?" She managed a tremulous smile. "You know, I think I believe you. . . ."

  Mac said nothing, only continued to smile encouragingly.

  She took a deep breath and relaxed, just a little. "Partway through reading today, papers and chalk came to life and started flying around the room on their own, attacking people. The door opened and slammed shut—it was a madhouse in here. Then it just stopped. I was terrified."

  "I'll bet." He put warmth into it, so much that Lianne smiled at him. Mac felt a twinge of excitement. Something was up—it seemed a bit of a coincidence that he should be hunting a telekinetic kid when inanimate objects suddenly came to life in that kid's homeroom teacher's class. Mac was willing to bet that something about the visit to the track had triggered the girl. Maybe the accident.

  Time to do a little fishing, he decided.

  "What were you doing when it started, baby?" he asked, urging her to keep talking. "Do you remember?"

  She nodded. "Oh, yeah. It was weird. One of the kids in my class had been lost in space all morning—I'd assigned everyone to read, and I went back to her seat to talk to her. I didn't get the chance to, though. I hadn't any more than gotten Amanda's attention when the classroom just—blew up."

  That name sounded familiar. "Amanda . . . is the name of the kid?"

  Lianne didn't notice his increased interest. "Yeah. You might remember her from our little disaster yesterday. She was the skinny blond girl who wouldn't get down behind the bleachers. She's an odd kid."

  Mac felt a surge of triumph. There are no coincidences. I knew it. Same child—and the accident was the trigger.

  He nodded casually. "I remember her—she always act like that?"

  Lianne picked up jacket, bag, and papers and headed out the door. Mac followed.

  "Yes, no, and maybe," she told him. "Nothing about her makes sense. Her aptitude tests indicate that she should be one of the smartest kids I've ever taught. . . ."

  "And?" he prompted, taking her elbow.

  Lianne sighed. "And sometimes she is. One minute she's sweet and chatty and willing to discuss the lesson, and the next she doesn't even seem to realize there is a lesson. Her spelling tests are a trip. She'll either slaughter the words entirely, or she'll get them all perfect—and sometimes she'll kill the first half of the test and ace the second half. As far as I can tell, she has no attention span. And sometimes she really likes me, and sometimes she really hates me—and I don't have any warning before she goes from one attitude to the other."

  Mac frowned; there was something about those symptoms. . . . "That is strange."

  "She has parents that care—they have lots of money, she has all the advantages—" Lianne shrugged. She waved to another teacher who was coming down the long hall toward the stairs from the other direction. "I'm not the only one she's this way around. Her health teacher says she went into a rage during sex ed the other day. Said that she started screaming that anyone who could do something that disgusting was a whore or a slut or worse—I guess Amanda used a few words Nancy had never heard before. What's funny was, they were talking about where babies come from. Really low key, really mild—and all of a sudden, there goes Amanda, right off the deep end."

  A sick feeling had started in the pit of Mac's stomach when Lianne began describing Amanda's behavior. It grew worse with every detail. By the time she'd finished, he was sure something was horribly wrong with the child. He just didn't have any idea what.

  They walked out of the hot hallways, redolent with chalk dust, ink, schoolgirl perfume, and sneakers, into baked-asphalt parking lot heat.

  Mac held onto her elbow as she started towards her own car. "Let me drive you home," he urged. I have to find out more about this child—or better yet, get Lianne to take me to her.

  But Lianne shook her head with a stubborn determination he was beginning to know well. "Mac, I appreciate it—but I'll be fine. I have to get some groceries, and I want to go home and just soak in the tub and think for a while." A bit of breeze touched the little tendrils of hair that had escaped from her French braid. Not enough breeze to cool, just enough to be annoying.

  Azaleas, dogwoods, and a goddamned heat wave, all blooming at the same time. Welcome to April in North Carolina, he thought.

  He persisted, in the forlorn hope that she had been worn down enough to give in to him. "Are you sure?"

  This time her nod was quite determined. "I'm sure."

  Mac shrugged. "Okay. I really guess I ought to stop by the track before D.D. sends out search teams, anyway." Try a different tactic. "May I see you tonight?"

  She finally gave in to his persistence, yielding with a willing heart, if the smile that answered his was any indication. "I'd like that. But—how about just an evening in? I'm too tired for anything that involves going out in public."

  He pretended to consider it. "Hmm. Never tried one of those before. . . ."

  She lifted a skeptical eyebrow, and he laughed. "It's a date," he said, and gave Lianne a tight hug and a kiss. She returned the kiss with startling enthusiasm, and Mac caught his breath.

  They are so warm, so bright . . . so enchanting—

  And so fleeting—

  He pulled away quickly and forced a grin. "Gotta run, babe. See you tonight," he told her, and turned away. He didn't want her to see the pain in his eyes.

  —And they die so soon, he thought. So soon . . . and anyone who loves them dies a little bit with them. Not again. I won't ever let myself hurt that way again.

  * * *

  Re
dmond Something-or-other was pawing Mac's mother again, back in the corner behind the tire stacks. Mac heard D.D. giggling and whispering, and her young lover's erratic breathing. It was, he reflected, a hard life that gave a man a mother who looked ten years younger than he did—when she was nearly two hundred years older.

  "Hey, D.D.," he yelled. "You're never going to get my car ready doing that. Chase your stud-muffin off with a nice big tire iron and get out here."

  "There's more to life than cars," she yelled brightly, but she and the stud-muffin appeared. Redmond, looking flushed and flustered, was struggling with his buttons. Mac suspected he'd gotten the zipper back in place before he came out of hiding.

  D.D., of course, was unfazed. "I didn't think you were going to join us poor peons today," she said, flaunting her pony-tail. "And Redmond and I didn't see any reason to waste a perfectly good day if you weren't even going to show up."

  "Mmmm-hmmm." Mac looked over at the dark corner of the garage. "Fooling around on the cement behind the tires has got to be one of the more romantic ways I could think of to spend a day."

  She laughed at him. "We pump grease our own way, we do. You're too stuffy, Mac. You wouldn't know a good time if it bit you on the ass."

  Mac smiled agreeably and made a tsk-ing noise. "That's the difference between you and me, D.D. If it bit me on the ass, I wouldn't call it a good time."

  D.D. laughed and flipped him the finger. "You'll never know what you're missing."

  He cast his eyes up to heaven, as if asking for help. "Gods, I hope not. You're one short step above delinquent, and if you weren't such a good mechanic—"

  "But I am," she replied impudently. "So you indulge me."

  "So I do. Hey, D.D.—I just remembered. A friend of yours stopped over at my place this morning—she had a present for you, but she couldn't find you, so she left it with me." Mac fished the scrap of green silk out of the bag in his pocket, and started to hand it to D.D. . . .

  But D.D. kept her hands shoved firmly into her pockets. :Bullshit, Maclyn, my love.: "What friend was that?" she asked out loud.