by Tom Deitz
The visitor managed to stop sniggering long enough to cock an inky brow. “So what bugs you most? The nekkid part, or the savage?”
“The early morning part!” Liz snapped, gazing carefully away as the visitor located a pair of well-used jeans and inserted his feet. “So, Calvin Macintosh, what brings you here this time of day?”
While David continued to alternately smirk, snort, and giggle, Calvin rose to secure his pants, casually shoving David off his precarious perch in the process. David toppled backward into the chair, feet in the air. Calvin ignored him. “I thought I’d cook you two breakfast in bed,” he answered brightly.
“Unlikely,” David challenged, righting himself.
“Shelter from the storm?”
David shook his head. “Storm’s over.”
Calvin looked appealingly at Liz. “I suppose unbridled desire to see two of my very best friends won’t fly either?”
Another shaken head.
“How ’bout—”
‘—Unbridled desire to scare the livin’ shit out of two people who may, at present, be having difficulty remembering they are your friends?” Liz supplied with a haughty sniff.
“How ’bout embarrassin’ the livin’ shit out of at least one of those folks?” David chimed in, helping himself to a dry pair of Levis from Calvin’s pack.
“You know,” Liz took up once more, eyeing Calvin speculatively. “I kinda like the breakfast in bed part.”
“Yeah,” David agreed. “Since we’re awake anyway.”
“But you’re already up!”
“That,” David observed sweetly, “can be changed.”
* * *
“You can blame this on McLean,” Calvin announced over his shoulder, peering intently into the aging refrigerator that occupied one fifth of the studio’s kitchen wall. It was likely the only appliance in the world with a carpet page from the Book of Kells reproduced in metallic auto enamel on the door. The fluorescent light inside washed Calvin’s face with an eerie glow that turned his rusty skin a sickly shade of pink and made the palm-sized wire-bound object dangling from a thong at his throat seem to glow. Which, for all David knew, it could. The blinds were up now, admitting the morning light and the sound of traffic building out on College.
“What?” David called back from the bed into which he and Liz had retucked themselves, the better to observe the creation of their impending meal.
Calvin emerged from his delving with a jug of milk in one hand and a carton of eggs in the other. “I said, ‘You can blame this on McLean.’” He brandished the jug for emphasis. “My untimely arrival, I mean.”
David raised a brow. “I’m listening.”
Calvin broke eggs into a frying pan. “Short form: I was doin’ graveyard shift up in the Great Northern Place. Didn’t get off ’til three. Didn’t get away until four, and thanks to our friend the storm and a recalcitrant motorcycle, didn’t get here until seven—soakin’ wet. Bein’ the gentleman that I am, and knowin’ that you two were stayin’ here, and also bein’ a lad who blushes easily, I chose to seek shelter at Casa McLean Y Sullivan, which is also conveniently north of here. Imagine my surprise when I pull up there to discover the door locked, no secret key, and no friendly computer geek to let me in. I become pissed. I ride away in a huff. I find a pay phone. I use it to melt yours down with verbal heat. I then call Aikie-boy on account of the fact that I didn’t want to intrude on you guys. Get him—pissed as hell. He says him and McLean have been gamin’ late, so Alec’s stayed over ’stead of drivin’ back home in the rain. I ask about the key. He wakes up Alec. Alec says it should be where it always is. Then he says, ‘Oops,’ no it’s not, ’cause he’d locked himself out earlier, used it, and not replaced it, but that I’m welcome to crash over there—over there bein’ further than over here. I become more pissed. I say ‘screw it, the worst I can do is catch you guys in the sack’—which I seem to have done. It’s not like I haven’t seen you en flagrante before.”
“The ’gator was an interesting flourish,” David noted, but with a troubled glint in his eye.
Calvin grinned. “Glad you liked it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t give me shit about it either, which I appreciate. Suffice to say some things have…changed.”
“Changed?”
“It’s a long story, and they’re best told on a full stomach.”
David rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Politeness required it; and Calvin was no fool. He had to trust him. Still….
Calvin plundered the refrigerator again. “So, does this make me the first arrival?” he inquired, when he reemerged.
Liz pleated the coverlet absently. “You want the body count?”
“Shoot me.”
“I’ve considered it,” she advised. “But as far as I know, you are in fact numero uno—not counting those of us who live here, which is to say me, David, Alec, Aik, and Scott—if you want to count Scott as one of us.”
“Depends on which us,” Calvin gave back. “Performers or Trackers.”
“Scotto’s definitely no musician,” David chortled. “If he ever starts singin’, head for the hills, for your sanity’s sake.”
“I’ll remember that,” Calvin replied. “But you were sayin’….”
“As for out-of-towners—well, from my old crowd, there’s Darrell, who’s a solo—fortunately, since he’s also a Tracker, and havin’ to give a band the slip would be a bitch—and probably beyond him, him bein’ kind of a space cadet. Gary might come Tracking if the wife’ll let him, but only for that part, and he said to look for him when we saw him comin’. Myra’s definitely comin’ Tracking, but won’t be in until this afternoon at the soonest—said she might have to come straight to rehearsal.”
“Which leaves Piper and LaWanda,” Liz concluded. “Who’ll probably show at rehearsal too. I mean, we know ’em, but they’re not exactly friends. And as far as Tracking—well, they have, but it kinda freaks ’em. Piper, especially.”
“So that’s it, musician wise? Me, Darrell, Piper, and LaWanda?”
“Think so. What about your lady?”
“Sandy? She headed out yesterday, but she had some kind of mysterious errand down south she wanted to tend to before she checked in with you guys. Said she’d show up at rehearsal.”
“Just like everybody else,” David groaned. “I was hopin’ folks’d space themselves out so I could spend some one-on-one time with ’em, ’stead of everybody showin’ up in a clump.”
“You’ve still got me,” Calvin pointed out, then busied himself at the stove. The odor of frying bacon and herbed omelettes filled the air. As if on cue, the programmable coffeemaker turned itself on and began to add its own enticing aroma.
“As for Trackers,” David went on, “since you asked. There should be the three of us, plus Alec, Aikin, Darrell, and maybe Gary; Sandy, Myra, Scott, Piper, and LaWanda, if we can talk ’em into it, and—I guess that’s it.”
“Aife,” Liz appended. “If enchanted critters that used to be people count.”
“How’s McLean handlin’ that?” Calvin queried.
David shrugged. “Who knows? Sometimes he’s fine; sometimes he’s not. But shoot, man, how’d you like havin’ a former girlfriend who’d shafted you livin’ with you? Plus havin’ to be her de facto jailor ’cause the King of the Faeries asked you to, and you can’t refuse ’cause of who and what he is; only you hate anything to do with Faerie.”
Liz nodded sagely. “Never mind that most of the time she’s a cat, which can be either good or bad depending, except that twice a day she turns red and grows a fox’s head and tail and eagle talons, at which time you have to be sure there’s no steel close by, or anybody who doesn’t know, and—”
“Stress for the McLean boy,” Calvin broke in. “I see.”
“I’m kinda worried about him, actually,” David admitted.
“We’re also worried about Scott,” Liz added.
“Uh-uh,” Calvin cautioned
. “That’s it. No serious stuff before breakfast.”
“Suits me,” David agreed. “I’ll hold off on the other thing.”
Liz’s eyed him narrowly. “What other thing?”
“Things that go bump in the night. That’s as much as I’m gonna say.”
Fifteen minutes later, the three of them were neatly ensconced in the bed, with Calvin leaning against the foot, legs folded beneath him, precisely between David’s and Liz’s feet. A pair of lacquered bed trays balanced precariously between them. “So,” Calvin prompted, between crunchings of bacon (he hadn’t eaten either), “what gives?”
David chugged the remainder of his orange juice, wiped his mouth, and flopped back appreciatively. “Which do you want first?”
“Search me. McLean’s stuff, I guess, since I know him better.”
David sighed. “Actually, the main problem is that Alec’s just not cut out for the kind of stuff he gets into—or that we get him into, rather—not that we’ve been tryin’ lately. Trouble is, he’s always been the rational one of the Gang: the voice of reason when the rest of us wanted to get wild and crazy.”
“Except that he also uses you guys as an excuse to get wild and crazy,” Liz countered. “He always wanted to grow up to be you.”
“Even though we’re the same age, and he’s taller’n me—and looks older now.”
“Age has nothing to do with it. He’s as much a kid at heart as the rest of us. Trouble is…I dunno, he just doesn’t seem to learn from his mistakes.”
David shook his head. “No, it’s more that he lives in Camelots.”
“Camelots?” asked Calvin.
“Brief shining moments. He’s enshrined certain periods of his life in his mind as golden ages and won’t let ’em go. Like the summer he and I got to be friends. Like the first summer after me and him and Aik all hit puberty—which he beat us to, incidentally. Like the summer G-Man and Darrell moved up, and we started the MacTyrie Gang.”
“Ah,” Calvin yawned, “I see.”
“Possibly,” David yawned back. “But most of ’em were before we got involved with Faerie and the Worlds and all—back when magic was just fun, ’cause it was mental masturbation out of a gaming manual. But anyway, the last golden age lasted about two days, which was back when I first met you, and Liz and me finally got together, and he got jealous of all that, and Aife used his jealousy to get to us through him. She also popped his cherry, which was something he’d romanticized: doin’ it under perfect conditions with the perfect woman.”
“And then findin’ it was all a cheat,” Calvin finished for him. “Poor guy.”
“Except that he can’t seem to let go and get on with his life. I mean, he really has been hurt, but there’re a lot a people in the world, and surely somewhere there’s somebody he can love who’ll love him back.”
“Unfortunately,” Liz said quietly, “he’s nobody’s number one—not even his folks’, ’cause they’ve got each other. I mean, it really isn’t fair: that some of us are the most important person in the world to two or three people, and poor Alec, who is absolutely not a bad guy, isn’t to even one.”
Calvin gnawed his lip. “I don’t suppose we could boil this down to something as crude as the fact that—’scuse me Liz—his first piece of ass was a Faery woman? I mean, no offense, but everything I’ve heard leads me to believe that any mortal woman would be an…an anticlimax after that.”
David grimaced at the probable pun. Liz scowled. “Even if the woman proved to be an ice-hearted bitch?”
“—Who finally admitted that she really did love him,” David shot back. “Who suffered imprisonment for him. Who risked Lugh’s wrath to be with him. Who’s stuck by him even with cat instincts ruling her mind most of the time, and you know how fickle even normal cats can be.”
“So we all agree that what Master McLean needs most is somebody to love him as much as he loves…the memory of Aife?”
David nodded. “We have to be honest: the boy can certainly love. I’ve felt that love and it’s wonderful. Trouble is, he fell in love with the wrong person. God knows it’s hard enough for two regular folks who love each other to keep things straight, as I’m sure you know, considering how different you and Sandy are.”
Calvin rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it.”
“Speaking of which,” Liz inserted. “Everything okay with you guys?”
“Fine as frog hair,” Calvin replied, with a wink. “So that’s it with McLean, then?”
David shrugged again. “Basically. Well, except that I guess things are a little worse with him right now, given that we’re going Tracking tonight and he doesn’t like doin’ that. Plus, it’s gotten to be kind of a couple-thing, and he’s often odd-man out. I could probably think of some more if I tried.”
Liz checked her watch. “Not if we’re gonna get through Scott’s woes and whatever’s bugging you before you have to head out for your final.”
“What about Scott’s woes?”
“Simply stated,” Liz began, “he’s been in grad school so long he’s about to start losing credits.”
“Faerie, again,” David appended. “His crowd had their own little interface with the dark side of the Sidhe a few years back—before I knew any of ’em but Myra, and her only ’cause she was Darrell’s sister. But anyway, I eventually found out about it, and, again to make a long story short, it had much the same effect on Scott it had on Alec. Freaked him out, made him withdraw into himself, turned him distrustful and paranoid. Even worse, made him dump most of his old friends, includin’ the ones in the SCA, ’cause they reminded him too much of Faerie.”
Calvin rubbed his chin. “So what happened to him there, exactly?”
David sighed. “Best I can tell, he spent most of his time captive in a tree, but he also got to see…let’s see: a maze of mirrors, a wizard’s tower, and a bunch of gryphons. Oh, and all that dissolved by some kind of screwy Track.”
“Not a lot there to base an opinion on.”
David lifted a brow. “You ever see a gryphon?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Neither have I, but we’ve both seen equivalent wonders—the uktena, for instance—and we both know that while things like that can scare the livin’ shit out of you, they’ve also got this…this terrible power of fascination. See one once, and you’re changed forever. Trouble is, we both got to ease into it gradually—relatively speaking. Scott got it out of the clear blue without warning.”
“Right…. So where you headed with all this?”
David chuckled grimly. “I’m not sure myself, but one of the keys to Scott is that me and Liz and him and Myra got drunk one night and he told us that in spite of all the crap that went down on him there, he actually loved that tiny taste of Faerie, and that nothing in this World had any flavor afterwards; that life in this World was just goin’ through the motions.”
“Sounds like McLean again: him and Aife.”
“Yeah—and like Alec, that World scared him to death, ’cause he’s a scientist and it didn’t fit with what he knew. The difference is, that he admits that it also attracts him; Alec denies that it does.”
“So he missed a lot of school trying to get his head straight,” Liz continued. “Did a lot of drugs trying to recapture Faerie, got straightened out by Myra, swapped majors once, swapped back, then discovered that he’s about to start losing credits. And since he already owes a fortune in student loans and isn’t very employable to start with, he’s under a lot of pressure to finish his degree and get a job before the ceiling caves in and he’s doomed to the late shift at Barnett’s.”
Calvin looked at David. “Which brings us to whatever’s buggin’ you.”
David took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Maybe it’s nothing,” he began finally. “I hope it’s just a minor aberration and doesn’t mean anything. Only I’ve come to doubt that kind of thing, when it comes to…that stuff.”
Liz lifted a brow. “We hadn’t established it involved
that stuff.”
David snorted softly. “Does anything else really bug me except that stuff?”
“When I’m late,” Liz retorted. “But go on.”
Another deep breath. “Well, I don’t want to sound like Scotto or Alec, but when anything weird happens anymore, it always makes me nervous, ’specially when we’re right on the doorstep of the longest day of the year.”
“When the Faery good-guys ought to be strongest,” Liz emphasized. “And you really do need to head out, so do you think you could get to the point?”
“It started,” David sighed, “when I woke up last night to the sound of rain.”
* * *
“Whew,” Calvin whistled five minutes later. “I can see why that might put the wind up you.”
David gnawed his lip. “Seein’ how our last run-in with Faerie began with weak spots in the World Walls.”
Calvin scratched his chin. “That screwy deer that came through while we were huntin’ back fall two years ago, right? Or has there been something since then?”
“I hope not!”
Liz puffed her cheeks. “But how do you know this was a World Wall thing? Lugh’s supposed to have banned any fooling with them.”
David counted on his fingers. “’Cause, number one, I felt a blast of chill, which seems to be a side effect of someone stepping straight through; and number two, ’cause we know for absolute fact that the only Track around here’s the one out at Whitehall.”
“Which implies,” Calvin mused, “that whoever brought that kid through was either breakin’ Lugh’s law or actin’ on his specific authority.”
“Yeah,” David agreed. “That’s what I figured too. Unfortunately, I suspect the former. For one reason, ’cause this was clearly a human kid, and dumpin’ him out on the street like that’s exactly the sort of petty, risky thing Ailill’s faction—the anti-human faction—would do. And for another reason, ’cause it was a young guy that did it—younger lookin’ than most of ’em, anyway, say early teens, human standard—and the young ones seem to be the big movers of the anti-human bunch, which is odd, knowin’ how much they like to slip into this World to raise hell and get their jollies—”