Just before Sean disappeared down the trail, he turned back. "We all know you like killing things. Look around for something else to soothe that itch. Stay away from Brian. Fiona wants him." He paused, and smiled. "Besides, I doubt if you could handle him alone. We can."
Then the gray form vanished between the trees.
Dougal glared after him. The eunuch had touched a nerve. Dougal knew exactly why he both hated and feared the witch twins. Yes, Fiona had spurned him. She'd made the reasons clear, in her acid-tongued way.
Certain combinations of the Old One and human genes made the ogres of myth--the kobolds and Nibelungs and other twisted gnomes of earth and forest. Certain combinations made the fairies and the elves, the sidhe, the fair people of light and air. The earth always desired the air, and the air always rejected and mocked the earth.
Shadow stirred. Dougal sensed restless energy in the bond between him and his killer. The cat was bored with these abstract problems. His was an immediate world built of the smells and sounds and dash of prey. Dougal had promised the cat a hunt.
"Yes, my friend. Your kill is near. It hides somewhere down below us. Wake up your nose, wake up your ears and eyes and instincts. Something is hiding in my forest, and you're the one to find it. You're the one to flush it from its den and kill it."
The cat's eyes glowed. Dougal touched Shadow's mind, placing a picture there: the track, the smell, the shape they hunted. The cat smiled back at him, his tail twitching in a slow snake-curve. Some kinds of game attracted Shadow more than others. This was his favorite.
"Ah, my laddie," he whispered. "You're black death, brought to my hand and tamed. Strange, isn't it, the love we have for deadly things, the love for owning and controlling them? So beautiful they are, so satisfying to loose them on our enemies. You wouldn't be half so fair, if you fed on berries or on grass. It's death we love, as much as beauty."
This woman, she would be as beautiful and deadly as a hunting cat. She wasn't, now. She didn't know who she was, either as a woman or a weapon. He would mold her into the mate he needed. Control her weaknesses. Aim her fears. Build her strengths.
Tamed and trained and brought to his bed, he would use her as a rapier to cut the new ways out of the Summer Country, extend his fief, strike his enemies like a thunderbolt out of the cloudless sky. Wipe out Fiona's neat checkerboard of fields and bring back the tangled dangerous wildwood that was the Summer Country's proper face, the face he loved.
And then there would be children, children of the Blood. They would be worth even more than the woman's powers--children with the blending of Old One and human blood, with all the abilities of both races.
She was his perfect mate.
"Not my equal," he whispered to the cat. "No woman is my equal. A woman's position is to serve, my beautiful assassin. To serve as you serve me."
The sister was little more than a prostitute even though her bloodlines were the same. He could never be contented with a whore. Bringing her to bed, controlling her, owning her, would not be a challenge. It would be like taming a chicken to peck corn from his hands. Someone else could have her.
Dougal needed a falcon for a mate.
He slipped the leash. Shadow flowed and became his namesake, a moving blackness among the other pools of black under the ancient trees. The two of them crept along the valley, searching through the tangled underbrush of the ridges and the laurel thickets along the clear limestone stream in the depths, testing the air for scent and the ground for tracks. Dougal let the tension and danger of the hunt, of the primitive hostile forest, wash over him and take his spirit. Shadow lived for the hunt and the kill. So did his master. They became two bodies of one will. Then Dougal knelt and read a track, tracing the thin line of its edge in a single patch of carelessly printed moss.
This would have been the only trace of his prey, if he had been hunting by himself or with a normal cat. Shadow was not normal. Most cats hunt by sight and sound. They have good noses but rarely hunt by smell. Not Shadow. He would follow a scent through the brimstone fumes of hell.
"Yes," Dougal whispered, half in his mind. "Yes, my old friend. We have him. We have our poacher."
Dougal scratched the coarse fur between the ears, smoothing it into a slick pelt and then roughening it down to the roots and the fierce heat beneath. His hunters gave him the gift of friendship, of the intimacy that Fiona and the others denied him. Shadow, and the peregrine, and the others, they were Dougal's true lovers.
The Pierce woman would be another, far greater than the others. Liam had said she even worshipped trees. She would understand his passion for the savage beauties of the wildwood.
"Go. Kill."
Shadow bounded along the line of the track, clearing twenty feet at a leap, and vanished into the bushes. Dougal's finger traced the track again, a single boot-print in the moss.
Man, human, slave: the fugitive hadn't fled from Dougal's keep. The same beast-mastery that bound Shadow and the falcons also worked on humans. None of Dougal's slaves ever ran away. None of them ever turned on him, or disobeyed, once he'd finished training them.
That was Dougal's magic. That was his gift from the Blood. That would bind the woman to him, once she was brought from the land of humans to the Summer Country.
Thrashing burst out in the bushes ahead, followed by curses and a scream. Dougal pushed himself up from his crouch, straightening kinks in his spine and quietly wiping his hands. He could have moved as fast and deadly as the cat, but he didn't need to rush: Shadow could avoid any weapons a human slave might carry in the Summer Country. That was the other way the cat was more than a normal leopard. A brain sat behind those golden eyes.
Now Dougal smelled fear on the breeze, rank human sweat and blood tinged by thin sour urine. Twigs snapped and a scraping sound gave him a clear picture of fingernails clawing bark. Shadow coughed once, a snarling cat-curse followed by silence.
{Treed.}
The thought blossomed in Dougal's head. His smile grew broader. To flee a leopard into a tree . . . .
Dougal could feel a plan forming. Shadow measured distances and angles, tensing muscles as his thoughts bounced to a low, heavy branch and then a higher one, switching back and forth and spinning like furred lightning until the frightened human twisted around and lost his grip and fell or dropped his spear. Then the kill would follow, and the hot rush of sweet blood.
{Do it!}
The image broke. Dougal didn't mind. He didn't need to see the details as they happened. The sounds and his bond with the forest gave him what he needed: the scratch of claw on bark, the thrashing leaves as a hundred pounds of cat sprang from ground to limb to limb, the scream of terror, the clatter of a wooden shaft falling to the ground, the crunching thud of a body following it.
There.
Shadow crouched under the tree, paws claiming his kill. His golden eyes blazed with blood-lust. Beast-master and beast read each other's thoughts, respectful.
The human lay twisted, leg broken by the fall. Deep fang wounds tore the throat where Shadow had made his killing bite. Dougal didn't recognize him, but the Old One rarely paid much attention to slaves even in his own keep. They were fixtures, much like chairs or doors. He only noticed them when they didn't work.
Shadow inched away from the head of the corpse, keeping a possessive paw on the lower back. This meat belonged to him.
Dougal crouched, not looming over the cat and threatening his claim, and drew a short, heavy boning knife. Skill slid the point between two vertebrae and levered, snapping one bone loose from another. Sharp steel sliced through the tough cartilage, the tendons, muscles, arteries, and veins, until the head fell loose. The trophy was all he wanted from this kill. It would hang outside his keep, not important enough for a place of honor but a statement none the less.
Dougal glanced down at the headless corpse. He felt better about Liam, and the Pendragon, and Fiona, and Sean. The cat had settled down, both front paws pinning one leg to the ground as an anchor against
the rip and pull of his jaws. Man-flesh vanished in chunks, to the sound of crunching bone and a deep, satisfied purr like an idling diesel.
Dougal shook his head. One thing Fiona didn't understand, one thing none of them understood. It wasn't the killing that mattered to Dougal. It was controlling the killer.
The falcon, the cat, the other beasts, the woman: it was the control that mattered. It was molding them to his will.
"Yes, my love," he murmured to the cat. "I’ve trained you into what you are. Just like I’ll train the woman. One such as Sean would take her with a glamour and expect to hold her. I know better. Her will must be changed. Changed into an extension of my will. Changed like you, my lovely one."
Chapter Five
Sunshine splintered off the ice, turning the Maine woods into a kaleidoscope of prisms that flashed with the slightest breeze. Blue sky, white ground, black and brown and gray and lichen green of the mottled trunks, all wove together into a world of crystalline beauty and mystery.
Maureen contented herself with finding beauty in the shadows; the sunbeams stabbed at her fading hangover. Waking up, even her teeth had throbbed with her pulse.
"Very smart," she said to herself. "Extremely smart. Mixing booze and sleeping pills."
The sound of her footsteps crunched out into the hushed forest and faded away. She barely sank into the crusted snow, evidence of the cold-front that had followed last night's storm, coating everything with rippled glass. The scattered pines and firs mixed in among the hardwoods bent down like penitents under their coating, white and stiff and crackling. Even their sharp sweet incense seemed frozen or washed from the sky.
No other footprints marred the path into Carlysle Woods this morning. Squirrels, snowshoe hares, birds--none of them were heavy enough to mark the hardened snow.
A candid observer just might have called it suicide, girl. You know, for example a shrink or the county coroner, they don't necessarily ask for a fucking note to be left behind. Do they, girl? Just ask if the deceased had been acting strange, depressed, had just suffered some personal loss? If they had a history of being, well, disturbed? In a clinical sense?
She glared at a shelf fungus on the trunk of an old birch snag, daring it to talk back. The oyster-shell edge wore a necklace of glittering diamonds, the gift of the storm.
The forest wasn't interested in her problems. Some quirk of ownership had left it here, two miles from the rail-yards of downtown Naskeag Falls, a patch of old-growth woods half a mile across and three times that in length. Surrounded by shopping malls, subdivisions, and the regional high school, laced by trails, it sheltered lovers and bird-watchers and the occasional poet.
The city owned it, now. On days like this, Maureen owned it. She had it to herself, sole proprietor. Possession was nine tenths of the law.
She reached out and ran her fingers over the scaly bark of a hemlock, savoring the slowness of its winter thoughts. Owning a forest would be heaven--talking to the trees, guiding their growth and health, understanding the tangled relationships of all the plants and animals. Even before Buddy, she'd been more comfortable with trees than she had been with people.
You would fucking think that a fucking honors graduate of the fucking forestry school could get a fucking job in the fucking forest industry in the State of Fucking Maine.
All she had to show for her degree was a degenerate vocabulary from hanging around in beer-halls with the sexist-pig machos of the unemployed Forestry Club.
Supply and demand. It doesn't matter that the sovereign State of Maine is something like 90 percent goddamn trees. Tree-raping paper companies aren't hiring. They don't need a professional forester to tell a woodcutter to nuke a hundred fucking acres.
So Maureen Anne Pierce worked six-to-midnight at the Quick Shop and parked her skinny redheaded bod in a cheap two-bedroom apartment with Cynthia Josephine Pierce, similar description, because she couldn't even afford a set of bedbugs of her own, much less a goddamn car that started when she asked it to. Mo and Jo, the sister act.
It didn't help her self-esteem any that Big Sister earned more than twice as much as she did, with health insurance and benefits, out of her tech-school associate degree in computer drafting.
So much for education as an investment in her future. But that was Old Business on the agenda, not her current problem.
Okay, Miz Psychiatrist, what's our next move? Back to square one in our habituation program? Treat our patient with gradually increasing doses of the phobia object? Have our acrophobic stand on a cushion, on a chair, a stepladder, increasing the height bit by bit until she can stare straight down into the Grand Canyon without a tremor? Until she can strip off her clothes and climb on top of a man of her own free will?
She walked further in, gradually relaxing, soaking up the silence and the privacy that the forest always gave her. She reached the patriarch beech she used as a signpost, with the hole twenty feet up where a limb had broken off decades ago. For three years now, a female barred owl had been roosting there and coveting small yappy dogs as their unknowing owners walked them on the paths below.
Maureen smiled at the thought and looked up. A faint patch of brown and gray lurked in the depths of the hole. The goddess Athena was home, resting from another night's hunting.
Carlysle Woods was Maureen's sacred grove. She felt like the owl bunkered in her hole, safe here from the mobbing crows of life. She walked among friends--trees and animals she trusted far more than she did any human.
The trees and elusive foxes had seen it all--birth and death, seduction and rape and simple friendship--the forest had seen that life went on, no matter what. Still, Maureen patted her pocket for the .38 she always carried with her. It no longer seemed quite as reliable a friend as it used to be, but she went with what she had.
She crunched her way over the ice, leaving the buried path for her own remembered route. It led across the ghost of a small stream where summer raccoons washed food and left their dainty footprints in the mud, past a white pine old enough to remember Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec, deep into the heart of the woods and the ancient oak that ruled there.
You know what they say, girl: a doctor who treats herself has a fool for a patient.
Going to a shrink meant she would have to talk about It. Anything else would be a waste of time. She'd proven that. The oak was the only one she'd ever told about Buddy, about Jo, about Maureen and pain and fear. But she'd promised . . .
Besides, shrinks cost money. That hundred from Brian would have covered one session, max. It would take her that long just to fill out the forms. Quick Shop didn't have a health plan and if they did it wouldn't cover psychos and if it did, this was definitely a pre-existing condition.
Ben Franklin and the empty speed-loader: those had been the only evidence last night ever happened. David and Jo were gone when Maureen crawled out of bed, groping for the aspirin bottle. Even the breakfast dishes were drying in the rack.
But the car had started and the greasy-fingered mechanic at the corner garage had found a crack in her distributor cap. He’d also replaced the plugs and the air cleaner. She'd had enough left over to buy a new bottle of Scotch and still have lunch.
Have lunch downtown. She grimaced. There were police barricades all around the smoking hulk of the strip club. Radio news said two women had died. Smoke inhalation. Trapped by jammed fire doors. Cause, probably an electrical fault.
She touched Father Oak. "Northern red oak," she recited to herself. "Quercus rubra, specimen tree approximately five foot diameter breast-height and seventy feet tall, struck by lightning about twenty years ago but apparently healthy."
He had already been recovering when Maureen first brought her troubles to him. She sometimes wondered if the lightning bolt had actually struck in the same year as Buddy Johnson. Maybe that was the bond she felt.
Maureen leaned her back against his rough bark and slumped down to squat on her heels. Strength. What Father Oak provided was strength. He could snatch
the lightning from the heavens and channel it down his branching arms and give up a strip of bark more than a hand-span wide and still survive. A little matter of non-consensual pre-pubescent sex must seem trivial after that.
She loved this tree. He was everything her own father wasn't: quiet, strong, sheltering, non-judgmental, sober. Father Oak would protect her. Father Oak was her friend. She talked to Father Oak. Sometimes He answered questions.
She had gone into forestry because of Father Oak, to return his love to him. Then she'd found out that Forestry, with the capital "F," was more concerned with killing trees than nurturing them. American forestry was an industrial process. It just asked how to get the most board feet of lumber, the largest yield in cords of pulp, in tons of fiber, per acre per year.
That was half the reason she worked at Quick Shop. The two job offers she'd had were as an overseer on the Paper Plantation, whip dem darkies if they don't meet quota.
Maureen shook her head at the memory. She reached into her other coat pocket and pulled out a hand-carved flute, double tubes of dark wood with a surface polished smooth by generations of fingers. She touch-traced the twining leaf-pattern of its decoration, feeling the warmth that had reached out and caressed her hand when she'd wandered into a Junque Shoppe on Martha's Vineyard. The tree that grew it must have had a dryad.
Smooth puffs of breath brought a gentle non-tune from the flute--a scattering of paired notes floating out into the crystalline stillness like wind chimes in the icy branches. She never tried to play any music, not with this gift from Pan. As best as she could tell, it had come from Romania and wasn't tuned to a Western scale.
The magic of the forest answered her. Jay-notes floated back to her in a squeaky echo, the smooth blue-crested thieves gliding from tree to tree, telling her of the night's changes and any other gossip that touched their sense of mischief. Her trills broke delicate tinkles of ice loose to cascade from upper limbs as the sun touched them with its sudden thaw. Maureen conducted a concerto for forest and solo flute, lost in comfort and safety.
The Summer Country Page 5