The Summer Country

by James A. Hetley

  David.

  Was David worth dying for? She wasn't talking metaphor. She was talking about the thing she'd called T. Rex. With cause.

  She was talking about David. She was talking about the best all-around lover she'd ever found. She was talking about the only man who'd ever got her thinking about cribs and diapers and maybe tossing the condoms in the trash.

  That was just her biological clock ticking. Men were men, interchangeable parts. She'd quit counting how many she'd screwed.

  No, she hadn't. The number was fifteen. That was just practice. That was just a large enough statistical sample to tell her how special David was.

  Special enough to die for?

  Jo sat on her rock, chilled. Dying. Not having David in her life. The two feelings left her equally empty. At least with the dragon, dying wouldn't take all that long.

  Special enough to die for.

  She stood up, pulled the pistol out of her pocket, and walked quietly down the trail.

  The forest watched her. She felt it, the mixed fear and protection all around her, the mixed fear and rage behind her. Whatever, whoever, was following her--it hated her but wasn't about to tangle with her. The fear was stronger. The forest told her that.

  Raucous cries filtered through the trees ahead, caws and croaks that even a city girl could identify as crows. Jo slowed down, a cold lump forming in her chest. Crows and ravens were scavengers. A mob of them usually meant dead meat.

  The chill spread down to her fingers and toes. That was how they always found the bodies in the Westerns, she remembered. By following the vultures. Grandpa used to tell his tales about the war, about the crows over the battlefield, picking at the dead. He'd talked about rats, too.

  David.

  The stranger had said David was dying. She was too late.

  The cold turned her heart to ice. Jo staggered off the trail and pressed her forehead against the rough bark of a tree. David. Dead. She felt the corrugations of the trunk biting into her skin and wanted to pound her skull against them until the blood ran and her head split open and the pain ended in oblivion.

  David. Dead.

  Instead, she dug her fingernails into the bark as if she was a cat, sharpening them. Fiona, the shadow had said. Dougal. The bastard and bitch who ran this freak-show world. Her rage started to burn through her fingers, and resinous smoke rose where she touched the bark.

  "Dougal and Fiona," she growled. Somebody should tell the ravens, dinner was about to be served in some other locations. Jo snarled. A part of her froze at the sound, so like a hungry lion stalking through the African plains.

  {. . . not . . . dead . . .}

  The whispers returned to mock her. David's voice rose from the tree, from the sticky pinesap gumming her fingers where she had gouged straight through to living wood.

  She stared at her nails, at the grooves cut into the bark. Some bear must have done that. She'd seen that on PBS, too, another Nature program. That's how bears marked their territory. She couldn't have done that; she hadn't even split a nail. She'd just put her fingers where the bear had already torn the bark.

  {. . . anger . . .}

  She gritted her teeth and snarled again, this time with words.

  "You want anger, I'll show you anger! I'll turn this goddamn tree into a torch! I'll burn your forest flat, your fucking vampire forest living off of David's body! I'll roast your god-almighty-damned land alive for taking my man from me!"

  She cranked the Bic up to maximum flame and held it against the resin and bark. Her rage glared into the dampness, forcing steam to curl out and then smoke and then flame as the green wood spat into fire against its will. She drove the heat of fire deep into the heartwood of the pine. Burn, baby, burn!

  {No!}

  David's voice screamed pain as if it was his own flesh in the fire. Jo shuddered, and she beat the flames into silence. Boiling pitch clung to her palms and hardened. She peeled it off, leaving clean undamaged skin behind. Illusions.

  The land is David, and David is the land, whispered the remembered voice. She'd taken that as metaphor.

  She'd joined Maureen in the world of delusion, of voices in her head, of strangers following her around. Had she ever shot that man, been in the sinkhole, run screaming from the avenue of skulls? Was the dragon real?

  {. . . real . . .}

  David.

  The crows still called their brothers to the feast. Jo stared at the charred circle of bark on the pine, the claw-marks matching her fingers, the thin white scars crossing her palms where the dragon scales had cut her.

  Those cuts had healed too fast. This was a land of magic.

  If David was dead, she had to see his body. She had to bury him. Then she would go and meet the owner of this forest. Debts would be paid.

  With interest.

  The cold anger carried her down the path, into the thin smell of death that grew into a garbage reek so thick she almost had to lean against the air to walk. Nearer and nearer came the raucous cackle of the crows, until they pounded her ears and the hiss of their wings filled the spaces in between their calls.

  There were too many birds. You couldn't feed that many crows from the fields of Armageddon. And then she saw the long, low lump ahead, crawling with a buzzing horde of flies and suddenly realized the flies were the crows, and what she saw was huge.

  It was the dragon. The frigging dragon was dead, not David.

  She gagged at the thick stench of rotten meat and the maggot-crawl of crows and ravens. They tore threads of meat from the carcass, fought, swirled overhead, waddled around like overweight ducks with the gorge of carrion in their bellies.

  She wrestled her stomach back into line. Damn good thing she'd skipped breakfast. To hell with what killed the dragon. The question she wanted answered was, Where was David?

  She saw scraps of cloth on the ground, fragments of curved fiberglass, a scattering of arrows. She forced her way through the heavy air and found a discarded backpack. She found a tangle of hooked-thorn green briar wrapped into the wicker effigy of a man David's height and weight.

  Dying, she remembered. Dying, inch by inch as the strangling python of thorns sucks his blood, his breath, his very soul out of his body and spreads it through the land.

  The icy lump in her chest spread to her lungs and blocked her breathing. She forgot the racket of the crows. She forgot the stench. She knelt down by the green man and stared at it.

  David.

  The forest told her that was David.

  She touched it. The thorns writhed away from her hand as if they refused to bite her. She'd touched the leg of the form and now she could see blue denim between the vines. David was inside.

  The denim was warm, even though the trees shaded her. If she watched carefully, a slight swell and fall moved the briars around the thing's chest. David was still alive.

  She fumbled the knife out of her pocket. She split a nail opening it. She slipped the blade under a single stem and cut carefully, delicately, away from David's leg.

  The scream jerked her hand away--the deep piercing scream of torture as if she'd lit bamboo slivers under his fingernails. The cut end of the briar writhed like a snake, away from her, away from the knife. It dripped the thick crimson of human blood.

  {I'll die if you cut me loose. I'll be trapped outside my body.}

  The clarity of David's voice jerked her out of her robot movements. He was here. He was focused.

  Fire had hurt him. The knife had hurt him. Jo sat back on her heels and stared at the vines. She could kill them with her eyes, she knew. If she could burn wet brush with her glare, set fire to a living tree in springtime, then she could scorch those vines into ash and charcoal.

  And David would die.

  She touched the vines again. "How can I set you free?"

  {. . . master . . .}

  Now he'd gone fuzzy again, just the single word coming through the static. Just before, he'd even said "I," not that goddamn "We."

  "I'll fry yo
ur Master's liver for lunch," she muttered. She reached for another vine of the briar, and it twisted away from her in fear. The knife flashed in her hand.

  {NO!} The mental scream was deafening.

  David's pain wrenched her guts. Another vine leaked drips of blood onto the dry leaves. "Can't do that," she hissed. "Fucking blood loss will kill him even if the pain doesn't."

  {. . . leave . . .}

  He was fading. Even with her hand on the stems wrapping his arm, he was fading into the static. Heedless of the thorns, she dug down underneath the briars and touched the skin of his wrist. His pulse beat weak and slow, and she felt only the faintest echo of life and thought.

  It was as if his soul was spreading out, like those drops of blood were mixing with the water of a pool, starting out pure red and gradually thinning away to purple smoke and then the merest dark haze before disappearing completely in the blue reflection of the sky. Another day, maybe another hour, and he would be gone beyond recall.

  She dropped the knife. She squatted on the forest floor, staring at the vines forming the effigy of the man she loved, and thought.

  David was dying. She was his only chance.

  Every thought led back to the same point: the forest's hold was too strong and too intimate for outside force to work. She could only see one place where it might be vulnerable, one place she could fight it. She could force him to focus and hold him together, waiting for a miracle.

  Slowly, gently, as if she was reaching for one of those over-trusting trout, she captured one of the rooted vines. The thorns twisted away from her flesh, and she jerked suddenly to force them to cut her palm. Her own blood touched the green stem.

  "I will follow you," she whispered. "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge." She felt her face set into a grim mask of stone.

  "I will track you to the ends of this land and gather every bit of you and bring you back. I will search every hill and hollow, every root and branch, I will search the rock and soil and water and the very sky if it be necessary. I swear it by the sun and moon and all the stars above." She paused for breath and emphasis.

  "I will bring you back or die with you."

  {Jo, don't!}

  Slowly, gently, precisely, as if she was arranging flowers for a Zen master, Jo draped the vine three times around her wrist and forced it to scratch the skin. She held the stem against her blood. She felt it root. She sent her mind into the thin filament joining her to the land and asked the darkness she found there to bring her David.

  The wordless hiss touched her hand and embraced her. She wrapped herself around its fog and squeezed it into the semblance of a man and held it. She looked around for her body and the daylight of the forest.

  Darkness surrounded them.

  {David?}

  * * *

  Sean leaned against a tree and coughed again, gently, the noise buried under the ravens' calls. He'd heal so much faster if he didn't try to move.

  But then he'd lose her.

  That bitch was his weapon against Fiona and Brian. That bitch owed him blood. He tried to weigh the balance. Revenge would be satisfied, either way. He fingered the heavy knife Fiona had taken from Brian.

  The woman knelt there by her lover. She didn't move.

  He stared at her back, willing her to move, willing her to speak, willing her to smell or hear or feel him through the land, willing her to notice him and pull out that ugly piece of human metal that never should have worked.

  If she sat there much longer, she'd make his decision for him. He knew how to find his dearest siblings without her help.

  His gut ached. His gut refused even the thought of food. The simple act of drinking water felt like it tore his chest and belly into shreds. Maybe it would be easier just to die, like a gut-shot deer in the woods.

  As the humans would say, "Up yours!" he thought. Next week, he'd be better. The week after that, he'd be back to normal. He'd been through this before. He would survive.

  Survive. He smiled. The full moon would rise tomorrow night. So much for Maureen's prophecy. Live one more night and he would break the doom she'd laid upon him.

  The sister still knelt there, her back toward him. Sean drew the knife and stole forward, as silent as a cat. Who needed magic when his enemies were fools?

  Something snagged his ankle, and he fell. Instinct and training tucked his fall into a roll, but his gut stabbed him and broke the silent flow. He staggered to his feet in a rustle of leaves and cracking twigs.

  She still knelt there like a statue.

  Sean shifted his weight to move again. A vise tightened around his leg, and he jerked his concentration away from her defenseless back.

  It was a vine. A green vine wrapped around his ankle and up his leg, its tendrils questing upwards. He snarled and hacked the vicious thing loose from the ground, ripping its thorns out of his pants and flesh. Red blossoms of blood tracked the cloth where it had twined.

  Even cut loose, the thing twisted like a mad snake in his hands. He shuddered and threw it across the clearing.

  The dead leaves rustled as if disturbed by a thousand insects. Smooth green curls and loops twisted out of the forest floor, searching. Sean knew they searched for him.

  He backed away. Gritting his teeth with concentration, shuffling his feet to avoid hidden traps and snares, he edged further and further away from the silent figure kneeling amid the briars.

  The forest quieted.

  So. Sean chuckled silently. He'd wanted a balance. He hadn't been able to decide between his hates. Now it looked like Brian and Fiona had just moved up to the top of the list.

  And it looked like Dougal didn't own this part of the forest any more. Sean wondered when the bastard would find out. And how.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  All Maureen could do was run. Buddy Johnson was stronger than she was. He was faster. Above all, he was meaner, and she fled through the backyards of her childhood. Sweat drenched her. Hedges tore at her skin and lashed her eyes. Again he caught her and dragged her into the overgrown yew bushes behind the Ford's old carriage house. Again he stripped off her shirt and shorts and pinned her naked body against the peeling clapboards and rough fieldstone of the empty building.

  And then it changed, as she stepped aside in a surreal jiu-jitsu move. Time and again, she cycled through the pain and terror of the chase until he caught her and groped her and forced her down on the prickly dead needles under the yews. Each time, she turned into mist and slipped away.

  Heat boiled in her belly. Her power flowed across the years and she seized him like a doll, pulling one leg from the other until he split from crotch to forehead like a wishbone. "Make a wish," she whispered savagely, in her dream. "Make a wish."

  She threw the bloody pieces away and twisted her world onto a new path.

  * * *

  Maureen woke slowly to warmth and softness. Images floated through her head, the fragments and remains of dreams--hot, wet, erotic dreams of Brian's touch, Brian's kisses, Brian enfolding her and covering her naked body with his. She smelled the sharpness of his male sweat, felt its touch on her skin, felt the drying sticky residue of him on her bare thighs.

  Her thoughts drifted in the place where such things were possible, away from the panic his actual touch would bring. In her dreams, she controlled things. She made the moves. She made the rules. She acted on him. That killed the memories.

  She stretched lazily, like a cat, basking in the feel of silk sheets on her bare skin. A bed like this was a work of art.

  Then her stomach growled and disturbed the peace.

  She opened her eyes. Dark beams arched overhead, alive with the deep golden brown of ancient varnish. Sunlight in tall windows shot beams of warmth across the room to fall on match-board mahogany paneling, splashing light on the steely gleam of hanging swords and lances, bringing out flashes of glittering blue and green in the tapestries, firing red sandstone into glowing coals.

  Dougal's bedroom.


  Tapered columns of golden oak stood at the four corners of the bed. The canopy and hangings they had once supported were gone; magic or technology took away the need to wrap the sleepers within a tent, as if they were camping inside the cold, damp castle. Her bathrobe hung, waiting, on the nearest post, and she smelled the fresh birch-smoke of a new-laid fire in the bathroom. She even sniffed a hint of coffee. Good coffee.

  Coffee that she didn't have to make, didn't have to wait for. Servants were a wonderful idea.

  Dougal grunted beside her, rolled over, and settled back to the slow, steady breathing of sound sleep. She turned to him. He lay face up, naked and half-covered by the sheets. Her eyes narrowed, comparing him to her dreams of Brian. She shook her head, gently so she wouldn't wake him. He still looked like a shaved chimpanzee stitched back together after a bad car wreck.

  So it was done. She remembered dreams, but her brain had shoved the rest off into a corner and walled it up with stone. Somewhere deep inside her belly, sperm and ova played their game of blind-man's-bluff with the calendar. She studied his face, relaxed in sleep. What kind of children would he father? Not that it would make any difference . . . .

  She quietly lifted herself up on one elbow and looked down at him. A sardonic smile touched her lips as she remembered his arrogant trust in his powers.

  Then she drove her fist into his throat.

  Every ounce of her weight and will rode behind the blow. He gasped, and his arms clutched at her. She rolled away, but one hand snatched her left arm and squeezed her biceps in a vise. Fire shot straight up her shoulder to her neck. The other hand groped for her, and she slashed her own right hand across his face, sinking her fingernails deep into his eye-sockets. A rasping scream forced its way out of his throat and he let go.

  She tumbled to the floor, smashing first her elbow and then her head on the wood. Dazed, she rolled through a black tunnel shot with the fire of her hurts. Something smacked her bare back, and she shook black spider-webs from her eyes.