by Hiatt, Bill
Most people wouldn’t have realized what I was doing, but he did, and he actually tried to hit me; however, the tynged my ally had laid on him made it impossible for his fist to strike. Again, though, he looked as if he were having a seizure.
“Now…you’re…spitting…on…his…grave,” he rasped, fighting against my order for silence. I looked into his eyes. They were raw with sheer, unadulterated hatred. Instead of making him more sympathetic to Stan, I had driven him away from me.
“I loved him too,” I whispered, and in the moment I said it, I realized it was true. “The three of us were inseparable back then. The day after the funeral, we both ended up bawling on each other’s shoulders and promised that neither of us would ever tell anyone. Then we became blood brothers, remember?” More old, buried memories seemed to resurface every minute, but I could tell from Dan’s reactions that he remembered, too. Otherwise, I might have begun to doubt my own sanity.
“And we were, we were like brothers, until I went to the hospital. I had a hard time, and I admit, I didn’t think much about you for a long time, but now we have another chance. We are like brothers again. I know you feel it too. That’s part of why this is so painful.”
“Shut…up!” Instead, I plunged ahead.
“Dan, I don’t want to hurt you. You are my brother. You will always be my brother. But so is Stan, whatever he’s done, and I won’t choose. What happens now is up to you. I want to continue as friends, to continue as brothers, but if that’s not what you want, I’ll get you released from whatever binds you to me…tomorrow. Tonight you help find Stan—whether you want to or not. It’s my fault he’s out there, and I have to bring him back. Period.”
Caught between binding spells and raging emotions, Dan seemed about to hit me with every bit of verbal abuse he could muster, but I was spared knowing exactly what he would say by the sudden arrival of Eva, who practically ran down the sidewalk as soon as she saw us. Dan wiped his eyes and became, in the blink of an eye, a macho idiot.
“I just heard about Stan. Is there anything I can do?”
“Be on hand to screw him when he gets back,” said Dan slowly, with deliberate cruelty.
I had to give Eva credit for the unflinching way she faced him. “I guess I had that coming, but abuse me later. Right now Stan’s family needs…”
“A son who doesn’t jump his friends’ girlfriends?”
“Stop it!” snapped Eva. “I feel terrible enough as it is, without you twisting the knife. Haven’t you figured out this is all my fault?”
Well, that was a new one. I was pretty sure it was all my fault.
“Oh, sorry, I forgot the part of the story where you held him at gun point and ordered him to have sex with you.”
“We did not have sex!” snapped Eva with such force people across the street looked at us suspiciously. “Nor were we going to have sex, you jerk.”
“I’m a jerk? What the hell?”
“Yes, you are…but I’m a bigger one. Listen to me, for the past few weeks you have been weird, distant. You wouldn’t talk about whatever was bothering you. Then, after you lied to me, denied what happened at Founders’ Day, made me feel like a lunatic, I knew, I knew you were doing it on purpose.”
“He wasn’t,” I interjected. “He…”
“Stay out of this,” shot back Eva. “You can’t think I was really attracted to Stan. That was just about hurting you. I’ll admit it—I was trying to inflict as much pain as I could. I bet Eric and Shar didn’t tell you about the notes they got that told them to go to the woods. Those were from me. I wanted them to see. I wanted them to tell you.”
Hmmm… As much as that kind of desire to hurt Dan didn’t sound like Eva, her story explained a lot.
“It doesn’t matter why you did it,” said Dan slowly, anger dripping from every syllable. “That doesn’t affect why Stan did it. He still betrayed me.”
“Not the way you think, though. I lied to him, Dan. I told him you and I were through, that you broke up with me. I pretended to turn to Stan for comfort, knowing he didn’t have any experience with girls and would buy the whole thing.” That rang true. What guy, experienced or not, ever questions the fact that a pretty girl wants him or needs him?
Now Eva was in tears, which made me want to cry, too. “He asked me, Dan, he kept asking me about you, over and over, even once after I had my top off. And I wasn’t really thinking about him, about how much all this would hurt him. I just kept lying and lying to him, until he finally took me in his arms. And after, when he realized what had happened, he told me he wouldn’t say anything. I had just used him, and he wanted to protect me! Me! He even offered to say it was all his fault.
“I know, I know, under the bro code, he shouldn’t have been with me even if you had broken up with me, but at least he really believed that I was not your girlfriend anymore.” So Eva and I now had this odd bond—we were apparently both charter members of the “kick the puppy dog in the face” club.
At this point Dan was on emotional overload. I could relate, but if he didn’t get himself sorted out soon, he would be no use to me or Stan. I wasn’t sure what to say that would get him to calm down, but I knew I had to say something—and fast!
“Dan, I know this is a lot to ask, but you can see that all may not have been what it seemed. Can you please, please, help us find Stan, and worry about whether or not you still need to hate his guts—or mine—tomorrow?” Dan looked at us as if I were a manipulative bastard, which at this point is what I felt like, and at Eva as if she were the town whore, which from her point of view was probably better than she felt she deserved.
At first I thought he would just turn and walk away. Then he visibly struggled his way into an impassive facade, his face an unreadable mask.
“What do you want me to do?” His voice was flat, unfeeling, but I had to applaud his self-control. Right at the moment he hated me with a white hot intensity, but he would help, regardless.
“I need the football team…and the cheerleaders, all of them. We’ll be taking the team bus to Isla Vista.”
Dan looked at me as if I had snapped completely.
“Why those people in particular? And why Isla Vista?” asked Eva.
“Because that’s where Stan almost certainly is. I don’t have time to go over all the details, but here’s the basic picture. Stan can’t go very far north without running into a lot of state parkland, and he’s smart enough to know he’s not up to wilderness survival. That leaves west, toward Santa Barbara, or southeast, toward Ventura. Of the two, Stan has much more experience with Santa Barbara. If he wants to hide, going to a place he knows better makes more sense. Stan also knows people at UC Santa Barbara, which is in Isla Vista. He can speak college student, and someone is bound to put him up in a dorm room for a while. He could create a good enough story to accomplish that much, I’m sure. He’ll be sleeping on the floor, but that’s better than on the street.”
“If you know where he is, why not send the cops after him?” asked Dan, a hint of his real emotions creeping into his voice.
“Because Stan is smart enough to find some counter-culture type who wouldn’t want to cooperate with the cops. On the other hand, students will be more responsive to being asked by one of their own. The football players in most cases know at least a few frat boys, the cheerleaders know some of the sorority sisters, so we get the whole football team, the whole cheerleading squad and all their Greek contacts on the campus knocking on doors, armed with Stan’s real story, and we have Stan back in half an hour, tops.”
“We can’t get the team bus,” objected Dan. Actually, he probably could have gotten four buses if the idea suited him, but I whipped out my cell phone, dialed up my other potential ally, Nurse Florence, who in turn called Coach Miller, and voila, team bus is ready to go in ten minutes—with the coach himself driving it, and Nurse Florence along for the ride. (They’re both single, and I couldn’t help thinking the fact that Nurse Florence was drop-dead gorgeous might have made
getting the bus just a little easier.) Dan’s objection removed, he got on his cell, and it did not take long to populate the bus with football players and cheerleaders. Since I had become de facto strategist, I went along (for what Coach Miller was calling “a fool’s errand” under his breath), and, awkwardly enough, so did Eva, though she sat conspicuously on the far end of the bus from Dan.
I had rendered White Hilt and its scabbard unnoticeable and carried it just in case, and while Nurse Florence and I packed a formidable magical punch between us, I hoped magic wouldn’t be needed. My army of jocks and Greeks certainly looked impressive as it fanned out in different directions to go door-to-door in the dorms. Another call to Carrie Winn had gotten us special permission for this late night intrusion; apparently she knew someone on the UC Board of Regents. So far, so good—but at that point the logistics proved more challenging than I had at first anticipated. Oh, I had been on the UC Santa Barbara campus before, mostly with Stan, but those visits hadn’t really given me a realistic idea of how challenging doing a door-to-door search for Stan would be. We started with the five residence halls on the east side of the main campus, hoping that we wouldn’t have to go over to west campus to check out the other two, let alone the off-campus apartments. At Nurse Florence’s suggestion, she and I stayed at the relatively central location from which we dispatched our searchers (supposedly in case Stan was in one of the dorms and made a run for it, but really to search through other means without being distracted).
Together we called upon the wind, we sent whispered queries from tree to tree, we looked through the eyes of what animals and birds we could find. Nothing.
“He must be inside,” I suggested.
“Or over on east campus…or not here at all,” said Nurse Florence with a hint of dejection.
“He better be here,” I said grimly. “I think Ms. Winn will have my head if we come up dry after she pulled all those strings to get the search authorized. She asked me at least three times if I were sure.”
“Well, you do know him as well as anybody, but knowing that, if he really wanted not to be found, he could be in Ventura waiting for tomorrow to take a bus to LA.” Well, there was a cheery thought. Seeing how downcast I looked, Nurse Florence suggested widening our magic search.
“The first search parties will start getting back any time; if we want to try this, it has to be now.”
Our thoughts took wing through nearby birds, but this time we searched farther, farther, toward the edges of the campus. Nothing visual. Wait, something, on the lagoon trail, near marine operations. A shadow, someone under the bench. Stan. Hiding under the bench, but not from us.
“Someone’s after him!” I shouted to Nurse Florence, but she already knew.
“I’m already dialing campus security. No, wait. I think what’s after Stan we may not want campus security to see. That path isn’t that far from here—get down there, now!”
I took off as fast as I could. One of the advantages of being in good shape was that my stamina had increased. Even so, I ran so fast I was short of breath by the time I reached the part of the lagoon trail where Stan was.
The thought crossed my mind that, if Nurse Florence were really my enemy, this could be some kind of trap, but I had little choice in that case but to fall into it. Stan didn’t have very long to wait.
“Little boy! Where are you?” The voice was simultaneously chilling and sexy. I scanned the area around the bench beneath which Stan was hiding.
“Little boy!” Then I saw her, no it. It was advancing parallel to the lagoon path, but almost at the water’s edge.
It looked human enough, feminine enough…God, hot enough. Long blond hair, perfect skin, ample breasts ill-concealed by a white gown that seemed more air than clothing.
But water dripped from that long blond hair, and there were tiny bits of kelp in it. No question—Stan was being stalked by a Kelpie.
Kelpies were Scottish shifters with a particular agenda—they liked to drown women and children, so they could drag them back to their lair and eat them. The usual tactic with children was to appear as a pony a child would be tempted to ride, but the kelpie had evidently sensed that Stan was a little bit beyond the pony ride stage. Hell, after today, way beyond it. Kelpies generally went after adult women or children rather than men, but maybe pickings were slim. Whatever the case, Stan had clearly recognized he was being stalked by someone supernatural but had no one he could go to for help. God only knew how long he had been playing hide and seek with the damn thing. He could have run, but no human could outrun a kelpie, which could shift into a full grown horse, catch him, and trample him, if nothing else. Kelpies preferred to drown people, but to them a kill was certainly better than no kill, however it was accomplished.
I drew White Hilt and let its flames blaze intensely.
“Begone, creature,” I shouted. The kelpie jumped back.
“You,” it said, staring right into my eyes. “Not like the little one. You would know what to do with a woman.”
Yeah, I would if ever I ran across one. My luck seemed to run more to murderous supernaturals than actual women, though.
The Kelpie let its gown dissolve and moved toward me. Its imitation of the female form, if one ignored the occasional kelp bits, was really quite remarkable.
Now, I know what you are thinking. I should have incinerated the thing where it stood, but it was still hard for me to psych myself up to kill. That, combined with the sexual allure, made me hesitate just long enough for the kelpie to make a flying jump at me. I took a good swing with White Hilt but missed. In midair the thing had sprouted long, wickedly sharp claws, and one set of those claws ripped into my sword hand, catching me completely off guard and causing me to drop White Hilt. The instant the sword left my grasp, the flames dissipated. The creature’s other set of claws ripped through my jacket sleeve and dug into my left arm. The weight of its momentum knocked me clear off my feet, and then it landed on top of me, which I’m sure you’ve gathered wasn’t anywhere nearly as much fun as it might have been just a minute or so ago, though I have to admit, it did feel a lot like a naked woman on top of me, yet another distraction. Its teeth were lengthening into fangs. I needed to make a move quickly.
Abruptly the kelpie jumped off me, howling in pain. Stan had jumped out from his hiding place, grabbed White Hilt, and stabbed the creature in the back. White Hilt wouldn’t flame for him, but at the end of the day, it was still a sword, and the kelpie was not invulnerable.
With an unearthly scream, it tore itself free and turned to face him. The seductive female form shuddered and vanished. The kelpie was still vaguely human, but now it was a tall, muscular man, a form such as it might have used to seduce women, except that it didn’t really bother with niceties like a face, being content instead with a kind of twitching darkness broken only by reddish eyes and now enormous fangs. Normally, kelpies worked by stealth, tricking people instead of overcoming them in physical combat—but apparently they could more than hold their own in a fight.
Poor Stan now had a bad dilemma. He had one sword, but the kelpie had two sets of claws and one of fangs. An expert swordsman might have kept the creature back, but Stan was no expert, and the kelpie’s arms were getting longer. Once those arms were long enough, the kelpie could attack from two sides while keeping all of its body except for its fast-moving arms too far away for Stan to strike. If nothing else it could keep feinting until it wore Stan down, and then it would dig its claws into him. His only other alternative was to try to toss the sword to me, a move he had no idea how to do, and one that would in any case leave him totally vulnerable.
“Stan, don’t!” I yelled, realizing that he was in fact contemplating trying to throw me the sword. Ignoring me, he started to lift the sword for the throw. I threw myself on the creature’s back to distract it from Stan—and then my grip was weaker than it should have been. I could feel blood oozing from both my left arm and right hand. Well, so much for stamina. With much more exertion, I wo
uld be lucky if I didn’t pass out.
Trying to tighten my grip on the flailing creature beneath me, I glanced over at the lagoon, then stared. The algae-green water near the shore was bubbling. In seconds a figure emerged from it. In horror I contemplated having to fight two kelpies at the same time, but, no, the newcomer emerging from the lagoon was…Nurse Florence.
Neat trick, that. I would have to ask her how she did it some time—if I lived long enough.
Distracted by what was happening lagoon-side, I didn’t immediately realize that a Santa Barbara PD cruiser had pulled up nearby. I did become aware of them when their lights illuminated the scene. I glanced over and realized they had their guns aimed at the kelpie. From where they were standing, they could see a fair amount of blood on the ground, so they knew the situation was not good, but from a distance, the kelpie just looked like a really big dude wreaking havoc, and they figured they could take him down if they had to. Well, except that I was in the way of their getting a good shot. With an effort I managed to drop off the kelpie and roll out of the way. The kelpie’s attention now focused on the two officers. Nurse Florence had grabbed Stan from behind and pulled him out of the way. The police shouted a warning, and the kelpie, seeing the tide had turned decisively against it, made a run for the lagoon. One of the officers fired, but missed because of the kelpie’s unexpected speed. Beyond the range of the lights, the kelpie slid into the lagoon, but from the officers’ point of view, it probably looked as if it had just disappeared into the night. One ran after it, while the other called for backup. Of course, they wouldn’t find the kelpie…but they had us, and I didn’t know how we were going to explain even the little that they had seen.
Thank God for Nurse Florence. Oh, I know, I know. I still couldn’t be sure she wasn’t the enemy, but she saved us hours of questioning. By the time the officers had their backup and had men combing the area, leaving someone time enough to take a statement, Nurse Florence had both Stan and me on the same page. She had also used enough magic to keep me from bleeding out or feeling the full extent of my pain while the police questioned us.