Changer's Daughter (42 page)

For now, though, he is uneasy.

Demetrios swings his goat legs out of the hotel bed, moving quietly so as not to disturb Phoebus, his roommate, who had gone to bed exhausted from rehearsal. When Tommy works with them, the power of his music buoys them all up. The recording is a pale imitation, like caffeine replacing honest sleep.

He does not bother with his disguise before stepping out into the hallway—this floor is restricted to only the theriomorphs, Tommy, and Lil. Not even Mary Malone can get up here, a thing that keeps her safer than she might realize, since in an ideal universe she would begin their day with a round of calisthenics and aerobics before breakfast.

The satyrs would probably rape her,
Demetrios thinks dryly. For them the line between enthusiastic sex and a bit of genial roughness isn’t that well marked. Not that fauns are particular angels, but goaty as they are, they have a bit more self-restraint.

As he trots down the hallway, long brown hair pushed back from his rather pointed ears so that he can hear more easily, Demetrios focuses on one of the things that had bothered him, even in the comparative quiet of his room. The satyrs aren’t noisy enough.

He’s heard the ruckus they can raise often enough. During auditions they made some small effort at self-control, each eager to be chosen for this great opportunity. However, since then, they’ve been so rambunctious that Lil finally rented the rooms both above and beneath their suite to halt the complaints.

Demetrios sometimes pities the roadies who have those rooms.

Pausing outside of the satyrs’s suite, he presses an ear to the door. Dominant is the repetitious sound track of a porno film underscored by simulated cries of passion from several women and probably a couple of men. Then there are the raucous comments of the observers, rude and anatomically graphic.

But as he sorts through these, wincing occasionally as they suggest things obscene even to his experienced hearing, Demetrios becomes more and more certain that something is missing.

Where is Georgios’s voice? The herd stallion normally leads such commentary, but his distinctive turns of phrase, showing ample evidence of the years he spent writing pornography, are missing from the mix. So are the voices of Stud and Hunk, his two greatest disciples.

Demetrios frowns. One of them might have fallen asleep, but all three? He can’t believe it. It would be a point of macho pride for Georgios, at least, to stay awake as long as the others.

He tries the door. It is unlocked and he enters.

The room is lit only by the light from the big-screen television on which two women and a man perform some erotic maneuvers involving a blue-velvet sofa and an astonishing array of sex toys. Beer cans are scattered on the floor, and pizza boxes are piled on the end tables.

Two satyrs lounge on the beds. A third leans with his back against the footboard, one hand in his lap, the other around a can. The rooms smells of semen and beer and onions.

There is no sign of the missing three, but the door into the other bedroom is closed. Without speaking to the satyrs, Demetrios crosses to it. His hand is on the knob when the satyr on the floor, one Mikos, notices him.

“Hey!” he says, loudly if not very intelligently. “You!”

Demetrios turns the doorknob. It is locked. He takes the passkey from the thong around his neck.

“You can’t go in there!” Mikos says. He sounds like Sylvester Stallone as Rocky after he’d been hit in the mouth a couple too many times, but he is an excellent dancer.

“I can,” Demetrios says, sliding the key into the lock. “And I am.”

The room is dark. There is no sound of breathing, no smell of food or drink. He feels for the light switch, aware that the three satyrs have risen and are sputtering at him. He ignores them, flips the switch.

The room is empty.

“Where are they?”

Mikos glances at the bathroom door as if searching for an excuse, but the door is open, and there is no way three beefy satyrs are hiding in there.

“Out,” he says sullenly.

“Out? Out as in off this floor or out of the hotel?” Demetrios looks suddenly wild and fearsome. Something in his attitude reminds the satyrs that the word “panic” has its root in chance encounters with a faun.

“Out of the hotel,” Mikos mutters. “Don’t know nothing more.”

Demetrios believes him and feels his heart begin to pound. Fauns are not immune to panic.

“What am I going to do?” he wails.

“They’ll be back,” Mikos says. “They just went to get laid. They’ll be back pretty soon.”

“I hope so,” Demetrios says, wringing his hands as he imagines the consequences if they should not. “I don’t know what I’ll do if they don’t!”

16

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

—George Bernard Shaw

L
ouhi hadn’t expected to be so lucky. Of course, as she reminds herself, running endless loops in her little aluminum wheel, it hadn’t been all luck. She’s been working hard, very hard, reaching out with what little power and concentration remains to her. Sometimes, it’s hard to be a mouse.

Actually, it’s almost always hard to be a mouse.

The coyote pup, her sister, had disappointed her by showing far more resistance to Louhi’s probing than Louhi had thought possible. When Shahrazad had taken to sleeping with the rest of the furballs on Frank MacDonald’s bed, the cats had effectively shielded her. Damn furballs!

Louhi had experienced a bad time then, seeing her hopes for escape sinking to nothing. In her rage and frustration, she had sunk down into the mouse mind, gnawing at her wooden chew stick, eating seeds, digging burrows in the fluffy pine shavings of her bedding. She’d recovered, though, not like that stupid Head, who, to the best of her knowledge, has sunk into the ground squirrel mind and remained there.

Maybe the Head thinks it’s imprisoned beneath the sea again and is again biding its time, waiting like some fairy-tale princess for a knight to rescue her. Frankly, Louhi doesn’t care. She’s not waiting for some prince. She’s questing for the key to open her cell, and now she knows that key has a name and the name is Wayne Watkins.

She caresses the name in her mind, reciting it over and over again until it becomes a mantra for freedom. Wayne has fingers. Wayne has hands. Wayne has a voice to speak, a car to drive, and money. Best of all, Wayne has powerful aggressions, aggressions she can touch, tap, channel. Like many powerful men, Wayne has superstitions, superstitions she can twist to her advantage.

When Wayne had first visited Frank’s house Louhi had touched him with the light sensory web she had managed to maintain despite the eroding force of passive cat magic. The rancher’s true purpose for being there had been so obvious that she been certain that Frank would read it as she did.

But Frank’s gifts are not shaped that way and, with the Cats of Egypt and several of the other athanor cats away, there is no one to warn him.

With a fresh understanding, Louhi realizes that the absence of the cats has let her magic grow stronger. Never before had she realized how powerful the felines’ passive protections could be. Unlike iron, which dampens magic without discrimination, cat magic seems to enhance what that cat desires and to diminish that which the cat does not.

Even if Louhi hadn’t been a mouse, at that moment she would have loathed cats.

But her spirit is buoyed by the memory of Wayne. Before he had departed, she had sunk a hook deep into him—a slender magical harpoon with a barbed head sunk deep into the human’s
dura mater
. A silver cord plays out and connects to her.

Now, running hard on the wheel so that the tiny runes she has etched into its surface vanish in a blur, Louhi sends pulses down the silver cord. She likes what Wayne plans to do next, for it will bring him closer to her. Then she can convince him that there is a charm in Frank’s house that will make him a success.

That charm, of course, will be a pink-nosed female mouse with silvery white fur and eyes the unforgiving blue of ice.

In a house built into a hillside in the forests of Oregon two creatures are asleep on a custom-built bed, for even a king-size bed would be far too small for them. Big feet poke out from under the quilt. There is the sound of deep breathing, restfulness, peace, all interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

Bronson Trapper comes awake at once, brought alert by reactions honed when mastodons and giant sloths still shambled across the plains of North America. His wife, Rebecca, wakes a little more slowly, but she is the one who recognizes the source of the disturbance and reaches for the phone.

“Hello?”

“Becky? This is Demetrios.”

The faun’s voice still sounds strange to Rebecca. Despite the fact that they do talk on the phone and have met in person, to her, Demetrios is still best represented by little lines of type marching across her computer screen. However, even if they had talked daily, Rebecca might not have recognized Demetrios’s voice tonight. His normally cultured diction is broken, his voice pitched higher with tension.

“Demi?” The lady sasquatch gets out of bed, not bothering with a wrapper or robe since her fur will keep her warm. “What’s wrong?”

Bronson also looks concerned. He knows that his wife’s best friend would not call at—he glances at the bedside clock—five in the morning without good reason. Padding to the kitchen, silent despite his bulk and the size of his feet, the sasquatch puts a kettle on the stove.

“I learned just a couple of hours ago,” Demetrios says, “Georgios and two of his buddies. They’ve gone out!”

“Out? As in they’re not in their rooms?”

“They’re not even in the hotel,” Demetrios moans. Rebecca can imagine him nervously rubbing his short goat’s horns. “I’ve checked—discreetly, of course. They’re not here.”

“Where did the satyrs go?”

“All the remaining three satyrs will admit is that the others went out to find women.”

“Oh!”

“And we’re in Las Vegas.”

“Oh?”

Demetrios clarifies. “You know how this city makes its living?”

“Gambling, right?”

“Yes. And conventions. That means lots of males with money away from their families, temporarily cut loose without the usual social restraints.”

Rebecca nods, intellectually but not instinctively understanding. Sasquatch are naturally monogamous, something which, combined with their low birthrate, has contributed to the small size of the population.

She replies, “So there are lots of easy women?”

“Lots!” Demetrios’s laugh is humorless. “You walk down the Strip here—that’s what they call the main street—and men hand you flyers advertising call girls, girlie shows, strip clubs, nude dancers. This in broad daylight, at night...”

His voice trails off, desperation and despair warring for prominence.

“So you don’t know where to look for them.”

“I don’t have the first idea where to start! I can’t call the police. The satyrs have been gone only a few hours. Even if I could call the police, I can’t call the police. They can’t learn what the satyrs really are!”

“Maybe the satyrs will be back soon.” Rebecca doesn’t sound hopeful. “The night isn’t over yet.”