Darkthunder's Way (14 page)

“Right.”

David finished his coffee (Calvin hadn’t touched his, he noticed), stood, and headed for the door. “See you at lunch?”

Dale shook his head. “Me and Miss Katie are just gonna have us a nice quiet one here. There’ll be enough of a to-do this afternoon to keep us all busy. And to tell the truth, boy; I’m not so keen on making a big fuss, but your mama wanted one, and I didn’t have the heart to argue.”

“Yeah, I know,” David said, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Fargo, let’s travel.”

*

“Well, he was certainly an interesting old coot,” Calvin observed, as they started up the Sullivan Cove road a moment later. “But you didn’t tell me he was
livin’
with somebody. I thought Aunt Katie was really your aunt!”

David laughed loudly. “Yeah, well, I wanted to surprise you.”

“You sure did that!”

“Neat, ain’t it? An old guy at his age, and her even older. Ma’s completely scandalized, of course.”

“Of course.”

They jogged on in silence for the next quarter-mile.

“Just one thing puzzles me,” Calvin panted, as they turned up the Sullivans’ driveway.

“Which is?”

“From what I’ve heard, Traders are pretty clannish. How’d y’all get hooked up with ’em?”

“That’s a long story.”

“I got time.”

“Not
that
much.”

“Just as well,” Calvin replied. “Now when are you gonna tell me about that model?”

“When you gonna tell me about that totem?”

Calvin stopped in place and regarded him seriously. “You
really
wanta know?”

David nodded. “I’m trustworthy.”

“Yeah, I suspect you are, but you’ll have to prove it. I already told you one secret; don’t you think you owe me one of yours?”

“I don’t know about that,” David said.

“No,” Calvin replied smugly. “But I do.”

The rest of the morning passed quickly as David and Calvin found themselves pressed into duty as housemaids in anticipation of the company who would soon be arriving. David thought once of calling Darrell to see if he could get another slant on the Alec situation, but just as he picked up the receiver his mother handed him the vacuum cleaner and a stack of clean sheets and dispatched him to make up the unused attic bedroom.

He had barely finished straightening the heirloom doll-pattern quilt his great grandmother had made when he heard a knock on the front door.

“Can you get that, David?” his mother hollered. “I’ve got my hands full.”

He exchanged mournful glances with Calvin and headed for the stairwell, wondering where Little Billy was, since he usually co-opted the role of doorman on such occasions.

More knocks, again, louder.

David pounded down the stairs and turned left into the living room. “Liz!” he exclaimed, when he saw the slender shape silhouetted beyond the screen. “What the heck are
you
doing here?”

“I’m on my way to Gainesville, stooge. But I thought I’d run some stuff by to help out with—if I can get somebody to come out to the truck and give me a hand.”

“You’re coming
back,
though, aren’t you?” David asked in panic, joining her on the porch. “I mean you said you would, and all.”

“In about four hours,” she replied easily, as she led him down the steps and across the yard to where her dad’s silver Ford pickup waited. David assumed Papa Hughes was in there somewhere, but it was hard to tell from the near-black tinting that covered the windows. Liz trotted to the back and popped open the camper’s tailgate. The inside was crammed with suitcases and boxes, but carefully wedged into the corners were a series of covered trays. She snaked one out and handed it to David.

“My God, girl,” he groaned, as the load grew rapidly higher, “what
is
all this stuff?”

“Oh, just some things I whipped up to help out with the party.” Liz smiled, casting a coy glance sideways as she filled her own arms and started back toward the house. “Brownies and fudge and…”

“Brownies! Oh no! Not brownies, not
your
brownies!”

“And what’s
wrong
with my brownies?”

“Nothing!— ’Cept that I don’t want to have to share ’em!

“You’ll get fat and ugly if you eat ’em all!”

“He’s already halfway there, then.” Calvin laughed, stepping from the shadows of the porch.

Liz did a double take, while David shot daggers over her shoulder.

“Uh—yeah,” Liz began uncertainly.

David cleared his throat. “Oh…this is Calvin. I kind of found him yesterday. He’ll be here through the weekend. Calvin McIntosh: Liz Hughes; Liz: Calvin.”

“Family?” Liz ventured.

“Not hardly. I guess he’s a—”

“Native American,” Calvin volunteered. “Raincheck on handshake or whatever, seein’ as how your hands are full. Unless you’d like a kiss?”

Liz looked flustered and made her way down the narrow hallway between the brothers’ bedrooms and into the kitchen.

“Nice lookin’ lady,” Calvin observed, following David back into the yard for a second load. “She the one you told me about?”

“Sho’ is,” David replied a little irritably.

“Looks like she’s got you well trained.”

“I just let her
think
that. I wear the pants.”

Calvin’s face broke into a mischievous grin. “I wouldn’t wear ’em very long, then, if I was you; least not around her, not if she’d take ’em off me. Jesus H. Christ, she’s a fox!”

“An apt description, what with the red hair and all.”

Calvin bent close behind David and whispered in his ear. “So, you guys makin’ it?”

“For
Chrissakes,
Calvin, her pa’s up there in the cab!”

“Well
are
you?”

David stared at him indignantly. “Look, man; I like you a lot, but you don’t know me well enough to ask me those kind of questions.”

“But I told you about the girl up at Silva, the one with the cabin and the—”

“—raging hormones. Yeah, I know. But I didn’t
ask
you, if you notice, and besides—”

“You know,” Calvin mused, “that red hair sure would make a nice scalp…”

“So would that black mess of yours,” David shot back fiendishly, as he piled Calvin’s arms full of more trays. “And
I
know where you’re sleeping.”

“Indian know woods like back of hand,” Calvin replied with a laugh. “Indian not sleep where expected.”

“Ah, but I know more about those woods than you ever will.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Calvin said seriously, “not for a moment. And I’ve not forgotten you owe me an explanation.” The sputter of flying gravel interrupted them, and David looked up to see a battered blue Chevy Caprice wagon start up the driveway. A red-haired man was at the wheel, a blond woman beside him, and three shapes moving too fast to tell in the back. David sighed; that would be Uncle Dick, Aunt Evelyn, and their eleven-year-old sons, Jason and Jackson, the Terror Twins—and their even more obnoxious eight-year-old sister, the Dread Cousin Amy.

“It’s gonna be a loooong day,” David confided, as he and Calvin trudged back inside. “A very long day for sure.”

“I think,” Calvin said very carefully, “I’ll have lunch up on the mountain.”

David reined
him
back by the collar. “The hell you will,
keemo-sabe!”
he cried fiendishly. “You’ll stay here, or I’ll
kill
you!”

“Humph! White man break treaty.”

“Show me the paper, kiddo!”

“Speak with forked tongue, then.”

David hissed loudly and followed
him
inside—just as Liz was leaving the kitchen. He risked a quick kiss as she scooted past.

“Love you,” he whispered.

“Love you too.”

“Yuck!” squealed the Dread Cousin Amy from the door.

Chapter IX: Revelation

(Tir-Nan-Og—high summer
—midday)

“War?”
Fionchadd cried, green eyes suddenly aglitter. “How soon?” He laid down the bow with which he had been practicing and paused to stroke the silver-scaled head of Dylan, his pet wyvem—far taller than he now and no longer totally reliable. It would not be long, he knew, before he would have to relinquish the creature to the wild.

“Soon enough,” Oisin replied heavily. He lowered himself onto one of the blocks of rough-cut stone that littered the half-finished courtyard, then turned his silver gaze toward the boy. Fionchadd flinched, in spite of what he knew of that stare.

“A shame, too,” Oisin added. “We were just beginning to initiate young Master Sullivan into another mystery, and now I fear we may have to end the lessons.”

Fionchadd’s face fell. “I was enjoying it, too.”

“I know,” Oisin said wistfully. “And I think you were enjoying other things as well.”

“Such as?”

“Why, the boy’s company itself!”

The resulting shrug was tinged with arrogance. “And where is the wrong in that? I owe him a debt I can never repay! Were it not for him I would still be a voice on the wind—or worse, a nightmare for a small green lizard. Besides, I like him. He is intelligent, talented, quick—for a mortal. He is not even bad to look on. I find, in fact, that he is often better company than our own folk. Certainly he is less predictable, and that has a certain charm.”

“
I
would not have predicted war,” Oisin noted dryly. The boy shook his head, suddenly serious. “Nor I.”

“You do not seem so eager, now that you have had a moment to consider it.”

“No…I suppose not.” Fionchadd straightened and stared at the old man, arms folded. “It is not that I fear, though; indeed, I would relish a good fight. It is only that it is so…so pointless. We will fight, some of us will die, and we will all live again, and nothing will be changed. And all because of my mother.”

“She is only the most immediate cause.”

“It seems enough for Uncle Finvarra.”

“Yet you love her.”

“I have no choice.”

“You chose not to love your father.”

“Again, I had no choice; he gave me none. At least she has not manipulated me.”

Oisin sighed and rose. “Enough of this. Tell me truly of David Sullivan: does he have the making of a warrior?”

Fionchadd’s brow furrowed. “He moves well enough. He has more strength than is common for one his size. He wears his body nicely, now I have shown him how. And he appears to be able to use his body and mind as one thing. But there is fear, too, and that makes him hard to teach. Fear of death, fear of pain: these are different for men than for us. For us they pass.”

“And for men they do not,” Oisin finished, as he turned to leave. “Do not forget to whom you speak.”

“Never, Lord. But another thing David Sullivan has, and that is Power, of a sort—and while I speak of Power, I met a strange thing that day of which I have not yet told you.”

Oisin paused in mid-step. “A strange thing?”

Fionchadd nodded. “A boy of the human folk, yet not like our fair-haired friend. This one had skin like red copper, hair coarse and black. Brown eyes that saw…”

“That saw what?”

“Enough. He glimpsed me before I could hide myself; and after that I could not. His mind was hard to cloud.”

“
Another
mortal with Power?”

“Possibly, but of a strange kind. Neither like ours nor the usual Mortal sort. I have never met its like.”

Oisin bit his upper lip thoughtfully. “This boy you spoke of—could you show him to me in your mind?”

Fionchadd nodded, and Oisin laid a hand upon his brow. He left it there for perhaps five heartbeats, a strange light awake in his sightless eyes.

“It is as I thought,” he said when he had dropped the hand. “And a fortunate thing that may be.”

“How so?”

“Because, if that boy is what I suspect, we may have an answer to the trouble that floats at our borders. He has reminded me of something I had long forgotten—and in that may lie our salvation.”

“And what might that be?” Fionchadd asked eagerly, as Oisin once more turned to go.

“I think,” the old man said slowly, “that our King should be the first to know!”

“But Oisin!”

“No, boy, there is no time for wasting.” And with that he strode away, leaving Fionchadd alone with his wyvem and his questions.

Chapter X: Partying and Parting

(Sullivan Cove
, Georgia—Saturday, August 17—afternoon)

“I’ll give your folks credit for one thing, Sullivan,” Gary Hudson slurred happily. “They sure know how to throw a party.” He giggled and flopped his brawny shoulders against the rough boards of Uncle Dale’s barn behind which he, Calvin, and the available members of the MacTyrie Gang (which was basically Alec, Darrell, and David—Aikin was still out of town) had been hanging out for the last thirty minutes. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and dinner-to-die-for (to use Darrell’s phrase) was still at least an hour away—though they were already so stuffed with finger-food and punch it hardly mattered. “Yep, Davy, m’man,” Gary continued, “this is one helluva do.” He wiped a lock of dark hair out of his face and took another sip from the Mason jar of ’shine he had surprised them with, then handed it to Darrell on his right, who took a longer swig and gave it in turn to Alec, who peered at it apprehensively for a moment, and took two.