Darkthunder's Way (39 page)

“Uh-uh, not me, man. I gotta be movin’ on.”

“But
Calvin
,” David teased, grabbing him by the arm. “That nice hot bath’s waitin’. Alec, you coming, or you gonna boogie?”

Alec shrugged indecisively. “Best be travelin’, I reckon. I imagine the folks’ll be wanting to see me.”

Five minutes later they trudged up the Sullivan’s driveway. The Mustang was where he had left it; the Volvo had been moved at least once.

“Well, take care of your own bad self,” David said, as Alec opened his trunk. “And hey, thanks a bunch, man—and I’m sorry.” He hugged his friend impulsively.

Alec’s response lacked conviction. “My bad self,” he whispered absently, staring at his hands. “Yeah, for certain.”

PART III

THE CENTERHOLDS

Chapter XXIII: Bad Things

(MacTyrie, Georgia
—Friday, August 24—afternoon)

My bad self,
Alec was still repeating silently as he sprawled across the bed in his attic sanctum late that afternoon. He had showered, shaved—all but the shred of moustache—and was wearing clean clothes for the first time in ages. But in spite of those concessions to normalcy, one thing alone was on his mind: that disturbing uneasiness which twisted through his thoughts every time that phrase boomeranged back to him—as it had been doing ever since David had tossed it off so casually that morning.
My bad self,
came the litany again;
I
have done a bad thing.

But what?

Much of his disquiet was doubtlessly simple letdown, his trusty left brain insisted: the sudden release of the tension that had filled his last few subjective days. And a big chunk of it was certainly disappointment over Eva’s departure, now that he was back in his own right world where things like girlfriends were important—as he had suddenly recalled all too well when he’d searched in vain for someone to whom he could relate his amazing tale.

It was strange, though, now he considered it, how seldom he had actually
thought
of Eva while in Galunlati. In fact she’d almost slipped his mind entirely. Still, there’d been so much else to occupy his time that he supposed such lapses were understandable. And in any event he had no such diversions now; he
would
think of her;
would
take time to logic everything through and hopefully recover from his lost first love. That done, he would turn his attention to his late adventures and try to assimilate yet another mass of data that expanded his world on the one hand, but threatened the rationality that was his core and center on the other. It didn’t do, he thought; to feel the things he felt—or know the things he knew.

And the one thing he did
not
know.

“I have done a bad thing.” There, he had named it aloud. But another scouring of his memory still rendered up no answers.

Idly he reached into his nightstand, snagged the jar that contained the ulunsuti, and removed the jewel, placing it on the fake-Persian throw rug beside his bed, while he lay athwart the covers, bare feet dangling off the opposite side. A blowup of R.E.M.’s latest album cover peered down at him from the ceiling; Metallica’s newest buzzed tinnily on a boom box turned too low to do the song justice. His folks were out: some faculty dinner or other.

Prophecy, huh? He wished it could show him the
past
.

Maybe it could. Or maybe…

He stared at the crystal and tried to concentrate on the bad thing, but that only made his head hurt. Perhaps if he tried to get at it sideways…. Let’s see, when had he first become aware of the wretched notion?

Well, he’d noticed a sort of vague apprehensiveness ever since he had shown up at David’s to begin their quest, but it had more or less been overshadowed, first by the minutiae of the ritual, then by the hypnotic languor of the asi. After that he’d been too distracted. But when…?

He had it! It was when he’d rushed in to stab the uktena and it had rolled over him. For that horrible instant, when he had truly believed he was dead, he had
known
, had held that terrible knowledge just long enough to proclaim it to the world and preserve it in David’s mind, whence it had come shrieking back to haunt him.

But what was it? He’d been jealous, he admitted, jealous of David and Liz and Fionchadd and Calvin. So jealous that he suspected he had snapped just a little there at the battle and hurled himself into the fray, recklessly desperate—he now acknowledged—to prove himself once and for all as heroic as David’s flashier friends. But it had rebounded on him, leaving him…
dying
, he supposed. The jealousy was bad, but he didn’t think it was the bad thing itself.

He had let his eyes slip out of focus as he continued to stare at the ulunsuti. He was getting sleepy, too; beginning to drift, yet he could not tear his gaze from the pulse of the red line that bisected the jewel. But he had to close his eyes,
had
to. He blinked, let his lids slide down—and the line was still before him and growing brighter. It started to spiral to the left, then shifted abruptly and began coiling
toward
him, boring into his brain, twisting a hole in his memory and laying its secrets bare.

Bad thing, bad thing, bad thing,
he heard himself chanting—though whether aloud or not, he did not know.

And then he did not care, because his head was awash with pain—exactly like an old house must feel if three centuries of hoarded cobwebs suddenly took flame in the attic.

Fire!
That was it! There had been a fire…and an enclosed place—a place of bricks.
His
place: the ruins! And there had been Eva, and she’d given him a dagger, and—no! It wasn’t possible. Yet it was, for Alec finally knew, as the power of the ulunsuti crisped the last shreds of glamour from his mind, what that bad thing was, who had done it, and why.

He stumbled to his desk, snatched up his phone, and called David.

* * *

David jerked his foot away an instant before the brick dislodged and went crashing noisily into the honeysuckle below.

“Careful,” Alec warned, “these old steps can be a little tippy.”

“Tell me about it,” David grumbled. “How come you never showed me this before?”

An hour had passed since Alec’s cryptic phone call; thirty minutes since the Volvo had scrunched into his yard (Alec had had no choice but to drive; the Mustang’s battery was dead as a doornail), and there was still no answer to the mystery.
Something to show you; something to tell you,
that was all he’d said.

Alec, trudging up the steps ahead of David, hunched his shoulders and navigated three more of the half-hidden treads before responding. “I was
afraid
you’d ask that,” he panted. “And truly I don’t know. I guess”—he halted at the top and turned around, face flushed beneath the remnants of Galunlati sunburn—“I guess I just wanted to keep one place for me alone—my own Place of Power, like. You’ve got Lookout Rock, and all. But when you first showed it to me back when we were little, I…I wanted one for myself. So I prowled all over MacTyrie and finally found this. I can’t believe nobody else has discovered it after all these years.”

“I can’t believe you’ve kept your mouth shut about it all these years,” David gasped, joining his friend on the terrace and flopping onto his back in the suppertime sun with his faithful knapsack for a pillow. “For that matter, I can’t believe I didn’t find it on my own—or that G-man or Darrell didn’t. I mean, the kids from the college must’ve been all over this part of the county. It’s not
that
far from town.”

“Just luck, I guess,” Alec said. “But swear to God I’ve never found a sign of a soul. Not so much as a cigarette butt.”

David raised an eyebrow. “So those are all
yours
?” He stared appreciatively at the neatly triangulated stack of beer cans that lined most of one inner wall.

Alec nodded sheepishly. “Four years’ accumulation. Hey, wanta go inside? Feel up to it,
old man
?”

“Don’t press it, McLean! I’ve only got six months on you, and I’ve regained my weight advantage, thanks to your little indiscretion, so don’t think I won’t beat your ass if you give me grief!” He laughed then, to prove he wasn’t serious, and regarded his buddy curiously.

Things were better with Alec than they’d been in a while—partly because their stay in Galunlati had given them time to rediscover the joys of each other’s company. But there was a new bond between them, too, because, for the first time in his almost-adult life, David had realized that friendships were
not
immortal, and that friends weren’t either, no more than family. In the past such things had been remote, even when confronting the Sidhe; for in his riskier encounters with them he had been most concerned with the preservation of his own life, endangered though others might be. But Alec lying wasted in another World was not an image that rested easily with him, nor had he rested easily the few nights of his friend’s illness. In fact, it had caused him to do a lot of thinking, both about Alec and, more pleasantly, Liz, and the whole dynamics of their triune friendship.

Liz! She’d be back tonight; had promised, via a noontime phone call, to drop by around eight. There’d been vague rumblings about catching the new Bond flick, which still gave him a couple of hours to find out what was up with his buddy.

“David?” Alec’s voice jogged him from his reverie.

“Sure thing, man. Lead the way.” He followed Alec across the terrace and into the shell of the building, noting the sudden coolness inside the thick walls. Goose bumps prickled across the bare arms below his U-2 T-shirt. “Burr,” he muttered, “least you don’t have to worry ’bout air-conditioning.”

“Yeah, great, isn’t it? You can lie on the terrace and toast, then come in here and cool off.”

“With a little help from the brew?” David giggled, indicating the stacked cans.

“Like I said, four years of cloak-and-dagger.”

David cocked his head toward the fireplace. “That work?”

Alec nodded. “Sure does—cleaned the chimney out myself, and if you think I didn’t have fun explaining that! Came home black as a coal miner’s heinie. Have to watch it, though; can’t use it by day, and generally only on cloudy nights—’cause of the smoke, and all.”

David scanned the horizon. “Folks can’t see the flames?”

“Not as far as I can tell. I’m careful, anyway.”

“No doubt,” David replied, knowing it was true. Alec was nothing if not circumspect—and evidently much sneakier than he’d ever suspected.

Alec slipped off his backpack and helped himself to a seat on the hearth. He unzipped a compartment and dragged out a paper bag that proved to be full of sandwiches and chips—and two cans of Miller, one of which he tossed to David.

“Mr. Sullivan,” he said, “would you do me the honor of being the first outsider to contribute to yon stack of dead soldiers?”

“My honor, indeed!” David chuckled, popping the top. “But just one, and same for you: you’re drivin’, remember?”

“Two’s all I could make off with anyway, without ’em being missed.”

“I
thought
they kept pretty close tabs.”

Alec sniggered and took an appreciative swig. “Mom thinks it’s Dad, and Dad thinks it’s Mom.”

David took a long swig and set the can down beside him. “So why now, Resurrection Man? Why, after all these years?”

Alec’s face grew serious. “It’s like I said, Davy: I truly don’t know.” He paused, swallowed distractedly, then looked at David again. “No, maybe I
do
know: maybe…I guess it was almost dying. Week before last was real shitty and all, and to be honest, once or twice I wanted to trash myself—until I met Eva.”

David’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s Eva?”

Alec froze, unable to meet David’s stare. “Well, that’s a real interesting question—but I don’t want to get into it quite yet. Or actually, I
do
,
but I need to get some other things out first.”

“Your move, man.”

Another swig, longer this time. “Right. Well, anyway, I guess when you—when you went to so much trouble to save me, I realized that I’d been a real asshole, being jealous of you and Liz and all. But worse, I knew I’d been keeping some things from you, and I didn’t want to do that anymore. This is one of them.”

“Oh, gee—thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, well, you’ve trusted me with so much, and it was the least I could do. I don’t want any more barriers.”

“Hey, don’t worry, things are fine. We’re off to school in a couple of days; Calvin’s ’bout ready to hit the trail again; Liz’ll only be here on weekends. That only leaves my weapons sessions with the Sidhe—if Silverhand still wants to do ’em, now that Finno’s gone. You wanta come along?”

“Thanks, but no,” Alec said quickly. “I prefer pixels to pixies.”

“I’m sure the Lizard would resent that bitterly.”

“Let him!”