Dreamseeker's Road (2 page)

Another breathless minute passed, ears alert for the alarm that would signal a secured zone breached. And then, cracking the profound silence only large buildings can conjure, Tana heard, by means of certain…advantages, a young male voice call “all clear.”

She'd timed it exactly right.

The red light above the door gained a green accomplice; the trigger was in place. Anyone breaking those contacts now would set off alarms in half a dozen offices. Tana, however, wasn't planning to leave that night—not by conventional means.

Assuming she ever got started.

A quick sifting of her pockets produced a tightly scribbled list in an odd fluid hand and luminous ink. She studied it briefly, then squared her shoulders and padded away from the stairwell and into the waist-high labyrinth of beige-enameled cabinets that housed the vast master archive of the Georgia Newspaper Project—a decades-long attempt at locating and preserving on microfilm the official legal organs of each of Georgia's 159 counties, most of the significant city rags, and all the major dailies. The largest collection in the state, 'twas said, and likewise the most comprehensive assemblage of information about Georgia happenings in existence—with duplicates strewn worldwide, including the Library of Congress.

So where was tonight's victim? She scanned the cardboard placards atop the cases. K…L L…M…Morgan County…Moultrie— But where…? O-kay… She squatted, scarcely able to see the drawer labels in the dim light, and at that, her night vision was better than most. M…for…
Mouth of the Mountains.

Carefully she slid out the designated drawer. It moved smoothly on nylon runners—and blessedly did not squeak, as others sometimes had.

Her gaze swept the blue-and-white boxes, each maybe four-by-four-by-two inches, with a range of dates typed on labels. But where to begin? August of a certain year, perhaps?
That
year, in fact—whereupon she snared a spool and rose. The walls around the labyrinth showed more carrels, these housing microfilm readers. Not locked.
Never
locked—as she well knew. She chose the nearest, eased inside, and shut the door. A denser gloom enclosed her, but she found the switch on the machine by practiced feel and flicked it. A square screen of white light promptly appeared, marred by abstract lines and speckles, and illuminating an intricate apparatus beneath. She slipped into the chair before it and threaded the film through a complex of rollers and between two plates of glass. Now what was the first date?

Right.

She twisted a dial. A blur of gray flew across the screen, smudged with darker lines that a more-leisurely viewing would resolve into type—fortunately, this reel was a
positive
image, a welcome change from the white-on-blue negatives she'd grown accustomed to. She slowed halfway through…slower… Larger words appeared, and squares of pictures. Slower, checking dates now: August 7…8…9…
Had it!
Now to locate the article…

Before she could, however, her gaze was drawn to a pair of grainy photographs to the upper right. Nothing remarkable, really, merely standard yearbook mug shots of two boys in their mid-to-late teens. Handsome one was, by the standards hereabouts, with thick, white-blond hair worn long above what she knew from other sources were blue eyes, the cheeks and chin showing the angles of incipient manhood emerging from the more androgynous curves of adolescence, the eyes displaying the slight squint of one accustomed to wearing glasses and eschewing them from vanity, a not-so-slight grin parting lips she would not have minded kissing.

The other boy, by contrast, was pleasantly bland if a shade too neat, with short dark hair rising in careful spikes above a smooth-jawed face that narrowed to a pointed chin. His lips were thinner than the other boy's, his brows level, shadowing eyes probably gray or green, his expression, self-consciously serious.
Follower
, that face proclaimed.
Eternal runner-up. Vice president. Second-in-command. Jilted lover.

“Local Boys Win Essay Awards at Governor's Honors Program,” ran the caption beneath. She shaped the names silently:
David Sullivan. Alec McLean.
“David
Kevin
Sullivan,” she repeated aloud. The blond. From rural Enotah County up in the mountains. Probably the smartest lad his age in his part of the world, the most gifted—and quite possibly the most cursed. Someone whose innocent actions a few years back had caused ripples in his small splash of Georgia that had become tsunamis impossibly far afield. Yeah, that boy, admirable though he was, had launched a shipload of grief. And though he'd been encouragingly quiescent lately, he still bore watching. Indeed, if not for him, she wouldn't be here now.

But she'd wasted enough time pondering facts that could not be altered; it was
her
job to massage their repercussions. And for that she required a certain article.

It took but an instant: four column inches on the lower half of the same page:

FREAK FIRE FRUSTRATES MACTYRIE FIRE DEPARTMENT

That was
exactly
what she sought: an account of a fire that had decimated the camp of a band of Travelers—Irish Horse Traders, as they were sometimes called—who'd set up business on the athletic field of a small north Georgia town. The article was sketchy on details but did note how very difficult the blaze had been to extinguish, how oddly it had appeared, and made reference to a number of unusual-looking characters setting the fire, prolonging it—and escaping on horseback. One in particular was mentioned: a tall, blond man with only one arm.

Not much there that was either informative or incriminating—by itself. But combined with enough
other
references, it could suggest a troubling pattern—which Tana was pledged to eradicate.

From a canvas tote, she extracted an Allstate Motor Club World Road Atlas, a yellow legal pad, and a gold fountain pen bearing swirls and flourishes upon its elegant barrel that might equally have been mindless filigree or writing in an unknown tongue. Holding her hand just
so
,
she proceeded to line through certain words and phrases on the screen: those that hinted most blatantly at…otherness. The ink did not so much mark the glass, however, as seep
through
,
into the image itself.

Revision took longer, as she wrote new words atop the old. “Freak Fire” became simply “Fire.” “Difficult to extinguish” became “easily put out.” “Seemed to spread by magic,” became “spread quickly through very dry grass.” And the escaped riders and one-armed man vanished entirely, the missing half column inch being replaced with a scribbled filler couplet by her favorite contemporary poet, John Devlin, set off in a bolder face to further shift attention from the account of the conflagration.

Her editing concluded, she opened the atlas to a certain page, removed the film without rewinding it, stretched the relevant segment on the Formica counter beside the reader, laid her left hand atop it—and stabbed the golden pen through her flesh and into the acetate.

She gasped as the metal slid between her bones, but only a little, for she was used to the pain by now, and had only a few more days of such work left in any case: mopping up the fringes, mostly, in lieu of the major damage control she'd accomplished earlier—like that mess in the
Willacoochee Witness
two years back, which had required some
truly
creative rewording.

Which was reflection for leisure, not haste.

Her blood was seeping out now: adding its red to the film's blue and white. And at a certain moment—instinct told her when—she raised the wounded hand and slapped it upon the atlas—atop a map of the United States on which all libraries and similar repositories likely to retain copies of the article she had just revised or its microfilm surrogates were marked with tiny stars of real gold. A deep breath, an instant's concentration, and tendrils of blood flowed out from between her fingers and found their way to those miniscule markers. Each pulsed briefly, as though they drank their fill, then dulled back to mundanity. Another breath, when the last bright star had faded, and
she was done. Her hand no longer bled, and the map was dry, as was the film.

Quickly, she reinserted the reels, located the suspect article, and read it one last time. Good. Her changes were all there—in print now. Anyone using either the original newspaper or the copies—be they at Emory University or the Library of Congress; the University of Tennessee, Harvard, Berkley, Boston University, Spellman College, the University of Texas at Austin, or the myriad others she'd starred; never mind the National Archives, the British Museum, and the Bibliotheque Nationale—would see a slightly different headline, a subtly altered text.

Too bad she couldn't track down
all
the copies, though, like the ones little old ladies tended to squirrel away in trunks and parents stuck in scrapbooks. Still, this was enough—probably. Besides, some things were even beyond the
Sidhe.

Nuada, she was certain, would be pleased.

Sighing, Tana recorded the change on her legal pad, then consulted her scribbled list. Her next target was an article about a storm disrupting graduation at Enotah County High School almost a year after the previous occurrence, on which occasion numerous spectators claimed to have glimpsed the ghostly shapes of strangely clad warriors engaged in some titanic battle.

Fixing
that
would be a challenge.

Chapter I: Autumn Chill

(Nichols Ridge, Enotah National Forest,

Georgia—Saturday, October 24—morning)

“
Will
you be quiet?” David Sullivan hissed under his breath and over his shoulder at the taller, fog-shrouded form behind him, that
might
have worn a fluorescent orange cap atop spiky dark hair. “And point that thing at the ground or somewhere. Anywhere but at my butt!”

The damp-edged crunch of forest leaves promptly decreased in frequency—but not, so David noticed, in volume, though the shadowing shape faded farther back into the morning fog, movement all that marked it from the gray trunks around it. “I can't yawn and stealth at the same time!” came a muttered reply.

“Put a sock on it, McLean!” David growled back. “Better yet, put one in it!”

“It's socks that's the trouble,” the soft voice retorted. “You're the one made me wear two pairs; they're makin' me walk funny!”

“You
always
walk funny! 'Sides, it's usually cold enough this early this time of year to need 'em!”

“You're
both
gonna be walkin' funny if you don't can it,” a third voice broke in, from the head of the three-man file. David froze in mid-stalk, cheeks hot with embarrassment garnished with irritation. The fog was thicker here: a shroud of white around what should be bright-leaved oaks and maples, now orange-pink and mauve and pastel yellow. The ground was steep: a mountainside.

McLean—Alec—disappeared entirely, save for the rasp of his breathing. Silence went before—until suddenly a form solidified a yard from David's nose. He started, jerked his .08 half-around from reflex, then lowered the barrel sheepishly as that shape resolved into a compact, serious-looking youth an inch or so shorter than he. Gold-framed glasses hid hazel eyes, while near-black hair masked the forehead beneath a camouflage cap that was ironic counterpoint to the blaze orange vest Georgia law required of hunters in deer season; wide cheekbones narrowed to a pointed chin below very red lips for a boy. Aikin “Mighty Hunter” Daniels, it was. David's number three buddy after Alec and Calvin McIntosh, Alec's
oldest
friend—and present nemesis.

Black brows furrowed Aikin's forehead as he frowned. “Okay, guys: five-minute break, then quiet, okay?
Absolute
quiet! Watch where you put your feet; ease 'em down
softly,
and try to remember that we're
supposed
to be hunting the wariest thing there is 'round here. Something that can smell the soap you washed with this mornin', and hear when you fantasize too hard about Winona Ryder.”

David discovered an oak near enough to flop against—which he did. Alec remanifested and claimed its twin, propping the old Enfield Aikin had loaned him against the trunk. “I don't need to
fantasize
about anyone!” David snorted.

“And I don't
usually
have to bitch at you 'bout bein' quiet!”

“Old age,” David yawned, as he massaged his thighs through cammo fatigues, surprised his legs were so tight. Alec wasn't the only one having trouble moving, and three miles uphill at o-bright-thirty didn't help.

“Twenty's, old?”

“Two years past your sexual peak,” Alec observed.

“Will you get off it?”

Aikin rolled his eyes at David. “This is what comes of watchin'
Emmanuel VII
last night 'stead of cashin' in early. Deer can
smell
testosterone.”

“So
that's
why you were in the john so long this morning,” Alec giggled.

“Put a
sock—
Oh shit! Forget I said that!”

“You wish!”

Aikin simply glowered. “Why, oh why, did I listen when you asked to come along?”

“'Cause I begged so prettily,” Alec shot back sweetly. “You and Dave can't have
all
the fun.”

“Yeah, Aik,” David broke in, from where he was scratching his shoulders against the bark of his tree, “I mean, you and me made this a ritual when we were what? Thirteen? Now we're college men. That's long enough to hold out on anybody. We—”

“
We
take it seriously,” Aikin interrupted. “I don't have to stop every five minutes to
explain
stuff to you!”

David shrugged. “It'll make a man out of 'im.”

“Think of it as advancing my education,” Alec added helpfully. “I learn how to shoot Bambi. I also learn what the big deal is about shooting Bambi, and thereby learn more about my two—present half hour apparently excluded—best buddies.”