Dreamseeker's Road (3 page)

“You've been huntin' before,” David reminded him. “Squirrels.”

“Killer instinct's killer instinct.”

“‘Better A Hunter Than A Gatherer Be,'” Aikin quoted the bumper sticker on his pickup. “And as for the big deal about shootin' Bambi—yucky phrase—you don't seem to mind
eatin'
Bambi—or his mom, or Thumper, or any of his other furry friends when Dave or me serve 'em up pan-fried! And you were Mr. Brave Guy at the wildlife supper last year!”

“Yeah,” David agreed with a smirk. “Even
I
won't eat mountain oysters.”

“I didn't know what they were,
okay
?”

“'Sides,” Aikin went on, “you've got a vested interest in this one. Whatever I get today's the main course for my Thanksgiving bash.”

“Presuming you get
anything
.”

“I may
not,
if we don't get on with it!”

“You said five minutes,” Alec noted. “We've still got two.”

“Anal retentive,” Aikin muttered. “And anyway, what
is
this about you wantin' the blood? You never gave me a straight answer last night.”

David stiffened abruptly and shot Alec a warning glance.
He
knew exactly why, and the reason was essentially unbelievable. Alec knew he knew, but Aik was supposed to be totally in the dark—and hopefully would stay that way.
Watch it!
he mouthed, where Aikin couldn't see. He drew his finger across his throat for emphasis.

Alec patted a thermos-shaped bulge in his vest's game-pocket. “It's for a project.” Which was not—quite—a lie.

“You're a computer nerd! What do you need deer blood for?”

Alec ignored Aikin's taunt—and David's warning. “I'm also taking Geology 101, in which I have to do a project, which is to test a bunch of minerals with supposed arcane properties against those same properties under scientific conditions—which should be of interest to you, Mr. GameGod! Unfortunately, I can't do like the Romans and drink wine from an amethyst cup to see if it keeps you from gettin' drunk—but I can soak a bloodstone in blood, to see if
that's
got any measurable effect.”

“So why does it have to be deer blood?” Aikin asked pointedly. “I can get all the beef blood you want from the animal science folks.”

“Yeah, well, my assumption is that stuff like that arose with Paleolithic hunters, and they didn't have animal science folks—or domestic cattle. I figure the closer to original conditions—”

“You're gonna sit naked in the woods with an atlatl?” Alec reached for his fly. “
Want
me to?”

Aikin grunted, then glared at David. “You got a hidden agenda too?” he asked abruptly.

The question caught David off guard, but he covered with a shrug. “Wouldn't be hidden if I talked about it, would it?”

“What if I invoke the Vow?” Aikin countered so recklessly that David wondered if something was bugging him that he wasn't letting on—besides Alec's presence. Something minor that had caught fire all in a rush, and blazed up past control—which was Aikin's style on those rare occasions when he lost it. Trouble was, the guy had guessed true.

“I would ask that you not do that,” David replied carefully. “If there was, it'd be personal—family personal.”

“One hint?”

David gnawed his lip. Dammit, why was Aik
doing
this? He, who a moment before had been urging silence, the most private of the entire MacTyrie Gang. More to the point, why did he have to invoke the oath he and the other Gangsters had made in ninth grade to always be straight with each other, to always answer sincere questions honestly, to hold back
nothing
that did not violate confidences conferred outside their circle?

Family personal…

Without warning, the memories ambushed him:

…
himself, age thirteen (but viewed from without, as by an observer), sprawled on his bed in jeans and sockfeet, reading
Dune
for the first time, in that down time between afterschool chores and supper. The distant knock on the
back
door he'd almost tuned out; the low buzz of voices; then his mom's, very clearly, gasping “Oh, God, no!” And then his uncle (grea
t-
uncle, technically) Dale Sullivan, appearing at his door white-faced, and his strange, calm voice saying, “I just got a call from Beirut…”

And then a fast-forward of others:

…
a closed-casket funeral in a small mountain church; lots of food, lots of crying; a burial in a hillside cemetery; a pervasive numbness that gave way to a silent, private anger…

…himself, alone, at sunset, with the mountains at his back and the sanguine smear of the Sullivan Cove Road bisecting the valley before him, and Bloody Bald
(too much blood,
he thought,
far
too much)
catching the rays of a dying sun
(dying son,
he remembered thinking) to the west. Him in his favorite jeans and sneakers, and a T-shirt proclaiming “Hard Rock Cafe: Tbilisi (Opening Soon),” with this very same Christmas gift Remington .30 in white-knuckled hands, firing twenty-one times into the crimsoning sky, as though to slay an unfair God where he sat on an undeserved throne…

“Seven years,” David whispered finally, blinking away a tear he hoped no one saw, hoping, likewise, that the reference was sufficiently obscure.

Alec—who clearly caught it—vented a sigh of relief. Aikin nodded. “I guess that'll have to do,” he grumbled. “Now, if you guys are
quite
finished, I suggest we stand here, very quietly, and think about nothing but the backstrap you will
not
be eating if we don't let
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
take over for
Home sapiens…IBMis!”

Alec fumbled for his rifle.

“And for God's sakes,” Aikin added, “will you point that thing at the
sky
!”

(Killing God,
the thought recycled.
Slaying the author of bad news…)

Alec bared his teeth, but Aikin's eyes went wide and wary as he raised a hand sharply, signing silence. Alec looked confused, but David nodded acknowledgment.

He'd caught it too: a rustle of leaves in a certain cadence, a rhythm of step and pause. Deer, almost certainly—large, close by, and approaching.

Stupid, too—or deaf—to have ignored the racket they'd been making. Normally one climbed a tree, sat a stand, and waited, silent as the grave, motionless as the dead. Normally the prey did not come to you.

(Normally, good people didn't get blown to hamburger at twenty-one.)

Having noticed it first, Aikin by tradition had first shot. David, therefore, kept his place, though he likewise shouldered his rifle and drew a tentative bead, peering through the scope.

Alec gawked.

Aikin was a man transformed. David could almost see the veneer of civilization sloughing off his sturdy shoulders as his buddy eased around in place, moving as if in slow motion; so carefully fabric did not rasp against itself as he leaned against an oak, steadied his Winchester .30.06 against a limb, and with calm deliberation set his eye to his scope, steel barrel gleaming damply, poised…ready…waiting. His ears, while small, stuck out slightly, and David could imagine one twitching, as though to catch each loudening rustle.

The softest of clicks, then, as Aikin released the safety with his thumb…

More rustling, closer yet—and a gust of oddly warm wind thinned the fog upslope to gauze, as if a gate had opened and set the silent air to dancing. David caught a blur of movement: a graying of the white; a flash of ivory above, that was surely sunlight on antler tines raised above the mist. He held his breath.

The beast was no more than fifty yards away now—impossibly close, given the ruckus they'd been raising. Any second the buck—for clearly it was, and a fine one—would prance into that patch of brightness that had awakened between those two hickories, and Aik would have a clear shot: uphill and with no brush between.

Soon…

Very
soon…

A finger eased to the rifle's trigger, though David knew beyond doubt that Aik would never shoot at sound alone, never fire at an uncertain target. He looked back at the shadow in the fog. His eyes…

“Shit!”
Aikin spat and dropped his rifle.

“
Oh
shit!” David gulped in turn—as a too-familiar tingle set fire to his eyes, filling them with tears as he lowered his own weapon—

—And they all saw a cervine shape bound into the blaze of light between the hickories and pause there at gaze, coat white as winter snow, dark eyes huge and frightened. And far too intelligent, when the buck stared at them, aloof and accusingly—and with one vast surge of muscle, bounded across the ridge and out of sight.

The wind whipped up at that; the warm air shifted. The burning in David's eyes ceased as suddenly as it had come, but a different fire had awakened in those Aikin turned upon him, as he slumped against his tree. “Goddamn, Sullivan; what the
fuck
was that?”

“What…do you
think
it was?” David panted, as he caught his breath and backed away—into Alec.

“Wow, did you
see
that guy?” Alec gasped.

“I'm…not sure
what
I saw,” Aikin managed shakily. “It was white, of course, which is rare as hell by itself; but I thought for a minute that— Oh, never mind.”

“What?” David persisted, as a cold clot of sick dread turned to ice in his gut.

“Its rack… You notice anything about its rack?”

“Like what?”

“That it didn't curve out and around like a whitetail's is supposed to. That it swept back like a…like a friggin'
elk
!”

“Elk?” from Alec.

David ignored him. “We don't
have
elk 'round here.”

“Of course we don't!” Aikin cried. “But if you hadn't spooked it 'fore I could figure out what was goin' on—!”

“It also had stripes!” Alec blundered on obliviously. “Stripes—like a zebra. Faint, but you could see 'em—or
I
could: streams of silver against the white. Like something out of—”

“No it didn't!” David broke in desperately, kicking Alec in the shin.

Aikin eyed him narrowly. “Yes it did. Only I'd say they were more like what you get on a bongo antelope.”

“Maybe,” Alec mumbled, too late. “I dunno.”

“Or
maybe
,” Aikin whispered, “on something out of…Faerie?”

Chapter II: Worlds, Tracks, and Blood

(Nichols Mountain, Enotah National Forest, Georgia)

“…Faerie?”

Aikin's last word was still melting into the thick cool air. And with it, the final vestige of Mighty Hunter vanished, leaving only a frustrated junior forestry jock who feared he'd said too much.

…
Faerie…

He could tell by the way David's blue eyes glittered, the way normally merry lips hardened to a thin grim line as his jawline tightened beneath its well-tanned curves, that he'd struck a naked nerve. And most times that would've bugged him; most times he'd already have been seething with guilt at having deliberately trespassed on taboo ground.

But he'd just flat out had
enough
!
They'd been at it for over four years now, Dave and Alec had. Never mind Runnerman and Gary and Dave's girlfriend, Liz Hughes—and that new Cherokee guy, Calvin McIntosh, and who-knew-who-else: disappearing unexpectedly, and not explaining shit when they returned wearing very grown-up shadows on their faces, joy and wonder in their eyes he'd not been asked to share.

And there was no reason he
shouldn't
share those things! No way he was any different from the others—
including
the entire Gang—who'd walked upon the—what did Dave call 'em? Straight Tracks? After all, wasn't his appellation, besides Mighty Hunter, GameGod? Earned because he was a master at creating fantasy worlds for role-playing adventures. Which was cold comfort when the rest of his buds were having real ones.

Of course they literally
couldn't
tell him—at first, not Dave and Alec and Liz. They'd finally confessed that much: how they'd been bound by a magical geas not to speak of what they'd seen in certain places, done in certain others. But there were ways around injunctions like that, ways to avoid direct questions: to listen without being seen, to pause outside doors or tent flaps or windows, to creep silently back when you'd loudly walked away. Dave himself acknowledged him to be the quietest person he knew, save Calvin. But even Mad David Sullivan didn't know how quiet Aikin Daniels could be, how stealthily he could move when frustration gave him cause.

And so he'd learned a few things, by repute and a scatter of begrudged conversations. But not once had he ventured in the flesh to that mysterious realm he'd just named. “Faerie,” he repeated, to force himself to confront it—and further lay the goad to David's soul. “Or
Galunlati
?”
he added, louder—though his voice shook in a way he loathed.

“Prob'ly,” David grunted, not looking at him, though the resigned slump of his shoulders proclaimed as loudly as words that he was about to relent. Alec would've caved in already, had he not been taking cues from Dave. Once, Aikin admitted wistfully,
he'd
have been calling the shots. He'd never fully accepted his demotion to Alec's number two bud.

Nor did he break eye contact with Alec as he slowly reset the Winchester's safety, folded himself down in place, and with deliberate nonchalance laid the weapon athwart his thighs: a woodland king with his sword of state. “If we're gonna keep on bein' friends,” he announced, “we
gotta
talk.”

“I thought you wanted to hunt!” David choked—and Aikin knew he'd won.