Ghostcountry's Wrath (46 page)

Sandy nodded grimly. “'Fraid so.”

Calvin puffed his cheeks and gnawed his lip, trying hard not to vent the anger that had just roared to life inside him.
She should've
remembered,
dammit! No, I should've remembered,
he countered.
Calm down, kid; you're tired and stressed out. Don't say anything you'll regret.

“I'm sorry,” Sandy sighed wearily. “I shouldn't have got so close. I just forgot. So did you.”

Calvin took a deep breath. “Yeah, well, there was so much else goin' on we both screwed up. But now…I think you'd better leave.”

Liz glared at him incredulously.
“Calvin!
What the hell are you saying? Do you have any
idea
how much Sandy worried about you last night?”

He returned the glare. “Do
you
have any idea what's goin' on here?”

“It's like this, Liz,” Sandy interrupted, though Calvin could tell she was fighting to keep her cool. “According to tradition—the tradition of Cal's people, which I respect—there're a ton of restrictions on…commerce between men and women. Traditionally, a man's supposed to abstain not only from sex, but from
any
contact with a woman before important undertakings, like ball games, or war, or—”

“But that's just
stupid
,”
Liz broke in.

“So is being shy about going topless—to some people,” Sandy shot back. “And if I'd had my head on straight, I wouldn't have come here now. Unfortunately, it gets worse. 'cause even worse than contact with a woman is contact with a
mensing
woman. Calvin's folks—his ancestors—insisted they stay away from everyone during that time. Which makes sense, given how interdependent everybody was: I mean, having somebody's temper go ballistic when you live as close to the edge as some of those folks did—well, it just wouldn't be cool.”

“And there's also the small matter of women's magic bein' stronger than men's, then,” Calvin put in, with more than a touch of sarcasm. “If we're bein'
thorough
here. In fact, if we're bein' thorough I oughta go get another willow sapling 'cause Sandy's polluted that one just by touchin' it.”

Sandy glared at him.

“I won't though,” he added sullenly.

“You're tired, Cal,” Sandy gritted.

“Yeah,” Calvin nodded, “you got it. I'm tired; I'm half a day away from the most important battle of my life; I don't have a clue how I'm gonna defeat Snakeeyes—and now I'm polluted.”

“I'm
sorry
!” Sandy snapped. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

He did not reply.

Liz gnawed her lip thoughtfully. “So the deal is that a mensing woman—”

“Saps a man's strength to replace the strength she loses through menstral blood,” Calvin told her irritably.

“Hmmmmm,” Sandy mused, “I never thought about the
why
of it, just the fact. Now that's very interesting.”

Calvin simply glared at her and commenced sharpening the first of the saplings prior to sticking it in the ground.

“Calvin, my lad,” Sandy announced a moment later. “You're worrying too much. C'mon, we need to talk.”

Chapter XXIV: War Among the Shifting Shadows

(Jackson County, Georgia—Wednesday, June 20—just before sunset)

The sky, David decided, looked like war. A study in red, gray, and black, it was; like something out of an Australian film: staged for maximum contrast, maximum effect, with a neon-crimson stain filtering through the thick, layered clouds to the west; light against dark—the eternal symbolic struggle. And even as he watched, the image was reinforced, for the sun suddenly mustered strength enough to send a whole phalanx of beams lancing through the stand of pines just past the opposite crown of the hill. Red and black. Cloud and sun. Sunbeam spears and shields of standing timber.

It was a tad too appropriate, he concluded grimly, given that a far more literal battle was imminent. Still, he preferred to gaze at the heavens, which were distant and remote and untouchable, in lieu of, closer in, the drizzle-damp meadow where the lonely, unlikely hump of Calvin's asi hunched like a turtle shell clad in motley; a street-person's shelter wrought of wishes and refuse and Salvation Army quilts.

But the really troubling thing about war was that when you read about it, it was clean. Battles only raged on sunny days because that's how folks envisioned them. Soldiers died neatly: pierced once through the heart and gone. It never rained; men never slogged through mud, or died slowly, sunk to their armpits in bloody muck while they tried vainly to hold in their own foul-smelling entrails.

In short, one never imagined a duel of wizards being staged in a half-assed drizzle.

Yet that was about to be the case. The pyrotechnics to the west promised either a return of clear skies or the continuation of gloom, depending on how the winds blew. And somewhere between here and there it wasn't raining.

Unfortunately it
was
here—almost. The knee-high grass was wet and had soaked David's jeans halfway to his crotch. And though it was summer, he'd had to slip on a sleeveless khaki vest with a hood just to be able to see.

Not that there was much
to
see, at the moment—which was why he'd become so obsessed with the sky. Yeah, the sunset was definitely preferable to the sweat lodge that presently sheltered Calvin in the last third of his purification rite. Preferable, too, to the faltering fire that only his own determined efforts—and Alec's, Brock's, and Liz's—had kept going into midafternoon, so that the load of field stones it contained could grow hot enough to heat the inside of the
asi
and permeate it with steam when Calvin ladled on river water mixed with the last of that which they had brought from Usunhiyi. And very definitely preferable to the glum expressions his companions wore, where they sat on the tailgate of Liz's pickup, gaining scanty shelter from the half-hearted sprinkles.

Liz checked her watch and snuggled closer to David.

He reached down and patted her arm. “Won't be long now,” she murmured.

“Official sundown's at 9:16,” Alec supplied from David's opposite shoulder.

“All we can do now is wait,” David sighed. “Wait and hope.”

“Which are two of the hardest things in the world,” Liz shot back grimly.

“Yeah, and if
we're
havin' trouble with it,” Brock appended from Alec's left, “think how poor Cal must feel.”

“I doubt he's feelin' much of anything, right now,” David snorted. “That's one of the points of the ritual: to take oneself out of oneself. To move oneself to a more…spiritual plane, so to speak.”

“Which isn't cool if it addles your wits and reflexes instead of sharpening 'em,” Liz muttered under her breath.

“Poor Cal.” Brock sniffed—he'd evidently caught a cold.

“And poor Sandy,” Liz countered. “This has to be double hard on her: to have the person she loves best in the world laying his life on the line, and her not allowed to watch.”

“In fact, to have maybe made it worse,” Alec grumbled.

“Hush, McLean,” David hissed. “We don't need to be reminded.”

“At least they talked it out.” From Liz.

“Reached an accommodation,” David corrected. “Cal didn't exactly look like a happy camper when he came back from that walk.”

“Yeah, but think how Sandy must look,” Liz persisted. “He knows what's happening. She gets to sit by the river and worry.”

“That's as close as tradition'd let her be, though,”

David replied. “And if there's anything both Sandy and Cal respect, it's tradition. They don't necessarily like it—but they respect it.”

It was Alec's turn to check his watch. “Can't be long now.”

David pulled the hood further over his forehead. A raindrop slipped from the rim and splashed on his nose. The bill of Brock's Atlanta Braves cap was beaded with them. Alec wore a wide-brimmed Australian hat, Liz a thrift-store bowler; both were dark with damp.

Alec stared fixedly at the west. “Just a…second longer…”

David followed his gaze back to the conflict in the heavens. The sun, he observed, had won free of the lowest battalion of clouds and had a clear drop to the horizon, which here was the topmost branches of a stand of pines half a mile away.

“Three…two…one…” Alec intoned.

Red disc touched black spear-points.

And the sound of vast wings flapping rode the low roll of thunder from the east.

David jerked his head around—and saw, as he'd expected, a dark shape drop from the heavier clouds on that side and dive toward the treetops. An owl, it had looked like: a very
big
owl. It lit in the forest a hundred yards to their left and vanished within the dense foliage.

What walked out of the woods went on two feet. But only by technicality was it human.

Oh, Snakeeyes wore man-shape, sure enough: tall and hard and well-muscled—as was revealed by the plain buckskin breechclout that was his only garment, the feather cloak he'd flourished earlier being nowhere in sight. But there was something too tight about his body: the cut-lines of those muscles showed too clearly, the veins and sinews that bound them were too sharply limned—especially for misty weather like this, which tended to soften forms. His waist-length hair—slicked back in a ponytail—was likewise too well-groomed, and too shiny, though not from moisture, David somehow knew.

His face showed nothing at all: no joy, no pain (though he'd been injured the last time they'd seen him), no anticipation, no regret. It was a face entirely devoid of emotion—and therefore of humanity. Only the eyes showed anything, and that was merely a grim yellow coldness: the dispassion of serpents.

David eased off the tailgate and stood, feeling his feet firm on the ground, even if his legs were shaky. Soft swishes to either side were his companions doing likewise.

Snakeeyes ignored them utterly, as though they were no more substantial than the raindrops that sketched arabesques on his chest and shoulders as he paced, in measured stride, straight toward the east-facing entrance of the asi.

Closer he came, and David realized that the witch's entire body was either subtly painted or tattooed (though if the latter, why hadn't he noticed it before?) with patterns that lessening distance revealed to be feathers and scales. They were almost the same color as his skin, too, the effect not unlike damask. And they alternated, one leg being feathered below the knee and scaled above, the opposite being patterned the other way round, and so on, all across his body.

The only ornaments he wore seemed to be a medicine pouch around his neck and a pair of dangling white earrings that David finally determined were skulls: a snake skull and a bird skull, most likely.

And still Snakeeyes proceeded toward the asi, the sun turning his skin so red he looked flayed, with the rivulets of rain transformed into blood. His eyes glittered like doubloons on the eyes of the dead. David nudged Liz and Alec with his elbows and plotted an intercept path: witch to the left, sweat lodge to the right.

When they were roughly twenty feet from either, Snakeeyes suddenly halted and swiveled his head to the right: a movement so swift and fluid it was like that of a reptile. “I'd stop right there, if I was you,” he hissed. “In fact, I'd
leave,
if I was you. You might live longer that way. Then again, you might not. It might not make that big a difference.”

“We're staying,” David called back calmly, standing as straight as he could and trying to look taller than five feet seven.

“Your head, then,” Snakeeyes spat. “But if Little Wizard in there gets to have partisans, I should, too, don't you reckon?”

David did not reply, simply tried to mask his confusion with a cold hard stare.

“I'm better at that than you are, white boy,” Snakeeyes snorted derisively. Whereupon he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and commenced a low, mumbled chant.

David tried to listen, but if the words were any language he knew (and he'd forced himself to learn a smattering of Cherokee), he didn't recognize it.

But something obviously did. For the woods were abruptly alive with noises: rustlings, and shufflings, and the soft thump of beating wings.

A bird landed on the limb nearest the meadow: a black bird with an ivory beak. A
raven,
David realized. Of which there were supposed to be but a few in Georgia, and none in Jackson County.

But as the chant continued, more appeared, all of them black birds of one species or another, so that the trees on the whole eastern side of the meadow were soon dark with their glistening bodies. The sunlit drizzle was like a veil of fire between.

A movement low down to the left caught David's eye, and he discovered that other creatures were likewise responding: lizards and snakes mostly, and not a few of the latter rattlers and copperheads: all the vermin of the Underworld, according to Calvin's ancestral myths. They coiled there among the grasses, tasting the air with forked tongues, beady eyes alert and hungry.