Landslayer's Law (7 page)

“Ah, Mr. Gresham!” a voice drawled as he eased in. “I was
wondering
when you’d happen by. How would you like to join me for breakfast?”

“Uh…uh, sure…sir,” Scott mumbled helplessly, as his major professor unfolded all six-plus feet of his lanky, Texas-bred frame from the lab stool on which he’d been sitting, and ushered his white-faced acolyte out the door.

Chapter V: Reunion

(Athens, Georgia—Friday, June 20—early morning)

“God, I hate makin’ decisions,” David mumbled from beneath the pillow he’d moments before crammed over his eyes to shut out the morning light. He punctuated the complaint with a yawn and a languid stretch, then mashed the floppy mass deeper into his sockets with one hand, while the other roamed down between the sheet and his own bare skin to scratch an itch that had awakened along his side.

Another hand met his there: softer and smaller-boned. It twined with his for a moment, then reached lower still. His breath caught as it found a certain something. “And what decision might that be, lad, that you’d be havin’ to make?” Liz murmured in a bogus, but very…arousing brogue.

“Whether to drag my butt off to study or pass the mornin’ in more pleasant pursuits.”

“Acing our finals is all we’d
better
pursue right now, growing boy!” And with that the hand withdrew, to linger at pouncing distance on his thigh.

“It’s not the pursuit I’m concerned about, it’s the arrival.”

At which point memory overtook reality and David recalled that he had, in fact, witnessed something fairly disturbing during the wee hours, which demanded further investigation; and that said experience was, by implication, downright sobering. He was trying to school his smug, sleepy grin into a scowl (having his balls stalked by a creeping hand didn’t help), when he noticed two things together.

First, it was daylight, and more to the point, bright daylight of the kind that proclaimed cloudless heavens—a notion he confirmed by a squinting glance toward the skylight.

Second, someone had just rapped sufficiently hard on the door to rattle the stained glass pane.

“Shit!” he spat, as he his brain filled with visions of uniformed men come to grill him about shell-shocked kids who appeared from nowhere in the middle of the night. Then, as his gaze sought frantically for his clothes: “Who is it?”

Nothing.

Nothing….

Another round of knocks, followed by—no other way to describe it—a sort of raspy moan.

“Somebody looking for Myra,” Liz yawned. “Go see.”

“Land shark,” David muttered back, and rose—to discover to his dismay that Liz had claimed squatter’s rights on the sheet, the coverlet had gone AWOL entirely, the towel on the helm was soaked, and that both his skivvies
and
his jeans (which had wound up under the armored armature) had played sponge to the ensuing puddle.

Another knock—raspier than before—and a muffled thump.

“Great! David grumbled. “Just great!” He grabbed a fringed silk scarf from the back of a cut-velvet chair and whipped it around his hips sarongwise as he stumbled toward the door. Unfortunately, it didn’t meet, and he had to hold the gap closed with one hand. “Who is it?” he demanded.

No reply. But he could certainly hear breathing.
Odd
breathing, actually. He considered retrieving a sword from the remarkable stash of edged weapons stuffed into a nail keg by the entrance, and greeting the persistent visitor armed. Only that would either require three hands or abandoning his sketchy modesty. He settled for visually marking the likeliest candidate, then shooting the dead bolt and cracking the door just enough to peer around, while lurking discreetly behind it.

He came face to face with an alligator.

An honest-to-god
Alligator mississipiensis
standing clumsily erect on its little hind legs to stare him (at foot-long nose length) straight in the eye.

Not stuffed, plastic, cardboard, nor papier mache.

A for real and true, living, breathing alligator!

Which had just sort of…leered at him.

It was difficult to say which happened first. He screeched in a most unmanly manner and tried to slam the door. Liz (who had line of sight to observe both him and portal) screamed with unrestrained enthusiasm. His hands went numb. The scarf dropped—and the ’gator slumped forward against the door.

Since the critter was at least as tall as David and had physics (and hinges that flexed inward) on its side, the door flew open. David staggered back. Liz clutched the sheet to her chin and whimpered. And the ’gator (now supine on the antique prayer rug before the door) rolled onto its back, kicked its legs in the air—and appeared to be trying to giggle.

David—stark naked again, courtesy of his own clumsiness—stared at it aghast from behind the cut-velvet chair where he had taken shelter. And then he noticed something glittering in one half-closed paw, and his eyes narrowed suspiciously.

The ’gator regarded him with one slit-pupiled yellow eye—and winked.

David frowned. A surge of anger pulsed through him—and
not
at being awakened—even as a certain doubt fought it down. “You perhaps think this is funny?” he growled, eyeing the supine reptile.

The reptile winked again.

David emerged from behind the chair, drew himself up to his full height, and fumbled one of the swords from the nail keg, with which he prodded the unwelcome visitor in its leathery solar plexus. “Shall we try for crocodile tears?”

The alligator suddenly looked very contrite, then closed its eyes. The paw-with-shiny-object slowly curled closed.

Abruptly, the tail retracted. The limbs lengthened, the snout grew stubbier, the skin smoothed. Black hair sprouted on the skull and groin as the beast acquired shoulders, hips, and a waist. And then everything seemed to twist upon itself, and David suddenly found himself confronting a handsome young Native American exactly as bare-assed as he, save that he was standing, and the visitor sitting neatly (and modestly) at his feet.

“Fargo, you asshole!” he roared.

“White ’Possum, ditto!” the other snickered through what was possibly the silliest grin David had ever seen. David found the scarf, rewrapped it, and sank down on the arm of the chair. The visitor smirked. David smirked too. Then giggled. Then guffawed. A pillow sailed in his direction from the bed. Then another. A glance that way showed Liz, still sheet-clad, fishing around on the floor for the T-shirt they had so happily abandoned the previous night. She found his instead (it was larger anyway), pulled it on, located her panties, and thus arrayed joined them by the door, pausing only to retrieve something from the landing outside. A pile of clothing, a backpack, and a drum case as it evolved, the former of which she deposited atop the visitor’s feet imperiously. “Nekkid savages are only slightly more welcome than nekkid crocodilians.”

The visitor managed to stop sniggering long enough to cock an inky brow. “So what bugs you most? The nekkid part, or the savage?”

“The early morning part!” Liz snapped, gazing carefully away as the visitor located a pair of well-used jeans and inserted his feet. “So, Calvin Macintosh, what brings you here this time of day?”

While David continued to alternately smirk, snort, and giggle, Calvin rose to secure his pants, casually shoving David off his precarious perch in the process. David toppled backward into the chair, feet in the air. Calvin ignored him. “I thought I’d cook you two breakfast in bed,” he answered brightly.

“Unlikely,” David challenged, righting himself.

“Shelter from the storm?”

David shook his head. “Storm’s over.”

Calvin looked appealingly at Liz. “I suppose unbridled desire to see two of my very best friends won’t fly either?”

Another shaken head.

“How ’bout—”

‘—Unbridled desire to scare the livin’ shit out of two people who may, at present, be having difficulty remembering they
are
your friends?” Liz supplied with a haughty sniff.

“How ’bout embarrassin’ the livin’ shit out of at least one of those folks?” David chimed in, helping himself to a dry pair of Levis from Calvin’s pack.

“You know,” Liz took up once more, eyeing Calvin speculatively. “I kinda like the breakfast in bed part.”

“Yeah,” David agreed. “Since we’re awake anyway.”

“But you’re already up!”

“That,” David observed sweetly, “can be changed.”

* * *

“You can blame this on McLean,” Calvin announced over his shoulder, peering intently into the aging refrigerator that occupied one fifth of the studio’s kitchen wall. It was likely the only appliance in the world with a carpet page from the Book of Kells reproduced in metallic auto enamel on the door. The fluorescent light inside washed Calvin’s face with an eerie glow that turned his rusty skin a sickly shade of pink and made the palm-sized wire-bound object dangling from a thong at his throat seem to glow. Which, for all David knew, it could. The blinds were up now, admitting the morning light and the sound of traffic building out on College.

“What?” David called back from the bed into which he and Liz had retucked themselves, the better to observe the creation of their impending meal.

Calvin emerged from his delving with a jug of milk in one hand and a carton of eggs in the other. “I said, ‘You can blame this on McLean.’” He brandished the jug for emphasis. “My untimely arrival, I mean.”

David raised a brow. “I’m listening.”

Calvin broke eggs into a frying pan. “Short form: I was doin’ graveyard shift up in the Great Northern Place. Didn’t get off ’til three. Didn’t get away until four, and thanks to our friend the storm and a recalcitrant motorcycle, didn’t get here until seven—soakin’ wet. Bein’ the gentleman that I am, and knowin’ that you two were stayin’ here, and also bein’ a lad who blushes easily, I chose to seek shelter at
Casa McLean Y Sullivan,
which is also conveniently north of here. Imagine my surprise when I pull up there to discover the door locked, no secret key, and no friendly computer geek to let me in. I become pissed. I ride away in a huff. I find a pay phone. I use it to melt yours down with verbal heat. I then call Aikie-boy on account of the fact that I didn’t want to intrude on you guys. Get him—pissed as hell. He says him and McLean have been gamin’ late, so Alec’s stayed over ’stead of drivin’ back home in the rain. I ask about the key. He wakes up Alec. Alec says it should be where it always is. Then he says, ‘Oops,’ no it’s not, ’cause he’d locked himself out earlier, used it, and not replaced it, but that I’m welcome to crash over there—over there bein’ further than over
here.
I become more pissed. I say ‘screw it, the worst I can do is catch you guys in the sack’—which I seem to have done. It’s not like I haven’t seen you
en flagrante
before.”

“The ’gator was an interesting flourish,” David noted, but with a troubled glint in his eye.

Calvin grinned. “Glad you liked it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t give me shit about it either, which I appreciate. Suffice to say some things have…changed.”

“Changed?”

“It’s a long story, and they’re best told on a full stomach.”

David rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Politeness required it; and Calvin was no fool. He had to trust him. Still….

Calvin plundered the refrigerator again. “So, does this make me the first arrival?” he inquired, when he reemerged.

Liz pleated the coverlet absently. “You want the body count?”

“Shoot me.”

“I’ve considered it,” she advised. “But as far as
I
know, you are in fact
numero uno—
not counting those of us who live here, which is to say me, David, Alec, Aik, and Scott—if you want to count Scott as one of us.”

“Depends on which us,” Calvin gave back. “Performers or Trackers.”

“Scotto’s definitely no musician,” David chortled. “If he ever starts singin’, head for the hills, for your sanity’s sake.”

“I’ll remember that,” Calvin replied. “But you were sayin’….”

“As for out-of-towners—well, from my old crowd, there’s Darrell, who’s a solo—fortunately, since he’s also a Tracker, and havin’ to give a band the slip would be a bitch—and probably beyond him, him bein’ kind of a space cadet. Gary might come Tracking if the wife’ll let him, but only for that part, and he said to look for him when we saw him comin’. Myra’s definitely comin’ Tracking, but won’t be in until this afternoon at the soonest—said she might have to come straight to rehearsal.”

“Which leaves Piper and LaWanda,” Liz concluded. “Who’ll probably show at rehearsal too. I mean, we know ’em, but they’re not exactly friends. And as far as Tracking—well, they have, but it kinda freaks ’em. Piper, especially.”

“So that’s it, musician wise? Me, Darrell, Piper, and LaWanda?”

“Think so. What about your lady?”

“Sandy? She headed out yesterday, but she had some kind of mysterious errand down south she wanted to tend to before she checked in with you guys. Said she’d show up at rehearsal.”

“Just like everybody else,” David groaned. “I was hopin’ folks’d space themselves out so I could spend some one-on-one time with ’em, ’stead of everybody showin’ up in a clump.”

“You’ve still got me,” Calvin pointed out, then busied himself at the stove. The odor of frying bacon and herbed omelettes filled the air. As if on cue, the programmable coffeemaker turned itself on and began to add its own enticing aroma.

“As for Trackers,” David went on, “since you asked. There should be the three of us, plus Alec, Aikin, Darrell, and maybe Gary; Sandy, Myra, Scott, Piper, and LaWanda, if we can talk ’em into it, and—I guess that’s it.”

“Aife,” Liz appended. “If enchanted critters that
used
to be people count.”

“How’s McLean handlin’ that?” Calvin queried.

David shrugged. “Who knows? Sometimes he’s fine; sometimes he’s not. But shoot, man, how’d you like havin’ a former girlfriend who’d shafted you
livin’
with you? Plus havin’ to be her de facto jailor ’cause the King of the Faeries asked you to, and you can’t refuse ’cause of who and what he is; only you hate anything to do with Faerie.”