Landslayer's Law (22 page)

“Talk, Sullivan,” Aikin ordered, poking him in the ribs. “Your chin’s gonna get dirty on the floor.”

David took a deep breath. “One thing. I don’t know what you guys’ve been thinkin’, but I’d bet money that whoever jumped me wasn’t workin’ for the big guns—anyone important, anyway.”

LaWanda lifted a brow. “How so?”

“’Cause they didn’t know diddly-squat about us. I mean, think, folks: they attacked me, presumably ’cause I’m either the leader of our group, or ’cause I’m from Sullivan Cove—which implies they
want
this resort to be started, so they can go to war with us, which implies they expect to win. Only, they missed a bunch of things. To start with, they knew we were all human, so they underestimated us in general. Number two, they either missed Aife altogether—maybe ’cause of the iron on her cage—or else they just figured she was a regular cat. But either way, the fact that she was able to slip up on ’em implies they hadn’t seen us until we got to the suite, maybe even until after we got to our rooms—my sense is they were hidin’ there ahead of us.”

Calvin nodded slowly. “Could be. But they didn’t know I was a shape-shifter, either—which I’m positive took that last guy off guard.”

“And I doubt they knew about this,” LaWanda added, prodding David’s medallion with a two-inch-long, gold-lacquered nail. “Shit,
I
didn’t notice it ’til just now. I—” She broke off, eyeing the disc suspiciously. “That thing’s got mojo. I don’t know what kind or how much, but it’s there.”

David nodded in turn. “Figured. But we can talk about that later. For now, we need to get back to the folks. The longer we’re gone, the more I think there might be more of those sneaks around; that we might’ve beat feet way too soon.”

Aikin puffed his cheeks. “I’m afraid you’re right. I also agree that those folks didn’t do their homework worth a
damn. In
fact
,”
he continued, “now that I think about it, we’re not exactly your normal bunch of…humans. Like, we know a shitload of magical theory. Cal’s a shape-shifter. You’ve shifted shape, and so have Brock and Sandy, back when you guys had scales. I have too—once, with Aife’s help. But the point is, everybody could if Cal’d let us use his scale or could get hold of more. You’ve also got the Sight, Dave; and Myra says she’s got it sometimes, and Liz can scry. LaWanda claims she’s got ‘feelin’s, and who knows what other kind of mojo? Piper’s music’s got
something,
or we couldn’t have got here so fast, and Alec’s got magical trinkets out the wazoo. The point is, we’re a lot more than we seem to be. Shoot, Gary and Runnerman are the only normal guys here.”

“Don’t think too hard about them, either,” David cautioned, rising to his feet and giving Aikin a hand-up on the fly.

Calvin cast one doubtful look at the too-narrow casement and began retracing their steps. They were halfway back—by guess—when Calvin brought them up short. Aikin nearly bumped into him, and David did bump into Aikin. “What’s the deal, Red Man?” LaWanda hissed.

“Never mind,” Calvin mumbled. “It’ll keep.”

“Better hurry, then,” David urged. “Way things are goin’, there may not
be
a later. I’m not at all convinced we’re gonna get out of here with anything like accurate memories. I wouldn’t be surprised if we just woke up by the Track with empty bottles around us, thinkin’ we’d all passed out.”

“Aife’d know,” Aikin countered. “She may look like a cat, but the woman’s awake in there. Point of fact, I suspect the woman’s a lot
more
awake, now that we’re back on her home turf. I doubt it was a coincidence that she saved you. Not just a kitty on the prowl, anyway.”

“Maybe,” David grunted. “But I don’t like talkin’ out here—or anywhere else, for that matter.”

“Back in the room, then,” Calvin conceded. “I promise.”

* * *

David was more than a little surprised that they actually made it back to the glittering portal unassailed. God, but he was jumpy! He actually found himself holding his breath as he, not Aikin, gave the requisite MacTyrie Gang secret knock before shooting the bolt again.

The door cracked open instantly, to reveal the suspicious, if sleepy-eyed, gaze of Alec McLean, who pulled back the panel as little as possible and ushered them in. “How’d it go?” he yawned. Then, “Christ, Dave, are you okay? Liz told me—”

David shushed him with a spontaneous hug, which surprised both of them. “I nearly lost it,” he choked into Alec’s neck, as he found his eyes awash with tears. “I nearly lost…
you
guys. I nearly lost…
everything
. I
—
What if I’d died?”

“You’d know something we don’t,” Myra drawled. “Or else you’d know nothing at all, and either way you’d have more peace of mind than you do now.”

Sandy ambled up to join them, sandwich in hand. She saw David peering at her latest fanciful concoction. “Eat when I get nervous,” she confessed. “Better than smoking, cheaper than drinking. More productive than sleeping. I—” She gazed about frantically. “Where’s Cal?”

David blinked at her. “He was with us a second ago. Did anybody—”

A sound reached them from without: the soft metallic snap of the door being bolted. David stiffened in alarm, but before he could do more than push at the panel, a tide of darkness flowed under it from outside. He backed away instinctively, dragging Alec with him. And was still back-peddling frantically when that darkness rose up before them: a man-shaped shadow in three dimensions—whereupon it began to blur, stretch, and acquire a modicum of color. For an instant it clarified into what was clearly the second Faery youth who’d assailed them—the one whose face David had glimpsed before he’d gone shadow and fled. But then that form likewise collapsed back into the initial pool of darkness, which immediately altered again; but this time when it solidified, it was Calvin.

“Shot the bolt,” he explained, scooping his jeans off the floor by the door. “Didn’t want somebody to happen by and wonder.”

“Can’t hurt,” Alec agreed, reaching down to scoop up Aife, who’d been rubbing against his legs and purring. “Besides,
they’re
the ones who owe us explanations.”

“I’ve got some,” Calvin volunteered breathlessly. “But folks…I think you’d better sit down.”

David frowned, but reclaimed the chair he’d sprawled in earlier, along with the same copper tumbler. It was still frosted, still held that delicious liquid. Exactly as
much
of that delicious liquid. The rest crowded round, lolling on the floor or collapsing into pillows. Only Calvin remained afoot, looking pale, wary, and extremely thoughtful. Finally he too sat. “It’s like this,” he began. “You folks know I’m a shapeshifter—and if you didn’t know before, you do now. Those of you who’ve seen me do it, or who’ve done it yourselves, know that in order to change, I have to prime the uktena scale with my blood”—he held out the scale for all to see.

“But anyway,” he went on, “it’s easiest when I shift to something my own mass, and a lot more pleasant when I shift to something with a decent-sized brain. Otherwise instinct starts to squeeze out memory, and if you’re not careful, your
self
will get squeezed out too. But what I’m gettin’ at is that to shift into any shape, I have to have eaten whatever it was—a drop of blood in my mouth’s enough. Just now I fought that shadow-thing. I bit it, and I tasted its blood. But that wasn’t its real shape; it was really one of the Sidhe—and that made me wonder. So when I went shadow a minute ago, I tried something I hadn’t tried before—had the idea while we were gone, Dave. See, Faeries shift with some power besides a scale; but since I, in shadow form, wore a shape
wrought
by that other power, I figured I might also
have
that power when in that shape. And guess what? Once I was in shadow-shape, I
could
draw on its power to assume the shadow’s original form. It wasn’t a lot of fun,” he continued, “but the point is, I basically became that last guy who attacked Dave—which means I could access that guy’s memories. It’s scary as hell in somebody else’s head, never mind someone who’s both…magical and immortal; there must be a zillion zillion memories in there, and I could only risk a couple seconds before I fried my own brain. But anyway, what I was
tryin’
to do was find out who attacked us, but I missed that and…learned something a whole lot worse.”

“Enough suspense,” Liz snapped. “If I’m gonna freak, I’d as soon get it over with.”

“You won’t like it.”

“I already don’t.”

Calvin took a deep breath. “Lugh lied to us…I think. As best I can tell, the guy who attacked us is some kind of double agent. And while I truly don’t think he was workin’ for Lugh when he jumped Dave, he’s definitely party to privileged information. And to make a long story short, Lugh’s got a plan already in place. The instant—the
instant—
any construction begins at either the Cove or, God forbid, Bloody Bald, he’s gonna raise the level of the lake—
your
lake, Dave—and force the developers out that way.”

David’s mouth popped open. For the thousandth time since reaching Tir-Nan-Og, his heart flip-flopped and his emotions neared overload. Not without difficulty did he regain a modicum of control. “That son-of-a-bitch,” he gritted.

Calvin grimaced helplessly. “There was no easy way to tell you.”

“Smart, though,” LaWanda mused. “He don’t have to hurt nobody, and he gets his way without either revealin’ himself directly or raisin’ questions that could lead to him by a crooked path.”

“It really is a backup plan, too,” Calvin emphasized. “I think.”

“So much for that council,” David groaned. “I knew it was too good to be true.”

“No,” Myra countered. “It was sincere. I don’t know how I know that, but…it just felt right. Any good leader’s gonna have contingencies, though, and Lugh’s had centuries to plot and plan. Christ, he’s probably had millennia. This is no different. He’s given us time—basically a burning fuse, I guess it is now. But it really is clever—and I’m sure, based on what I’ve heard, that he can not only do what he says, but has figured out a way to make it seem like a natural occurrence—natural as we define it in the Lands of Men, anyway.”

“So the Cove gets flooded,” David spat. “And Lugh gets to keep his palace and his crown.”

“Was there any doubt about the latter?” Alec snorted.

David shrugged. “Maybe. Just a guess, but my feelin’ is that Lugh’s throne isn’t as secure as he’d like us to think it is. For one thing, where were the other Sidhe? Just Nuada and Finno—unless those other folks were bogus too, and set up for our benefit: shapeshifted Sidhe or plain old illusions, maybe.”

“But not Finno,” Alec pointed out. “Or if that wasn’t him, it was someone enough like him to activate the Track.”

“And violate the Ban,” Liz appended. “Which means that whoever summoned us was acting on Lugh’s orders.”

“So we distrust Finno too?” Alec sighed. “Great! So, who
can
we trust?”

“Nobody,” David muttered. “Nobody here, except—well, maybe just nobody.” He paused thoughtfully. “One thing I can do when we get home—assumin’ we do—is to call John Devlin—that guy in the corner with the glove on his left hand, for those of you who don’t know him. I don’t know Dev real well myself, though I’ve been up to his place one time and we’ve talked a bunch. But I can phone him, and if he was actually here tonight, I’m pretty sure he’d tell me.”

“Unless he’s been one of theirs all along,” Alec cautioned.

David was already formulating a reply when he froze. “God, you’re right!” he gasped. “We really can’t trust anybody. Shoot, since I didn’t see most of you guys until you showed up today, I’m not even sure I can trust all of you!”

“We could check,” Alec ventured. “We could all hold something iron.”

David shook his head. “Wouldn’t help. We could be human and ensorceled; God knows the Sidhe don’t have any qualms about fuckin’ with our minds. Or we could be Faeries in human substance, which lets ’em touch iron.”

All at once LaWanda chuckled, then laughed out loud. “Conspiracy theory,” she chortled. “That’s what this sounds like: the world’s ultimate kick-ass conspiracy theory!”

“Which doesn’t change one thing,” David replied. “There’s still at least an even chance that two weeks from now,
if
we’re lucky and it takes that long, the place I grew up in, where my folks and my favorite uncle and my kid brother live, will be underwater. I’ve gotta stop that. And there’s only two ways to do that: stop Lugh, which I
can’t
imagine doin’, or stop the resort from bein’ built, which I can
barely
imagine doin’.”

“I dunno, Davy,” Liz began, but at that exact moment a firm knock sounded on the door. An image promptly formed in his mind.
Nuada.

“Bad time for company,” David grumbled. “But I reckon we’d better answer it.” Without waiting for reply, he rose and padded toward the door. It was unbolted. He pulled it aside. And sure enough, the figure on the threshold was Lugh’s second-in-command. The Faery’s face was hard and grim. Unreadable. But his eyes spoke eloquently of anger: flashing like summer lightning.

Yet Nuada made no move to enter. “It would be good if you let me in,” he said, in a voice like low, rolling thunder. “I cannot enter otherwise, though some evidently preceded me, even as they evaded me just now.”

“You knew about that?” David blurted. “What the hell—”

“
Learned
about it,” Nuada snarled back, as angry as David had ever seen him. “Never imagine that one such as I thinks remotely the same as you!”

David was taken aback, but stepped numbly aside to motion the Faery in. Nuada strode straight toward the prostrate—and bound—body of the captive assassin. “Dead, by his own foolishness and his own will,” he declared. “By the time he lives again this will all be over, one way or another. He is both clever and a coward: clever enough to spy on his betters, and brave enough to risk the consequences of attacking you. More than that, I would be a fool to suggest until I have more knowledge. For now”—he spun around in place—“I must get you out of here. In fact you must leave
now.
Collect your gear at once.”

“Aife too?” Alec dared, as the rest dispersed in frantic haste.