Landslayer's Law (33 page)

“What about amethysts?”

“That's a different matter—not that they don't wash out too, but the good ones you usually gotta dig for. I'm gonna keep checkin’, though. Gonna raid the local library.”

“Gotta get you on the Net, boy.”

“Any time.”

“Got some news down here, too,” Mims volunteered after another round of pops and crackles.

“Oh?”

“Real progress, actually. Architects called today and said they'd finished a revised set of blueprints for the marina and landside facility. Had ’em already started, actually—that was the set you saw. Just have to adapt ’em to what's really there. In the meantime, they blew up some Landsats to get the shoreline and scale, then scanned that plus those photos we took into a computer along with those plans, and
voila:
instant 3-D resort. Except for the Mountain Lodge, I mean.”

“They look good?”

“I dunno. They're up there, I'm down here. And unfortunately, they're scared to download a copy to me ’cause of these frigging power fluctuations.”

Scott's eyebrows lifted slyly. “Oh, so it's all on disc then?”

“Plus a model and a couple of printouts. But essentially…yes. You oughta run over there and see ’em if you get the chance.”

Scott coughed in lieu of reply.

“Anything else?” Mims prompted. “This was mostly a check-in call. I'll be back up tomorrow. If it clears, I'll meet you in town and we can zip out to the lake together.”

“I'll look forward to it,” Scott lied.

“Anything else?” Mims repeated. “Beer, maybe?
Good
beer?”

“I'd take some of that,” Scott acknowledged, with a wicked grin. “Bye.”

He was still grinning, if somewhat ambivalently, when Calvin ambled out of the bathroom where he'd been showering. “Cal, m’man,” he called with far more enthusiasm than that stiff, awkward conversation with Ralph Mims, “have I got some news for you!”

* * *

“You gonna nurse that soldier all night?”

Aikin bared his teeth at Scott from across the cheap lamp table upon which the two of them, for the last hour, had been playing five card stud, and raised the bottle of freshly imported Sam Adams to his lips with casual deliberation, eyes never leaving Scott's face. Not a good poker face, either. Aikin had won every hand. The motel TV showed ESPN with the sound turned down. Calvin was sprawled barefoot and shirtless on the king-sized bed, maybe watching almost-local boy Bill Elliott silently lap Dale Earnhardt: an event that would’ve set dyed-in-the-wool Ford man David Sullivan jumping around and cheering. Or maybe Cal was snoozing. Or getting himself psyched for his latest round of mojo-making. Certainly Cal hadn't eaten (so he'd said) since that morning. But what Cal didn't know was that Aikin hadn’t either. Or slept, or engaged in anything even vaguely sexual (mostly five-finger Mary these days), or done anything else Cherokee ritual claimed was proscribed.

Yep, he was officially here to bring Calvin certain botanical supplies. But that wasn't the only reason. And he supposed it was time he got to it.

“Four nines,” he announced, and laid down his hand.

“Fuck me!” Scott spat, and dumped his three eights in the trash can by his feet, pushing the pile of pennies that had been the pot straight off the table and into Aikin's lap—and the ugly green shag carpet.

Aikin made a point of ignoring them. He cleared his throat. “Cal,” he called, stretching over to rap their third conspirator on the ankle. “I've been thinkin’.”

Calvin didn't move, save that his eyelids twitched, and his irises shifted sideways beneath them. “Dangerous thing, in one so young.”

“You got me by two, last time I noticed—
old
man
—
but seriously….”

Calvin lifted a brow.

Aikin leaned back in his chair and puffed his cheeks. “I've been thinkin’,” he repeated. “And it occurs to me that you may not be the best man for what we were plannin’.”

The brow didn't move.

“Yeah,” Aikin went on uncomfortably; he didn't know Calvin well, and if the truth were known, was a touch in awe of him—anybody who was quieter in the woods than he was deserved a certain measure of respect. Which didn't change raw facts when you had ’em on your side. “Uh, yeah. See, I think the basic idea’s fine—in fact, I know it is. But…I think I oughta be the one to execute it.”

Calvin's lips barely moved. “You?”

A nod. “Uh, yeah. See, folks don’t know you up here—not many, anyway. And most of the ones who do know you, even to sight, live over ’round Davy's folks’ place. Plus, I, uh, hate to say it, but you're pretty distinctive lookin’, which means folks are likely to remember you, and the last thing we need is for anybody to draw attention to themselves, ’specially where you'd need to be.”

“So?”

“So…I'm local. I grew up in MacTyrie. I'm over there all the time, even now. And folks’re used to me sneakin’ ’round. They wouldn't think anything about it if
I
was prowlin’ through a graveyard or something. You, they'd—”

“—Arrest,” Scott concluded, coopting Aikin's beer in lieu of retrieving a fresh one of his own from the tiny ’fridge in the corner. “Actually, Aik may be right. After all, the hard part’s not the doin’, it's the getting’ in and out.”

“Or there and back,” Aikin supplied. “You'd be conspicuous as hell on your bike.”

“A bitch in the rain, too,” Scott noted.

A shrug. “So Aik can drive me over in his truck, let me out, then circle back to get me.”

“Score one for the Red Man,” Scott remarked.

Aikin glared at him. “But Cal—”

Calvin fingered the uktena scale on his bare chest reflectively. “No.”

Aikin felt a surge of anger, which he quickly suppressed. The last person he wanted to lose his cool around was Calvin. He chewed his lip for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Give me one
good
reason.”

“It's dangerous.”

“So was drivin’ up here in your famous rain.”

Scott looked up from rummaging through the trash can in quest of the cards he'd forsaken. “He's got you there.”

Calvin scowled. “I know why you really want to do this.”

“’Cause I'm the best person,” Aikin shot back instantly. He'd anticipated that one.

Calvin shook his head. “’Cause you're magic-obsessed, but you've only done it that one time, when the Wild Hunt got after you, and you didn’t get to enjoy it then; whereas, me and Dave have done it a lot. It's something me and him share that you and him don't. Part of that chip-on-the-shoulder, I-was-the-last-to-get-to-Faerie bullshit thing.”

Aikin felt his anger striving to return, this time far more forcefully. He swallowed hard, refusing to be baited. “I was a fish too,” he growled instead.

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Didn't have time!”

Calvin snorted.

Another deep breath, and Aikin tried a different tact. “Look at it as furtherin’ my education. I'm a forestry major—”

“—Another point for the Aikster,” Scott put in.

Calvin eyed him warily. “Whose side are you on?”

“The angels, of course,” Scott smirked.

Calvin lifted the scale and ran a speculative finger delicately along one milky-clear edge. It looked, Aikin thought, like a palm-sized fish scale cast in semitransparent resin, bar that red inclusion at the root. “I shouldn't,” Calvin muttered, “and I'm probably stupid if I do, but…okay. I mean, I wouldn't want you to
cry,
or anything—and it really would be a pain if I went over solo on my bike—conspicuous to park, awkward to change, and bitchy weather all. But,” he added archly, “
I’m
gonna drive the getaway car.”

It was Aikin's turn to protest. “Nobody drives my truck!”

Calvin slipped the thong that secured the scale from around his neck. “No pain,” he grinned, “no gain.”

“I feel for you both,” Scott giggled. And fell silent.

* * *

“Twenty minutes, max,” Aikin emphasized an hour later, as Calvin eased Aikin's pickup to a crawl beside the parking lot of the MacTyrie Tastee Freeze. It was midnight, and the lot had been deserted since eleven—not that it would’ve mattered; Aikin had tinted every window in his S-10 absolutely to the legal limit. And Calvin, at the wheel, could’ve been his twin—when you glimpsed them in the dark through a layer of smoke-colored film. Cal was taller, of course (so was everybody else—including David—Aikin admitted sourly), but that didn't show sitting down; and with his hair pulled back in a tail, their ’dos were nearly identical—especially since Calvin also wore one of Aikin's trademark black sweatshirts and the floppy khaki hat his friends, to a man, fairly loathed.

Aikin wasn't wearing much at all—Calvin had advised him not to—just black sweatpants and shirt, and cheap Chinese slippers. Stuff he could doff or don in a hurry.

Calvin was watching him too, with a mixture of amusement and irritation and…genuine concern, as best Aikin could determine. “Any time,” Calvin prompted. “’Less you've changed your mind….”

Aikin didn't answer. Rather, he closed his eyes and felt for the scale that now lay oddly warm against his chest. A deep breath, and he clamped his fist around it—hard. Per Calvin's instructions, he tried to ignore the fine clear pain building there, where the edge sliced into the heel of his thumb; and focus instead, first on his breathing, then on the beast he would become.

They’d discussed a number of options, but in the end had settled on something both obvious and easy—with the caveat Calvin had already stressed three times on the trip down MacTyrie’s main drag.

He had to have eaten the target beast, of course; but he was a wildlife major, and had actually tasted quite a number of unlikely critters, furred, winged, and scaled alike. And while it was best if the prototype had roughly one’s own mass, Aikin didn’t think your garden-variety Georgia whitetail would be the optimum choice for the middle of a very small town, while ’gator and German shepherd had too many other limitations. Unlike Calvin, he hadn’t sampled cougar or bear; but either wouldn’t have been completely over the top anyway.

Instead, he thought small: soft gray fur, white belly, and tiny bright black eyes; ears like fold of velvet, and nimble paws, thick strong haunches, and a tail like a twitchy plume erupting from the end of his spine.

For a long moment, nothing happened, and he was on the verge of opening his eyes when he felt a wash of heat spread up his arm from the scale—a rush that was followed by a conflagration and far more pain than he’d ever experienced, in far more places than he’d ever imagined he possessed. Calvin had warned him about that too, so he tried not to think about it; tried, instead, to focus not on the process, but the result: on what a very fine squirrel he would be.

If
he ever finished changing. Maybe—

The pain intensified, threatening to drown thought—and Aikin suddenly felt
everything
collapsing upon itself, as though his skin were shrinking across muscle and bone, forcing them to compress along with it. Except that parts were being forced out too, at odd places like the base of his spine. Weird notions awoke in his brain and started nagging, and it was suddenly hard to think like a man at all, because trees had become important all at once, and nuts and—God? What was that awful smell? Was it
Calvin
? Or synthetic velvet upholstery, or motor oil, or Oreos, or what?

And then reality clarified abruptly, and he dared open his eyes (and wasn’t that weird: to have eyes on the side of such a preposterous honker?), and inventoried those odd new senses.

And would’ve probably spent the next hour doing the same, had Calvin not powered the passenger window down and reached over to give him a solid tug on that elegant flag of a tail.

Reflex sent him to the window sill before decision did, and the quickest of backward glances showed his clothes slumped in the seat, with the scale gleaming approximately where his own human hands instants before had been.

And then the night seduced him, with an orgy of sensory overload he’d in no wise expected, and before he knew it, he’d leapt from the car to the soggy parking lot tarmac.

For a miracle, it wasn’t raining. (Cal had wondered about that too: whether his and LaWanda’s workings were running down, or if the forces they commanded were only off regrouping.) And for a bigger and more fortunate wonder, there were no stray dogs hanging around the dumpster behind the restaurant.

But Aikin scampered swiftly anyway, across the Tastee Freeze lot and into that of the building next door: a brand-new prefab cedar-shingled A-frame someone had trucked in the previous Friday, above the door of which a sandblasted wooden sigh proclaimed
Mystic Mountain Properties.
Perhaps, Aikin considered, it should’ve read
ground zero.

A mechanized roar behind him made him scurry toward the nearest tree before he realized it was only Calvin, per plan, driving away. Which gave him twenty—twenty what?— Oh: minutes. Yeah. Sure.

Aikin felt a chill at that, for he could already feel his humanity slipping, as those instincts necessary for rodent survival kicked in major-league and threatened to overwhelm his own, more subtle, ones. And since reflex was on the ascendent anyway, courtesy of Cal’s little yank, he had to work to remember who he was and, more importantly, his mission.

Mission…?

Right. He studied the darkened A-frame critically, confirming what Cal had told him from his own afternoon reconnoiter. The roof beams angled close to the ground on two sides: an easy leap for a squirrel (and awkward for your average derelict hound, which was also a consideration); a ventilation stack showed up top, of the sort that in working hours spun leisurely, but this time of night was stationary.

Aikin was amazed at how quickly he arrived. Shoot, getting around in this shape was virtually the same as thinking! No way his clumsy human bod could’ve navigated an equivalent slope and surface so rapidly, with so much facility.

The vent was another matter; mostly, he realized, because the squirrel wasn’t all that fond of touching bare metal. He overrode those instincts, though, and poked his nose inside (Gosh, but whiskers were useful!), then his sharp-nailed paws, after which the rest of him followed without volition.