Landslayer's Law (8 page)

Liz nodded sagely. “Never mind that most of the time she’s a cat, which can be either good or bad depending, except that twice a day she turns red and grows a fox’s head and tail and eagle talons, at which time you have to be sure there’s no steel close by, or anybody who doesn’t know, and—”

“Stress for the McLean boy,” Calvin broke in. “I see.”

“I’m kinda worried about him, actually,” David admitted.

“We’re also worried about Scott,” Liz added.

“Uh-uh,” Calvin cautioned. “That’s it. No serious stuff before breakfast.”

“Suits me,” David agreed. “I’ll hold off on the other thing.”

Liz’s eyed him narrowly. “
What
other thing?”

“Things that go bump in the night. That’s as much as I’m gonna say.”

Fifteen minutes later, the three of them were neatly ensconced in the bed, with Calvin leaning against the foot, legs folded beneath him, precisely between David’s and Liz’s feet. A pair of lacquered bed trays balanced precariously between them. “So,” Calvin prompted, between crunchings of bacon (he hadn’t eaten either), “what gives?”

David chugged the remainder of his orange juice, wiped his mouth, and flopped back appreciatively. “Which do you want first?”

“Search me. McLean’s stuff, I guess, since I know him better.”

David sighed. “Actually, the main problem is that Alec’s just not cut out for the kind of stuff he gets into—or that we get him into, rather—not that we’ve been tryin’ lately. Trouble is, he’s always been the rational one of the Gang: the voice of reason when the rest of us wanted to get wild and crazy.”

“Except that he also uses you guys as an excuse to get wild and crazy,” Liz countered. “He always wanted to grow up to be you.”

“Even though we’re the same age, and he’s taller’n me—and looks older now.”

“Age has nothing to do with it. He’s as much a kid at heart as the rest of us. Trouble is…I dunno, he just doesn’t seem to learn from his mistakes.”

David shook his head. “No, it’s more that he lives in Camelots.”

“Camelots?” asked Calvin.

“Brief shining moments. He’s enshrined certain periods of his life in his mind as golden ages and won’t let ’em go. Like the summer he and I got to be friends. Like the first summer after me and him and Aik all hit puberty—which he beat us to, incidentally. Like the summer G-Man and Darrell moved up, and we started the MacTyrie Gang.”

“Ah,” Calvin yawned, “I see.”

“Possibly,” David yawned back. “But most of ’em were before we got involved with Faerie and the Worlds and all—back when magic was just fun, ’cause it was mental masturbation out of a gaming manual. But anyway, the last golden age lasted about two days, which was back when I first met you, and Liz and me finally got together, and he got jealous of all that, and Aife used his jealousy to get to us through him. She also popped his cherry, which was something he’d romanticized: doin’ it under perfect conditions with the perfect woman.”

“And then findin’ it was all a cheat,” Calvin finished for him. “Poor guy.”

“Except that he can’t seem to let go and get on with his life. I mean, he really has been hurt, but there’re a lot a people in the world, and surely somewhere there’s somebody he can love who’ll love him back.”

“Unfortunately,” Liz said quietly, “he’s
nobody’s
number one—not even his folks’, ’cause they’ve got each other. I mean, it really isn’t fair: that some of us are the most important person in the world to two or three people, and poor Alec, who is absolutely not a bad guy, isn’t to even one.”

Calvin gnawed his lip. “I don’t suppose we could boil this down to something as crude as the fact that—’scuse me Liz—his first piece of ass was a Faery woman? I mean, no offense, but everything I’ve heard leads me to believe that any mortal woman would be an…an anticlimax after that.”

David grimaced at the probable pun. Liz scowled. “Even if the woman proved to be an ice-hearted bitch?”

“—Who finally admitted that she really did love him,” David shot back. “Who suffered imprisonment for him. Who risked Lugh’s wrath to be with him. Who’s stuck by him even with cat instincts ruling her mind most of the time, and you know how fickle even normal cats can be.”

“So we all agree that what Master McLean needs most is somebody to love him as much as he loves…the memory of Aife?”

David nodded. “We have to be honest: the boy can certainly love. I’ve felt that love and it’s wonderful. Trouble is, he fell in love with the wrong person. God knows it’s hard enough for two
regular
folks who love each other to keep things straight, as I’m sure you know, considering how different you and Sandy are.”

Calvin rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it.”

“Speaking of which,” Liz inserted. “Everything okay with you guys?”

“Fine as frog hair,” Calvin replied, with a wink. “So that’s it with McLean, then?”

David shrugged again. “Basically. Well, except that I guess things are a little worse with him right now, given that we’re going Tracking tonight and he doesn’t like doin’ that. Plus, it’s gotten to be kind of a couple-thing, and he’s often odd-man out. I could probably think of some more if I tried.”

Liz checked her watch. “Not if we’re gonna get through Scott’s woes and whatever’s bugging you before you have to head out for your final.”

“What
about
Scott’s woes?”

“Simply stated,” Liz began, “he’s been in grad school so long he’s about to start losing credits.”

“Faerie, again,” David appended. “His crowd had their own little interface with the dark side of the Sidhe a few years back—before I knew any of ’em but Myra, and her only ’cause she was Darrell’s sister. But anyway, I eventually found out about it, and, again to make a long story short, it had much the same effect on Scott it had on Alec. Freaked him out, made him withdraw into himself, turned him distrustful and paranoid. Even worse, made him dump most of his old friends, includin’ the ones in the SCA, ’cause they reminded him too much of Faerie.”

Calvin rubbed his chin. “So what happened to him there, exactly?”

David sighed. “Best I can tell, he spent most of his time captive in a tree, but he also got to see…let’s see: a maze of mirrors, a wizard’s tower, and a bunch of gryphons. Oh, and all that dissolved by some kind of screwy Track.”

“Not a lot there to base an opinion on.”

David lifted a brow. “
You
ever see a gryphon?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“Neither have I, but we’ve both seen equivalent wonders—the uktena, for instance—and we both know that while things like that can scare the livin’ shit out of you, they’ve also got this…this terrible power of fascination. See one once, and you’re changed forever. Trouble is,
we
both got to ease into it gradually—relatively speaking. Scott got it out of the clear blue without warning.”

“Right…. So where you headed with all this?”

David chuckled grimly. “I’m not sure myself, but one of the keys to Scott is that me and Liz and him and Myra got drunk one night and he told us that in spite of all the crap that went down on him there, he actually
loved
that tiny taste of Faerie, and that nothing in this World had any flavor afterwards; that life in this World was just goin’ through the motions.”

“Sounds like McLean again: him and Aife.”

“Yeah—and like Alec, that World scared him to death, ’cause he’s a scientist and it didn’t fit with what he knew. The difference is, that he
admits
that it also attracts him; Alec
denies
that it does.”

“So he missed a lot of school trying to get his head straight,” Liz continued. “Did a lot of drugs trying to recapture Faerie, got straightened out by Myra, swapped majors once, swapped back, then discovered that he’s about to start losing credits. And since he already owes a fortune in student loans and isn’t very employable to start with, he’s under a lot of pressure to finish his degree and get a job before the ceiling caves in and he’s doomed to the late shift at Barnett’s.”

Calvin looked at David. “Which brings us to whatever’s buggin’ you.”

David took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Maybe it’s nothing,” he began finally. “I
hope
it’s just a minor aberration and doesn’t mean anything. Only I’ve come to doubt that kind of thing, when it comes to…
that
stuff.”

Liz lifted a brow. “We hadn’t established it involved
that
stuff.”

David snorted softly. “Does anything else really bug me
except
that stuff?”

“When I’m late,” Liz retorted. “But go on.”

Another deep breath. “Well, I don’t want to sound like Scotto or Alec, but when anything weird happens anymore, it always makes me nervous, ’specially when we’re right on the doorstep of the longest day of the year.”

“When the Faery good-guys ought to be strongest,” Liz emphasized. “And you really do need to head out, so do you think you could get to the point?”

“It started,” David sighed, “when I woke up last night to the sound of rain.”

* * *

“Whew,” Calvin whistled five minutes later. “I can see why that might put the wind up you.”

David gnawed his lip. “Seein’ how our last run-in with Faerie began with weak spots in the World Walls.”

Calvin scratched his chin. “That screwy deer that came through while we were huntin’ back fall two years ago, right? Or has there been something since then?”

“I hope not!”

Liz puffed her cheeks. “But how do you know this was a World Wall thing? Lugh’s supposed to have banned any fooling with them.”

David counted on his fingers. “’Cause, number one, I felt a blast of chill, which seems to be a side effect of someone stepping straight through; and number two, ’cause we know for absolute fact that the only Track around here’s the one out at Whitehall.”

“Which implies,” Calvin mused, “that whoever brought that kid through was either breakin’ Lugh’s law or actin’ on his specific authority.”

“Yeah,” David agreed. “That’s what I figured too. Unfortunately, I suspect the former. For one reason, ’cause this was clearly a human kid, and dumpin’ him out on the street like that’s exactly the sort of petty, risky thing Ailill’s faction—the anti-human faction—would do. And for another reason, ’cause it was a young guy that did it—younger lookin’ than most of ’em, anyway, say early teens, human standard—and the young ones seem to be the big movers of the anti-human bunch, which is odd, knowin’ how much they like to slip into this World to raise hell and get their jollies—”

“Like some of us go to the zoo, or hike, or go hunting—any place that’s different from home,” Liz observed.

“Right. But what really spooks me,” David went on, “was the way the guy looked at me. He knew I was there, and he knew I’d caught him doin’ something he shouldn’t—it was like he was defyin’ me
and
what I represented by my implicit connection with the old-line Faery hierarchy. Like he was thumbin’ his nose at Lugh through me.”

“At authority, in other words,” Liz concluded.

A shrug. “I guess. Never thought of myself as an authority figure.”

Calvin leaned back and gnawed his lip. “So what I’m readin’ between the lines here is more trouble in Tir-Nan-Og.”

Another shrug. “We’ve known for a while that things aren’t right there. There’s the human/anti-human faction for one thing: those who acknowledge that we’re stronger than the Sidhe in some ways, and that since we control the World whose gravity maintains
their
World, we need to be cultivated and trusted; versus those who think we’re a threat to them, and that our World would do as good a job supportin’ their World if it was a glowin’ mass of slag.”

“Wrong word,” Calvin cautioned. “Slag’s often iron residue—and iron melts through the World Walls, if I recall.”

“If they’re thin enough where iron is in our World,” David acknowledged. “But to get back to Tir-Nan-Og, there’s also the problem of the small Faeries—bodachs, leprechauns, and so on—feelin’ ignored and dispossessed by the Seelie Lords, as they call ’em. A lot of ’em have emigrated to Ys, which is another Faery realm that, best I can tell, overlaps our World underwater, but which also has access to another, empty World, where the small guys would have nothing to fear from us.”

“All of which I knew,” Calvin yawned.

“Sorry,” David grunted. “I forget who knows what anymore. Need to do a chart, I reckon.”

“Comes of keeping secrets,” Liz muttered.

“Of
havin’
to keep secrets,” David amended.

“Whatever.”

“Anyway,” David continued, “the bottom line is that Faerie, which was always fairly factionalized, has become more so since—forgive my ego here—I found out the Sidhe were trompin’ around my pa’s back forty. Basically, I’ve given both big factions a rallyin’ point, and—’cause of the effects of all the Gating we’ve wound up doin’—helped polarize all kinds of minor factions and grievances as well.”

“My man, the revolutionary figurehead,” Liz drawled.

David grimaced. “Very unwilling figurehead. Frankly, it still feels unreal, ’specially when I think back to when I first heard music and sneaked out of my folks house, and met the Faeries riding in the woods one summer night.
That
all seems like a dream now.”

“Good dream, too,” Calvin assured him. “Oh, sure it changed your life—it changed all our lives, and I didn’t even know you then. But look me straight in the eye, David Kevin Sullivan, and tell me you’d undo it if you had the chance.”

“I’d undo the
damage
I’ve done those folks in a minute!” David replied hotly.

“But not the experience itself. If Lugh, or Nuada, or any of ’em told you they’d wipe your memory if you wanted—which we know they can do—you wouldn’t let ’em.”

David shrugged a third time. “I dunno. Probably not.”

“No,” Calvin echoed firmly. “Because we both know there can never be too much wonder in the world.”

Silence, for a moment, then, from Liz: “Well, the main thing
I
wonder right now, is whether I oughta take a bath or a shower.” And with that she uncoiled herself from the bed, gave both David and Calvin perfunctory smooches, and pranced into the bathroom. As the patter of water began, David likewise rose and crossed to the window, to stare down at the thronging street. Calvin joined him. “I have a terrible feeling,” David whispered, “that something may be starting. I— What the fuck?”