Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free (7 page)

“What the frak does—”

Vincent turned and followed after the feybloods to a minivan parked on the road.

*I don't think he likes waerwolves.*

You think?
I responded. I shut the door, and returned to the dining room.

Pete and Vee still sat holding each other, his round baby face pressed into her white-blond hair. Mattie stood behind them now, a worried look on her face.

“Hey guys,” I said. “We'll figure this out. I'll talk to Reggie, and—”

“Thanks, brother,” Pete said, looking up. “But I think we need some time to think about stuff. And aren't you supposed to be helping that sasquatch?”

“You two are more important than finding Sal a girlfriend,” I replied.

“Pete's right,” Vee said. “There's nothing you can do here right now. You shouldn't pass up this chance to finally get your business going. We'll be okay.”

I sighed, and glanced at my watch. Ten minutes to ten. “Okay. I can call Reggie on the way to Elwha, see what he can do. In fact, do you guys want to come along? Sal said there was a Silver Court steading in the area. It might help you make a decision one way or the other.”

“No, thanks,” Vee said. “We've visited several steadings already.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised. “Oh. Well, uh, if you guys need anything—”

“Thank you,” Pete and Vee both replied.

I nodded, then headed upstairs to where most of the bedrooms were. I needed to change into my Woodland Adventure Finn outfit.

The hairs on my arm stood up, and I felt a familiar tingling between my eyes, resonating from down the hall.

A spirit was being summoned in Mort's bedroom.

 

4

Wanted Dead or Alive

I tried the doorknob to Mort's bedroom, but it was locked.

“Mort!” I pounded on his door. “What's going on?”

I heard a muffled curse, and then Mort replied, “I'm busy. What do you want?”

“I wanted to talk for a minute. Did you—are you summoning in there?”

Silence.

Then, “No. What do you need?” His voice sounded scratchy, and he began coughing.

I knew what I'd felt. There had been a disembodied spirit in Mort's room, and given recent events, I didn't trust it was a random haunting or visitation. Either Mort had summoned the spirit, or someone had summoned it and sent it to Mort, possibly to possess him.

I tried the knob again. “This is stupid. Open the door so we can talk.”

“Piss off. Go play with your girlfriend or something.”

Well, that sounded like Mort. Which meant he probably wasn't possessed, at least. Just a dickhead.

“Mort, open this door or I'm going to break it in.”

“Who died and made you Merlin of the world?”

“Who died and made you a douche? Gods, dude, I'm just trying to help.”

“Well, if I need help, I wouldn't ask the guy who doesn't even know what Wi-Fi is,” he replied.

“You know what? Screw it. You're clearly not possessed, or being attacked, so have fun playing necromancer with yourself. And don't come to me if you need someone to shave your palms.”

I strode off. Mattie would be disappointed, but there was only so much I could do when it came to Mort. If anything strange started happening outside of his room, I'd do something about it. But I didn't have time right now to deal with Mort being stupid on his own time and energy.

I changed into the steel-toed boots, Carhartt pants, and leather jacket I'd bought before our assault on the EMP sanctum a few months ago—the closest thing I had to armor—then stopped down in the basement. I retrieved a couple of items from the padlocked case near the stairs: a hex amulet to protect against witch curses, a pair of specially coated women's sunglasses to protect against stone gazes, and then grabbed Zeke's silver-coated steel baton, which Dawn had returned to the safe.

I reluctantly left the revolver behind again. The Pax forbade civilian arcana to use guns outside of home defense. There were exceptions, of course, especially for enforcers or their assistants, but one of those exceptions was not, unfortunately, simply going into feyblood territory. In fact, guns were doubly restricted there to protect feybloods against poaching or hunting. But those same rules forbade feybloods from having firearms at all, so it was to everyone's benefit they not be given the excuse for an arms escalation.

Besides, sasquatches could smell gun oil a mile away, and I didn't want to spook Sal's love before we got close enough for them to meet.

I loaded the Kin Finder into the back of the hearse and headed out.

I turned onto Washington Street and stopped to let a family of deer cross the road. The waterfront of Port Townsend spread out below me and to the left, where a steady stream of people moved along the row of brick and stone buildings. Tourist season was in full swing, people attracted by the artsy small-town charm, countless Victorian buildings, and wooden boat culture. I still wasn't used to how much the town had become focused on the tourists. Gone were the days of community barter and families gathering at the tavern every evening.

Even the arcana families seemed more worried about their property taxes or running small businesses than improving the world through magic; they ordered their magic supplies online and interacted more through cell phones and the Internet than meeting in local moots or forming circles. They barely celebrated the Wheel of the Year, where once we could count on large house or beach parties at least four times a year.

I'd certainly wanted to get out of necromancy and chase my own mundy dream once, and so I found my own reaction to all the changes even more confusing.

Maybe it was just that I didn't really have anyplace else to call home. And if Pete and Vee were taken away, it would feel even less like home.

As if reading my private thoughts, Alynon said, *You must face that your brother is no longer arcana. Sooner or later, he shall need help related to his waer spirit, the kind of help you cannot give.*

I turned on the radio rather than respond. It was set to the “oldies” station. Before my exile, the oldies station played classics from the '50s and '60s. Now, it played the music of the 70s, 80s, and even 90s, music I'd grown up with, the music that defined my teen years and music that would have defined my early adulthood if I'd been around to hear it. I tried not to think about that too deeply, and changed to an empty station. I pushed play on the iPod that Dawn had given me.

“Love Shack” by the B-52's started playing over the radio.

“Seriously,” I said. “How amazing is this thing? There's, like, hundreds of albums worth of music in here!”

*Yeah, amazing,* Alynon replied in a less-than-amazed tone. *A few clever thaumaturges have begun moving human experience from physical objects into a virtual cloud, where experiences are only given form when manifested through choice and action and a bit of power. Hmmm, I wonder where they got that idea from? I mean, it's not like there's an entire Other Realm that works something like that?*

“Whatever,” I said. “At least I don't have to keep a pencil around to rewind the cassette every time it tangles.” Our hearse's cassette player had eaten tapes with the enthusiasm of Slimer in a hot dog factory.

*Indeed. And soon, your infomancers will have control over everything you own and are.*

“Paranoid much?” I asked.

*Clueless, much?* Alynon responded.

“At least I have an excuse,” I replied, and turned up the music.

I had twenty-five years of history and pop culture to catch up on, everything that happened between my exile in 1986 and 2011 when I returned. At Dawn's suggestion, and with her help, I was doing it chronologically. We'd started at 1987, the year after my exile, and each month we moved to the next year. We watched movies and television shows of the time, and highlights of the year on YouTube. And she made me playlists of all the best, or at least most popular, music from that year.

Dawn promised it would get better around 1991, but that was a whole two months away.

Not that I wasn't already exposed to stuff from later years here and there of course. And wild horses couldn't have kept me from watching
Lord of the Rings
. But despite wonders like hand-held computers and the Internet, the world itself hadn't really changed much. The Russians had never invaded or started World War III, no doubt daunted by the prospect of facing Rambo and the insurgent Wolverines. We weren't driving fusion-powered hover cars or teleporting, thanks, in Dawn's opinion, to oil corporations; and we weren't able to transport into virtual computer worlds, or create computer-generated lovers by wearing bras on our heads and hacking NORAD Satcom (which was actually a good thing, probably).

So taking time to truly grok each year seemed like a decent plan, especially if I wanted to be able to talk as if I'd been there, and really understand pop-cultural jokes. Which, when hanging around people like Dawn's friends, seemed an important skill to have.

*   *   *

It took an hour and a half to drive from Port Townsend to Port Angeles along the northeastern edge of the Olympic National Forest, and from there up into the Elwha River campground. Early summer sunshine glistened off the melting snowpack of the Olympic mountains, and a light breeze caused the spruce and cedar trees to sway gently.

I parked and made my way along a hiking trail to the viewpoint for the Elwha Dam, a small hydroelectric structure of concrete and great steel tunnels that spanned a choke point in the narrow river ravine and filled the air with a deafening whirring sound.

I left the main hiking trail, and made my way up to a hidden path that paralleled the river.

Sal stepped out from behind a giant cedar tree, his red-brown fur matching the color of the tree's bark, his head brushing against branches I would have to stretch to touch. “Youself late, Finn-mage.”

“Sorry, Sal. I had a bit of ARC trouble. Ready to go find your soul mate?”

“Iself ready to try.”

“Cowabunga!” I held up the map and compared it against what I could see of the river's path. “It looks like we should find your true love about two bends up the river.”

Sal nodded. “That is near Silver steading.”

“Okay then. Shall we?”

I put on the saucer-sized women's sunglasses of Protection Against Stonegaze, despite the −5 hit to my Charisma, and we hiked upriver, leaving the man-made trails and the whirring of the dam behind. I followed Sal, who better knew how to find those feyblood trails invisible to the untrained or, in some cases, unmagical eye. Whenever our path brought us close to the river's edge, my stomach began to churn, my knees felt a little wobbly, and I walked as far from the water's edge as possible. Ever since I'd drowned while escaping my grandfather's underwater super-villain lair, I'd had difficulty with large bodies of water, or the thought of being submerged.

“Stop!”

A faun stepped out from behind a tree. He looked like a tan little man with goat legs, and wore a camo vest, a Utilikilt that hung down to his furry goat knees, and a Budweiser baseball cap that didn't quite cover the nubby little horns on either side of his forehead. He held a crossbow loosely in his hands, and he spit to the side of the trail.

“Where do you two think you're going?” he asked.

“Uh, hi,” I said. “Do you know where they keep the nuclear wessels?”

He frowned, and raised his crossbow. “Nuclear what?”

I raised my hands. “Sorry. We're just heading up the river a bit. We think my friend here might have a, ah, connection with someone there.”

“Good connection or bad?” the faun asked, lowering the crossbow again, and looked at Sal. “You're not on a job, are ya?”

Sal shook his head. “Iself not on a job. Iself looking for a truefriend.”

“Uh huh. Well all right then. I'd best lead you in so you don't hurt yourselves. Go ahead and just continue down that path there, I'll follow right behind ya.”

Sal began striding down the path, and I hurried to catch up.

The faun trailed behind us, giving occasional directions to walk around a spot in the trail, or to take a side path marked only by a cluster of mushrooms or other subtle marker.

“Had a couple of amateur hunters get so drunk that the glamours and our will-o'-the-wisp didn't even work on them, they just stumbled right into our steading,” the faun explained as we walked. “So we started putting traps on the paths.”

“Is that where you got the gear?” I asked.

“Naw. Garl, this waerbear friend of mine, he sometimes likes to scare campers and hunters for fun. They leave all kinds of stuff behind.”

“And the DFM doesn't mind Garl's games, or these traps?” I asked.

“The Department of Feyblood Mismanagement don't care what we do long as we ain't collecting guns or causing them any paperwork.”

Sounded about right. “My name's Finn, by the way, and this is Sal.”

“Don,” the faun said. “Don Faun. And yes, my sires hated me.”

We emerged from the thick patch of forest into a clearing at the river's edge—a clearing filled with feybloods.

They stood in a crowd with their backs to us, facing a young woman. Behind her stood a single cedar tree on the riverbank, its branches covered in drooping bunches of needlelike fronds doing a slow dance in the breeze.

In the crowd of feybloods I spotted a bear, a frog-faced fellow, a jackalope, a wolf, and a fox, a moving pile of dirt and rocks that must be a dwarf, several fauns who didn't share Don Faun's clothing appreciation, a couple of river nymphs—and a single sasquatch female. Now, I just had to convince her to return with us to the car, and I could verify with—

“Got some visitors!” Don Faun called out, then tipped his hat at us and disappeared back into the forest.