Landslayer's Law (3 page)

Got off job
numero uno,
rather. He still had
numero dos
to attend: his quasi-assistantship over at UGA’s cartography lab.

“Quick pick on Lotto,” a new arrival coughed. Scott shifted toward the machine, but Byron was there before him, dusky fingers dancing across the keypad. Scott grimaced and leaned back against the shelf behind him, head barely clearing the assortment of rolling tobaccos kept there. He ignored the short businessman (by his dress) even now receiving the requested random numbers, for his gaze had been snared by a pair of figures pounding up the sidewalk beyond the glass windows up front. And before his weary brain could do more than catalog the set, they had yanked the door open and burst inside, tumbling to a breathless halt beyond the counter.

Alec McLean and Aikin “Mighty Hunter” Daniels; at twenty-twoish, a fair bit younger than Scott’s own pushing-thirty, and more friends-of-his-friends than actual friends themselves—had not the three of them been party to certain extraordinary secrets. Secrets
so
extraordinary, in fact, that they’d make Mr. X-phile here abandon his little cap in the despair of the utterly outclassed if he even suspected.

Otherwise—basically they were typical UGA seniors. Aik was shortish, with close-cropped dark hair, silver-framed specs, and a tendency (as now) to dress in black T-shirts and cammo fatigues—which made sense, given he was a forestry jock. Alec—whom Scott knew better because the lad had been in a geology lab he’d TAd—was almost depressingly average: average major (computer science), average height, average weight, mouse-brown hair above blandly handsome features. True, he sported the obligatory loop earring, subtly spiked hair, and carefully trendy clothes, but the overall effect was too contrived, too—there was no other word for it—neat.

Well, except for the moment, when he was flushed, panting, and had his shirttail half undone.

He was also lugging a beige plastic pet cage of a size to contain an average (of course, it being Alec’s) feline. Which, to judge by the caterwauling issuing from behind the chrome steel bars, the cage, at least at present, did.

Alec, having now regained his wind (and Scott’s assessment having expended less than a second), managed to compose himself sufficiently to blurt out a desperate, “Whew, Scotto, thank God you’re here; I need a major favor
now
!”

“Oh?” Scott drawled back, with the deliberate languor of someone who’d had to contain himself with too many people for too long and now found an opportunity to push someone else’s buttons for a change.

Alec’s eyes were wild, almost panicked. A glance at Aikin showed much the same, with a fair bit of resigned irritation thrown in. “We need to borrow the back room! I mean, it’s an emergency, okay?”

“Sure,” Scott agreed amiably, having concluded (in part from certain suspicions about the cage) that perhaps this wasn’t the time to prod the proletariat after all. Byron was looking bemused—and relieved, the Lotto Machine having, for the ten minutes of the draw break, shut down.

“Oh wow, thanks, man!” Alec gasped, already scooting past a twelve-foot rack of cigars toward the door to the Staff-Only storeroom-cum-office.

“Back in a sec,” Scott told his coworker. “Sorry.” Byron shrugged and proceeded to sell a stubble-haired kid in an REM T-shirt a pouch of American Spirit.

Scott joined the two invaders in a cramped and cluttered cubby walled on two sides by shelves bearing an assortment of spare-stock magazines and newspapers, as well as several boxes of returned publications sporting such evocative titles as
Busty, Manshots,
and
Shaved Orientals.

“So what’s the deal?” he demanded, even as Alec plopped the cage on the relatively uncluttered surface of the owner’s desk and fumbled with the latch. Then: “Hey, you’re not gonna let
that
loose in here, are you?”

“No choice,” Alec countered, as wired as Scott had ever seen him. Evidently the occupant of the cage was clawing him through the barred front, thereby complicating its own release. A release it apparently craved in no uncertain terms, to judge by the screeches and very unfeline whistles issuing from within, which sounded like a bobcat trying to mate with a bagpipe and a flute.

“Thank God!” Alec sighed, as the door finally opened.

“You may thank
me
instead,” Scott shot back, then, in spite of the fact he’d seen it numerous times before, gaped at what had just stepped onto Midge Lee’s green felt desk pad.

Not a cat—entirely—at the moment. Or more precisely, it seemed to have begun as your basic orange tabby—the head had clearly been short-muzzled and green-eyed when it emerged. But already the nose was growing longer, the fur assuming a ruddy tinge, the eyes shifting to yellow-gold. And the forelegs—well, they’d started out standard old
Felis domesticus
issue: round, soft, and furry; only now they were bare and scaled from the elbow joint down (and feathered for another joint above it), ending in what closely resembled the claws of a good-sized raptor. An eagle perhaps, or something more exotic, like an African secretary bird.

As for the tail (which had now joined the rest of the beast in the cold electric light of not-quite-day), it was exactly like that of a small red fox—as indeed (save the front limbs), was everything else.

Scott exhaled a breath he didn’t recall holding, and as if on cue, so did his accomplices. “Well,” he began preemptorially, “which of you lads would like to explain why you felt compelled to bring the fuckin’
enfield
in here, right at shape-shiftin’ time?”

“Not ‘the fucking enfield,’” Alec corrected. “
Aife,
since that’s her name. And we brought her here because—well, basically, we had no choice.”

“Would you like to
explain
?” Scott repeated, leaning back with his arms folded expectantly.

“Shouldn’t have to,” Aikin grumbled from the corner.

“You don’t have to explain the critter,” Scott conceded wearily. “I’ve
seen
it a time or two, even in that shape. What I wanta know is how two bright lads like you happen to be luggin’ a patently magical animal around downtown Athens, when you
know
the damned thing changes from Aife-the-housecat back to its enfield secret identity at dusk and dawn. I still don’t understand that,” he added. “Why it
has
to change, I mean.”

“Don’t ask
me
!”
Alec spat. “That was Mr. Lugh’s bright idea!”

“It has to do with keepin’ brain patterns imprinted, or something,” Aikin supplied. “And with keepin’ McLean on his toes by remindin’ him this is a magical beast he’s got custody of.”

“
Don’t
remind me,” Alec groaned. “Doesn’t help that she’s also my girlfriend.”

“
Was
your girlfriend,” Aikin amended. “Lover, anyway.”

Alec bared his teeth and shot Aikin a warning look which took even Scott (who knew how wimpy Alec usually was) aback.

“Sorry,” Aikin grunted. “As to what we’re doin’ here—uh, actually, it was an accident.”

“A
stupid
accident, okay?” Alec admitted. “See, Aik’s been bugging me forever to let him do some before-and-after X-rays of our furry friend here”—he patted the now complacent enfield encouragingly—”so anyway, a bud of his who’s in vet school finally found a slot when he could zap her with the nukes off the record, and—”

“You told somebody
else
?”
Scott yipped, aghast.

Alec shook his head. “Favor for favor. Guy showed Aik how to work the gizmo; Aik promised him two packs of venison.”

“It’s addictive,” Aikin explained helpfully.

“Right. So anyway, the plan was to sneak in at sunset in a forestry van we’d got hold of, and do the deed—except that somebody showed up who wasn’t supposed to, which means we had to boogie before we even got the first round done.”

“And then we had to explain ourselves,” Aikin added, rolling his eyes. “Which cost a bunch of time, which meant we had to get Miss Aife here home before she shifted.”

“So guess what?” Alec took up again—to Scott’s amusement; it was like watching a comedy relay team, which concept would have chagrined the hell out of either nominally sober boy. “Guess whose van died in the middle of downtown Athens?”

Scott lifted an eyebrow.

Aikin nodded sourly. “Piece of shit. More to the point, piece of shit with no upholstery in back, which means Our Lady of the Iron Phobia looked set to do her thing in the worst place you can imagine.”

“But being the quick thinking lads we are,” Alec went on, “we abandoned our wheels and beat feet to the nearest safe haven. Actually, we tried Myra’s place first, but she wasn’t home.”

“Right.”

“And we thank you for it,” Alec concluded, then turned to inspecting the enfield, which was quietly combing its elegant vulpine tail with one not-so-elegant claw. It trilled happily.

Scott eyed the door with alarm. “Please don’t let it do that again. I’d hate to have Mr.
X-Files
barge in.”

Alec turned pale. “Sorry. Like I said, it was the only place we could think of to let her out to change.”

“I still don’t understand why you couldn’t just leave her in the cage.”

Alec scowled. “’Cause she would’ve been too close to the iron bars, which really freaks her when she changes. It’s Aik’s famous imprinted conditioning, I think; when the change kicks in all that runs is instinct. Last time something like that happened, she yowled for three days solid.”

“Yeah,” Scott nodded. “I heard about that.”

“Made me wonder what’d happen if you tried to kill a double-cursed Faery woman who’s wearing the substance of this World.”

“I don’t wanta know,” Scott sighed, checking his watch, then sighed once more—from relief—as he noted that the enfield was reverting to its more conventional form. Which was still damned disconcerting, even when it only wore its magical shape for roughly five minutes twice a day. “Must be a pill,” he told Alec.

Alec nodded sagely. “I hate magic.”

“Yeah,” Scott murmured. “I know.”

A quick check to confirm that the enfield had fully lapsed back to cat shape, and Alec shooed his nominal pet back into the carrier. “Sorry,” he repeated. “Any port in a storm.”

“And speakin’ of storms,” Scott noted. “It’s supposed to rain tonight, and I’ve still gotta put in some grunt time down at the lab.”

“At least there’s no magic there,” Alec retorted with a smirk. “Just good old high tech-no-lo-gee.”

“Right,” Scott snorted as he ushered his callers out, to the curious regard of his partner-in-crime at the register. “Thank God.”

Interlude I: A Time Between

(near Sylva, North Carolina—Thursday, June 19—early evening)

“You say they had
green
hair?” the Macon County Sheriff rumbled incredulously, his voice an uncanny echo of the thunder brawling among the mountains behind Jamie’s folks’ trailer, on the warped front deck of which they were presently ensconced.

Jamie didn’t reply. Terror had caught him again—that cold, sick tightening in his gut that arose whenever something
bad
happened and he was forced to confront it with neither mercy, grace, nor warning—and sent him off to that dreamy distant place where he only lived in
now.
And for the moment,
now
consisted of contemplating his own scrawny reflection in the sheriff’s mirrorshades. Unconsciously he stretched up on tiptoes, which made his glassy twin’s tummy go as fat as his flesh-and-blood ma’s really was.

“Pay attention!” that ma hissed. He wished she’d go away and leave him alone. Or maybe that she was as little as her reflection, where it showed in a second set of mirrorshades belonging to a deputy Jamie strongly suspected by his black hair, rusty skin, and the name Bushyhead emblazoned on his plastic name tag, was a for-real local Indian, which was to say Cherokee. It was too bad, Jamie reckoned, that it wasn’t Ma who’d vanished, ’stead of Alvin. Pa might’ve complained some, but Alv wouldn’t have protested at all, and certainly not had hysterics all over the mountainside the way Ma had. What was she worrying about anyway? Sure, Alv was her kid, but Jamie was the one who mostly took care of him, or at least made sure he was loved and happy, which was the most important thing.

The sheriff cleared his throat. Jamie’s gaze drifted back to his own silver doppelganger, then down to the man’s name tag.
Smith,
it read. Which was why he’d forgotten it. Twice.

“Green hair,” Smith prompted, more irritably than before.

“One of ’em,” Jamie acknowledged at last, and it took him a moment to realize that it was his own voice that had spoken. “I said
one
of ’em had green hair.”

“Jamie, don’t lie!” Ma snapped.

“I’m not! I—”

The sheriff silenced her with a glance. “Might be so, ma’am,” he conceded. “Kids nowadays dye their hair a lot. Even little’uns. They use Jello or Kool-aid.”

“This wasn’t like that,” Jamie protested before he could stop himself. “This looked…I dunno, it just looked real. It was kinda dark, for one thing. Metally-lookin’—almost.”

“Anything else?” Bushyhead urged. “Any detail at all?”

Jamie shifted his weight, wishing he could sit down. His gaze had gone wandering again, to the trailer’s glass front door, which had likewise assumed the quality of a mirror. Unfortunately, it revealed a vista of the trees at the foot of the hill: the trees and the park. The park where Alvin had—

“…vanished.” The sheriff was saying.

Jamie shook himself, trying really hard to concentrate and be grown-up and cooperative, which was hard when your ma wasn’t being any of those things, and you were scared to death of what your pa would do when he came home, and it really was your fault that you’d disobeyed both your folks’ warnings about playing with strangers and as a consequence misplaced your only brother. Yeah, that’s what it was:
misplaced.
Better that than lost, or abandoned. And darn sight better than that word everybody was avoiding, which was kidnapping. Alvin had been kidnapped.

“Now let’s go over that last part again,” Sheriff Smith said through a yawn. “You were playin’ hide-and-seek…?”