Warstalker's Track (3 page)

Nuada looked surprised at her presence and leaned closer. John noted his interest and likewise attended. “What…?” John wondered.

“The last time I saw that one,” Nuada hissed, “she was a cat. And before that, an enfield.”

John’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “Like the rifle?”

“Like the beast—Lugh’s pets—you would know them from heraldry.” Nuada pointed once more toward the tableau. “It would seem that a discussion is about to commence that it would be wise for us both to attend.”

John shook his head. “When…?”

“A week, in your World, since you…left. Less than an hour, if that, for me. Now be silent, and let us see what we shall see.”

PART ONE

Chapter I: Ongoing Chaos

(Sullivan Cove, Georgia—Friday, June 27—early morning)

“This ain’t no natural storm,” Big Billy Sullivan opined from the smaller of the two back porches that flanked the kitchen extension on the back of the north Georgia farmhouse he’d occupied for close to fifty years. He thumped the morning’s third cup of coffee down on the porch rail and leaned against the post nearest the steps. The worn, faded wood groaned at the pressure: two hundred pounds was a lot to bring to bear on old construction. The yard was all but invisible, masked by slanting sheets of rain and rushing streams of mud-colored water that carried more of the drive-way—and the mountain, on whose knees the house squatted—into the frothing river at its base that had once been Sullivan Cove Road. His lower lip stuck out in his standard scowl of disapproval. A chill breeze caught him
—damned
chilly for Georgia in June—and he shivered, hugging the brawny torso that strained beneath the plain white T-shirt he wore above worn jeans and bare feet.

“No natural storm,” he repeated.

The initial response was from Tiberius, the ancient yellow tomcat, who made one quick pass against his legs, apparently sensed a kick impending, and fled to the sheltered corner where Little Billy’s bedroom had been tacked on ten years back.

“You ever think it was?” someone snorted behind him, the tones so masked by the rattly timpani of what sounded suspiciously like hail on the roof he couldn’t tell if it was his wife or younger son who had spoken—save for the wording. Nor did he look around, as JoAnne, his spouse of twenty-three years, padded out to join him. The scent of breakfast came with her: coffee, corn bread, and bacon freshly fried. He felt her stop at his back, and reached around to draw her close. Warmth flowed across his shoulders as her arms enclosed his ribs. Hair brushed his neck where she laid her head against him.
Gettin’ to her, too,
he thought.
Has to be, for her to be like this.

“Hoped it might be,” he replied in a pause between blasts of thunder. He squinted into space, gazing west: toward the lake, the mountain—Bloody Bald—and the farm that lay between his own and those two landmarks: Dale Sullivan’s place, home of his single surviving uncle. It was dark as pitch over there, as if all the fury that had wracked the mountains for nigh onto a week had been distilled into one single vat of gloom that was rupturing out there, half a mile away.

“Men in this family do a lot of hopin’,” JoAnne murmured through a shudder he knew she’d have masked if she could. “Me, I do most of my hopin’
about
the men in this family.”

“Billy okay?”

A shrug. “Think so. He was up half the night, but once he’s out, he could sleep through the Second Comin’.”

Big Billy nodded toward the yard, the rain, and the road. “Might get his chance sooner’n we thought.”

JoAnne eased around to flank him. “Wish it
was
that,” she acknowledged. “That I’d understand. It’s this stuff that comes from that
other
place I can’t puzzle out. I’ve seen it and I still can’t. Seen enough, anyway.”

“Magic,” Big Billy agreed. “Just ain’t natural. Folks like us oughtn’t to have nothin’ to do with it.”

JoAnne nodded solemnly. “Yeah, well you an’ me both know that, but this ain’t our world anymore. We got the kids, but this
sure
ain’t their world now! Shoot, they know more now than we’ll ever know. And David’s just barely finished the first part of college, never mind Billy—I still say he’s gonna beat ’em all, smart-wise.”

Big Billy gestured at the yard with a stubby right hand, while the left sought his abandoned coffee; he winced as a gust of wind whipped rain into his face. JoAnne edged behind him again. “Shit,” he spat. “Reckon I oughta go check on Dale?”

“Might be a good idea. Phone was still out last time I tried. Comes and goes,” she added, as her husband turned toward the house.

“Wish this fuckin’
rain’d
go!” Big Billy grumbled, aiming one final frown at the storm before retreating inside. “Guess I’d better walk; truck’d prob’ly flood out on the way.”

As if in answer, thunder boomed again—louder and closer alike. A final gust of wind flailed at him, as though to hasten him away from things he did not understand.

*

It was just as well that the loudest thunderclap yet had that moment rattled what remained of Uncle Dale Sullivan’s first-and-birthright house, because the noise hid a room’s worth of startled exclamations; and the flare of lightning that followed hard on the thunder’s heels—prelude to a clap that was even louder—gave the occupants something to gape at besides the figure that had just appeared in the doorway to the ruins of the collapsing farmhouse’s kitchen.

A woman. A beautiful, dark-haired, exotic-looking woman. A
Faery
woman, who was clutching—barely—the remains of what looked suspiciously like a tablecloth around her like a threadbare sarong.

A woman who instants before had been a yellow cat named Eva and who twice a day, for a few moments at dusk and dawn, had worn a third, less likely, shape entirely. One patently
not
part of mundane reality.

Not that the woman David Sullivan saw now was either.

“Aife,” he blurted into the silence that followed the last round of thunder. Silence, save the white noise cacophony on the roof.

The woman blinked at him as she slumped against the doorjamb—and kept on slumping, as though she were mortally tired. David lunged toward her, but Alec was there before him—and the other fifteen people in the crowded room—and eased the woman’s descent as she sank down atop a pile of dusty cushions between the worn-out sofa and the floor. And went utterly mute, as though tongue-tied.

An eruption of voices followed: questions, cries of astonishment, admonitions of caution, offerings of advice. David ignored them all, save Alec, who had a vested interest. Yet even he sat back on his haunches as the woman’s face contorted, a mighty cough racked her, and she doubled over, coughing twice more, before choking something dark into her hand. He recognized it as she dried it against her sketchy robe, and was reaching toward it even as she passed it up to him with the merest ghost of a smile.

“Iron has its uses,” she murmured in a voice soft and oddly accented. “Especially iron that is overlaid with Power—even when one wears the substance of this World.” She paused, dark eyes probing the room. David twisted around to follow that gaze as it settled on the smallest person present: a boy of about fourteen, slim and feral-looking, his face pale with alarm beneath a belt-length flag of patently dyed black hair.
Gothic elf
was how someone had described him. It fit, as much as his name did—the name he went by anyway:
Brock.

Brock’s eyes locked with David’s, who countered with a
wary smile and an upward quirking brow, as one tiny mystery was clarified.

“Told you it was magic,” the boy chuckled.

David regarded the object curiously. It was a medallion the size of a half-dollar, wrought of black iron that still showed a faint metallic sheen beneath the patina of ages. Quite a few ages, to judge by the wear that had smoothed the device raised on both sides. A wild boar: the ancient arms of the Sullivans of Ireland, though Brock claimed to have bought it from an old woman in an antiques store in Yorkshire.

“What’s that?” someone asked nearby. David started—
God, but there were too many people in too small a space, and too much was hitting him too fast, and he was having a damned hard time sorting it out. And now one more thing!

Finally he cleared his throat—no one else seemed able to say anything coherent, including Alec, whom logic suggested might have
some
comment, given that the woman to whom he was ministering had once, in a fashion, been his lover. “Lady, is there anything we can do?”

Aife shook her head even as she accepted a cup of coffee from Liz Hughes, David’s own sweetie. “That was a potent magic, and a strange one,” she managed at last. “Or”—she paused, staring at the grimy window to her right, as though what she sought might somehow be visible there—“or perhaps it was not only the Power of the medallion but also the fact that he who bespelled me is no longer in touch with
his
Power.”

Lugh,
David thought through a chill, and scanned the room for reactions—or advice. Troubled faces stared back: his friends, and friends of friends, the latter mostly folks he knew through Myra Buchanan, the blond woman with the fountain of hair gathered atop her head. Folks like James Morrison Murphy (Piper, to his chums) and LaWanda Gilmore. Not to omit Myra’s sometime-lover, sometime-basket-case, underachiever, work-in-progress: Scott Gresham, who had more than a little to do with why they were all crammed in here.

Never mind the immortals. Besides Aife, there was rash young Fionchadd mac Ailill, David’s closest friend among the Sidhe. And the newest arrival: the golden-haired man who sat slumped on the hearth with his inhumanly handsome face buried in his hands, while his tattered white surcoat steamed in the heat of the fire someone had (in spite of the season) had the sense to stoke up—for light as much as anything, given that the cabin’s power had long been disconnected. Shoot, he still didn’t know that guy’s name—or anything else, save that he’d been a guard to Lugh Samildinach, High King of the Daoine Sidhe in Tir-Nan-Og, and had just escaped that place with his life—and a warning.

Too many people, too much chaos. Too many stories that had to be told one at a time and debated.

And, if what the Faery had revealed scant seconds before Aife’s arrival was true, quite possibly far too
little
time.

Somehow, too, he had found himself leader of the band—which was a laugh, given that he was barely twenty-two, not quite five-foot-eight, and was only now on the threshold of his first college degree—though he doubted, at this point, he’d physically graduate.

Twenty-two, and a veteran of nearly six years dealing with Faerie and the World Walls and those strange glowing roads that laced between them that were the Straight Tracks.

And now, he feared, he faced war between his own World—the Lands of Men—and Faerie.

Everyone was looking at him, too, dammit!
Even Uncle Dale, who was well past seventy and had fought in more than one war himself. Never mind Aife, who’d been in Lugh’s guard, and this still-unnamed stranger, who—until the last few hours—apparently still was. He had just opened his mouth to ask what their Faery guest’s name might be when he heard the sodden thump of footsteps on what remained of the back porch stoop. He was already glancing frantically around for a makeshift weapon when he caught—muffled by rain and a room’s worth of breathing—someone male grunting, “Oh, fuck! Shit!”

David relaxed even as he caught Alec’s scowl. With Liz at his heels, he bolted for the door. “Pa!” he gasped as Big Billy Sullivan stomped through the kitchen door. Water puddled around his feet like the lake around the mountains, and his thinning red hair was plastered to his skull like a bathing cap. “I had a hat,” he growled as he divested himself of a sodden slicker, “but the wind got hold of it. I—” He broke off, irritation replaced with anger, and then that wistful, disturbing confusion David had come to realize meant an adult had suddenly discovered he was in over his head—or thoroughly outgunned.

“Got company, Bill,” Dale drawled smoothly, joining David and Liz in the tiny room. “And most of it the kind you don’t wanta see.”

Big Billy glared at him. “Right now all I want to see is something dry.”

“What’re you doin’ here, anyway, Pa?” David ventured.

His father’s gaze shifted toward him. “Checkin’ on Dale. Phone didn’t work, and the storm was so bad I got worried—trailers and storms don’t mix. Saw all these cars down here, and lanterns burnin’, and the chimney smokin’, and figured something was goin’ on I oughta know about.”

David handed his father a towel. “
Lots
goin’ on, Pa,” he acknowledged wearily.

“Well, start at the beginnin’,” Big Billy retorted. “I ain’t got nothin’
but
time.”

David took a deep breath and steered his father back into the larger room. “This is my pa,” he explained. “He can figure out who’s who as we go along—easier to keep folks straight that way.” Big Billy looked seriously pissed—and a dozen other emotions all at the same time—but nodded a greeting and flopped down on the floor as close as he could get to Dale. He studiously avoided looking at any of the three Faeries—though his gaze did creep now and then toward Aife. Not that David blamed him.

David accepted a cup of coffee-an’-’shine from Liz (who promptly contrived another for his pa), then cleared his throat. “Okay, Pa,” he began, “you know about the Worlds, right? How there’s more than one…reality occupyin’ the same space at the same time, but with different rules in some of those places than we count on here. And I know you’ve heard me talk about the World Walls—they’re what separate these overlapping places from each other. Are you with me so far?”

Big Billy grunted assent, and David went on.

“Fine, so anyway, you know how a few years ago me—first—and then most of my friends, started runnin’ into situations that took us to some of these other Worlds, to Faerie, mainly, but also to Galunlati, the World of Cherokee myth, if you want to think of it that way. And sometimes we took the Straight Tracks, which connect…everything just about, at some level; and sometimes we just went straight through the World Walls. Well, it turned out that wasn’t good for the World Walls. And what’s worse is that iron—plain old everyday iron and steel that’s
everywhere
in our World—has different properties in some other places, and one of those differences is that iron in our World can actually eat through the World Walls and into places on the other side, like Faerie, and…basically dissolve ’em away.”