Fireshaper's Doom (16 page)

At the far end of the hall a lofty door cracked open. The shape of a woman showed there, darkness cut out against light. Tall she was, and dressed in red, with a crow perched on her shoulder.

“You sent for me, Lord?” the Morrigu inquired.

“I have sealed the borders, Lady of War,” Lugh told her. “Now, this is what must
happen…”

Chapter XIV: By Moonlight

(Sullivan Cove, Georgia)

It was just past eleven-thirty when Liz eased the car onto the Sullivan Cove road.

“I dread going home,” David sighed, noticing that the lights were still on at his house. “And I
really
dread what Pa’s gonna say when I get there. I wouldn’t be surprised if he weren’t waiting for me belt in hand.”

“You two should try not to fight so much,” Liz said. “I know you care about each other, you just don’t like to show it.”

“Yeah, well, it just kind of happens, you know how it is—
Hey, you just missed the driveway!”

Liz was continuing out the road, her eyes focused straight ahead with deliberate concentration. The headlights picked out a pattern of split rail fences laced with weeds, and fields beyond those fences, with mountains looming above them all like waiting beasts: dark, watchful shadows in the night.

“Liz?”

She grimaced momentarily as the surface roughened, then flashed an amused glance at David. “Well, you said you didn’t want to go home yet, and
I
certainly don’t want to go home yet, and we’re both enjoying the conversation, so I thought I’d see if I could find a good place to finish it. Reckon
B.A.
Beach’d do?”

“Sounds good to me,” David agreed.
Very good
, he added to himself, if it meant what he thought it might.

In a moment they had reached the turnaround, the line of steel gray lake now glimmering under the first stars. The moon was almost full. The best thing, though, was that the place was deserted. Liz pulled over to the right and parked the car.

Wordlessly they got out and began to pick their way across the field to the north, then entered the woods. The tracks Darrell’s van had left there six weeks before were still faintly visible, and it was that trail they followed until they lost it and turned left toward the sound of lapping water. A short while later they came out of the sheltering pines and onto a mossy bank overlooking a thin strip of natural beach. Before them was the lake. To the left, almost hidden by a hump of forested peninsula, was Bloody Bald. The naked rocks at its mortal summit gleamed vaguely pink above a zigzag of trees.

“Too bad we couldn’t have come at sunset,” David said, pointing at it. “Then I could have given you the Sight, and you could have seen the palace that’s really there. Even with the Sight you can see it only at sunset and sunrise. That was the first thing I ever saw that gave me any idea about the Faeries.”

Liz did not answer, and David suddenly wondered if she was doing the same thing he was: recalling the last time they’d both been there.

It had been at the end of the previous summer, right after their journey to Faerie. Right before school had started. Right when David was beginning to think their years-old friendship might turn into something more. But he had been too scared, too confused to pursue it, so they had picked blackberries instead and complained about the heat. She had told him that her parents’ divorce had been finalized and that she was going to spend the next year in Gainesville with her father. The schools were better there, she had said. They’d almost had a fight, and he’d practically had to bite his tongue to keep from smarting off. He had always wondered if she’d noticed.

“I didn’t dare try for Lookout,” Liz whispered. “Couldn’t get all the way in the car, and didn’t want to risk your folks seeing us, anyway. No way we could have gone up that road unnoticed.” Her voice quivered ever so slightly.

“Right,” David mumbled awkwardly. “Sure.”

They sat down on a layer of smooth pine straw atop a carpet of moss. Thirty feet beyond them water lapped gently against the rocky shore. The moss felt cool beneath them, and they kicked off their shoes.

David flopped back against a fallen tree trunk, and Liz lay down beside him. They looked up at a medallion of starlit sky that was brighter by far than the trees that framed it in three directions.

Liz took a deep breath. “I’ve missed you, David.”

David’s breath was even deeper, and tinged with a trace of nervousness. “I’ve missed you too, Liz. I— Why was it so hard for me to say that?”

Liz rolled onto her side and plucked a dandelion that grew between them, then looked up at David as she rolled the stem between her fingers.

“I can’t answer that, David—but I think you ought to listen to what your heart’s saying once in a while. You might get some interesting answers.”

David regarded her seriously. “Do you do that, Liz? Do you listen to your heart?”

“Always; even when my head seems to be ruling, it’s my heart that’s giving it the choices.”

David folded his arms behind his head. “You were pretty good about that during the Trial of Heroes. Do you really think I was that way then? The selfless hero? Funny, I can never think of myself as a hero—even though I’ve gone through the ritual to prove it. It doesn’t make any difference in the real world.”

“You’re a hero, David,” Liz said slowly, “because what you did wasn’t for yourself. It was for other people,”

“Yeah, I guess.” David cleared his throat and swallowed. “But that’s getting off the subject. I’ve…I’ve said one thing that was hard to say and shouldn’t have been, and now I’m gonna say another. I… Oh, I don’t know.”

Liz laid a finger against his lips. “Don’t rush, David. Heart over head. Just turn off your brain and let your tongue go.”

David grinned nervously and folded the hand in his own, lowered it to his chest. “Easy for you to say.”

“What are you afraid of?” Liz asked quietly. “Surely it can’t be of me.”

“Liz, I thought about you all summer,” David blurted out. “I mean I met a lot of girls at Governor’s Honors. Lots of bright girls, nice-looking girls. Kind of girls I ought to be attracted to. Kind of girls my body told me I
was
attracted to. Some of ’em liked me, too. But there was no sparkle, Liz, no magic—not the kind I get from you.”

“That’s good to hear.”

The corners of David’s mouth quirked upward in a foolish smile. “Yeah, well, I hoped it would be.”

Liz’s tone turned serious. “The same thing happened to me, David, down in Gainesville, but I didn’t dare do anything. Because there was always you in the back of my mind, doing crazy things, with your brain running ten times as fast as your mouth, and your imagination ten times faster than that.”

“Liz… Do you want to know something really scary?”

“How scary?”

“Pretty scary.”

Liz raised an eyebrow. “Tell me, and I’ll let you know.”

“I think I love you.”

“I love you, too, Davy, and there’s no ‘think’ about it—but you know, I’m not sure I could have said it until just now.”

David grinned and levered himself up on his elbow. Moonlight cast a silver-blue veil across Liz’s features.

“You want to know something
really
awful?”

“Awful as that was scary?”

“Worse: I’ve never kissed a girl. Seventeen years old and never kissed a girl.”

“
That
I don’t believe.”

“Well,” David amended, “never kissed a girl like I meant it.”

Liz’s eyes twinkled. “That’s more likely. Now,
you
want to know something?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve never kissed a boy!”

“That can be easily remedied.”

Liz’s breath was a touch of sweetness on David’s cheek. He moved toward her, slid his left hand over her waist, and pulled her to him.

It was awkward and funny—clumsy and quite simply the most wonderful feeling he had ever known: her soft lips, her wonderfully firm and supple body next to his. They broke apart, smiled foolishly, then drew together again, this time with more authority.

And something awoke within David—something that had never been far from the surface but which he had ruthlessly denied.

“Shirt’s a little hot for close contact,” he mumbled. He pulled away and skinned off his CommArts jersey.

The third kiss lasted a very long time. But finally they separated, giggling like idiots for no apparent reason.

David rolled onto his back, facing the stars. Liz flopped over on her belly and began to run her fingertips lightly over his smooth, hairless chest. “I’ve always envied you this,” she said.

“Huh? Surely you don’t want to be flat-chested!”

“No, foolish boy, being able to go shirtless whenever you want to. Being free about your body… Going skinny-dipping with Alec.” David’s eyes flicked sideways and caught her own. “You’ve envied Alec a lot, haven’t you?”

“Yeah…I mean, I know he’s your best friend, and all. But he’s been so close to you so long—he knows so much more about you. He’s seen so much more of you—both figuratively and literally—than I have.”

David took her hand and kissed it. “I can’t help that, Liz, and I wouldn’t want to. But you want to know something funny? He’s been pushing me toward you, too, just like everybody else. He could see what I couldn’t—or wouldn’t.”

Liz’s finger began to trace the curved outline of David’s pectoral muscles, occasionally venturing up to mid chest, more rarely and more enticingly slipping down the valley of his stomach to draw circles around his navel.

“Know something?” she whispered.

“Hmmm?”

“I like you better when you don’t talk so much.”

“Do something about it then.”

She did.

Eventually David slipped his hand under her T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra, he’d known that. And she did not resist, though he heard her breath catch. Her breasts were small, no more than a palmed handful. But they were firm and smooth, and they responded to his touch.

Liz’s hands too began to wander, becoming ever more venturesome. Even as David’s hands slid down to probe at the waist band of her jeans, her hands found the top of his.

He reached down and popped the snap, unzipped his fly.

“What the heck,” he muttered, and sat up to slide them the rest of the way off.

He looked inquiringly at Liz, reached down to tug shyly at the tail of her T-shirt.

“Your move.”

“I…I don’t know, David.” She looked suddenly very unhappy.

David fought the urge to snap at her. Romantic that he was, he could not have contrived better circumstances than these—and he’d never been so intimate with a girl. But Liz was frightened, and, he admitted, so was he. There’d be other times. Just once he’d do the right thing when it came to Liz. But still…maybe…

“Yeah, all right,” he said at last, looking away. “But since you’ve got me all hot and bothered, you’ve got to help me cool off.”

A faint frown furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

David pointed at the lake and wagged a mischievous eyebrow. “Skinny-dipping. Then you won’t have any reason to be jealous of Alec anymore; you’ll know as much about the bod as he does. More in fact, since you already know what most of it feels like.”

Abruptly, he stood up, stepped into the moonlight, then glanced around. Liz was still hesitating. He stretched a hand toward her. She took it and he pulled her to her feet.

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it once with extravagant chivalry, then grinned and sprinted to the shore. With one decisive move, he skinned his skivvies off. The night breeze was cool against his bare skin, and he shivered slightly.

“You’ve got a cute fanny, you know that, David Sullivan?” Liz giggled nervously as she joined him.

David felt himself blushing. “I guess I do now.”

“Well, seeing you in one of those little Speedo bathing suits kinda woke my suspicions—but I think I like the real thing even better.”

“I think this is gonna be fun.” David grinned. “Alec never tells me things like this.”

“I hope not!”

He paused, staring at her, hoping the eagerness he felt stirring within him would not show in the moonlight. “It’s kinda your turn now…I mean if you don’t want to take it all off, you don’t have to, just ’cause I did. Course, you’ll have wet clothes to explain otherwise.
Because I’ll throw you in!”

He made a grab for her, but she sideslipped him and turned away. Her back to him, she stripped in a series of efficient movements.

David could not help the smile that broke out on his face when she turned back around. “You’ve got a cute—a cute everything, Liz.”

She stepped closer.

He thought of something then, reached back and unhooked the chain that held the ring. He cupped it in his palm for a moment, staring at it, then took Liz’s hand and slipped the silver circle onto her finger.

She looked up at him uncertainly.

David stopped the unspoken protest with a finger against her lips. “Just until I can get another. It’s the most precious thing I own—or maybe the second most precious, now. But it’s not really mine to give—not yet. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. But for now…”