Stoneskin's Revenge (12 page)

Allison jumped, having discovered that she'd gone right up to the old woman, squatted before her, and started staring at her dolls without bothering to speak to her, and without being told it was all right to do so.

“They're made out of rocks, ain't they?” Allison inquired carefully. Then, as curiosity caught up with her: “Did
you
make 'em?”

“Bone and muscle, pebble and rock,” the woman replied, and Allison blinked as she said that. An eyebrow lifted in perplexity, for she was pretty sure the woman's mouth hadn't matched the words she'd heard. But just as she began to consider that, her thoughts brushed the tune that was still hiding among them, and the notion drifted right on away.

A soft click, and Allison's gaze shifted to the work-in-progress in the woman's lap. She had on a filthy-looking rag shawl, which served her as a sort of work surface across her knees. But what Allison found curious was the way she was putting the dolls together. As best she could tell, the woman simply picked up a pebble about the right size from the pile at her feet, whispered something to it, and then stuck it where she wanted it to go and it just stayed there. And if the shape hadn't been quite right to start with, why, all of a sudden it was. But there was something else queer about the way the woman worked, too; and Allison realized that she was doing everything with her right hand. The left she kept hidden, sort of thrust up under a fold of the shawl. Maybe there was something wrong with it she didn't want folks to see.

“You
do
like my children?” the woman prompted, and Allison remembered she hadn't responded to her earlier invitation to play with the stone poppets.

“Can I have one?” Allison asked suddenly.

“You may have them
all
!”
the woman chuckled.

“Really?”

“All.”

“No kiddin'?”

“All. I ask only one thing in return.”

Allison was suddenly wary. “What?”

The black eyes found hers again, and Allison felt herself growing dizzy, though it really wasn't such a bad feeling.

“Let me comb your hair,” the woman whispered, stretching out a gnarled hand, and rising just enough that the doll she'd been working on shifted and clicked in her lap.

Allison's fingers sought automatically for the blond curls that were so obviously superior to the lank gray wisps she could see peeping out from beneath the woman's shawl.

“Pretty hair,” the woman murmured. “Maybe I should call you that: Pretty Hair.”

“Thank you,” Allison said, because it was polite. And true, and certainly true if you were comparing it to the crone's dusty-looking locks.

The woman patted a smooth place on the stone to her right. “Come, sit, lay your head in my lap.”

Allison hesitated, but just as fear came sneaking back, so did the song, and without really wanting to, she slipped around to the old woman's side and sat down there, so close she could hear the rasp of the shawl's coarse fibers against each other.

“You heard my song, didn't you, my little one?” And Allison felt an arm slide around her shoulders and draw her down into the woman's lap. She flinched a little, because the crone was so old and wrinkled and bound to smell bad, but the only odors she caught were of hot stone and a sort of musty smell like dusty rags. Not her favorites, but they weren't really unpleasant.

What
was
unpleasant was the feel of the old woman's skin against her bare arm. Though thin and wrinkled, it felt—there was no other word for it
—hard.
But not hard the way leather can be made hard: no, this was more like how sand can be firm and yet yielding.

Uwelanatsiku. Su sa sai!

Uwelanatsiku. Su sa sai!

The song was crooningly soft now, almost a lullaby, and Allison found herself relaxing. Before she knew it, her eyes drifted closed. She felt the woman's hand on her head, gently probing, then slowly dragging something stiff and pointy through her hair, sorting through the snags and tangles the woods had given her, tugging now and then to remove a twig or leaf. And all the while the song kept on, sent her drifting further and further down toward sleep.

At some point the woman shifted, and Allison started awake, but then the song returned, and Allison was only vaguely aware that there were two hands at play amid her curls. No, wait, one was slipping down across her shoulders until it rested on her side. She could feel it there, like a bag full of warm sand. A movement, and she realized the woman had slid her shirt up and was resting the hand on the bare skin just below Allison's ribs. Her flesh was hotter:
too
warm—like rocks that have lain in the sun all day.

Allison stirred, but just as she did, she felt something poke her right beneath her bottom rib. She gasped, but by then the pain was gone.

Uwelanatsiku. Su sa sai!

And Allison's eyes slid closed. She dreamed of sliding down sand dunes. And then she dreamed of nothing.

Chapter IX: Runaways

(east of Whidden, Georgia—late afternoon)

The first thing that Calvin noticed when he began to return to himself was
pain:
a
pervasive soreness that bounced all across his body when he tried to zero in on it, that moved as he moved, sending long, dull tugs of agony along his muscles.

Gradually, however, his senses began to clear and he became sufficiently aware to focus on the more persistent spots. The worst was along his thigh—a kind of thin-edged burning; another was along his jaw, which was duller but still sensitive to the touch of his tongue. There were a couple of others along his ribs and around his right arm—those felt more or less like bruises. He opened his eyes then—and almost cried out, for the world had gone strange and blurry and he couldn't see colors right, could not perceive distance the way he thought he should.

No!
he cried. And got another shock, for the word had come out as a sort of snort. That hurt his jaw, and he slapped his tongue across it automatically—and found that he had licked the tip of his nose! And that nose was altogether wrong, was long and brown and…

Christ! I'm still a deer!

And with that realization, Calvin began to reassess his situation, though he had to fight hard to remember how he had come here to this sheltered place by the riverbank. He could recall the fear easily enough, and running for what seemed like hours through the woods, running until he could run no more. But he didn't remember choosing this particular spot or collapsing, or why he should be so sore. And he could only with difficulty conjure back the lawmen and their dreadful words:
“They found your daddy dead this mornin'…and there was evidence you'd been there too.”
Every time he started to think about
that,
his memory promptly clouded up and a new set of instincts made him want to leap to his feet and flee, and eat the thick foliage around him, and never be human again.

He had to get a grip on himself, had to let his rational side regain command.

A movement startled him; triggered cervine reflexes before the human could override. Something was stalking him, watching him. Maybe if he were still it wouldn't notice. (That was the deer again, a part of him noted.) He froze, but cast his gaze about, seeing only the gnarled trunk of an oak, the riverbank, the shrubs that grew close around—and, crouching almost as still as he was beside a decaying cypress stump, what appeared to be a boy about eleven or twelve. He was short and thin, fair and towheaded, and sported the remnants of a hi-tech haircut. He was also rather dirty, and looked to be rather trendily dressed, to judge by the number of zippers and pockets and tags and loops and studs that adorned the jeans and vest he wore with his B-52s T-shirt. Finally, he sported a dangling earring, but Calvin couldn't make out what form it took.

The boy was watching him, peering intently with wide, dark-lashed eyes, and it came to Calvin then that he was probably behaving damned peculiarly for a deer.

The boy shifted subtly, extended a hand in one slow, smooth gesture as he hunched forward a half step. Probably trying very hard not to alarm this poor hurt animal he had discovered. Slowly, slowly, and Calvin could feel his heart rate increasing, as one set of instincts fought another.

Slowly…slowly, and then a dragonfly lit on the boy's hand and he yipped and flinched and utterly lost his cool.

And with that abrupt motion, the wariness that ever haunted the deer-mind asserted itself, and Calvin rose to his feet, staggered for a moment, then commenced running, the deer taking more and more control as it coordinated four legs instead of two.

But…but…he
hurt,
was dizzy… A twig poked his injured jaw and he bleated in pain, and then the dizziness claimed him and he slumped to the ground, barely conscious.

The boy was there in a moment, his thin face crammed full of the rounded eyes and lips of astonishment, his body a-fidget with headlong energy that he suddenly checked as he began to creep closer and closer to his quarry. “Don't worry, deer,” he pleaded desperately. “I'm not gonna hurt you; I'm gonna help you if I can. Oh, don't worry. I'm not a hunter, I
like
deer, but you're gonna have to relax and trust me if I'm gonna help you.”

Calvin jerked his head around but did not rise. The pain returned with the movement—and brought sickening flashes of darkness which neither consciousness desired and which incited real fear in both parts of his awareness.

“Shit,” the boy yelped. “Oh shit!” And with that he turned and crashed away through the bushes.

Calvin tried to rise, to follow, but his body wouldn't let him, it was too full of pain. He thrashed, trying to get to his feet, but could not. As he moved, though, something gouged his throat, which brought more pain. If only he could escape it, if only he could win free for just a moment.

And then he
did
feel pain, as spasm after spasm wracked his body.

And then, without warning, it was over, and he lay gasping and panting on the ground.

It was a moment before Calvin dared open his eyes, but when he did, it was to glimpse bare, smooth skin. “I'm back,” he croaked in his own voice, and fainted once more.

*

This time he woke to a blessed coolness across his forehead, trickling down his cheeks and into his eyes, sliding down the angle of his jaw and onto his neck and chest. Somebody was holding him, he realized dimly, cradling his head against bony shins. And he didn't hurt nearly so much now, though he was still getting occasional twinges from his jaw and hip.

Water found its way into his mouth and he choked on it before he could swallow. That made him open his eyes, which showed him a splatter of blue sky above a lacework of branches—and, closer in, filling half his field of vision, the wild blond hair and dark brows of the boy he had seen before.

Another spasm, and he sat up, though he could feel the boy's hand on his shoulders trying to ease him down again.

“You okay, mister?” The boy's voice was softer now, and it took Calvin a moment to figure out that he was hearing it with human ears, not the deer's more finely tuned senses. He couldn't place the accent beyond generic South.

Another round of coughs, and Calvin finally gasped, “I'm fine. I…” And then the peculiarity of his situation dawned on him. The boy had gone off looking for help for a deer, had come back to find a naked man in roughly the same location. If he was a sharp-eyed lad, he'd probably noted the uktena scale on its thong around both sets of throats. (And it was a wonder he still had it; a miracle it had neither been torn off during his headlong flight nor garroted him when he'd transformed.) Suddenly Calvin would have given a lot to know what was going on in that boy's head right now.

A final series of coughs cleared his lungs, and Calvin scooted around in place to face his benefactor. “Thanks,” he whispered hoarsely. “Thanks a bunch.”

The boy regarded him levelly, and with more than a trace of suspicion. “You're just lucky,” he replied, with the tone of someone trying to act cool and not quite certain he was succeeding. “I…I was lookin' for a sick deer and found you instead.”

“That why you've got water?”

The boy nodded sheepishly when Calvin indicated a plastic juice jug still half full by his side. There was a wadded pile of blue fabric nearby too, which looked disturbingly like the jeans he'd abandoned earlier.

“You're countin' on a lot if you think a deer'll let you near enough to give it water.”

“It was hurt, and I was gonna clean its wounds.”

“Hurt?”

“Had a bad scrape along its thigh, looked like it couldn't walk easy.”

The boy's eyes shifted lower, and Calvin dared a glimpse at his bare thigh—and was both relieved and shocked to note that there was no wound there, only a thin, pale line almost invisible amid the long shadows that dappled him.

“Maybe not,” Calvin countered quickly, “but it'd be a powerful stupid deer—or a powerful trustin' one—that'd let you get that close.”