Windmaster's Bane (20 page)

The trail widened then; the air felt cooler. The green of the needles, the brown of the pine straw, even the gray of the patches of sky he occasionally glimpsed seemed subtly brighter, more clearly defined. David’s eyes itched—but they did that almost all the time now—and he was sweating rather profusely. He could still hear Alec behind him, though; kept expecting at any moment to see his friend pull even with him, or worse, to grab him behind to wrest from him the secret he was now honorbound to reveal.

All at once David became aware of a pain in his side. No, not his side—his chest!—burning from where the ring bounced up and down atop his breastbone. He could still see the tantalizing white flash up ahead, hear the muffled rustle of its passage through the woods.

The trail leveled again, but the trees closed in ominously, and the shafts of sunlight faded abruptly like a light turned off. David slowed, suddenly frightened. Something weird was happening here.
He was on a Straight Track!
The trail
was
arrow-straight, broken only by gentle undulations, but rising steadily…to where? And it was glowing softly golden, its margin marked by star-shaped white flowers of an unknown species which—David shuddered when he noticed—were also glowing. Now that he was aware of it, it was obvious, and he felt an utter fool for not at least suspecting earlier; but he was not exactly used to thinking in terms of such things. His eyes were burning painfully, and he tried to veer off, to turn aside from that place of subtly disturbing otherness. But as he approached the edge of the trail, he found that he could go so far and no farther. It was as if he ran into a soft but infinitely strong barrier through which he could not pass, exactly the sort of barrier he had encountered the night he met the Sidhe.

Oh God!
he thought, clutching at the ring
, I’m on one of their Straight Tracks, like Great-grandpa got on, and I can’t get off! I wonder if this is a trap…. But I haven’t done anything to them; they should know that. I haven’t even told anybody about them, except Alec, and he doesn’t believe me. Shit! If they’ve got me, they’ve got him too!

Behind him David could still hear Alec gasping along. “Where you going, Sullivan?” his friend croaked. “You gone off the deep end or something? This ain’t the way I remember.”

“Veer off, Alec. Veer off!” David screamed over his shoulder as panic began to encircle his rationality.

But Alec did not veer off.

And David kept running, though he wanted to stop, to fling Alec bodily from that path, if such a thing were possible. He tried to stop—and found he could not. His legs continued working in spite of his mind’s orders to the contrary. There was nothing to do but run.

In one brief instant David’s whole world compressed to the sounds of feet and breath, and to alternating flashes of darkness and light that were
too
dark and
too
light as David sped past trees that grew thicker and taller than any Georgia tree had done since before man walked the earth. And there were certainly no familiar landmarks now; all that was certain was that he ran in a straight line. Up ahead the other shape that he had once thought a deer seemed to have paused beside the trail, but intervening branches made a clear view impossible. He doubted it was anything he wanted to encounter, though.

“I’ll catch you sooner or later, Sullivan,” he heard Alec pant. “You can’t run forever.”

“That may be exactly what we’re doing,” David shouted back.

David did run faster then, surely as fast as it was possible for him to go, until the world became a whistling blur of dark green and pale gray, centered on the pain on his chest where the ring burned white-hot. And as he passed a particularly thick and squatty live oak
(live oak? here?)
he saw with a small cry of dismay that no woodland creature crouched there, nor any monster out of his worst fears, either. Rather, the half-seen runner was a pale-skinned, blond-haired boy who looked scarcely older than himself, clad only in a golden belt and a white loincloth—a lad whose slanted green eyes and slightly pointed ears and unearthly grace of face and limb marked him, surely, as one of the Sidhe. As he passed the lad, David saw the perfect lips open and a rather too evil smile play about them, even as the boy reached toward him with one slim-fingered hand. David dodged left at the last possible instant and ran on, now pursued by two runners.

Abruptly the Track began to slant downhill. Painful shocks raced up David’s legs as his feet impacted the ground with ever-increasing force. Behind him he could still hear Alec’s consistent strides, and the softer but somehow more threatening tread of the Faery runner. David’s heart rose for a moment as a thought occurred to him. Alec was back there; Alec would see now, and believe. But, no, his friend hadn’t reacted when the boy had appeared and surely he would have. His heart sank as quickly as it had risen, for he very much feared Alec could not see that runner.

Up ahead a light showed, a break in the trees. It offered a goal, if nothing else. Perhaps with clear sky above him he could think of a solution.

The trail leveled off again and then sloped steeply downward, and then he would be there. What he would do when he passed that goal, he didn’t know. He guessed he would run onward until the Track ended or he died. That would make some obituary! No one would write a song, though, about Mad Davy Sullivan, who ran a footrace with the Sidhe. He laughed grimly, reminded of the song about the man lost forever on the Boston subway, and was suddenly jerked back to what passed for reality by the brush of hands against his shirt.

“Got you now, Sullivan!” he heard Alec cry.

Alec! He was in as much danger as David himself, perhaps worse, for his friend had no notion that this was any more than another one of David’s mad indulgences. Alec was running for knowledge; David was quite literally running for his life—for both their lives.

David exerted himself one last time, imagining himself as a deer pursued by two hounds, neither of which suspected the other’s presence, both with teeth snapping at his heels, each for a different reason. He could almost see mortal and Faery hands reaching toward him. But up ahead was the open place, the blue sky.
Blue sky?
He ran on down the slope toward that welcoming blue.

And then, quite suddenly, he broke free into empty space.

A pain centered on his chest shattered his senses. Golden light exploded behind his eyes. A voice screamed his name.

And then there was no ground below him at all, only thirty feet of empty air and a long, steep bank of blood-colored earth, studded here and there with bruised and broken rocks. Far below he could see the stream that flowed behind Uncle Dale’s house.

In that one eternal second, when he felt he hung suspended in mid-air, before gravity woke up to his unexpected presence there, he felt something brush his neck, and twisted half around to see an inhumanly white arm pass his line of sight. There was a flash of pain again, like a knife drawn across his throat. And then he saw nothing except Alec’s face frozen in an incredulous open-mouthed stare.

Then he began to fall.

He hit once; a staggering pain tore through his right thigh and hip as the earth shredded the bare flesh there; his shoulder impacted something hard, and then he was sliding, rolling, trying to slow himself with hands that ripped to tatters. And then it was his head that hit something, and the air was knocked from his lungs. Something cold and wet enfolded him; water filled his nose and ears, and then oblivion seized his consciousness and he blacked out.

*

He came to looking up at that same ominous and strangely remote gray sky he remembered from earlier that morning, but then Alec’s face swung into view closer in, dark against the glare. He looked concerned; a drop of sweat fell from his forehead onto David’s cheek to become one with that much cooler wetness that tickled capriciously about him. He was dizzy; his head spun. His head
hurt,
he realized suddenly. There was a darkness out there waiting for him; it would be so easy to fall into it, to let it hold off the pain. Stars. Stars and comets and the granddaddy of all meteor showers, his own private show going on behind his eyes.

No! David fought his way back to consciousness, opened his eyes and felt for his glasses which, remarkably, still rested crookedly on his nose. But there was too much light, too much pain. He closed his eyes again, whether to return to that place of increasingly pleasant darkness or to steel himself to rise he didn’t know until he found himself trying to sit up—and cried out as agony exploded from his right shoulder, joining other bursts from his hip, his legs, his hands. His whole body ached, and an unpleasant stickiness oozed from his palms. He fell back into the water, gripping the bank with one hand, fingers digging small trenches among the pebbles.

“Davy! You okay?” It was Alec’s voice that echoed metallically in his ears. Someone lifted his head, a hand worked its way into his armpit.

“Easy, boy, let me help you here,” a different voice crackled.

David forced his eyes open to see another face looming above him, this one crowned with silver hair escaping the dark halo of an ancient felt hat. The smell of tobacco reached his nostrils: Uncle Dale’s own personal blend of homegrown.

He felt hands in his armpits again, dragging him onto dry land. Somebody picked up his feet, and he grunted at the pain. Then there was solid ground under him again.

“David?” he could hear Uncle Dale’s voice call. “Davy, boy, you hear me?” The old man sounded strangely calm. “Don’t talk, just nod if you can hear me.”

David opened his mouth, but could only croak something that sounded like “hurt.”

“You’ll live, I think,” Uncle Dale said. “Appears you’ve scraped yourself up some; your butt looks like a side of bacon. Maybe one of them concussions, too—leastwise you look like you’re seeing stars. Now, then, you just lay there and get your breath; I don’t think nothin’ else is wrong.”

Wrong?
thought David, dimly.
Wrong? Something must be wrong.
But he couldn’t remember. All he could recall was running and getting lost in the woods, and running and turning and running some more, and then falling for what seemed like forever, only there was a burst of agony about every ten centuries, each in a different place. And there had been other runners… He tensed, felt pain again, and groaned dully as he tried to roll away from that pain, even as he felt hands forcing him again onto his back. He heard some distant shaky voice that might have been Alec’s say, “Here’s a blanket, Uncle Dale,” then add, “I can’t believe he didn’t see that bank. I just can’t believe it.”

No, this wasn’t Alec’s fault, David realized vaguely, nor even his own; it was that other boy, the one who’d been after him, after the…

The ring!

David’s fingers clutched for his throat, felt for the chain that should lie about his neck.

It was gone.

His fingers sought the ring then.

It
was gone!

The Faeries had won it back, this he now knew of a certainty. It was gone. The most precious thing he owned, one of the great heirlooms of the world, maybe—according to what Oisin had said. Gone. Stolen.

And with that abandonment of hope, David abandoned consciousness as well, passing into an empty, falling blackness from which he did not return until much, much later.

* * *

The next thing David remembered clearly was waking up on the couch in the dim light of Uncle Dale’s living room. His scraped thigh, the raw ruin of his hands made themselves known only by distant throbbings. Someone coughed softly, and David followed that sound through slitted eyes to see Uncle Dale sitting beside the couch, looking seriously concerned. A small transistor radio beside him whispered country music. For some reason David’s vision focused on the stuffed deer head that hung above the fieldstone fireplace opposite the couch.

David rolled his eyes.
Oh God, I hurt! But I can’t stay here. The Faeries have my ring. I’ve got to find it.
“I’ve got to find it!” he shouted aloud. He tried to sit up, but firm hands on his shoulders held him back.

“Now, now, boy, don’t go gettin’ excited. You hit yore head a good’un, and I ’spect we’d better get a doctor to take a look at it. That McLean boy’s called the hospital and yore folks; he’s in the kitchen makin’ us some coffee right now. You hungry?” Uncle Dale stood up and started for the kitchen door.

“Hospital!” David started to shriek to the old man’s departing back, but the simple effort of stretching his jaws wide made pains shoot through his head that made a perfect counterpoint to the stars that returned to cloud his vision. “Hospital,” he whispered. “I can’t go to the hospital. I can’t! I’ve got to find my ring!” His voice grew louder. “I gotta go look for my ring! You didn’t find my ring, did you? Oh God!” His voice sank again into a moan.

Alec came in from the kitchen with a can of Coke in his hand, which he started to hand to David. But David grabbed his friend’s wrist, oblivious to the agony it cost him. “Alec,
you
didn’t find my ring, did you?”

Alec gently pried David’s fingers loose. “No, sorry…I didn’t even think about it.”

David sat up, though it made his eyes fill up with darkness and his head spin. Thunder pounded between his ears.

“You didn’t
think
about it? What
did
you think about?”

Alec looked incredulous. “Why you, of course; you’re more important than any old ring.”

“You sure of that?”

“Dammit, Sullivan, you could have drowned in that creek if I hadn’t been right behind you when you decided to play Mexican cliff diver with the wrong kind of cliff. You think I’m gonna be worrying about jewelry when you’ve got blood all over you? You could have been dying for all I knew.”