She didn’t ask why. Having walked the road, she knew that someone had to assume his responsibility of it. He’d chosen her.
“I’ll show you sometime—when I’m better. Did you go to the Wood?”
“No. I thought I’d save that for when I could go with you.”
“Did you have any ... trouble?”
Her dream of Mahail flashed into her mind. And Dorn’s very real presence. The hounds that he could have called down on her if he hadn’t been so sure of himself.
“Ah,” Elderee said, catching the images. “Dorn. I wish I’d been there to see you deal with him.”
“Are you reading my mind?”
“Only what you’re projecting to me.”
“Oh.” Lorio settled down into a more comfortable position. “He folded pretty easily, didn’t he? Just like the polrech that attacked us in the alley.”
Elderee shrugged. “Dorn is a lesser evil. He could control one hound at a time, no more. But like most of his kind, he liked to think of himself as far more than he was. You did well. As for the polrech—you were simply stronger. And quicker.”
Lorio flushed at the praise.
“And now?” Elderee asked. “What will you do?”
“Jeez, I I ... I don’t know. Take care of your part of the road until you get better, I guess.”
“I’m getting old,” Elderee said. “I could use your help—even when I’m better. There are more of them—” he didn’t need to name Mahail and his minions for Lorio to know whom he meant “—than there ever are of us. And there are many roads.”
“We’ll handle it,” Lorio said, still buzzing from her time on the road. “No problem.”
“It can be dangerous,” Elderee warned, “if a polrech catches you unaware—or if you run into a pack of them. And there are others like Dorn—only stronger, fiercer. But,” he added as Lorio’s humor began to drain away, “there are good things, too. Wait until you see the monkey puzzle tree—there are more birds in it, and from stranger worlds, than you could ever imagine. And there are friends in the Wood that I’d like you to meet—Jacca and Mabena and ...”
His voice began to drift a bit.
“You’re wearing yourself out,” Lorio said.
Elderee nodded.
“I’ll come back and see you tomorrow night,” she said. “You should rest now. There’ll be time enough to meet all your friends and for us to get to know each other better later on.”
She stood up and smiled down at him. Elderee’s gaze lifted to meet hers.
“I will,” Lorio said. “Maybe not a Gypsy road, but a good road all the same.”
“Not a Gypsy road? Then what are you?”
“Part Rom,” Lorio replied with a grin. “But mostly just a punker.”
Elderee shook his head. Lorio lifted a hand in farewell, then reached for and found the road that would take her home. She stepped onto it and disappeared. Elderee lay back with a contented smile on his lips and let sleep rise up to claim him once again.
The Sacred Fire
No one lives forever,
And dead men rise up never,
And even the longest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea
There were ten thousand maniacs on the radio—the band, not a bunch of lunatics; playing their latest single, Natalie Merchant’s distinctive voice rising from the music like a soothing balm.
Sharing your problems ... sometimes talking a thing through was enough to ease the burden. You didn’t need to be a shrink to know it could work. You just had to find someone to listen to you.
Nicky Straw had tried talking. He’d try anything if it would work, but nothing did. There was only one way to deal with his problems and it took him a long time to accept that. But it was hard, because the job was never done. Every time he put one of them down, another of the freaks would come buzzing in his face like a fly on a corpse.
He was getting tired of fixing things. Tired of running. Tired of being on his own.
He could hear the music clearly from where he crouched in the bushes. The boom box pumped out the song from one corner of the blanket on which she was sitting, reading a paperback edition of Christy Riddell’s
The light was leaking from the sky. Be too dark to read soon. Maybe she’d get up and go.
Nicky sat back on his haunches. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other.
Maybe nothing would happen, but he didn’t see things working out that way. Not with how his luck was running.
All bad.
I did, he thought. I tried. But it didn’t work out, did it?
So now he was back to fixing things the only way he knew how.
Her name was Luann. Luann Somerson.
She’d picked him up in the Tombs—about as far from the green harbor of Fitzhenry Park as you could get in Newford. It was the lost part of the city—a wilderness of urban decay stolen back from the neon and glitter. Block on block of decaying tenements and rundown buildings. The kind of place to which the homeless gravitated, looking for squats; where the kids hung out to sneak beers and junkies made their deals, hands twitching as they exchanged rumpled bills for little packets of shortlived empyrean; where winos slept in doorways that reeked of puke and urine and the cops only went if they were on the take and meeting the moneyman.
It was also the kind of place where the freaks hid out, waiting for Lady Night to start her prowl.
Waiting for dark. The freaks liked her shadows and he did too, because he could hide in them as well as they could. Maybe better. He was still alive, wasn’t he?
He was looking for the freaks to show when Luann approached him, sitting with his back against the wall, right on the edge of the Tombs, watching the rush hour slow to a trickle on Gracie Street. He had his legs splayed out on the sidewalk in front of him, playing the drunk, the bum. Threedays’ stubble, hair getting ragged, scruffy clothes, two dimes in his pocket—it wasn’t hard to look the part. Commuters stepped over him or went around him, but nobody gave him a second glance. Their gazes just touched him, then slid on by. Until she showed up.
She stopped, then crouched down so that she wasn’t standing over him. She looked too healthy and clean to be hanging around this part of town.
“You look like you could use a meal,” she said.
“I suppose you’re buying?”
She nodded.
