"Past the guardians of the forest,
"Pressing onward up the hill.
"Falling but to climb yet onward
"Proving strength is mostly will."
He felt a resonance to the verse, as if it referred to something, someone, else, as well as his revenge. The words woke images in his head, the red witch looking up at similar barriers and surmounting them. Their fates had become bound together in some fashion he couldn't taste.
Chapter Nineteen
David plodded along, head down and leaning forward as if forcing his way into a stiff breeze, seeing just enough of the landscape to avoid stepping in front of an eighteen-wheeler on Route 186 headed out of town. Not that he had anything against semis, mind you. That would be a nice, clean, quick way to die. Nothing compared to having your brain sucked out of your head and distributed around the landscape. Still alive.
Been there, done that. Don't want to go back for the encore.
For that matter, his nightmares didn't have much good to say about the prospect of being served up as Purina Dragon Chow. He'd been down that road as well, and he'd still be running if he could have figured out someplace to run to. And Maureen had happily informed Jo that the other dragon guarded a nest and eggs out in the swamp. Maureen seemed to think it was like having pandas or some other cute cuddly endangered species in her back yard.
He shuddered at the thought. Endangering went the other way, this time. He'd killed the one only through sheer luck goosed by desperation.
He'd been terrified. He'd pissed his pants, but Brian had been too polite to notice it. He'd pissed his pants and run away, and then had to listen to all that Red Badge of Courage crap about being a dragon-slaying hero.
He knew otherwise.
David roused himself enough to look both ways, then loped across the highway to another disused sidewalk. Naskeag Falls spent very little on sidewalk maintenance, on the reasonable belief that the average American citizen spent very little time walking. He was some kind of subversive, not owning a car. Part of a conspiracy of subversives. Jo didn't own one, either, and Maureen's Toyota could scarcely be called a car.
Besides, it was parked behind a chain-link fence in the evidence lot next to the police station. So Jo couldn't have driven anywhere.
He scuffed at the winter's accumulation of sand and dead leaves. Coward. You know where Jo went. You know she needs you. You even have a clue as to how to get there. You just don't want to do it.
Just thinking about it made his sphincter clench. That cop sergeant said she'd been in an office, he'd been talking to the psychologist just outside the door, they'd turned and opened the door, and she was gone.
Now, David could either believe that two competent professionals hadn't noticed an hysterical woman walking out that door, that nobody else in that crime-scene nursing-home riot had noticed a beautiful redheaded damsel in distress walking through the halls and out the entry and past the meat wagons, or he could believe that Jo took those three steps between the "real" world and the Summer Country and left the office by way of her Blood Power. No doors needed.
One other place she might have gone. He was grasping at straws, but she'd dug up Maureen's survey of the town forest out at Carlysle Woods. She'd mentioned maybe going out there to find some peace, draw on the calm Maureen had sometimes borrowed from the trees, ask some questions of the patriarch oak. Talk like that made David's skin crawl. He had too much experience with plants that were more aware than they had any right to be.
Grass heaved and split the asphalt in front of him, thin brown tendrils with the power to break stone. They didn't move, didn't search and trap and strangle, but he could swear they hadn't been there a second earlier. He kicked at the ridge, and the grass tore off and lay dead in the rotting leaves drifted across the sidewalk.
You can't go home again. The world had changed, and he had changed, and he did not sleep well.
Maureen had set him and Jo free from the forest. She'd threatened fire against it, and then offered it a bribe. She'd help it, heal it, balance it, protect it, but she wouldn't control it. She'd make the forest more dangerous than it was before.
She loved trees more than she loved people. Always had.
And that was where Jo had gone. Vanished from an office without walking out the door. Taken his heart with her.
Like the last time.
"Bound by duty, bound by magic,
"Blazing ebon in sun's glow,
"Teeth and claws by power shackled,
"Set by fate against fate's foe."
He wiped his palms on his jeans. The poem was taking on its own life. Change a word here, a line there, the sky darkened and sunbeams centered like spotlights on the actors. And the scene froze his heart. He faced the dragon again, jerked an arrow wild into the trees again, threw away the bow and quiver and pack again, and ran.
No. He couldn't go through that . . . again.
The world formed around him, crappy mud-season Maine, and he walked on. Damn good thing Carlysle woods sat five miles from the apartment. Damn good thing he didn't have a car. Otherwise he'd be there already, facing facts. Fact that Jo wasn't there. Fact that there was only one other place she could be. Fact that he was a coward and didn't dare follow her.
And even if he dared, he wouldn't be able to. He was
