Free Fireshaper's Doom by Tom Deitz Page B

all. Maybe he won’t stick it to you too badly.”
    “ He wouldn’t. But his old man would. Man trying to sell Bimmers in a county with three thousand people’s bound to need a little extra. There aren’t that many rich Atlantans up here—and,” David added pointedly, “some of them drive Volvos.”
    He knelt in the ditch and began to probe around the curve of the tire, feeling for any contact with the fender.
    “Shit!” he muttered after a moment, then, “Damn!” as a finger snagged a piece of jagged metal. He yanked it out, saw blood, and stuck it hastily into his mouth.
    “For God’s sake, Sullivan,” Alec cried, stuffing a wadded handkerchief into David’s good hand, “you’ve tried being a werewolf to no good effect, so what’re you doing now? Making a start on vampire?”
    David wrapped the cloth around the wound, then knelt again and stuck his other hand back under the car.
    “Uh, Davy…”
    “Take it easy, kid. I’ve got to find out if the fender’s slashed the tire.”
    “David—”
    He felt a tug at the back of his jersey.
    “David!” Alec whispered insistently.
    The hair on David’s neck prickled unaccountably. “What is it, McLean? I’d like to get home sometime this year!”
    “Uh, David, I hate to tell you this, but…it’s back.”
    David extracted his hand and twisted around in the ditch. “What’s back?” he snapped. “The tire’s—”
    And then he saw it, standing pale and magnificent in the exact center of the road not thirty yards uphill from them:
    A monstrous stag, the size of a small horse; light reddish gray, with a vast backward-sweeping rack half as wide as the Mustang. Its legs were long and thickly muscled, its chest deep, its narrow head arrogant. Its eyes were black and moist—and looking right at them.
    Intelligence showed there—intelligence or madness, David could not tell which.
    Even more disquieting was the way David’s eyes were beginning to tingle as the ring put forth its warning in stabbing bursts of heat and radiance. Magic was afoot.
    “That’s not a deer,” Alec gasped, “it’s an elk—a friggin’ elk!”
    “No,” David whispered. “I don’t think it’s either one.”
    “Huh? What’re you talking about, Sullivan?” Alec froze. “You don’t mean it’s…one of Them ?”
    David nodded. “I’m pretty sure.”
    “Well, whatever it is, it’s huge—and it’s looking straight at us, Davy!”
    The creature took a step forward.
    “Oh, God, it’s gonna charge!”
    David grabbed Alec’s arm and dragged him toward the front of the Mustang. “Quick. Onto the car. It can’t touch us there if it’s one of them—steel and all.”
    Alec stared dubiously back and forth between the car and the animal. “What if it’s not one of them?”
    ‘Then we’re in trouble. Now come on!”
    They backed up quickly and scrambled onto the Mustang’s hood. The elk took another step, lowered its head so that its outstretched antlers seemed to reach toward them like a cage of silver spikes. Fire blazed in its eyes. Steam—or smoke?—vented from its nostrils.
    “David?”
    David’s face was contorted in pain. The ring was a point of fire above his heart; his eyes felt as though they were blazing.
    The image before him swam, shifted in endless cycle: a horse—a deer—a man. Over and over.
    It was too much, not like any manifestation of the Sight he had ever had. It was most like the changeling that Ailill had once left in place of Little Billy. That had been one of the Sidhe shape-shifted and wrapped in the substance of the Mortal World. Yet even then he had been able to discern a sort of shadow form upon it that revealed its true configuration—as if he had looked-on a memory of a shape. But this was more complex, as though all three strove for some arcane ascendency.
    In confirmation of his fears, the burning in his eyes and the ring hot on his chest pulsed out their own dire warnings: Power afoot, dangerous Power. The Power of the