Games Creatures Play

by Charlaine Harris

At least it wasn’t washboard here. And at least it was as straight as an arrow.

  Billy Ray was planning ahead, far ahead. He knew where this road came out onto the two-lane blacktop, and of all things, he wanted to be ahead and stay ahead on the blacktop as far as Cherokee Mountain. It didn’t matter if he was only a few inches ahead; he needed to be on the inside of the road when it hit the mountainside. Because there were no guardrails on Cherokee Mountain, and not a lot of verge, and the inside lane was the only safe place to be.

  If he could hold on to his lead up to the mountain, he’d keep it when the road started climbing.

  Unless the stranger was crazy . . . or crazy-good.

  Or completely without fear, which it was looking very like he was.

  Any sound was drowned out by the song of the two engines, the howl of the Fairlane and the guttural roar of the stranger’s machine. He glanced over at the car that was pacing him as if the two vehicles were Siamese twins, and barely made out the stranger in the headlight wash, Stetson still pulled low down on his forehead, hands on the top of the wheel, staring intently ahead.

  Billy Ray didn’t dare do more than glance, just enough to get a fleeting impression. Even though the road was straight, there were plenty of hazards. Any one of the bumps could throw the Fairlane into the stranger’s car, or vice versa. Deer could jump out onto the road. Hell, at the speeds they were going, a rabbit could make one of them skid into the other.

  And the blacktop was coming up—

  He sensed it, then oh-so-briefly recognized it, the darkness that meant the trees were gone, and he swung the wheel more on instinct and knowing the road in his gut than by anything he actually saw. The Fairlane’s tubeless tires shrieked as they hit the surface and skidded before digging in and Billy was thrown to the side by the force of the turn, holding on to control by his nails and teeth. The tires bit into the asphalt, and the Fairlane howled away, and—

  And that damned black machine was right there with him, as if it were glued to him! She was a little behind him, her headlights just about even with where he sat, but a moment later she was back, side by side, the two of them racing down the two-lane blacktop as if they owned it.

  The blacktop road wasn’t straight; it swerved and jinked around the bottom of the valley, following the contours of Higgins Crick. Billy Ray had never powered down this road, this fast, at night. This was white-knuckle driving, and there was one thing of paramount importance. He absolutely had to be in the lead by at least a little at the point where the stranger realized they were going up the face of the mountain. He had to have the inside lane on the mountain. Taking the outside at this speed—

  Well, there were stories about that, and they generally ended in a pile of twisted metal.

  He had both windows down, and the air was thick with the scent of cold, fresh water and green river weeds. He glanced out the side of his eye at the other car. They were so close he could have reached out and yanked on the stranger’s door handle. The stranger was nothing but a dark silhouette against the headlight wash of the blur that was the forest on his side of the road.

  He was waiting for something only he, or someone who knew this road as well as he did, would know. And there it came—the scent of pine. There was going to be a dip and a rise, and anyone who wasn’t ready for it would automatically pull back on the gas.

  He hit the dip and jammed the pedal to the floor, the Fairlane actually taking to the air over the rise. The stranger dropped back almost a full car length; Billy kept his foot down.

  But the stranger wasn’t surrendering; not with plenty of miles between here and the county line. Slowly the stranger’s car crept up, somehow gaining what he’d lost an inch at a time. At the point where Billy Ray felt the road starting to rise, climbing away from the crick and starting the climb up the side of the mountain, the stranger’s hood was even with his door again. But that was enough.

  He found a little more pedal, and a little more acceleration. As he began to pull ahead again, he glanced back.

  And the hair on the back of his neck stood straight up.

  Glaring at him through the windshield where the driver would be was a pair of hell-hot, glowing green orbs.

  And that was when he finally came to his senses; when he recognized what he should have figured out a good long time ago. Like, back at the crossroads, when the stranger talked about wagers, and offered to bet his car, a car of a sort Billy Ray had never laid eyes on even in pictures.

  The stranger wasn’t . . . human.

  Billy Ray was racing with the Devil.

  As his body wrenched and hauled on the steering wheel, sending his car thundering up the mountain road, his mind was moving almost as fast in a panic. The stranger had dropped back, seeing the wisdom of not taking the outside lane when there was nowhere to go if you encountered another car in the outside lane, and the danger of skidding off if you lost even a little control or hitting a patch of the stones that were always coming down off the rock face. But when Billy Ray looked up to his rearview, he could see them, faintly, through the headlight glare. Those eyes, those inhuman eyes, green and glowing.

  Billy Ray’s granny’d had a great store of tales about the Devil; granted, there were other critters this driver could be, according to those stories, but they were all unholy. She’d had tales, and songs too. Little Billy had listened avidly, and a good thing he had, too, because somewhere in all those stories and songs was the key to getting him out of this mess. Or so he was praying.

  Not that praying was going to do him any good right now. Billy’s granny had been very clear on something in her tales. God wasn’t going to be hornswaggled by a last-minute repentance and pleas for mercy. God was like Granny. “You made that there bed, you’re a-gonna lie in it.” It was one thing for a good man to be tricked by the Devil; God would take pity on such, and send him help. But a bad man would have to get his own self out of the mess. And Billy Ray knew he was a bad man.

  Not so much because of the ’shine running. That might be against man’s law, but it was a plain, bad law that had no reason to exist except to enrich some men at the expense of common folks. There hadn’t even been such a law until Prohibition, but then after, the revenuers had figured out there was a lot of money to be made for the government by keeping the likker-making in the hands of a few and taxing the hell out of it. That was greed, and sin, in and of itself, to deny a man the ability to take his own corn from his own land and do what he wanted with it.

  No, it was because Billy had done more than his fair share of sinning, for all that he was a young’un. Cussin’ and lyin’, getting drunk and not just having a drink or two, fornicatin’ . . . and he’d had lust for the stranger’s car, which was right against the commandments, lusting after what your neighbor had. No, he was a bad man, and God was going to be no help to him.

  So what he needed was cleverness.

  Some of Granny’s stories had been new, or at least came from this side of the ocean, but a lot had been old, going all the way back to the family roots in English soil. And the one he could remember now was the one that he’d acted out to the amusement of his ma and pa, singing out the lines for the clever lad, while Granny sang the ones for Old Scratch. “Never nohow call him by his name,” she’d warned. “Or he’ll come, soon or late, he’ll come!” Well, Billy had called out that name often enough . . . and here was proof that Granny was right.

  He was driving this road on pure instinct, relying on the memory of a couple hundred such runs to tell him where to hit the brakes and crank the wheel over a fraction of a second before the next hairpin turn came into view. And the stranger was still right on his tail, headlights burning furiously through the rear glass, green eyes glaring through the light-haze.

  “The False Knight on the Road” . . .

  In the song, like now, the Devil had appeared in disguise, in the guise of a man of wealth and status. He’d co
nfronted a little boy—probably a very naughty little boy, since God hadn’t sent an angel with a flaming sword to drive Old Scratch away—but a clever little boy. Billy hauled the wheel around another turn and searched the song for a way out of his predicament.

  “Oh where are ye going?” said the False Knight on the road.

  “I’m goin’ to my school,” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  “And what is on yer back?” said the False Knight on the road.

  “Me bundles and me books,” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  All right, what did that tell him? What had Granny said? The wee boy showed courage: standing right up to the Devil. But not lying. Lying would have given the Devil leave to snatch him up on the instant. And he wasn’t insolent; insolence wouldn’t have let the Devil take him, but you didn’t anger the Devil, for he might well kill you. God would have your soul, but that wasn’t a great consolation if you were dead.

  “What sheep and cattle’s them?” said the False Knight on the road.

  “They’re mine and me father’s,” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  “How many of ’em’s mine?” said the False Knight on the road.

  “As many’s got blue tails,” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  He was sweating with fear and his heart was pounding along with the throbbing engine. Granny had explained that one. If the boy had said “none,” that would have given the Devil a pretext to find one or more sheep that “could” belong to him—a ram with curled horns, maybe, or a black sheep. That would prove the boy a liar and forfeit his soul. But by setting a condition, the boy had bested him. And that made him angry, and that kicked off the dangerous part of the song, where the boy had to counter every curse the Devil threw at him, and throw it back.

  “I wish you were in yonder tree!” said the False Knight on the road.

  “A ladder under me,” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  “The ladder it would break!” said the False Knight on the road.

  “And you would surely fall!” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  “I wish you were in yonder sea!” said the False Knight on the road.

  “A good boat under me!” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  “The boat would surely sink!” said the False Knight on the road.

  “And you would surely drown!” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  “Has your mother more than you?” said the False Knight on the road.

  “They’re none of ’em for you,” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  And there the clever boy even diverted the harm from his siblings.

  “I think I hear a bell!” said the False Knight on the road.

  That would be the death knell—the Devil had lost patience, and if he could not have the boy’s soul, then he would have his life!

  But the boy knew the answer to that—

  “Aye, it’s ringin’ ye to hell!” said the wee boy and still he stood.

  Turning it from a death knell to a church bell. And that—that was it! No demon, nor fairy, nor the Devil hisself could stand against a church bell, and it was, by the feel of the air and the finely tuned time sense Billy had honed over many, many trips, close to midnight. If he lost the race—if he lost the race—if he could just keep the Devil talking until the church bells from Holy Grace Baptist rang up from the valley, he’d be saved.

  Now, if he could get up this mountain and win the race, he had nothing to fear. And that was his best chance.

  And he was close, close to the top, for the road had started to narrow still further, to the point where cars approaching each other at this part of the road would stop and inch forward, door handles actually scraping, to get past each other. Surely not even the Devil would chance trying to pass here, at the speeds they were going. His heart started pounding, and not with fear, but with triumph. He was going to win! He was going to win!

  And then he heard it.

  Behind him, a new note rose in the throat of the great black beast that the Devil was driving. The howl rose to a scream, and with a scant five hundred yards to the top and a thousand to the county line, the sleek machine accelerated like nothing Billy Ray had ever seen before, tore past him on a lane that could not have been more than three fourths of a proper lane wide, and shoved itself in front of him so quickly he had to brake to avoid ramming it—

  And then, to add insult to injury and shame to it all, the red taillights ran off up the road and out of sight so fast you would have thought the beast was powered by rockets and not by an engine at all.

  Of course it’s not powered by an engine, Billy thought with his stomach in knots and his mind in a whirl. Or at least, it ain’t an engine that any man’s hand was in the building of.

  For one brief moment, as he made the last turn and headed for the county line, he hoped that the Devil had got so far in front of him that he might could make a run for it.

  But no.

  There he was, the bastard, his sleek car parked square across the road, blocking it, right on the other side of the county border. And him leaning up against it, hat still pulled down over his face.

  Billy rolled up slowly and turned off his engine. Just as slowly, and racked with terror, he got out of the car. From the Fairlane came the tick-tick-tick of cooling metal. From the stranger’s car . . . nothing.

  How far was it to midnight?

  “Well,” said the Devil. “There’s the little matter of the bet.”

  “Aight,” Billy agreed, sweating. How to turn that against him? There was nothing there to use! How to keep him talking?

  But the Devil was already talking. “I’ll have what’s under the front seat of your Ford Fairlane, Billy Ray,” he said, with a hint of laughter in his voice. “And don’t you trouble to tell me there ain’t nothing there. There’s six old-style bottles there, all wrapped in flour-sack towels and corked with their tops waxed, all full of proper corn whiskey, made from ’shine from a clean, clean still, all good copper and no lead solder about it, and aged in charred oak barrels, and I’ll be having them all.”

  Billy almost fainted with relief. The Devil wanted whiskey? That was all? He’d have given the Devil his whole cargo and thrown in the Fairlane—

  He hardly knew how he managed to get the passenger door open. His hands shook so much getting out the “special” bottles that it was a wonder he didn’t drop them. He didn’t even stammer thanks when the stranger gave him six flour-sack towels full of broken glass to stick back under there, and give him the excuse for why those special bottles of real whiskey weren’t there no more.

  All that he could really do, when the stranger had pulled the car far enough off the road that he could get by, was put the pedal to the floor and speed away. . . .

  • • •

  “Great Harry’s Ghost, did you see his face?” howled Dylan ap Dai, throwing the Stetson onto the head of what had been a sleek automobile and was now a stunning black horse and exposing his pointed ears as the wind at the top of the mountain blew back his hair. The elvensteed snorted and shook her head so the Stetson settled into place, looking quite at home there.

  “Aye, that I did, ye daft bugger,” said his cousin Caradoc, coming out of the woods at the side of the road, followed by his own mount, a silver stallion. “Poor lad, he thought you were the Devil! Shame on you, for putting such a fright into the boy!”

  “Well the shame’s on him for carrying such a delectable cargo I couldn’t resist the challenge!” Dylan retorted, and twirled his finger around the top of the one of the bottles that hadn’t made it into his elvensteed’s saddlebags. The wax obligingly peeled off and the cork extracted itself and Dylan took a pull of the bottle. “Oh, aye . . .” he sighed. “There’s the sweet dew of the mountain . . . here, taste that and see if it was worth a challenge.”

  He handed the bottle
to his cousin, who took it, exposing the badge of Elfhame Fairegrove on his chest as his cloak lifted a little. Caradoc took a considering sip, his eyebrow rose, and he took as deep a draught as Dylan had. “Why is’t yon mortals can make such delectables and we cannot?”

  Dylan shrugged. “And what d’ye think of yon challenge-race?” he demanded, taking the bottle back and having another mouthful. “I think we’ve found us a new sport.”

  “Safer than a challenge-joust, for certain sure.” Caradoc claimed the bottle, and pondered over his second drink. “I reck me Lord Keighvin Silverhair will find it as tasty as he finds this drink.”

  “Then we’ve two prizes to carry home, sweet cuz!” Dylan laughed, and slapped his fellow elf on the shoulder. “So, let’s hie us hence, and give him the winnings and the word!”

  A moment later, two sleek sportscars, one silver, one black, sped away along a road that, until a moment before, had not been there. Then the trees swallowed them up, and they were gone.

  JAMMED

  SEANAN MCGUIRE

  Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, explaining her love of redwoods and fear of weather. She writes urban fantasy under her own name and science fiction thrillers under the name Mira Grant. When not writing, she watches a lot of horror movies and television and attends a lot of Roller Derby, as well as attending conventions and arguing endlessly about the X-Men. She lives in a crumbling farmhouse with too many books and three abnormally large blue cats. Seanan is exactly as much of a geek as this bio makes her seem.

  Nobody ever got eaten because they ran too fast. Maybe a few people went over cliffs they didn’t see coming, but that’s probably a better way to die.

  —ALICE HEALY

  A NONDESCRIPT WAREHOUSE IN NORTHEAST PORTLAND, OREGON

  NOW

  I sank deeper into my crouch, waiting for the whistle to free me from the starting line. Princess Leya-you-out crouched next to me, the white star on her red helmet cover marking her as the current jammer for the Concussion Stand. We were halfway through the first bout of the season, and this was the first jam Leya and I were skating against each other. Every other round, it had been my team captain, Elmira Street, versus Leya, while I skated against the newer, slower, Holly Go Lightspeed. The blockers were a solid mass ahead of us, obscuring the open track. That didn’t matter. I’d seen it before.