The Summer Country

by James A. Hetley

  Bloody hell! Now she was going cloudy on him. Next thing, she'd be chanting "The Lady of Shalott."

  "Don't get any warm-puppy feelings about this: the legend of Arthur has to be about the most depressing tale ever told in the English language. It's an endless stream of people you like doing their damnedest to doom themselves and knowing it every step of the way.

  "Besides, with Liam you're looking at the other side. Mordred. Nimue. The tangled dysfunctional family of Clan Orkney. Pain for the fun of it."

  Pain for the fun of it, like what Liam had done to Mulvaney seven years ago. Well, that debt was paid, although Liam's nasty little cousin still wove his traps. Wait a minute . . . . Maybe Dougal had been after this girl.

  She started to hum a tune from Camelot. Even allowing her the twenty-eight years, she wasn't old enough to remember that show. He was. It had made him sick.

  "Do they still hold tournaments in the Summer Country? I hung out with the S.C.A. in college, even learned to fence a bit. We held medieval banquets and mock duels."

  Brian had swallowed enough fantasy for one night. "They have dungeons in the Summer Country. They have slaves in the Summer Country. Camelot is dead. Arthur is dead. Law is dead. Power rules."

  He wondered how much of this was slipping past the alcohol. Time to get crude. "Liam had power. He wanted a woman, either for himself or for his master. He saw you and wanted you and was about to take you. For life. For rape. A bed-slave to bear his children. You wouldn't get a vote. 'Women's Lib' never came to the Summer Country. A woman is either a sorceress or a slave. A bed-slave while she is young and fertile and pretty, a drudge in the kitchen or farmyard afterwards. Much the same is true for men, unless you have the Old Blood and the Power."

  Brian stopped and realized he’d been ranting. Her mug was empty. He wanted a drink or two of his own, to settle his stomach. The next round was his. If she got too drunk, there were things he could do about it.

  That waitress was what they wanted in the Summer Country: a sex toy with no brain. Where the hell was she? His glance scouted the corners of the room.

  A slim woman, dark-haired and dark-skinned, stood at the bottom of the entry stair. A man who could have been her twin held her arm. The gray-clad pair scanned the smoky room like a pair of elegant cobras, their expensively understated dress warping the strip-club into a Parisian demi-monde cellar.

  Damn! Fiona and Sean. Here. Now. Bloody, bloody hell!

  Brian couldn't waste the time to figure out what that meant.

  The redhead blinked fuzzily at him when he draped her coat over her shoulders and dragged her through the nearest exit. He turned and had a few words with the door, hoping the walls were stronger than they looked. They probably weren't.

  Shouts echoed through the room behind them. Customers weren't allowed out back. Brian leaned a little harder on his control, and the girl finished shrugging her arms into the sleeves of her jacket. He slipped her gun out of her pocket before she could think about reaching for it.

  He could make it work, if he had to, no matter what Fiona or Sean tried to say to the little grains of nitrocellulose.

  He pulled her down the corridor past three curtains, dog-leg right, up a flight of stairs flanked by flaking cinder-block walls to a door with a crash-bar and one of those idiot red flags that said "Alarm Will Sound." He held another quick discussion with locks and electrons.

  They pushed through, not into the storm but into another passageway with doors and stairs and exit signs. The place was a bloody fire-marshal’s nightmare. The door clicked shut without an alarm, and he told it to be a good boy and stay closed. Not that Fiona or Sean couldn't also talk to locks. It would just take them a little while.

  A dull thud shook the floor from below, probably Sean or Fiona showing off. That did trigger the alarms--electronic horns rather than the metallic snarl that would have been the door. Brian hauled the girl up another flight of stairs and slammed the door open with his hip, dragging her out into freezing rain. He'd expected stairs down, but they were in an alley. The place must be built into a slope.

  Another alarm cut in, a mechanical ringing clatter overhead. A sign under it said "Sprinkler Alarm." That meant fire. Must have been Sean: Fiona tended to more subtlety. She wasn't less dangerous, just quieter about it.

  Rain, he thought.

  Scent.

  Fiona would follow him. She wouldn't pay much attention to the girl's smell: wrong circuitry. And Sean wouldn't notice her, either, being what he was. Liam had been the one who'd tracked her.

  He looked for water--rain and slush and the running gutters --things to kill his scent. He had to get the girl home without a fight. She was a dead weight, a drunk, a distraction. She'd almost gotten him caught down there.

  Mental chess. Fiona was such a devious little bitch, twisting Dougal's plot to her own ends. The bloody girl had been bait for a trap, Fiona’s own trap using Liam's hunt as cover.

  He slowed down, the clamor of the alarms blocks behind them in the rainy darkness. Sirens wailed in the distance, stringing together the great braying horns of the fire-trucks as they plowed through intersections against the lights, and he winced at the thought of a panic stop of one of those metal monsters on the ice and slush. At least there wasn't much traffic at this time of night. Or morning.

  Maybe Fiona and Sean would get tangled up in that, get squashed flatter than bedbugs. Faint hope. They'd be more likely to wreck the truck. And Fiona had the persistence of a saint, even if nothing else about her was holy. That book wasn't closed.

  He slipped the gun back into the girl's pocket. He had better ones. Then he smiled at her and turned on the charm. "You never told me your name."

  She blinked back, still dizzy from the drinks and the run. "Mau-reen," she said, stumbling over pronouncing her own name. "Maureen Pierce. I don' know if Grandma'd call this a formal in-tro-duc-tion."

  He took her hand and kissed it, gravely.

  "I won't presume upon it."

  Now, to adjust her feelings a little further . . . . Any woman who could take what she'd been through and come back with Queen's Gambit Declined was someone he wanted to know better.

  A touch of the glamour wouldn't hurt anybody.

  Chapter Three

  Maureen's thoughts reminded her of some of the test drugs the doctors had tried on her. She felt the same detached unreality, as if she were a normal woman walking home with a normal man after a normal night on the town. The sense of horror and terror had exhausted itself like a moth fluttering against a lighted window.

  Only this strange man remained, a courtly knight guiding her to shelter from the storm. She'd never felt protected by a man before. They'd always been the threats.

  I'd like to invite him in. I'm afraid, but I'm not afraid of him. A normal woman would invite him in.

  Maureen repeated her mantra as they slogged the last block to her apartment. She ignored the faint voice that whispered fear of any man, that whispered of the fire and death behind them in the cold rain. The mantra shoved that voice back under water and held it there to drown. She felt bewitched by this man, and by a longing her body hadn't felt outside of dreams.

  The rain rattled on her jacket like dribbles of soft gravel, half sleet, still soaking in rather than just bouncing off. She thought it was about the most miserable weather a Maine winter could produce.

  Brian's hand was warm through her sleeve, no gloves. Maybe the same powers he'd used in the alley also protected him against the shitty weather. Calm and safety seemed to flow from his touch, almost like an electric current.

  A normal woman would invite him in--to chat, to warm up, to have a cup of coffee or a drink. Not necessarily to stay the night. It would be simple politeness, on a night like this.

  He was good-looking, quiet, strong, and he reacted fast. He smelled right. He played Queen Pawn openings in his head. He had saved her from something, tonight. Twice.

  A normal woman would invite him in.

  She swiped a
curl of wet hair off her forehead as if it was a fly tickling across her skin. Caffeine and alcohol tangled in her bloodstream and left her with a detached twitching high that ignored little things like slush soaking through her boots and icicles forming in her hair and a three-alarm fire lighting up the downtown sky. Instead, she paid attention to that warm hand on her arm and the fact that he seemed content to keep a polite distance.

  A normal woman would invite him in.

  And her cynical inner commentator answered her in the second person singular it always used. You are not a normal woman. A normal woman doesn't take a month of foreplay to work up to a kiss. A normal woman doesn't feel like vomiting from fear when a man comes within smelling range. A normal woman doesn't keep waking up clammy with sweat, eighteen years after that monster crushed her to the grass and forced pain between her legs.

  And yet she wasn't doing any of these things. Maybe the night's weirdness had burned out the necessary connections.

  A normal woman doesn't see a rapist in every man she meets.

  It wasn't fair. After enough psych. classes to take a minor in college, she damn well knew what her problem was. That didn't solve it.

  It hadn't "made a lesbian out of her," like some of the idiots she'd met might have said. Sexual attraction didn't work that way. Those strippers did nothing for her. She still dreamed about men--gentle men with gentle hands that never went anywhere without permission. She still would really like to find out what it meant, to do those things with somebody she loved.

  And every time she tried, Buddy Johnson elbowed his way into the scene and tore up the script.

  She dragged her thoughts out of the filthy slush. Even with all the crap running through her head, she could still find her way home in a storm. They were slogging across a gray-rutted parking lot full of white car-lumps, up to a three-story tenement with rotting balconies and cracked tan vinyl siding. Highland Apartments: the place she hung her hat.

  Yeah. Home is where the hat is, she thought. The world hasn't offered you too many places to leave your heart.

  Sometimes she wished she could kill that inner voice. She covered her turmoil by walking over to one mound of snow and kicking its bumper, hard. The wet snow slid off its hood, revealing a rusty green Toyota with, if memory served, 145,407 miles on the speedometer. She'd nicknamed it Musashi, after the samurai who never took a bath. Up to now, it had been crude but reliable, like him. Judging by this week, though, it might never turn 145,408.

  "Sonuvabitch won't start." She kicked it again, and more snow slumped down off the roof to pile up against the wipers. There was also a metallic clunk that sounded like a piece of rotten tailpipe expiring. Classic rust-bucket. It was all she could afford.

  Brian sloshed through the puddles to her side. He leaned over with hands flat on the hood, closed his eyes, and started muttering to himself.

  Maureen shivered at the sight of his bare skin touching cold wet metal. My God, she thought, he's just like one of those southern preachers, laying on the hands. Faith healing. This man is seriously weird.

  "You've got a cracked distributor cap," he said, after about two minutes of communing with Jap steel. "It also needs a new air filter and new plugs, but the distributor cap is what's killing you. And remember to use the parking brake more: the cable's going to rust up and seize on you if you don't."

  Bullshit! "You expect me to believe that? I've heard about wizard mechanics before, but at least they have to open the hood!"

  He shrugged. "How else do you think the British Empire survived Lucas Electrics? It had to be magic 'cause it sure wasn't engineering." He straightened up and dug a rumpled scrap of paper out of his pocket.

  "You should be able to start it in the morning. It won't last more than a couple of days, so you'd better get it fixed. This should cover it." She caught a glimpse of Ben Franklin in the streetlight's glow. A hundred-dollar bill.

  "But . . . "

  "I don't need it. You do." He shoved it into her pocket, next to the .38 Special.

  Good-looking, quiet, strong, smart, reacted fast. And, apparently, rich. She hadn't seen a hundred in years. The Quick Shop wouldn't take them.

  Taking money from strange men, Maureen? Like those women in the club? But her critic's voice sounded like it came from the far side of a brick wall, and the thought of comparing her life to an exotic dancer's or prostitute's almost made her laugh. The closest he'd come to making a pass at her was keeping her from falling on her butt when she'd slipped on a patch of ice.

  "Why don't you come inside and dry off for a few minutes?"

  Brian nodded, as if her question was totally normal instead of the summation of a formal debate. They stomped their way up the front steps, shaking off winter again like a pair of wet dogs. The outside door was never locked, and half the bulbs in the hallway were dead or stolen. A chill returned to the pit of her stomach, but all the shadows seemed to be empty.

  Besides, Brian could protect her. He'd proven that.

  She covered her fear by sniffing the wash of warm, damp air in the stairwell, her usual game of guessing who had what for dinner. It was the only use she'd ever found for a hypersensitive nose that could tell the difference between white and red oak by the smell of their leaves. Otherwise, a good nose was a liability in the city.

  All the apartments had their kitchens near the stairs. First floor, pizza with mushrooms and pepperoni overpowered whatever the other unit had. Second floor east smelled like KFC again, and west had whipped up a pot of chili. West's cooking was a fire-hazard, real five-alarm. They loved Cajun, Tex-Mex, Thai curries--anything to steam your eyeballs out. The couple had grown up in Jalisco.

  Fires kindled in her head--dismembered chunks of body burning in the alley, flames exploding out of the cellar club. Old Ones. Summer Country. Hunters. Terror dragged her into myth: visions of sleek gray cobras, man-sized and spitting fire.

  Maureen started to shake again.

  Brian shifted his hand, circling his arm gently around her waist as they creaked up the stairs to the third floor. It felt safe, as if he was comforting her instead of putting on a move. A memory from Girl Scout camp floated up, a skilled trainer running her hands along the flank of a skittish horse, smoothing out the mane, talking quietly to calm the frightened animal.

  The trainer's hands were magic. Brian would make a good trainer. His touch was gentle, reassuring. He had a feral, furry smell with a touch of acrid male to it, vaguely fox or skunk, unlike any other man she'd ever known. It roused a sense of rightness, weirdly soothing. It might not take her a month to kiss this man.

  She fumbled with her keys, her fingers cold and shaky. A man she'd known for an hour or so, and she was letting him inside her apartment. One step from letting him inside her body. Magic hands.

  "You say you're English?"

  "British. Welsh ancestry, anyway. Most Yanks don't know the difference. England, Scotland, Wales, even Ireland, it's all the same to you."

  "You don't have much of an accent."

  "I spent a few years in a place where a British accent could be hazardous to my health. Yanks were more welcome. Habits change fast with incentives like that."

  She flipped on the lights. The kitchen looked presentable for once: Jo hadn't left dinner dishes all over the place, with plates of petrified spaghetti sauce or gnawed chicken bones looking like the remains of a voodoo ceremony.

  Maureen hung her jacket on the coat-rack over the radiator. If the furnace didn't die again, even the quilted batting should be dried out by morning. Boots went in the tray where drips couldn't spread across the floor and ambush her bare feet when she stumbled out to make breakfast. That was a real rude way to wake up.

  "Get you a drink? We've got Scotch or Irish whiskey, rum, or brandy. Cup of tea or I could make some coffee."

  "Tea would be nice."

  Such a prosaic end to such a surreal evening: tea for the British visitor. She set the kettle on the rear burner and cranked up the gas. It even lit. How novel.
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  "Uh, take a seat. I've got to powder my nose."

  She'd drunk a lot of coffee in the last hour. Plus there was the question of that warmth she'd felt back in the alley. If she was thinking of letting a man inside her pants, they damn well ought to be clean.

  Maureen blinked three times, shocked at her own thoughts. The farther she got away from Brian, the less sane the whole night seemed. Her fingers started to tremble with delayed reaction.

  She almost tripped over a pair of black engineer's boots in the hallway, next to a battered hard-shell guitar case. Jo's door was shut.

  Shit!

  She stumbled to the end of the hall, past Jo's door and David's damn guitar, past her own door and into the john. She shut the door. Leaned her head against the cold mirror. Stared cross-eyed at the freckles that looked like they were painted on white paper.

  The night's load of shit had totally driven David out of her mind. He'd been as close to a boyfriend as she'd ever found in years. She'd forgotten he would probably come over, after practice. And go to bed with Jo.

  Jo.

  David.

  Bedroom.

  Goddamn whore.

  Goddamn man.

  The teakettle whistled in the kitchen, snapping her out of her misery. She must have been leaning there for a couple of minutes. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, flushed the toilet for camouflage.

  Walking back past the bedroom door and the evidence, a muffled giggle slapped her in the face. She heard bedsprings creaking.

  Brian had shuffled around in the cabinets, had two mugs out and the box of Earl Grey. Now he waited for her to pour, like a gentleman. Maureen swallowed a scream.

  "I think you'd better leave. I don't feel so good, all of a sudden."

  He stood up and touched her cheek. She flinched.

  "I understand. You've had a rough night. Try to get some sleep. Can I call you in the morning, make sure everything's alright?"