Dreamseeker's Road Read Free Page B

noted. “We’ve still got two.”
    “Anal retentive,” Aikin muttered. “And anyway, what is this about you wantin’ the blood? You never gave me a straight answer last night.”
    David stiffened abruptly and shot Alec a warning glance. He knew exactly why, and the reason was essentially unbelievable. Alec knew he knew, but Aik was supposed to be totally in the dark—and hopefully would stay that way. Watch it! he mouthed, where Aikin couldn’t see. He drew his finger across his throat for emphasis.
    Alec patted a thermos-shaped bulge in his vest’s game-pocket. “It’s for a project.” Which was not—quite—a lie.
    “You’re a computer nerd! What do you need deer blood for?”
    Alec ignored Aikin’s taunt—and David’s warning. “I’m also taking Geology 101, in which I have to do a project, which is to test a bunch of minerals with supposed arcane properties against those same properties under scientific conditions—which should be of interest to you, Mr. GameGod! Unfortunately, I can’t do like the Romans and drink wine from an amethyst cup to see if it keeps you from gettin’ drunk—but I can soak a bloodstone in blood, to see if that’s got any measurable effect.”
    “So why does it have to be deer blood?” Aikin asked pointedly. “I can get all the beef blood you want from the animal science folks.”
    “Yeah, well, my assumption is that stuff like that arose with Paleolithic hunters, and they didn’t have animal science folks—or domestic cattle. I figure the closer to original conditions—”
    “You’re gonna sit naked in the woods with an atlatl?” Alec reached for his fly. “ Want me to?”
    Aikin grunted, then glared at David. “You got a hidden agenda too?” he asked abruptly.
    The question caught David off guard, but he covered with a shrug. “Wouldn’t be hidden if I talked about it, would it?”
    “What if I invoke the Vow?” Aikin countered so recklessly that David wondered if something was bugging him that he wasn’t letting on—besides Alec’s presence. Something minor that had caught fire all in a rush, and blazed up past control—which was Aikin’s style on those rare occasions when he lost it. Trouble was, the guy had guessed true.
    “I would ask that you not do that,” David replied carefully. “If there was, it’d be personal—family personal.”
    “One hint?”
    David gnawed his lip. Dammit, why was Aik doing this? He, who a moment before had been urging silence, the most private of the entire MacTyrie Gang. More to the point, why did he have to invoke the oath he and the other Gangsters had made in ninth grade to always be straight with each other, to always answer sincere questions honestly, to hold back nothing that did not violate confidences conferred outside their circle?
    Family personal…
    Without warning, the memories ambushed him:
    … himself, age thirteen (but viewed from without, as by an observer), sprawled on his bed in jeans and sockfeet, reading Dune for the first time, in that down time between afterschool chores and supper. The distant knock on the back door he’d almost tuned out; the low buzz of voices; then his mom’s, very clearly, gasping “Oh, God, no!” And then his uncle (grea t- uncle, technically) Dale Sullivan, appearing at his door white-faced, and his strange, calm voice saying, “I just got a call from Beirut…”
    And then a fast-forward of others:
    … a closed-casket funeral in a small mountain church; lots of food, lots of crying; a burial in a hillside cemetery; a pervasive numbness that gave way to a silent, private anger…
    …himself, alone, at sunset, with the mountains at his back and the sanguine smear of the Sullivan Cove Road bisecting the valley before him, and Bloody Bald (too much blood, he thought, fartoo much) catching the rays of a dying sun (dying son, he remembered thinking) to the west. Him in his favorite jeans and sneakers, and a T-shirt proclaiming “Hard Rock Cafe: Tbilisi (Opening