Ghostcountry's Wrath Read Free

shower expiring.
    Once again Alec and David exchanged glances: blue and gray eyes locked in quizzical resignation. While David collected his finery, Alec resurrected his civilian persona. An instant later, the bathroom door squeaked open, releasing a cloud of steam around a muscular, rusty-skinned young man who stood there applying one end of a long blue towel to shoulder-length black hair, while the other flirted with his thighs.
    David stared fixedly at the opposite wall as Calvin continued drying himself. “So, Fargo,” he drawled, “when are you gonna reveal this great secret of yours?”
    “Besides the one he’s already revealing?” Alec chuckled. “Doesn’t look so great to me!”
    “Eat me, White Boy!” Calvin snarled.
    “Don’t have a fork that small,” Alec shot back. Calvin bent over to dry his legs—which not so coincidentally mooned him.
    “Neither does your tattoo, actually,” Alec observed coolly, refusing to be baited. “—Look good, I mean.” “
    Eat me!”
    David glanced at Calvin’s bare backside reflexively, in quest of the cross-in-circle tattoo that had always graced—if that word was appropriate to such a referent—his friend’s upper right “cheek.” “God, he’s right!” he gasped. “It’s all…faded!”
    Calvin straightened and craned his neck to peer over his shoulder, then gave up and padded to the mirror, where he proceeded to peruse his bottom critically. “Well, that’s interestin’,” he mused. “Not that I spend a lot of time lookin’ at my butt, or anything. Gosh, I bet it’s ’cause—”
    He broke off, scowling, and unhooked a small, mud-colored leather bag from a peg by the door and slipped the thin cord over his head. It thumped against his chest and lodged against a glassy, palm-sized object wrapped in copper wire and depending from a wet and obviously brand-new rawhide thong. First things first, David noted: mojo before modesty.
    “’Cause why?” he prompted.
    “The door can be locked,” Alec added. “Runner-man’s out of it, and Aik’ll forgive us—eventually.”
    “Poor Aik.” David sighed, shaking his head.
    “You guys still haven’t told him?” From Calvin.
    “Not much,” David grunted. “’Course we don’t know everything either,” he added pointedly.
    “Start with the tattoo,” Alec suggested.
    Calvin fingered the vitreous ornament between his pecs. “I…was gonna say that I bet it’s faded ’cause of all the shapeshifting I’ve been doin’ lately.”
    Alec looked stricken—as he usually did when such topics arose. David shot him a glare and gnawed his lip. “I thought you didn’t like doing that,” he ventured at last.
    Calvin fished a pair of flowered boxer shorts from a battered khaki knapsack. “Not likin’ something and not doin’ something are two different somethings,” he observed as he slipped them on. “But like I said, I’ve been doin’ a lot of shapeshiftin’—and I guess every time I do, the tattoo loses something. I mean, it’s not part of me, really. Like—”
    “Oh, I see!” David broke in eagerly. “When you change back to human, your body has to reconstruct you according to your genetic blueprint. Only the tattoo’s not part of it, so it has to make do as best it can.”
    Calvin nodded. “And when you turn into something with scales—which I, to my regret, have lately done—it’s kinda hard for a few grains of pigment to figure out where to go, ’cause there aren’t any analogous structures. Like, rattlesnakes don’t even have hipbones, much less asses!”
    Both David’s brows shot up. “Rattlesnakes?”
    “A matter of necessity. I don’t recommend the experience.”
    “Which is very interesting,” Alec inserted. “But which doesn’t explain why you’re late—or all that B.S. on the phone. I mean, you called right after we discovered… it. And at the last possible moment before we had to split for the bachelor party. Five minutes later, and you’d have missed