Games Creatures Play

  “You did it,” she said, glowing. “You held him down long enough for Rabies to get here! Once Phi got control of his last body, Rabies already had it in custody! You won, Dreamer.”

  “He cheated.”

  I sat up. Phi sat there in the body of another construction worker; the two men had been taking cover here, it appeared, near the base of the building. I could tell it was him. My brother always has this self-satisfied leer on his face, and I could recognize him in any body.

  “What? That’s nonsense.” The businesswoman would be Icer, from that tone in her voice. She sat on the edge of a planter nearby. “We got you, Phi.”

  “He shot into the crowd!” Phi said.

  “So did you!” I said, climbing to my feet with Longshot’s help. After spending so long . . . too long . . . outside a body, the warmth felt good. It had probably been only a few minutes, but that was an eternity without a body.

  “You were playing detective, Dave,” Phi said, pointing at me. “I was criminal. I can shoot innocents. You can’t.”

  “By whose rules?” Icer demanded.

  “Everyone’s rules!” Phi said, throwing up his hands. “You’ve got five, I’m only one. The criminal has to have a few advantages. That’s why I can kill, and you can’t.”

  “It’s five on one,” I said, “because you bragged you could take us all on your own, Phi.”

  “You cheated,” he said, leaning back. “Flat-out.”

  “Man,” Rabies said, wearing the body of a thick-armed black man. He stood a little off from us, looking at the chaos of Broadway, with police, ambulances. “We kind of caused a mess, didn’t we?”

  “We need to ban guns,” Longshot said.

  “You always say that,” Phi replied.

  “Look,” Longshot said. “We won’t be able to use Manhattan for months.”

  “Eh,” Phi said. “I’m doing a race with TheGannon across the country next. What do I care?”

  “What happened to TheGannon, anyway?” Icer asked.

  Longshot grimaced. “We had an argument. He left.”

  “He bugged out in the middle of a game?” Icer said. “Damn that kid. We should never have invited him.”

  “They’re coming over here,” Rabies said. “To check on the bodies of the two cops. We should split.”

  “Meet up in Jersey?” Longshot asked.

  We all nodded, and the glowing individuals went their separate ways. They’d probably dump these bodies soon, working their way out of the city by hopping from person to person in whatever way suited them.

  I ended up going with Phi. Side by side, walking away from the dead cops, hoping nobody would stop us. I was tired, and Bolting to another body didn’t sound pleasant.

  “I did get you,” I told him.

  “You tried hard, I’ll give you that.”

  “I won, Phi. Can’t you just admit that?”

  He just grinned. “I’ll tell you what. Footrace to Jersey. No limit on bodies. And just for you, no guns. Loser admits defeat.” With that, he took off.

  I sighed, shaking my head, watching my older brother go. A footrace? That meant no cars, no subways. We’d have to run the entire way, jumping into new bodies every few minutes as the ones we were using grew exhausted—like a poltergeist version of a relay race.

  Phi never knew when to stop. I didn’t remember a lot about when we’d been alive, back when our capture the flag games had been limited to controllers and a flatscreen—but I did know he’d been like this then, too.

  Well, I could beat him in a footrace. He wasn’t nearly as good at those as he was at capture the flag.

  I’d win this time, and then he’d see.

  FALSE KNIGHT ON THE ROAD

  A SERRATED EDGE STORY

  MERCEDES LACKEY

  Mercedes Lackey was born in Chicago, Illinois, on June 24, 1950. The very next day, the Korean War was declared. It is hoped that there is no connection between the two events.

  She was raised mostly in the northwestern corner of Indiana, attending grade school and high school in Highland, Indiana. She graduated from Purdue University in 1972 with a bachelor of science degree in biology. This, she soon learned, along with a paper hat and a name tag, will qualify you to ask, “Would you like fries with that?” at a variety of fast-food locations.

  In 1985 her first book was published. In 1990 she met artist Larry Dixon at a small science fiction convention in Meridian, Mississippi, on a television interview organized by the convention. They began working together from that time on and were married in Las Vegas at the Excalibur chapel by Merlin the Magician (aka the Reverend Duckworth) in 1992.

  They moved to their current home, the “second weirdest house in Oklahoma,” also in 1992. She has many pet parrots and “the house is never quiet.” She is approaching one hundred books in print, with five being published in 2012 alone, and some of her foreign editions can be found in Russian, German, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese. She is the author, alone or in collaboration, of the Heralds of Valdemar, Elemental Masters, Secret World Chronicles, Five Hundred Kingdoms, Diana Tregarde, Heirs of Alexandria, Obsidian Mountain, Dragon Jousters, Bedlam Bards, Shadow Grail, Dragon Prophecy, Halfblood Chronicles, Bardic Voices, SERRAted Edge, Doubled Edge (prequel to SERRAted Edge), and other series and stand-alone books.

  A night owl by nature, she is generally found at the keyboard between ten P.M. and six A.M.

  Billy Ray Johnson listened attentively past the thunder of the three-carb, supercharged V8 under the hood of his Ford Fairlane. He knew every grumble and roar of his machine; what he was listening for was something that wasn’t it. The rumble he was listening for would be a Chevy, which would be the cops, more than likely, and that would mean he’d need to lie off the road a piece until they cleared out. All the ’shiners hereabouts ran Fords or Hudson Hornets. Sometimes he regretted not getting a Hudson; they gripped the curves like a cat about to be tossed into the river. But the Ford was faster. Fastest car in the county, probably the fastest car in this part of the state.

  It was a perfect night for ’shine running. Which was not to say that it was a beautiful, clear night with a full moon. Outsiders might consider that a perfect night, but a clear, bright night meant the cops could see you running up the mountain a mile away. Tonight was a quarter moon, and you couldn’t see it for the overcast and the fog. Not enough fog to slick up the road, and it wasn’t an even blanket, but it was enough to make driving a challenge if you didn’t know the roads the way Billy Ray did.

  Right now he was on a piece of section line that just had patches of fog on it, not enough to turn the clay under the gravel greasy. Thanks to the fog, the thick woods to either side of the gravel road were like walls, just a hint of individual trees in the sidewash of his headlights as he sped by. He was laden down, trunk full of cartons of tightly packed mason jars full of ’shine cradled in newspaper so they wouldn’t bang together and break, tank built into the backseat full and sealed, and some extra-special bottles tucked in flour sacks under the front seat. He was early, by his reckoning. He’d made good time. He’d make better time when he got to the hardtop road. Seventy-five miles to Shelby, where he’d turn over his load, collect his money, and head back home again.

  Moonshine had bought and paid for this car. Moonshine bought and paid for everything his ma and pa couldn’t grow or hunt for themselves and the kids. Life was rough on the mountain; hardscrabble farming, plowing the few bits of land that weren’t vertical without any mechanical help, just with plow blade and a mule. In theory it was possible to live completely off the land, but in practice, unless you didn’t mind dressing yourself and the kids in leather and furs like a bunch of Indians, and you didn’t mind doing without things like bread, it wasn’t. What Billy brought in running ’shine paid for the flour and the stuff for clothing, all the things that made life a little easie
r.

  Ma worried, but Billy even knew what he’d do if he got caught; he’d be a first-time offender and the judge in this county had a reputation for offering people like him the prison farm or the army. He’d take the army, and send his pay home. It wouldn’t be as much as he got for ’shine running—a hundred dollars a month instead of a night—but it’d be better than nothing.

  But he didn’t plan on getting cau—

  The hell! he thought, as his headlights cut through a patch of fog and hit the side of a car parked right across the road at a crossroads he didn’t remember being there, and he stood on the brakes to avoid piling into it.

  Which he did, just barely, and only by hauling on the hand brake and sending the Fairlane slewing sideways in a shower of gravel.

  The first thing in his mind was—revenuers!—and his heart, already racing, went into a panicked gallop, as his brain went into overdrive calculating how to sling the Fairlane all the way around and gun her back up the road he’d just come down.

  But in the next moment he realized—no, that was never a cop car, or a revenuer car, nor the FBI. There were no markings, no lights—and no cop car, not even FBI or Treasury agent, had ever looked like this one.

  It set his mind into a tailspin then, all thoughts of escape vanishing—because he could not identify it. At all. And he knew every make and model of every car ever built, at least in the U.S. of A. It had to be foreign. One of those cars he’d read about the few times he’d gotten his hands on a racing magazine, with names he couldn’t even begin to figure out how to pronounce. What the hell was it doing out here? Was the driver lost, or stuck? In either case, what the hell was it doing out here?

  It was low, and lean, and sleek. Solid black without a hint of chrome anywhere. It matched no make or model he had ever seen, not even in pictures. Some rich man’s made-just-for-him racing car? There had been one magazine, with photos of cars with outlandish bodies competing in some Frenchified race . . . Grand Prix, they called it. But what in the name of God was something like that doing out in these mountains?

  And what in hell was it doing parked in the middle of a crossroads he would have sworn hadn’t been there the last time he’d made this run?

  He’d pulled the Fairlane to a stop mere feet away from the mystery car, and now the driver’s side opened, and the driver stepped out. Calm. Cool. If the positions had been reversed, Billy Ray would have been out of that car before the Fairlane stopped moving and heading for the brush—and when the crash didn’t happen, he’d have been heading out of the brush with a fat stick in his hand to administer a whuppin’.

  Like the car, the driver was all in black from head to toe. Black pants, black jacket zipped up against the damp chill in the air, black gloves. He wore a black hat—a Stetson—pulled down low on his head, so you couldn’t really see his face. He strolled around the front of his beauty of a car, walked over to Billy’s window, and tapped on it.

  Too astounded by all of this to think at all at this point, Billy automatically rolled it down. Little cold, damp wisps of fog drifted in through the window, along with a faint scent of leather and a hint of something expensive and spicy.

  “Billy Ray Johnson?” The stranger’s voice was low, smooth, rich sounding.

  “That there’d be me,” Billy admitted, the words coming out of his mouth before he thought.

  The stranger leaned back against his car and crossed his arms over his chest. “I heard,” he said, making no attempt to disguise his high-class accent, words coming out of his mouth that sounded more like what you’d hear on a radio show one late night, tuned in by accident from some place far, far away, than anything these mountains had ever echoed. “I heard that your Ford is a fast car.”

  Now there were finally thoughts running through Billy’s head. That he was in the middle of a run. That this was no time to be palaverin’ with a stranger in the middle of the road. That the smartest thing he could do would be to throw the Fairlane into reverse, hightail it back down the way he’d just come, and take another section-line road to the hardtop.

  But Billy’s mouth wasn’t nearly as smart as his brain. “It’s fast,” he heard himself say smugly.

  “I heard,” the stranger continued, “that you’re the fastest driver in the county.”

  Billy’s mouth was really, really stupid tonight. “I am,” he heard himself say even as he considered punching himself in the face to get himself to stop. “Ain’t nobody faster.”

  The stranger nodded, as if all this were exactly what he expected to hear. “Well, then. Are you prepared to prove how fast you and that piece of American iron are? Because last I saw, me and my girl were the fastest in three states, and I intend to make it four.”

  Now that made Billy Ray angry, and when he was angry, as his ma had pointed out to him time and time again, his temper burned up every bit of brains he had. “Now look here, mister, you might be fast on blacktop an’ straight roads, but you and that car ain’t really fast less’n y’all’re fast on roads like you ain’t likely ever seen afore—”

  “Sounds to me as if you’re inviting me to a race,” the stranger said, smoothly, with just a hint of . . . challenge.

  And Billy Ray was not the man to let a challenge pass unanswered. “Reckon I am,” he replied, his chin stuck out belligerently.

  “That was what I was hoping to hear,” the stranger said with deep satisfaction. “Let’s make it interesting. Here to the county line. If you win, you get this”—and he patted the fender of his machine.

  Now, Billy Ray was no stranger to avarice. He’d lusted after the Fairlane ever since the model came out, and it had taken him a lot of runs to pay for her and her modifications, even after getting the “special price” from the dealer that all his boss’s runners got. But just the curves of the stranger’s beauty of a machine made that desire seem like a grade school crush. Whereas this was the lust of a man for a red-hot woman. He wanted that car, as he had never wanted anything in his life. Already in his mind he was boring her cylinders, mounting a supercharger. . . .

  But there was one tiny little bit of reason left in his brain, just enough to choke out, “And what if I lose?”

  “We’ll talk about that at the end of the race,” the stranger laughed. “Don’t worry. It won’t be anything you can’t afford. In fact, you probably won’t even miss it.”

  Well, the stranger must have been insane, but then, foreigners generally were. A lot of the men of the mountains had come home from the Big War with stories about those crazy French, Italians, and English—

  So long as he wasn’t betting the Fairlane, he didn’t care in the state he was in—half angry at the condescending tone of the stranger, half on fire at the challenge. He backed up the Fairlane to the tree line and slowly got her pointed in the right direction. The stranger’s maneuvering was more graceful, a smooth curve of a backward turn that came within a hair of the Fairlane’s bumper without ever touching it, and put him door-to-door to Billy Ray.

  The driver revved his engine. It had a throat like nothing Billy Ray had ever heard before; a deep, throbbing rumble, deeper than the Fairlane. Not a growl, not a howl, but still something primal. A roar. A jungle roar.

  It put the hair up on the back of his neck, and for the first time, he felt a sense of warning. . . .

  But it was too late to do anything about it now.

  “You count it off!” the stranger shouted through his open window to Billy Ray.

  That was an invitation to cheat, to jump the gun. The stranger was taking the measure of him.

  Well, Billy Ray was going to measure up as a man. He might be doing something he could go to jail for in order to make a living, but he never had cheated in his life, and he never would.

  “On your mark!” he shouted, one foot on the gas and the other on the brake. “Get set! GO!”

  There was not a second’s worth of differenc
e between them as the two cars leapt forward into the night.

  Now . . . racing like this was taking a calculated risk. Whether or not someone tried to arrest them both depended largely on who was prowling the night tonight. If it was Treasury, revenuers—they’d see two fast cars out neck and neck and figure no way either of them was carrying ’shine. The extra weight of all those gallons of liquid alone was going to handicap a vehicle and if there was a crash, the very last thing you wanted was a car soaked in alcohol about to catch fire. If it was state troopers—now they might take an interest in stopping the race and arresting them both for speeding. If it was local cops—they knew Billy Ray’s Fairlane, and while they surely knew he was a runner, they’d never actually caught him, and in a case like this one, seeing him pitted against a furriner and a strange car . . . it would be a case of letting Billy Ray uphold the honor of the county and show that outsider just who ruled the roads hereabouts. Why, they might even use their new radios to make sure the road stayed clear, once they figured out the route.

  And tonight was a damp, cold, foggy night. Hard to see. Hard to navigate if you didn’t know the roads like someone born and raised in one of these hollers. He’d bet that if there was anyone out looking for ’shine runners, it would be the local boys.

  They were “running by the tree line,” as one of the other ’shine runners said. If you asked someone, they’d say this was a two-lane road, but that only meant there was enough room for two cars to get out of the way of each other and not end up hung up in the brush. The right side of the Fairlane was getting beat to death with twigs, but that wouldn’t be as bad as it was for the stranger, who’d be getting his driver’s side whupped. There wasn’t more than five inches between them, and they were door handle to door handle, two sets of headlights lighting up the whole road as they bounced over the uneven surface.