Dragon's Teeth Page 4

  Alice sat there, her face quiet. "And yet she let you enter the kiva. How did you change her mind?"

  "I sat in front of her door."

  "And?"

  "I sat in front of her door."

  Now Alice lifted her left eyebrow. "And?"

  "I thought about our Spring. That Arizona sun gets to you after a while."

  "How long did it take?"

  "She offered me water on the third morning. Said that no English could be that stubborn." Caroline's mouth quirked a smile. "If she thinks I'm stubborn, she's never met you."

  Alice just stared at her, quiet, ignoring the jab. Finally she nodded to herself. "That would get you past the first wall, maybe the second. What got you into the heart?"

  "I told her about us, of course. After we'd swapped stories for about a year, I chanted her our creation myth. The real one, including the lines about the Sea People from the land of the dawn and their white swan canoes. About how we assimilated the whiteskins, the first time around, them and enough of their diseases that the Colonial epidemics mostly passed us by. About how we used the Sea People as camouflage when the English showed up and tried to take our homes."

  Caroline paused, glanced at the door still resolutely shut behind Kate, and cut a couple of slabs of apple pie. She consulted the state of her stomach and added one for herself with a side order of a cheddar wedge. Prouty cheddar.

  "Then it got complicated. I had to explain about the difference between the Welsh and English tribes, about how to outsiders they might look the same, like Blackfoot and Crow, but that they were really ancient enemies. About how half the French thought we were English, and half the English thought we were French, and how we dodged them both by being neither. Switching sides so fast the paint never dried on the road signs, was the way I explained it."

  That drew a snort from Alice. "You tell her about us?"

  Caroline understood the accent on that word — "us" the family, not "us" the tribe. "I had to. You don't get far, trying to hide things from Grandmother Walks. Anyway, as soon as I mentioned epidemics, she was all over that like a tall dog. I had to give her an explanation a lot stronger than that we'd met some of those germs before. Summoning the spirits of the land and air and water, now, that she could believe."

  Alice stared down into her glass of water. "You never mentioned any of this. No letters, emails, phone calls. Nothing."

  "No. That was half the point of going out West, wasn't it? You kept telling me that I had to stand on my own two feet. Learn to fight my own battles, without you and the House to back me up. The all-powerful Haskell Witch can't ever rely on anyone but herself."

  "Jeezum. Nothing says you can't ask for help. Can't accept help when it comes along. I've got Kate . . ."

  Time to break this off before it dissolved into tears and words regretted in the morning. "Speaking of Kate, what are we supposed to be plotting behind her back?"

  Alice shook herself and then looked up from her glass. "Plots? Nothing dark and sinister, girl. I just want you to comb through those papers for any mention of a stone circle up on Dyers Ridge. Any mention at all. That thing is old and powerful and tied somehow to Kate. It isn't Naskeag — its roots have to be Welsh, damn near as old as the Morgans in this land. We've got to find out more about it. Ask your father to help, if he isn't too busy stealing something from a museum in Bangkok. Ask Gary."

  Gary Morgan, the half-brother she'd always thought was a cousin until Alice sorted out some of the local tangles for her. Ben Morgan had the morals of a tomcat. Damned awkward that the only boy in three townships who caught her fancy turned out to be her half-brother. Cousin wouldn't have been so bad. Half-brother was . . . tacky.

  But maybe her hormones were just missing Kenny Grayeyes. Damn few Haskell women had much use for celibacy.

  Caroline grabbed her wandering thoughts by the scruff of the neck. Back to business. "Ummm. Aunt Alice, you still haven't told me what this is all about. What the hell did you and Aunt Kate get into?"

  "Eh? Girl, you've got to work on your mind-reading skills if you're ever going to amount to something as a witch. We've got a problem. A big problem."

  Oh, shit.

  Chapter Four

  Ben Morgan double-checked a computer screen, reached out one gloved finger to tap "Enter" and send his last message, waited until the transmitter LED quit blinking and the screen confirmed reception, and then pulled CDs from three computers. One by one he fed the disks into a heavy-duty shredder, wrinkling his nose at the buzz-saw snarl of the blades and the stink of tortured plastic.

  Encryption algorithms and some rather specialized radio control software, the CDs were "one-use" items. To finish his cleanup, he set all three computers to overwrite their deleted files, repetitions that went rather beyond the current NSA standards for secure computing. He flipped his jeweler's loupe down, stared into the bared microcircuitry of a standard UHF ham radio transceiver, and pulled out the jumpers and control board that allowed the synthesizer to transmit on blocked frequencies never intended by the manufacturer. He fed those into the shredder, as well. The machine screeched annoyance at him but did its job.

  Then he stood up and stretched. His back and shoulders complained about the morning's work, but he overruled their protests and smiled. Hacking communications satellites could be fun.

  And profitable. Alice Haskell now commanded another million bucks, fully laundered and legal, as guardian and trustee for the kids. And Alice wouldn't ask from whence the money came. She knew better. Granted, Ben had started the morning with nearly three times that much on paper, but the wastage served as insurance. Various officials and semi-officials and private bankers and businessmen scattered across twenty countries had a serious reason to keep their own mouths shut. Grease.

  But every dollar of that million now owned a paper trail, taxes paid and all. Governments were a pain in the ass. A few generations back, Morgans could just bring home their booty as foreign coin and goods, profits from a trading voyage, and nobody asked questions. Now every government, everywhere, wanted their cut. Call it taxes, call it graft, call it whatever you wanted, they all claimed a monopoly on robbing their citizens and corporations. And they talked to each other.

  Damned bureaucrats got in the way of earning a decent dollar. Or stealing one. On the other hand, governments made it possible for an enterprising man to make real money in the import/export business. Declare something illegal and the price for it jumped into the stratosphere, whether you dealt with Shan poppy growers or Guatemalan grave-robbers. And in either case, the middlemen took the lion's share.

  Ben grinned again. Make something illegal, and the man who lost it couldn't even call the cops. One major chunk of his morning's work related to a single Mayan "eccentric flint," illegally dug and illegally exported and then stolen and stolen and stolen again.

  He stared at the wall, the ancient rough granite curve of the tower called Morgan's Castle, and saw the flint hanging there in his mind's eye, glinting. "Eccentric" didn't even begin to describe it.

  God, it was a beautiful thing, ceremonial staff ornament or pole ax or totally unusable knife. Whatever it was. You had to hold it to believe it, as long as a man's forearm and broad as his spread hand, the body a flat openwork no thicker than his thumb and chipped into a delirium of fantastic curves and angles, flake by microscopic flake, the tang thin and sharp as a scalpel, without a single crack or stain or blemish to show the millennia since it had left the artist's hand.

  Collectors gibbered and drooled over a piece like that. To be able to hold it and examine it rather than stare at a ghost of the thing locked behind laminated glass in a museum case, feel the contrasting weight and delicacy that stretched the bounds of craft and broke through them into art, turn it in your hands and stare deep into the years and see the stylized perfection of a jaguar's head grinning back at you from its profile of faceted stone. Know that the jaguar god meant sacrifice, that this work of art might once have carved human flesh, loosed blood
steaming on the altar.

  The buyer would know such things. Or think he knew them. The flint was far too delicate ever to have a practical use, but Ben's "clients" lied to themselves just as easily as any other human. That explained why many of his schemes worked at all. That explained why a single weird chunk of stone could bring a price well into six figures, US dollars, without certification or import license or even a bill of sale.

  Blind obsession.

  Ben had sold the flint three times, waited a decent interval, and stolen it back three times. He doubted if he'd risk a fourth. He chose his marks well, but the supply of rich and obsessive had its limits. Once in the U.S., once in Japan, once in Europe — anything more could cross that invisible boundary where greed led to a fatal error. Someone might talk to someone else.

  And it was a lovely thing.

  He'd keep it. He could even build a paper trail for it, trace its lineage to a sea-captain's house and trade routes for Maine shipping a century and a half ago. Write letters on ancient paper with ancient ink and pen, provide scratched glass-plate negatives of stiff Sunday-portrait Yankees in their Victorian parlor. He'd take that paper trail back to the point where owning an old piece of stone was legal.

  Not that he'd ever make the paper public. Word might reach certain ears. But hold the documents in reserve, aged in the wood . . . .

  Damn, it was a lovely thing. Ben shook himself, and the vision faded. Beauty could be as addictive as all hell. If he wasn't careful, he could end up committing the classic drug-dealer's mistake, getting hooked on his own product.

  And that was usually fatal.

  He shook himself again, bent down and gathered the iridescent plastic sawdust of dead larceny from the bin of the shredder, and bagged it for feeding to a woodstove up in the main house. He buttoned up the radio case, just another piece of equipment from the cluttered ham "shack" that Dan had shared with Gary, both holders of "Extra" class licenses and fully qualified in the FCC's own files for amateur satellite communications. The computers had finished their routine, so he started defragging their hard drives as a further guard.

  He'd used Gary's login and password. No fingerprints left behind, either physical or electronic. After all, Ben Morgan was dead. Dead for twenty years, now, because having a dozen names and no legal existence gave you certain advantages when you lived outside the law. And now Dan was also "dead," leaving Gary and Ellen and Peggy in Alice Haskell's somewhat dubious care. Only in Stonefort could a lesbian witch be appointed guardian to three orphaned minors . . . .

  He stepped through a doorway into the musty smell of old, old books long unread, the Morgan archives. A dark woman looked up at him from a table and a bound parchment manuscript, raven hair and dark eyes and the oiled-teak skin of First People genes exposed to fierce Arizona sun. A beautiful young woman, the echo of one summer twenty years ago.

  His daughter, a child he'd never seen, never even suspected, until a few months back.

  "How's it going?"

  "Slow. This dumb schmuck's grasp of Latin is even worse than mine. I'd hate to see what kind of grades Mr. Dean would give him."

  "Mr. Dean? He's still teaching? I had him for Latin."

  "God. I didn't realize he was that old!" She grinned to take the sting out of her jab, and his heart lurched. The twinkling eyes and quick twitch of her lips came straight out of memories of her mother — Lainie Haskell at that age, not the Haskell Witch but she might as well have been, the way she had bewitched him.

  And then he had to go and die. And go away to college under another name, and find another woman to fill the empty spot in his heart, and father Gary. And since he was dead, Maria ended up married to his brother Dan to gain a name and family and fortune for the baby.

  The Dragon's Eye was the other reason he was "dead." The damned thing demanded a selkie for the head of the Morgan clan. Ben couldn't change. Dan could. And the head of the clan had to be the eldest living son. Medieval primogeniture bullshit. End of story.

  The glowing red football-shaped something had dominated Morgan life for over a thousand years. It talked. It thought. It gave pieces of itself to selected Morgans in each generation, ruby-colored Tears that talked to each other and helped Morgans to hide, to detect lies and see through illusions, to sneak in and steal or sail in with guns blazing and steal. Gave them the glib tongue to convince idiots to part with money for the goods thus stolen.

  Between the Dragon's Eye and Morgan family business and the Haskell blood running here and there, life in Stonefort got too damned tangled. Small town, everyone lived in everyone else's back pocket. Take Alice Haskell's current girlfriend for example, the town cop, damned awkward connection by way of Caroline.

  Latin made for safer ground. "Who's your current problem?"

  Her grin twisted into a grimace. "Some guy calls himself Columbanus. What kind of Welsh name is that? He seems to operate on the Humpty Dumpty principle — 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.' And I think he's applying Welsh grammar rules to Latin vocabulary. But then, I've never studied Welsh. Maybe he's just winging it."

  "Hey, some of our priests weren't all that bright. If they had any brains, we gave them something better to do. Columbanus? That'd have to be way back, couple of centuries after the great exodus. What tripped you up?"

  "Dingbat seems to think 'domina' and 'magistra' are interchangeable. Mixes 'saga' in with some hen-scratch that seems to be 'sacerdota', as if 'sacerdos' doesn't work both sides of the street. Either masculine or feminine priests. But then, he doesn't seem to like women much. Other stuff that ain't in any of the dictionaries." She waved at a stack of thick books on the table.

  Ben reminded himself that she was a doctoral student, a nationally-certified brain a couple of years into grad school when she still couldn't get past the bouncer at a bar. She probably could make sense of stuff that had been gibberish to him.

  "I think I know your guy. We had five or six priests call themselves 'Columbanus' — took some tight-assed Irish saint's name and turned it into a title. That one had a hard time getting used to living with a matriarchy. He kept tangling with your ancestress over the natural supremacy of the male. If I recall correctly, he died young. Funny thing, the name fell out of favor after that."

  Her mouth quirked again, that fleeting Lainie smile. "Can't have been a poisoned apple. We didn't get apple trees until after the English showed up." She pointed at a museum-grade ash-splint basket full of glossy Winesaps on a side table. "Want one?"

  He picked up an apple, buffed it on his sleeve, and bit into it. Cold, crisp, sweet, with the true wine tang in its juice. He remembered the same taste, most likely from the same tree, taken in bites from Lainie's hand while his head rested in her lap. Morgans and Haskells had been close for centuries. Now Caroline was both.

  Speaking of which . . . "How's your brother?"

  She reached into the top of her blouse and pulled out a pendant. Old worn silver, it wrapped a Celtic or Norse dragon around a red stone that seemed to glow with its own internal light. Dragon's Tear, a piece of the tie that bound the Morgan clan together. She murmured to it, as if it was a radio mike or perhaps a living thing. Both things it might well be.

  "He's fine. He's working hard, getting to bed early, eating right, earning good grades. Needs a bigger allowance. Everything a dutiful freshman at college would say." She frowned for a moment, concentrating, then flashed her quirky grin again. "He's got a hot date tonight, a cute sophomore in that Computer Architecture class. She doesn't know he's a freshman."

  Gary had placed out of the whole freshman year of Computer Science courses, as well as AP credit for two semesters each in math and physics. It looked like he shared some of his half-sister's brains. And he was about two hours' drive away, at the university in Naskeag Falls, which raised new questions about the Dragon and its Tears, the twinned pendants that Ben's children wore.

  The two he knew about, anyway. This fatherhood business included a lot of twists and turns tha
t hadn't been covered in the fine print. Apparently Lainie had intended to get pregnant. He didn't know whether Maria had also tucked that idea in the back of her head. Sex sure could interfere with a man's brain function.

  At least Lainie hadn't been looking for marriage or child support. Haskell women usually kept a father's role to the necessary minimum. But Ben thought he ought to have a talk with Gary about that "cute sophomore." If she ever figured out the kid was rich . . .

  Caroline's eyes had narrowed speculatively, as if she was reading his mind. Damn Alice and her home-study courses in amateur psychology. Scratch that. No "amateur" about it.

  Being around Caroline made him twitchy — too smart, too sexy, a Haskell witch-in-training, and his own daughter. "I'm done with the computers. There's stuff down in the tunnels that wants doing, and then I'll go up to the house. Give me a beep when you're ready to leave. I'll need to reset the security."

  Now she wore a sardonic cat-look that said, "I could do that for you, but I'm too polite to mention it." Her mix of Haskell and Morgan genes could mean big trouble, for the world if not for him.

  But she only patted the VHF handheld radio that lay beside her stack of dictionaries. "Three longs and three shorts, number seven on the DTMF pad. No problem. I think I can take maybe another hour of this before I run away screaming. Then you can go back to sitting motionless in the center of your web. That's the Daddy we all know and love, the veritable Napoleon of Crime." She chuckled, and it was Lainie's throaty sexy laugh all over again.

  Damn the girl.

  He fled down the stairs, spiraling around within the tower wall and then passing from old stone masonry into older tunnels carved into the coarse-grained pink Maine granite. Morgans had held this point of sea-girt land for eight centuries, give or take a few, and his ancestors had memories of English fire and sword to fuel their native paranoia. The place hid defenses wrapped one around another like the layers of an onion.