Stoneskin's Revenge Read Online Free

she didn’t notice. Girl had to make a living, too, he supposed; and it really was kind of sorry of him to upset her routine like he had. Still, he wondered what Little-Miss-Evil-Eye would say if he told her that this World wasn’t the only one: not by a bloody long shot.
    More to the point, he wondered what she’d say if she knew she’d kept vigil not only over a Cherokee Indian, but also over one who just happened to be an apprentice shaman.
    He grinned as he trotted over to rejoin his friends. He didn’t quite believe it either.

Chapter II: Inconveniences
    (five miles south of Whidden, Georgia—oneish)
    The sun was straight overhead in a cloudless sky and his shadow a puddle of black on the parking lot pavement beneath him when Calvin saw Dave’s brake lights flash on as he slowed what he called the Mustang-of-Death at the entrance to the main highway. He heard a final shouted “Bye,” and then the car passed from view behind a stand of scruffy magnolias, though the tired bellow of its exhaust persisted a moment longer.
    And Calvin found himself alone outside an unremarkable restaurant in a south Georgia county he had never set foot in until that morning. It was hot, and there was no breeze; nothing to dispel the sharp tang of the nearby marshes or the sulfur-sweet smell of one of Union Camp’s papermills a little farther off to the southeast. There was only the parking lot, the scrap of highway, the unpretentious white cinder-block building, the surrounding loom of pine woods—and himself and his thoughts.
    His thoughts…
    Where did he begin? With the nature of reality maybe?
    With the world as it really was? But if he got off on that now, it would lead him…
    Nowhere, Calvin decided, and turned away from both restaurant and road, hoisting a borrowed blue nylon backpack across his shoulders beside the rather special bow Dave’s uncle had been thoughtful enough to bring along when he’d joined them. He had not gone three strides, however, before the pack straps began to chafe across his collarbones and tug at his unbound hair. He grunted and paused to resettle them, wishing there was more in it than a change of borrowed clothes, a small assortment of camping gear, a handmade Rakestraw hunting knife (also one of Dale’s lendings), and some rapidly mellowing McDonald’s biscuits. Comfortable at last, he fished in his pockets and produced a rubber band, with which he secured the bulk of his mane at the nape of his neck. Maybe that wouldn’t attract too much attention: lots of twenty-year-old south Georgia boys had black hair. Some of ’em even wore ponytails. But, Calvin reckoned wryly, that was about all he had in common with the local lads. He took a deep breath and marched, with deliberate precision, into the forest.
    *
    An hour later Calvin had begun to suspect that the overland route was a bad idea, at least as far as speeding his quest for a pay phone. An hour along open highway would probably have put him in Whidden itself, had he any intention of going there, which he did not. Instead, he’d spent most of his time threading his way through close-grown groves of live oaks, circumnavigating spiky clumps of saw-toothed palmettos, peering through endless tendrils of Spanish moss, and beating off armies of gnats. It was hotter than ever, too, because there was no wind. And sticky. Still, he took some solace from the coolness of the ground under his now-bare feet, and the caress of sunlight across his muscular torso. For a time he’d considered stripping naked and navigating the woods the way Kanati had made him—but that would probably have been pushing his luck and local tolerance a little too far. Calvin did not want to make waves; not even a ripple. Complete invisibility was his (so-far-unattainable) goal, but he’d settle for being unobtrusive.
    And then he came abruptly to the edge of the forest. Before him was a narrow ditch full of rancid-smelling black water and cattails, then a yard-wide