Trickster's Girl (The Raven Duet) Read online

  She hadn't felt threatened by him today—mostly he was annoying. That was it. An annoying guy, putting on some sort of mystery act to try to pick up girls! Forget the way those lockers had opened. In broad daylight. No, don't forget it! Anyone who owned a lock tripper was—

  Because her window was open, she heard the flapping wings and the rustling in the ancient crab apple tree. It grew so close to the house that she could leave her curtains open in the summer and still have privacy from the neighbors.

  A bird perching in that tree wasn't uncommon, though this one sounded larger.

  The wings flapped again, right up to her window, and something rapped sharply on the thermopane.

  Kelsa sat bolt upright and stared as a big black bird hopped back into the branches. Soon a large pale shape emerged from the shadows. The leaves rustled furiously as he struggled into his shirt. Of course, Kelsa thought dazedly, his clothes wouldn't come with him when he ... No!

  The stranger was up to his tricks again. Illusionists had been using trained birds for centuries, but using one to terrorize women was vile. The oversize stretchie she slept in fell to midthigh, so she didn't bother to grab a robe when she stalked over to the window and whispered, "What the frack are you doing? You're trespassing! Get off our property right now, or I'm calling the police!"

  "I'd be gone by the time they arrived." His voice was barely louder than the shaking leaves as he shifted position—the leaves were pretty noisy. The branches he perched on bobbed under his weight, and although the old-fashioned shirttails were long enough to preserve his modesty, he wasn't wearing jeans. Was she supposed to think that he'd flown his shirt up into the tree as a bird, then put it on? He was an idiot! A half-naked idiot, sitting in the tree outside her window. She really should call the police. But he clung to the quivering branches with a desperation that was more comical than threatening.

  He muttered something that sounded like "gee-so-fat," which made no sense at all, and braced one foot cautiously against a thicker branch.

  "Look, we got off to a bad start. Let me try again. My name is Raven—"

  Kelsa snorted. "Yeah, right."

  "And I need your help. Will you just listen? That's all I ask." He sounded serious, for once, but he must have worked for years to train that bird. Or maybe he used sound recordings and some sort of holo projection. Whichever it was, he was lying to her in every way, and she'd have to be an idiot to listen.

  "No," said Kelsa firmly. "If you're not off my property in three minutes I'm calling the police. If I ever see you again, I'm going to report you as a stalker. You leave me alone! Got it? Good!"

  She slammed the window shut and drew the drapes before going back to bed. She'd check in five minutes, and if he was still there she would report him!

  But he was right; he'd be gone by the time they got there, and her mother didn't need the stress of her daughter being stalked along with her other problems. Neither did Kelsa!

  He's just some lunatic, she told herself firmly. A grave-robbing nut!

  She was pulling the blankets over her head only because he weirded her out, not at all because she didn't want to hear the sound of wings flapping in the darkness.

  ***

  By breakfast, Kelsa had realized that she should have called the police even if he would have been gone when they arrived. Stalkers weren't harmless, no matter how often they said they wouldn't hurt you. It wasn't only in vids that they sometimes raped or murdered their victims. And in real life, Kelsa thought soberly, their victims were less likely to heroically escape at the last minute.

  She took her vita-juice out to the backyard and looked around the base of the tree for evidence, but grass grew right up to the trunk so there were no footprints. He hadn't scraped the tough bark when he climbed it. There was no evidence but her word, and if Kelsa described the tricks he'd played the police would think she was crazy.

  The next time she saw him, if there was a next time, she'd pull out her com pod and record everything he did and said. And why hadn't she done that earlier? Because she was stupid, that's why.

  Kelsa sighed. With luck she'd never see him again—and if she did, she'd be ready.

  She half expected to see him leaning against the lockers every time she turned a corner, but he didn't reappear for the rest of the day. Kelsa managed to get through her history final in reasonable shape, though the number of questions she had no memory of made her realize how much her father's illness had distracted her.

  The soft fog of grief threatened to close down again at the thought, so Kelsa opened a side window on her deskcomp and looked up some statistics about stalkers—which convinced her that she really should have recorded him and called the police.

  She added the name Raven to her stalker search. If he'd murdered a dozen teenage girls in some other city, she'd call the police without a recording.

  She found no mention of a homicidal maniac calling himself Raven, which lightened her mood considerably. On impulse, she ran "Raven/illusionist/magic," even though he was too young to be a professional performer. She didn't find him with that search either, though she did come across several hits on the Native American trickster spirit Raven, who was also a shapeshifter.

  So that's where he got the shtick from.

  Or that was the form his psychosis had taken. Kelsa shivered and closed the window. She knew what she had to do if she saw him again.

  But he didn't come popping out at her as she walked home, and nothing flapped up that night to tap on her thermopane behind the closed curtains.

  ***

  "Have you thought about our summer plans?" Kelsa's mother's voice was filled with the kind of fake cheer that didn't belong at the breakfast table, even at the best of times. "I was thinking, maybe we should do something different this year."

  With her father gone, neither of them had the heart to go camping—and Kelsa had no desire to do anything with her mother, anyway.

  "I might take Aunt Sarabeth up on her offer," Kelsa said. Aunt Sarabeth lived in an apartment in downtown Chicago, and Kelsa had always thought that she wanted a teenage niece to visit her as little as Kelsa wanted to waste a summer in a city. But her aunt renewed the offer every year, and there was nothing else she wanted to do.

  Her mother frowned. "Are you sure? I was thinking maybe you and Joby and I—"

  Kelsa pushed her chair back from the table. "I've got homework."

  Her mother knew she didn't. Her scowl was designed to trip Kelsa's guilt switch, but Kelsa didn't apologize.

  She wanted to go for a walk, but she was afraid that Raven guy would be waiting for her—though as the day wore on, being terrorized by a stalker began to look good compared to the sagging depression that saturated the house. In the last few months her mother—who had once despised d-vid and had strictly limited the amount her children watched—had taken to shutting down in front of the screen for hours on end, watching nothing but comedy and old flat-vid movies with happy-happy endings.

  Kelsa understood her mother's need to escape, but by Sunday morning she would rather have hung around with Jack the Ripper than go to church with her mother and Joby and then spend the afternoon listening to canned laughter. Besides, Sunday was Kelsa and her father's hiking afternoon, and she wasn't going to let either grave-robbing sickos or her mother keep her from honoring that tradition.

  Kelsa knew her mother was still angry with her, but the expression of relief that flashed across her face when Kelsa said that she'd be gone for the rest of the day was annoying.

  Her mother and Joby had departed by the time Kelsa topped off her hiking pack: a sandwich, an apple, a handful of energy bars, and several bottles of water, since it would be hot in the canyon. She always took her com pod on long hikes, in case she needed to call her mother and tell her she'd be later than expected, or in case of emergencies. But her mother would have been surprised when Kelsa snapped it onto a lanyard and hung it around her neck. People who wanted to have their hands free often wore their pods tha
t way, but when she hiked Kelsa usually kept it in her pack or her pocket.

  Not today. Her crazy stalker had probably given up, but if he hadn't, she'd be ready for him.

  She took the city shuttle out to the canyon trailhead, and even on a hot Sunday morning both the shuttle and the first mile of trail were crowded. Most of the nature lovers were couples or parents with young children. Once she and her father had been part of that group, and Kelsa felt her throat tighten.

  But most of the young kids dropped out after the first mile, where the trail steepened and the real canyon began. Her father had said it was debatable whether this was a "real" canyon.

  It had been created seventy years ago, when a series of droughts convinced the Provo planners that both their growing city and the nearby farms needed more water than could be sucked from Utah Lake. They'd built Paradise Dam, which soon created Paradise Reservoir. And to bring the water down to the city, instead of laying eighty miles of expensive pipe, they'd chosen to run it through a series of mountain valleys. With a river roaring down them, the valleys were slowly eroding into canyons filled with tumbling rapids and a series of spectacular waterfalls—if you viewed them in the spring, when the farmers most needed water. In winter only an icy trickle flowed through the boulder-dotted streambed, and even now, at the end of May, the flow wasn't the roaring cataract it had been the last time her father had enough energy to hike this trail.

  He'd been feeling the effects of both the cancer and the treatment drugs by then, his steps slowed, his face and body sweaty with effort—forgetting, sometimes, to smile for his daughter's sake and pretend that nothing was wrong. Would that memory fade someday, and the memories of her father striding up the trail as if it was his natural habitat come to the fore again?

  It wouldn't have worked!

  "You have to believe in faith healing for it to have any effect," her father had said. "I don't."

  And Kelsa had agreed with him.

  Now she transformed her grief, her anger, into energy to climb. By the time she reached the next milepost she was drenched in sweat, her muscles moving as if they'd been oiled.

  It was nearly noon; the intense sunlight cast stark shadows and flashed on the rushing water. For most of its length, the trail ran roughly ten feet higher than the river it followed. Air scented with hot dust and pine filled her lungs as Kelsa climbed carefully down the steep rocky bank. After looking around to be sure no one was in sight, she stripped off her stretchie and soaked it in the river. It ran deeper than she'd thought, maybe three feet deep, and cold. Even after she wrung out her shirt the fabric clung clammily to her skin, but as she hiked up the trail, she now wore a tempcontrol shirt that cooled her more efficiently than the high-tech ones worn by several of the red-faced hikers coming down the trail.

  Her shirt was nearly dry, and she was looking for a shady place to stop for lunch, when she saw Raven. He sat on a rock at the edge of the steep bank, wearing the same clothes as before. They were beginning to look grubby. Didn't whatever hotel he was staying at have a laundry?

  She set her com pod to "record," twisting the focus to the widest possible scan. The edge of the images would be distorted, but anything that happened in front of her would be preserved. That knowledge alone should have sent him running—he had watched her adjust the pod—but he remained seated on the rock as she approached.

  "Are you following me?" she demanded, though only an idiot would give her a confirmation on record.

  "Of course I am." He shot her that glowing, untrustworthy smile. "How else can I talk to you? Are you ready to believe in magic yet?"

  If he had followed her, how had he gotten ahead of her on the trail? He must have realized where the shuttle was going and hiked up before her. But Kelsa hadn't been on this trail for months. Had he been watching her, stalking her, for that long?

  A shiver that had nothing to do with her damp shirt ran over her skin.

  "I don't believe in magic," she said. "I've told you before that I want you to leave me alone. And I'm going to enforce it. I'm going to the police."

  The smile still lingered, though his eyes had grown serious. "This little thing, it makes a record of our conversation?" He gestured to the thumb-size pod.

  "Of course." Kelsa frowned. There was no place in the world so backward that people wouldn't know what a com pod was!

  He may not have known much about tech, but the clasp on the lanyard was simple enough for anyone's understanding. He rose to his feet and reached out—she'd forgotten how quick he was—and pinched the catch open, dropping the com pod into his hand.

  Kelsa had stepped back, but now she lunged forward, snatching at the pod as he twisted aside. "Give me that! It's mine!"

  He threw it into the river.

  Kelsa had never before felt the kind of fury she did then; it surged through her blood, whiting out rational thought.

  "You bastard! My father gave me that!"

  She pushed him.

  She hadn't thought it through. She was sure, almost sure, that she hadn't intended to kill him. But they were standing at the top of the riverbank, and Kelsa put the full weight of her body and her anger into that shove.

  He stumbled back and fell over the edge.

  She heard him hit several rocks on the way down, heard the splash as he hit the water. She reached the edge just in time to see him sink.

  It was only a few feet deep, but the channel here was narrow, the current hard and fast. One white sleeve splashed to the surface, but his face didn't emerge. Why didn't he stand up? Start to swim? Had he hit his head? Whatever the problem, he'd be too far downstream for her to reach him if she took the time to scramble down the bank.

  Kelsa knew this river, this trail. She ran down it, keeping one eye on the shimmering white of his shirt and another on the rough surface. If she broke an ankle, he might die!

  The few minutes it took her to reach the bend where the river spread and slowed, where the trail dipped down to the water, seemed an eternity. Kelsa rushed into the river, stumbling on the slippery rocks, feeling the chill soak through her jeans, into her shoes. Her eyes were fixed on the patch of white floating just below the surface, and she managed to position herself in front of it. Plunging her arms and face into the water, she fisted both hands in the fabric as the current whisked it past.

  Even before she hauled it out she knew the shirt was empty.

  A scream rose in her throat and she stared frantically, trying to catch a glimpse of a body beneath the rippling surface, a hand breaking free, anything—

  The silver fish that leaped out of the river was the biggest she'd ever seen, easily four feet long. Larger than anything that could survive in a creek that vanished every winter. Kelsa's jaw dropped. She was already clambering toward the shore when it jumped again, out of the water and into the muddy shallows.

  Kelsa struggled up beside it, close enough to see each gleaming scale and the seep of blood from a gash over one round fishy eye, before it began to change.

  In the full sunlight, the stretching skin and warping bones should have been even more horrifying. But the fish was turning into something human, instead of a human dissolving, and perhaps that made it less shocking—it could never be less than grotesque. His skin still had a silvery cast when his features became clear enough to be recognized, and a gash over one eye oozed blood. Then he began to cough—hard, rasping coughs, like someone who really had almost drowned. Living color flooded his face, and the last of the silver sheen vanished.

  "Jehoshaphat! You almost killed me!"

  Kelsa's mind began to function, and she realized that the terrible transformation had taken only a handful of seconds. Even as she watched, the bruises on his temple faded and the cut healed—but the blood was still on his skin. Kelsa reached out and touched it. His skull was firm; his flesh held only the normal cold of someone who'd been swimming in a freezing river. His clothing had not magically reappeared with his human form, but Kelsa was too shocked by the rest of it to care. />
  "Could I have killed you?" Her voice was too calm. She should have been screaming. Part of her was screaming, but either she was crazy, or she had to accept the evidence of her eyes.

  She didn't think she was crazy.

  He coughed again before he answered. "Yes, you could have killed me. Transformation takes time, and I have to be conscious to do it. I can be killed. I can be hurt too!"

  He rubbed his temple and glared at her, and for some reason the simple human irritation in his expression brought the world back into focus. The sun was warm on her back, birds twittered in the brush, and Raven had no clothes on. She tried to keep her eyes on his face, but they crept down anyway. He looked human.

  Kelsa yanked her gaze up again and handed him his shirt. Her cheeks were hot.

  "I didn't mean to kill you. Though you probably deserved to get hurt. But now..."

  She took a deep breath. If she was crazy she was crazy. She might as well go with it.

  "...I'm ready to listen."

  CHAPTER 3

  "YOU WANT ME TO ROB a museum?" Kelsa asked incredulously. "No way!"

  Raven had put on the cotton shirt she'd retrieved and the rain pants Kelsa kept in her hiking pack. The combination looked a bit odd, but not enough to draw the attention of passing hikers to the shade of the tree where they'd settled. Because, Raven said, it was likely to be a long discussion.

  It was going to be shorter than he thought if he didn't say something more sensible than that.

  "It's not really robbery," he told her. "They don't even know—"

  "Is the museum going to be locked?" Kelsa demanded.

  "Well, yes. But I can take care of that."

  "Are we taking something without permission, and with no intention of returning it?"

  "Yes, but they won't care—"

  "Then it's robbery. And no way."

  The dark eyes met hers directly. "Not even to stop the tree plague?"

  "There's no excuse ... The tree plague?"

  It had begun over two years ago, when a small group of terrorists had released a mutating bacterium into the South American rain forest, promising to provide the antidote when their demands were met.