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ods%203%20-%20Vengeance%20of%20the%20Danc.txt around her, and kissed her.
"We've all got our problems.
/ need you here. Leaving you alone back in Husaquahr with that
Master-of-lhe-Dead creep still on the loose would have worried me so much I
couldn't have thought straight here anyway."
"I was also pretty upset tonight, not just with the taxis, but with some of
the places and people. Nothing was restricted or segregated or anything like
that, but I still often felt hostility here and there. And for no reason!"
He chuckled. "Honey, don't you worry about that stuff.
I know you're second class in these parts, but don't think all that was
directed at you. There's a class around here down at the bottom real far below
whites, blacks, Mex-
icans, and anybody else. That's Indian and I'm it."
Roger had not seen her come, and he was sleeping peacefully when she left, so
she walked back out after turning off the lights and turning off the TV. It
was late, later than she'd expected to be here, but still early enough to see
a bit more. She was certainly no longer hungry, and would not be perhaps for
several days, but she knew she'd lifted two burdens tonight and buried her
last per-
sonal ghost as well.
There was no one apparently around, so she flew into the night, circled one
last time around the trailer park, and headed back toward Midland.
There were several thunderstorms in the area and she grew worried about Tiana.
She knew she should go back immediately, but she was overly full and needed to
work some of it off, changing it to energy, or she might be nasty or mean as
hell when she didn't intend to be.
The storms attracted her childish inner nature. There was nothing quite like a
west Texas thunderstorm in late spring, one whose violence and power was
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enormous but whose boundaries one could see from a great distance.
She had been in awe of them as a girl and in fear of them as an adult in a
trailer park, but she'd never before seen them with fairy eyes, in which their
power was tangible and somewhat mystical.
Now the lightning was no threat to one who swam in volcanic fires, and the
tremendous updrafts and down-
drafts were like a super roller coaster. She knew that she could be slammed to
the ground, but she was confident of her abilities to recover before that
time. For now, she played at dodging the lightning bolts and rode the violence
she could not merely sense but see, and it worked of? a lot of excess energy.
It was while doing this that she suddenly had a strong stabbing sensation. It
was brief, and not painful, more as if some great invisible lance vibrated
through her mid-
section. Play stopped, and she tried to find the sensation once again. She
knew it, although she had never expected to sense it on Earth, and
particularly not here, so close to home.
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It was a universal, racial call for help. It was the sen-
sation you got when a fairy was hurt and needed help
not just Kauri, any kind.
With two or three of her sisters, it would have taken no time at all to locate
the source, even in the storm; but, although the storm passed quickly, it took
her the better part of an hour to find that strong pulsing vibration once
again, and even longer to be able to hold onto it and follow it down. It was
not a strong signal, which could mean many things, one of which was that one
of faerie was dying.
She came down, at last, on the grimy tar and cinder roof of a building, now
awash in deep puddles. Her only
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VENGEANCE OF THE DANCING GODS JACK L. CHALKER
191
thought was that perhaps something terrible had hap-
pened to Poquah, but the Imir would be easy to spot up here on this roof, and
it definitely was coming from on the roof rather than inside the building.
She extended her wings and followed the signal's inten-
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