Changer (Athanor) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Martinez, gather up his daughter, and head into Albuquerque.  He wonders what the orphan coyote will think of the city, wishes that he could explain more clearly what is happening.  He shrugs.  One problem at a time.
    He only stalls the car three times before he feels confident driving his purchase.  After filling the gas tank, he heads back south toward the Martinez ranch.  As the little sedan carries him effortlessly across lands he has traversed more laboriously on wings or pads, he reflects that, whatever else they have done, humans have mastered the art of transportation.  The cost, needless to say, is isolation from their world.  
    From the first time a human slung his leg up over some cooperative equine, thus freeing himself from the need to slog along on his own two feet, the faster and farther a human has traveled, the further he has traveled from knowing the land he traverses.
    The Changer doesn’t feel particularly judgmental about this.  The car will make it possible for his daughter to exceed the limits of her four legs.  That she may be unable to find her way home again is a minor concern since that home is inhospitable to an orphaned coyote pup.
    He debates visiting her first, then discards the notion.  She will do well enough, and he will endanger her more if anyone sees him crossing the fields in human-form.  Instead he revs the engine and heads for the Martinez ranch.

    Red hair, Sven decides, is a bit of a liability if one wishes to go unnoticed, especially if one wishes to go unnoticed in Santa Fe, where dark hair and tanned skin are the rule.  Still, he has established this persona, and creating another would take more effort than he wants to invest.  Besides… he’d hate to give up his snappy new wardrobe.
    Humming softly, he glances in the window of the Prima! gallery.  He sees Lil inside, talking intently with a chunky woman with permed black hair.  A customer.  Good.  With the bitch busy here, his meeting with Tommy should go quite well.
    And soon, hopefully soon, Lil will be gone for good.
    Leaving downtown, he redeems his rented Lumina from a parking garage and heads toward an exclusive gated community at the northern end of the city.  He has no difficulty getting in, though the name he signs to the register is false.  The license number the guard neatly jots down will do nothing more than cause confusion if anyone tries to check his trail.
    Sven likes that.  Chuckling to himself, he parks the car a short walk from his destination.  Then, eschewing the labeled trails, he crosses a decadently green lawn to a pair of attached town houses.  Both of these, along with those to either side, belong to Lil and Tommy—privacy that appears to be public living.  The rich can do such things with ease.
    Straightening his cream-colored raw-silk jacket, Sven presses the buzzer on the door of the left-hand town house.
    “Yeah?”  The voice that answers is sleepy, but for all that sensually masculine.
    “Hello, Tommy.  I’m the person who left a certain… present for you at the club last night.”
    There is a long pause, long enough that Sven wonders if Tommy has fallen asleep again.  
    “Yeah?”  The tones on the other side of the connection are more alert now.  Sven can almost taste the tang of the cocaine that fuels them.  “Well, hey!  Come in, man.”
    The man who opens the door for Sven is belting a silk tapestry-print lounging robe about his waist, but that is as far as he goes in the direction of social graces.  Sven doesn’t mind.  His earliest memories of this man recall him draped in a leopard skin, dappled with fresh blood and red wine, his hair tousled, a wreath of vine leaves askew on his brow.
    Tommy’s last identity had possessed jet-black hair, pouting lips, and seductive blue eyes.  With the aid of mass media, it had been his most successful persona since the earliest—and those had tended to end up both deified and violently dead.
    This time around