Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (20 page)

 
          
"Well
a magician knows you," Truth said shortly, "and if I were you I'd
find out who it is, and what he wants."

 
          
"Can't
you just—well—make it go away?" Winter begged, hating herself for asking,
when the first attempt to help had nearly killed Truth.

 
          
Truth
shook her head, and Dylan put a comforting arm around her shoulder. "It's
always going to come back. Throwing up a barrier powerful enough to keep it
away from you would probably kill you, and would certainly kill me—Blackburn
magic is tied to the living world and needs life to power it. Living energy.
Sometimes even blood."

 
          
"Which
is why it keeps killing things," Winter guessed despairingly. And why
Truth's hands and mouth had bled.

 
          
"It's
using the power generated by those deaths to stay in the realm of
manifestation—the earth-plane—the world," Truth said. "The fact that
it's taking larger and larger lives at increasingly frequent intervals worries
me; it must need the power for something—but what is it doing with it? So far
it's only attacked wild animals, but if it tries for humans, for children—or
pets, domestic animals linked to humankind ..." Truth was almost mumbling
now, keeping her eyes open by an effort of will that Winter could recognize.

           
"You've got to get some
rest," Dr. Palmer urged. "I'll take both of you back to my place and
then come back and clean up here."

 
          
Only
now did Winter take a good look around the laboratory. Every flat surface
glittered with broken glass from the shattered windows, giving the entire lab
a grotesque Christmas-card sparkle. If the chairs she and Truth sat in had been
anywhere near a window, they too would have been covered with broken glass.

 
          
"Winter,
will you stay with her?" Truth made an annoyed sound but Dylan continued.
"I've got a guest bedroom, and I don't really want to think of either of
you alone tonight."

 
          
Dylan
Palmer owned an old white-painted wood frame house on a quiet residential
street in
Glastonbury
. It was a part of town that Winter could
tell had been open fields not so many years ago, and the old farmhouse looked
faintly out of place among the modern tract housing. Winter had gone along with
Dr. Palmer's insistence that she accompany Truth— more for Truth's sake than
her own—but after Truth was settled and sleeping and he had driven back to the
Institute, Winter went out onto the porch and sat on the railing, staring out
into the night.

 
          
What did it all mean?
The unanswerable
vagueness of the question made her smile ruefully. Where to begin? Was the
beginning the place where her life had stopped with a crash—or after that? When
she'd decided to seek out her own truths—or when she realized what they were?

 
          
It's in me.
Not the power that had
nearly killed both her and Truth tonight—and which
would
kill her if she could not manage to accept its unbelievable
reality—but the other. The force that stopped watches and drained car batteries
and knocked pictures off of the mantelpiece.
That
was part of her—the part that called to the—what was it Truth
had called it?—that called to the
magickal
child.

 
          
Winter
held her hand out, palm up, and regarded it dubiously. She tried not to care
that she might be on her way to becoming a deluded spoon-bending crank—no, that
wasn't right. She wasn't deluded, and what she had to try not to care about was
suddenly being forced to live in a world where this sort of unreasonable fairy
tale was real. Where telepathy coexisted with magic, where invisible entities
could walk through walls, where the faint electrical pulses of the human
nervous system could become lightning powerful enough to ...

           
To
blow out a car's electrical system, at the very least. Poor Nina
—
that was
my
fault. I hope I can find some way to make her let me pay for it. . . .

 
          
Thinking
this way was stupid, a reptilian inner voice assured her. It was magical
thinking—megalomania—
disassociative
delusional
conditions characteristic of the borderline schizophrenic state. Believing in
these intangible things was not normal. It was not healthy. It was not
sane.

 
          
Then I won't be sane,
Winter decided with
despairing clarity. /
can't afford to be.
The price is too high.

 
          
Clinging
to the safety of what she had always believed would only free the hatred that
lived beneath her skin to do as it pleased. In order to make a conscious choice
to stop it, she had to believe in the serpent, and if she believed in it, she
had to believe in everything its existence implied: that an unseen world
existed side-by-side with their own, where Grey Angels walked the Taconic hills
and ghost ships sailed the Hudson. That in that world, things like telepathy
and poltergeists were real.

 
          
"Choose,"
Winter told herself.
And don't snivel
about it afterward. And don't look back.

 
          
Believe.

 
          
Believe
as she had once, when she was a girl on the threshold of life, and anything had
seemed possible. Before she had known that all the possibilities dangled before
her eyes led only to grief and disappointment.

 
          
Winter
sighed and stretched, rising to her feet. She walked back inside the house and
went into the bedroom where Truth lay sleeping in Dylan's bed, dark smudges of
exhaustion like moth-wings under her eyes.

 
          
/
cannot disbelieve,
Winter told
herself.
If this is madness
—
delusion
—
hypocritical self-indulgence
—
then
so be it. I think I've come about as far as rationality can take me.

 
          
And I think I know where I have to go next.

 
          
Satisfied
that Truth would sleep on uninterrupted, Winter called for a cab to take her
back to her car and took the time to scribble a note to Dr. Palmer. She knew he
hadn't wanted her to be alone tonight, but she wondered if he'd really
understood what Truth had said: that this
magickal
child
was coming for
her.

           
Why?

 
          
That
was the question everyone ought to be asking, Winter thought as she waited on
the steps for the cab. Assume magic, assume magicians—if that was what they
were called—why would a magician be sending monsters after
her?

 
          
"If
he wanted to send a message, why didn't he just use
Western Union
?" she asked herself crossly, just as
the cab pulled up.

 
          
Winter
paid the cab off in the college parking lot—her new Saturn was in guest
parking, and Dr. Palmer would be using the faculty section, so there was little
danger of running into him. Winter didn't know how long it would take him to
clean up the lab—considering the mess it had been in, she wondered how he
thought he could possibly do it alone— but she was fairly sure that clean-up
efforts would keep him busy for a few hours, and she could be home at
Greyangels
before he knew she was gone. But Winter stood in
the empty parking lot after the cab had driven away, making no move to unlock
her car and go.

 
          
It
was close to midnight; the spring night was chilly and she was glad for the
warmth of her wool-lined Burberry trench coat. Only the hiss of the wind
through the pines and the reproachful wail of a northbound freight train on the
other side of the river broke the silence. How long had it been since she had
stood anywhere like this, relaxed and open to the world around her? For as long
as Winter could remember she'd been running—running to get somewhere, running
to stay in the same place. Even her fun had been frenetic—weekend jaunts to
London, to L.A., to wherever there had been people and noise and parties that
had in themselves been another form of war.

 
          
How
long since she had questioned why she ran—in the rat race, where the rats were
winning?

 
          
It
always kept coming back to
"Why?"

 
          
Why
was the
magickal
child
after her?

 
          
—
no, go farther back
—

 
          
Why
had she left
Fall River
?

 
          
—
farther back
—

 
          
What
had put her in
Fall River
in the first place?

 
          
—
farther still
—

 
          
Why
had she chosen the work she had?

           
Close,
now, but not there yet. . .

 
          
What
had made her do it? What had turned that girl into the woman Winter Musgrave
was now? It was more than just time and growing up; there was something . . . not
right
here.

 
          
She
wanted answers. She wanted reasons. She wanted her friends, her past, her
life
back. Her
real
life.

 
          
And
she was going to get them.

 
          
A
sense of relief, of triumph—of guessing the answer that could not be revealed
to the riddle that must be solved—sent a surge of pleasure through Winter's
weary body. She pulled her coat more firmly around her and fitted her key to
the car door's lock. She got in, and tensed for a moment as she turned the key
in the ignition, but whatever vengeful power she possessed was quiescent now,
and the Saturn started smoothly. Winter turned out of the college parking lot,
heading down
Leyden
Road to Glastonbury, and from
there to home.

 
          
The
farmhouse felt more welcoming than it ever had before—if this was a delusion it
was a benign one—and despite the amazing horrors of the night Winter opened her
front door without fear. For the first time in longer than she liked to
remember, Winter did not feel thwarted at every step in her attempts to
accomplish even the simplest tasks. She put water on for tea—she hadn't been
back to
Inquire Within
yet, so it
would have to be chamomile—stoked the woodstove in the bedroom, and laid a new
fire in the parlor, all the time thinking of what she must do now.

 
          
Truth
had seemed to think that the Blackburn Work had something to do with the
magickal
child's
existence, and the fact that
Winter had— so evidence if not memory told her—dabbled in the Work in college
seemed to mean something important to Truth as well. She had said that the
creature stalking Winter was the creation of a magician, and one trained in the
Blackburn Work at that. But Hunter
Greyson
—if Winter
stretched a point nearly to breaking—was the only magician she knew. Why would
Grey do something like that?

 
          
For
that matter,
where
was Grey, and what
was he doing? Nina had been able to find everyone from Winter's college days
but him—and how could Winter have lost touch with him so thoroughly if they
were as close as her memories hinted and Professor Rhys had implied?

 
          
What happened?

           
She kept coming back to that
question, Winter realized. What happened, and when had it happened? And, as
she'd realized earlier this night, the stakes were too high now to worry about
looking foolish when she asked it. She must find Grey, find the others, find
herself, find the answer to the monstrous riddle of the dark and bloody
creature that stalked her.

 
          
Before
it was too late.