Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (34 page)

 
          
Because
just like the others, she had staggered down some spiritual blind alley
somewhere in the past she could not remember.

           
Because
of Grey?
Somehow that felt right. The largest part of her unfinished
business had to do with him. Ramsey had said how surprised they'd all been when
she left college without a word to any of them.

 
          
Antigua
,
and a brightly impersonal motel meant to serve the nearby Air Force base. Each
night as she slept, Winter felt Grey waiting for her beneath the surface of
sleep, and could no longer say which she dreaded more
—
the
bad dreams or the good ones.

 
          
Had
she just walked off and left them—left
him?
What had he thought—how long had Grey waited before realizing she was never
coming back? If that was what she'd done, then no wonder the dreams began with
him begging her to stay, and ended in blood and terror.

 
          
Lemuria
. No town at all, simply a cluster of
battered, time-bleached wooden buildings, and Winter too tired to go onward or
back. She'd driven into the sagging barn and slept in cramped discomfort on
the back seat of her car as coyote howls crossed and blended in the night. In
the morning she had driven four hours down the ruler-straight desert highway
before she saw a roadside cafe.

 
          
She
had wronged him. She owed both of them some closure to that part of their past,
an ending in place of a thoughtless adolescent cruelty. And perhaps that
closure could help her end the inhumanity that stalked all of them. Truth
Jourdemayne
had told Winter that she must take the
magickal
child
back into herself to destroy it,
but at the time she hadn't even known where to begin. She felt stronger now.
Perhaps it
was
possible, Winter thought
with dawning hope.

 
          
She
would ask Cassie.

 
          
Cassie
would know.

 
          
There
are two
U.S.
cities into which the Automobile Association of America earnestly
advises its members
not,
under any
circumstances, to bring their automobiles.

 
          
Boston
is the other one.

 
          
Yesterday
morning Winter had crossed the border near Needles, circled wide around the
L.A.
Metroplex
, and headed north along
California
1, the
Pacific Coast Highway
. Coastal
California
's amazing and dramatic beauty captivated
her just as it did on every visit: the hillsides still green at the end of the
rainy season, the mist-hung redwoods marching all the way to the ocean's stark
edge.

           
She'd stopped that night at a
Bed-and-Breakfast just south of
San Jose
, and had a reservation for tonight in
San Francisco
at a B-and-B somewhere near a neighborhood
called Russian Hill.

 
          
The
rest ought to have been easy. And it was, until she crossed the
Oakland
Bay
Bridge
.

 
          
San Francisco
, like
Rome
, is a city built on seven hills—and like
the
Eternal
City
, Winter discovered that the City by the Bay
was a magic labyrinth of dead ends and one-way streets: of streets that
vanished while she drove down them and streets that appeared on her map and
nowhere else. She ended up down at Fisherman's Wharf almost immediately—
learning in the process that cable cars always have right-of-way— and at the
end of three frustrating hours she was back there again; no closer to
Haight
Street and Cassie's bookshop than she'd been to
begin with.

 
          
Winter
pulled into a parking lot and rolled down her window. The ocean smell was
strong and fresh—Winter, who lived in the country's other great seaport, could
not remember ever having smelled the sea so clearly.

 
          
Tourists
seemed to be everywhere, carrying shopping bags full of sourdough bread or
pennants advertising
Ripley's Believe It
or Not Museum.
The balloons carried by children and offered by vendors gave
the Wharf the look of an open-air carnival, and seemed to underscore Winter's
angry ungracious mood. She wondered if she ought to give up, if only for the
day. Or stop for lunch, at least—the box of granola bars she'd consumed instead
of breakfast was not an adequate substitute for two missed meals, or so her
body told her.

 
          
"Can
I help you?"

 
          
Winter
glanced up. The voice belonged to a young man with long brown hair, wearing
overalls and a tie-dyed T-shirt and looking as if he was as much a part of this
place as the fishing boats that clustered in the water beyond.

 
          
"You
look lost," he went on, smiling.

 
          
Winter
regarded him with habitual suspicion, resisting the impulse to roll up the
driver's-side window in his face. On second glance, he wasn't as young as all
that, but something about his friendly, open, features held the ageless grace
of the High Elves—as if some woodland sprite had chosen to mingle with the
tourists on a spring day in SF.

 
          
"I'm
actually trying to find the, um,
Haight-Ashbury
," she said.
Make what you care to of that!

 
          
"You
are
lost," he said ruefully.
"And that isn't really such a good area for . . ."

 
          
For a tourist,
Winter mentally completed
the sentence. "A friend of mine lives there," she added, unbending
slightly. "Can you help me? The map I have says you can get there from
here, but—"

 
          
"There
are a couple of streets closed because of the construction. Can I see your
map?"

 
          
Winter
passed it over, and, looking to her for permission, the stranger pulled a
felt-tip out of his pocket and marked a route. "This is the best way to
get there. What address are you looking for?"

 
          
Winter
couldn't see any harm in giving him that information—the bookstore was a public
business, after all—and rattled off the number of the Ancient Mysteries
Bookstore.

 
          
The
man seemed to recoil for a moment, as if what she said had more than ordinary
meaning to him.

 
          
"Oh."
The liveliness that she had heard a moment before in his voice was gone.
"Oh," he said again. "I'm sorry."

 
          
"Is
something wrong?" Winter said, an edge to her voice.

 
          
There
was a silence, long enough that Winter wondered if she'd run into one of the
loonies
San
Francisco
was supposed to abound in.

 
          
"Let
me give you my card," the man said finally. "I have a shop in that
area, right down the street. There's a map on the back that should help you get
. . . where you're going. And you might stop by sometime. We'd like to see you.
Really."

 
          
When Hell freezes over,
Winter thought
grimly, but she took the card. As he'd said, there was a map on the back, and
the directions looked fairly clear. She turned it over.

 
          
Handmade Music,
Luthiers
.
And then, below, in smaller type:
Antiques
restored. Tuning
—
Harpsichord and
Piano. Paul Frederick.

 
          
Winter
relaxed a little. As a small-business owner he was a bit more respectable than
the traveling street person and lunatic he acted like.

 
          
"Well,
Mr. Frederick, thank you for your help," Winter said decisively. "I'm
sure I'll find it now."

           
"Good luck," Paul
Frederick said somberly, stepping back from her car.

 
          
He
kneiv
. He knew
while he was talking to me!

 
          
But
the anger at being mocked was a pale, reflexive thing in the face of what confronted
her.

 
          
Winter
pulled her car to a halt in the open space at the curb in front of the Ancient
Mysteries Bookstore. She was blocking the fire hydrant, but that hardly
mattered now. She got out of the car and walked slowly over to stand in front
of the shop.

 
          
Large
sheets of plywood were tacked up over the doors and windows, but streaks of
soot against the pale storefront still showed where the flames had shot upward,
scorching everything in their path. The sheets of plywood gave the ground floor
a smooth anonymity, blotting out the evidence of destruction.

 
          
There
were wreaths and bouquets nailed to the plywood front door, some draggled and
withered as if they had been there for weeks, some bright and new. Their
meaning was unmistakable.

 
          
Someone has died here.

 
          
Winter
felt a wave of angry panic that blotted out every other sensation. There was no
need to ask who had died—it seemed to her that she had always known. The one
hope she'd had was gone. It had been too late to keep this appointment even before
she had left
Glastonbury
, and now there would never be time.

 
          
Oh, Cassie. I didn't even get a chance to
say good-bye.

 
          
A
bitter heaviness descended upon her aching heart, as if all hope of reclaiming
her past had been ripped irrevocably away. She came closer, her fingers
brushing the laurel leaves of one of the wreaths.
Laurel
, that crowned triumphant athletes and
victorious generals.
Laurel
, for victory and death.

 
          
The
card beneath the wreath was enclosed in plastic to protect it from the rain.
Water had leaked in, blurring the dates, but Winter could read the rest:
Mary
Cassilda
Chandler
—
Born Again to the Goddess.

 
          
Cassie
had loved her, understood her, cared about her. Cassie would have helped her
now—giving herself freely without judgment to solve the misfortunes besetting
Winter's life. And with her death, the mirror that Winter had hoped to see
herself in was smashed forever.

           
The scene before her wavered, and
Winter blinked back hot tears. The pain of her loss was so raw, so intense, so
shocking in its force that even to acknowledge it was to court her own
destruction. Desperately Winter sought refuge in glib flippancy. So this was
it. The trail ended here. Cassie was dead.

 
          
Murdered.

LORD OF THE WILD HUNT

See, Winter comes to rule the
varied year, Sullen and sad.

—JAMES THOMSON

 
          
WINTER HAD NO IDEA HOW LONG SHE STOOD THERE,
grieving in her own bleak autumn. Cassie was dead, and Winter mourned for her
as if they had been closer than sisters until the moment of Cassie's death.

 
          
Abruptly,
without any saving sense of transition, Winter became aware of someone watching
her.

 
          
She
started up, as wild as if she were being stalked, but the only thing in sight
was a rather ordinary woman in denim jeans, T-shirt, and a green down vest. The
only thing unusual about her was the cloud of frizzy bright red hair that
framed her face like some Pre-Raphaelite
madonna's
.
It made Winter think momentarily of Janelle. How could she tell
Jannie
that Cassie was dead?

 
          
"Hello
..." the young woman said. "Are you Winter? Winter Musgrave?"

           
No!
Winter's mind shouted in reflexive denial. She took a step backward.

 
          
"Don't
run away!" the other woman said. "I'm Rhiannon—I was a friend of
Cassie's! She told me to wait for you—that you'd come."

 
          
"When?"
Even to Winter, her voice sounded hostile and grudging. Cassie was dead, and
she didn't want to share her memories of her with anyone.

 
          
"Please,"
Rhiannon said. "Please don't run away. I just want to talk to you. Just
for a moment."

 
          
Winter
took another hesitant step backward, although if this woman was going to cause
a really unpleasant scene, Winter doubted if she could make it to the safety of
her car in time.

 
          
"There's
a restaurant around the corner," Rhiannon said. "We could go there.
We have to talk."

 
          
It
was, Winter realized belatedly, long past lunchtime. Her body still wanted
food, even if her heart was sick at the thought. And this woman seemed
determined to talk to her. Nothing much could happen to her in such a public
place—and if she didn't like what this woman had to say she could always get up
and leave. Wondering if she was listening to her instincts or defying them,
Winter made a grudging gesture of acceptance and followed Rhiannon around the
corner.

 
          
The
Green Man was a bright and rather archaic oasis in the middle of modern urban
decay. The
Haight-Ashbury
district, though faddish thirty years before, had always been a shabby
and neglected part of
San Francisco
. It had been precisely because no one else wanted it that the flower
children had flocked to it in such numbers; despite their avowed desire to
create a new world, most of them had found their homes in the cracks of the old
one. But The Green Man was shining and defiantly welcoming, with polished
wooden tables made out of discarded cable spools, cane-bottomed Bentwood
chairs, and salvaged panels of stained glass hanging in the windows. There were
plants everywhere, giving the cafe even more the look of a green oasis in the
midst of the city's steel and stone.

 
          
The
waitress greeted Rhiannon by name and showed her and Winter to a booth in the
back.

 
          
"So,"
Winter said coolly, when the woman had taken an order for tea and departed.
"What can I do for you?"
Probably
not much,
her tone implied.

           
Rhiannon flinched away from her
coldness and Winter regarded her scornfully, anger displacing grief. She knew
Rhiannon's kind—meddlers, and incompetent ones at that, wandering through life
like some self-proclaimed New Age secret agents, dispensing occult wisdom and
psychic Band-Aids to anyone they could manage to catch.

 
          
Ice
numbed her heart, but ice was better than the unbearable pain and guilt.
Cassilda
, oh, sister
—

 
          
"Well,
I thought—" Rhiannon stumbled over her words in the face of Winter's
obvious disapproval. "You see, Cassie and I were friends. . . ."

 
          
Not as I was her friend!

 
          
Rhiannon's
eyes reddened and began to fill. She groped in the pocket of her down vest for
a wad of tissues as Winter watched implacably.

 
          
You've had a lot longer to get used to her
death than I have, and you don't see
ME
sniveling!
Is sympathy what you're after? You won't get it here; I've suffered more than
you can possibly imagine. . . .

 
          
"Yes,"
Winter drawled mockingly, "I can see that."

 
          
Rhiannon
flushed and glared at her. She opened her mouth to speak and reined herself in
with an effort. "The point is," Rhiannon said, taking a deep breath,
"we'd been friends for a long time. We met through Circle of Fire—-that's
a Blackburn Work group that meets in the East Bay—but Cassie felt it was more important
to take responsibility for your own life than to expect another set of gods to
come to people's rescue—-which is what the New
Aeon
ought
to be about, really. So she
started a
Wiccan
coven
based on
the Blackburn Work, but more Goddess-oriented, really.
..."

 
          
Fortunately
the tea arrived—if it hadn't Winter would probably have walked out right then.
Cassie was dead, and in the face of that disaster Winter had no taste for
listening to New Age drivel.

 
          
"We
sort of worked as astral police, you know, like the Grey Angels," Rhiannon
said, and with that phrase got Winter's entire attention. What did Rhiannon
know about the Grey Angels? "So we knew it was coming."

 
          
"You'll
forgive me," Winter said tightly, "if I ask what this has to do with
anything?" She pushed the raw anguish of Cassie's murder from her mind,
courting the blessed numbness that hovered on her mental horizon. This was how
it could be, if she only surrendered to it: no more fear, no more pain, no more
weariness and tears. There was no need to wander in the wilderness looking for
some better answer that she would never find: She could become winter in fact
as well as name, and if she could not heal, at least she would never be hurt
again.

 
          
Only surrender, surrender,
sang the
seductive serpent voice. . . .

 
          
"Cassie
knew the Elemental was coming," Rhiannon said, and now her eyes glittered
with anger as well as tears. "She knew she was going to die. We tried to
stop it, to bind it, but Cassie said it drew power from the fact that the task
it had been created for was undone. We put up the strongest wards we could. . .
. Cassie thought you might be able to control it—she tried to find you but you
never answered your phone; she called all your old friends and none of them
could help. ..."

 
          
The
fury in Winter blazed up until she felt clothed in invisible lightning, like a
character in a book she'd read once, whose anger alone could kill. The power of
the poltergeist struggled to break free, but she had chained it, chained it
forever to her service and it would never be free.

 
          
"I've
heard about enough," Winter said. How dare this . . .
person
drag her in here simply to whine that Winter had not been
there when Cassie died? "Thank you for the tea." She got to her feet.

 
          
"No!
Don't go—I'm sorry! But she knew it was coming for her for weeks and there was
nothing she could do—she tried and she tried, she knew it would kill her, and I
loved her—" Rhiannon was crying openly now, her pale freckled skin turned
blotchy and unattractive by her tears. "She never blamed you—she knew
you'd come, only you'd be too late— she knew what you needed; she told me to
give you a message—"

 
          
"You?"
Winter said in blazing
contempt. Everyone in the cafe was staring at both of them, which angered her
further. She dug in her purse for some money, and threw a handful of ones on
the table. "I wouldn't trust you to deliver a pizza. Now leave me
alone."
Leave Cassie's memory alone!

 
          
Winter
turned and strode from the restaurant. She heard Rhiannon scramble out of the
booth behind her and walked faster, her heels beating a quick tattoo on the
wooden floor.

 
          
Rhiannon
followed her up the street. "She knew you'd be coming!" she shouted
at Winter's back. "She wrote you a letter—to explain—it's in my
apartment—it isn't far from here. I can get it if you'll wait.
Will you at least give me some place I can
mail it to?"

 
          
Winter
managed to keep ahead of Rhiannon, but when she reached the car she had to stop
in order to unlock the door. It took her three tries to get her key into the
lock, and by that time the other woman had caught up to her.

 
          
"Won't
you even
read it?"
Rhiannon said
from behind her. "Please—" She put her hand on Winter's arm.

 
          
Winter
shrugged her off with a gesture that was barely less than a blow. Rhiannon
staggered back, staring at her in incredulity.

 
          
"Get
your hands off me, you filthy little—
coward!"
Winter spat. Cowards, all of them, running away from Reality's hard truths
with their fairy tales of
specialness
and purpose!

 
          
Rhiannon
retreated another step in the face of Winter's white-faced fury, but stubbornly
held her ground. "I'm not the one who's running away," she said
shakily, as Winter climbed into the driver's seat and slammed the door in
Rhiannon's face.

 
          
Winter
tucked the ticket for Long-Term Parking into her purse and started in the
direction of the distant airport terminal. As much as she strove for calm,
every time she thought about Rhiannon, ghoulishly haunting the sidewalk in
front of the burned-out bookstore, waiting for her, her hands began to tremble
and invisible
lightnings
danced behind her eyes. . .
.

 
          
Winter
took a deep and steadying breath. It was over. Everything was over, and there
was no point to dwelling upon it. What mattered was that now any hope she had
of finding Hunter
Greyson
was gone, unless she wanted
to hire a private detective.

 
          
And the
magickal
child—
the Elemental? What about it? It
killed Cassie.

 
          
No.
The denial was automatic. There had been a fire; the bookstore had burned with
Cassie trapped inside. The rest was lies. There was no vengeful ghost stalking
the five—the four—of them.

 
          
A
wave of vertigo washed over her, forcing Winter to clutch at a nearby car for
support. She closed her eyes, willing herself to stay upright. After a moment
the dizziness waned, but every time she tried to think things over it got
worse.