Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (51 page)

 
          
"Burned,"
Winter said brutally. "Burned to death in her bookstore— trying to
communicate with what you sent after her."

 
          
"But
that isn't the way it should have happened," Grey protested. His
unhappiness and puzzlement communicated themselves to Winter,
tingleing
her feelings with his own. "I'm caught
between life and death—I don't have either the animal energy of a physical body
or the spiritual power of the disembodied to draw on."

 
          
"
'Your powers are weak, old man,'" Winter quoted, and Grey smiled
painfully.

 
          
"Something
like that. So what I sent was the Elemental that
Nuclear Circle
had played around with back in college—we
pretty much didn't know what we were doing back then, but on the astral every
action leaves a trace. The
idea
of it
still existed, and I was able to lend it enough will to give it coherence again—but
it should never have been able to affect the physical plane at all."

 
          
Winter
gazed at him steadily. "That isn't what happened."

 
          
Grey
ran his free hand through his hair, holding tight to Winter's hand with the
other. She would have pulled loose from his grip, but she suspected that Grey
was the one keeping her anchored here.

 
          
"I
didn't intend—I've been on the Path too long to say something like that, even
if it's true, but I don't understand. Where did it
get
the power to become real? Even if it were to visit any of the
rest of you—we all created it together, so there'd be a link—all that should
have happened was a few bad dreams."

 
          
"It
killed her," Winter said fiercely. "It drove me— It stalked all of
us, Grey: me, Janelle, Ramsey, Cassie. Why did you
do
it, Grey?" she demanded.

 
          
"Because
I didn't want to stay like this until my body finally wore out! The silver cord
is broken—I can't find my way back to it, but my body's still alive out there!
This should have worked—"

 
          
"Well,
it didn't! Your singing telegram is very comfortable back in the real world—it
started out killing squirrels, but it's working its way up the food chain
nicely. Every time it kills it gets stronger, and it doesn't want to tell
anybody anything. Don't you think Cassie tried to find out why it was after
her? Or Truth? I was there when it came after Truth—it nearly killed her—and
she says it's after me."

 
          
"Truth
. . .
Jourdemayne
?" Grey said in renewed horror.
"It attacked Thorne Blackburn's daughter?"

 
          
Winter
didn't know why the fact that Grey knew about Truth seemed to make him more
real to her, but now Winter believed, both in Grey's reality and in his
innocence. His bewilderment was genuine enough to make Winter's heart ache.

 
          
"I
never meant . . . And I didn't think you'd help me anyway, even if you
knew," he finished quietly.

 
          
"I—"
Winter began, but everything she could think of to say sounded like
self-justification, and there was no time left for that. Only one thing
mattered.

 
          
"You
created it. Can you stop it?" Winter said.

 
          
Watching
Grey's face, she saw him hesitate; his robes—the robes of an Adept in the
Blackburn Work—darkened further, from ivory and burgundy to gray and umber.
Far away, upon the horizon, flashes like heat lightning played across the sky.

 
          
"Maybe,"
Grey said at last. "There's one thing I can think of to try. If you trust
me."

 
          
"Trust
you?" Winter said suspiciously. "Why do I have to trust you?"

 
          
"Because
for this to work," Grey said, "you've got to kill me."

 
          
It
would be nice to pack it all in and decide that she was actually crazy, Winter
thought to herself several hours later. Then all of this could be just some
elaborate mental spasm, a sequel to her problematic nervous breakdown. But the
hard truth was that she simply didn't care about other people's definition of
sanity any more.

 
          
She'd
signed the papers that afternoon taking legal responsibility for Grey's care.
Meaningless signatures, falsely given, but they bought her the few hours that
was all the time she would need. By tomorrow—next week—whenever they discovered
her deception—it wouldn't matter any more.

 
          
Under
other circumstances, this would have been a beautiful spring night. It was
after
midnight
; a
waning moon rode high in the sky, and the loudest sound was the rhythmic rush
of the surf against the beach ahead. She'd left her car parked on a quiet
street several blocks away, a few miles into town from the motel where she'd
spent the day and evening. No one would be expecting a car to drive up to the
facility at this time of night; even a lone pedestrian would rouse suspicion,
but that much couldn't be helped. This was something that had to be done at
night.

 
          
The
afternoon's events seemed
wavery
and unreal, but
Winter clung to what he had told her. Stopping the Elemental was what mattered
and, tied as he was to a body he could not awaken, the
magickal
power Grey could wield was almost nil. Once dead—or, as Grey had kept referring
to it,
discarnate
—he would be free to
move beyond the Astral Plane with much greater power.

 
          
But
once dead, he would no longer be tied to what he called the Plane of
Manifestation, the real world—unless there were someone holding him here.
Someone who could be his anchor, lending him the animal power of the physical
body and the Plane of Manifestation to blend with the power of the Mental and
Spiritual Planes that Grey would have.

 
          
Winter.

 
          
I'd rather be crazy. It's much more restful.

 
          
She
didn't know if Grey's plan would sound sensible to another magician; to her it
was voodoo, plain and simple. Leaving aside what was going to happen if Grey
had been telling her the literal truth, the least of what Winter was going to
do here tonight was, by any legal definition, murder—and a hospital full of
life-support equipment wasn't the place Winter would have chosen to summon the
Elemental's
psychokinetic storm to if she'd had a choice.
But her choices had been stripped away from her one by one, until she had only
one choice left:

 
          
Win
or die.

 
          
Winter
walked around to the back of the building and chuckled softly as she reached
the back door. She'd expected it to be locked, and it was, but she'd come a
long way in the past few months, and it was a small step from moving keys
across a table to moving pins in a locking cylinder. This much, at least, she
was confident of her ability to do.

 
          
The
heavy door shuddered under her fingers for a few moments, and when Winter
turned the knob again, the door swung open. She stepped into a sort of
vestibule, and walked past the cartons of liquid nutrient and the time clock
with its row of punch cards. She glanced at the rack. According to the cards,
there were only two people here on this shift. She hoped she didn't run into
either of them, because even in a Donna
Karan
white
linen duster over gray flannel man-tailored slacks and a beige wild silk shirt,
Winter didn't think she had much hope of convincing anyone that she was a
doctor making a late-night visit to a patient.

 
          
She
walked to the inner door and pushed it open.

 
          
The
lights were lowered for night, and in the darkness and quiet the institution
had a bleak, untended air. Wheelchairs and other pieces of equipment lined the
halls. Winter looked around dubiously. Where was Grey's room? She'd memorized
the room number when she'd been here before, but in the dark, coming at it from
this unfamiliar direction, everything looked different and whatever else she
did, she didn't dare find herself going past the nurse's station.

 
          
She
reached Grey's room at last, slipping inside and pulling the door halfway shut
with a pang of relief. She couldn't risk a light that might be seen from the
hall, but fortunately someone had forgotten to close the window curtains, and
the pale moonlight streaming in through the window was enough to see by.
Winter crossed the room, pulling the privacy curtains around the bed by the window
to shield her further.

 
          
"Grey—?"
she whispered.

 
          
The
body on the bed did not respond, and, looking down at Grey lying there, Winter
experienced a wrenching sense of disorientation. This wasted body in a hospital
bed was not the Hunter
Greyson
she knew and had
spoken to just this afternoon.

 
          
But
the Grey she had spoken to was a ghost, a sort of psychic echo of the man on
the bed, with no more tangible reality than a picture on a television screen.
She stood gazing down at him, hesitating. When she turned off the respirator,
he'd be gone, just like blowing out a candle.

 
          
But
that wasn't really true. He was gone already. He'd been gone ever since that
rainy night on the coast road when a hit-and-run driver had taken away all of
his choices. All that remained was to allow his body to accept that fact.

 
          
Winter
closed her eyes against the sudden burning of tears, but she knew she was
luckier than she really deserved. At least she got the chance to say good-bye.

 
          
And,
with luck, she might even survive to grieve for him.

 
          
She
reached for the tube that covered his throat. Removing it should be enough—the
respirator was breathing for him; without it, he would suffocate quickly. She
closed her fingers around the plastic to pull it free and stopped.

 
          
Alarms.
There must be alarms of some kind that would go off the moment this thing
stopped working, and discovery would be a disaster she could not imagine
explaining away. Could she turn the machine off first? Winter walked around the
bed and stood in front of the ventilator that breathed for Hunter
Greyson
. It was as tall as she was, boxy, dark, and
threatening. Lights flickered on and off in time to the sounds it made; a
bellows worked; there was some sort of dial with the words NEGATIVE PRESSURE on
it, and a needle fluttered in the middle of the white zone. She looked further.
The respirator had a box plugged into the side that had a red light and a green
one on the side and a round speaker grille on the front. The green light burned
steadily. That must be the alarm, but she couldn't see any way to turn it off.

 
          
Winter
continued studying the machine, wishing she'd thought to look at it more
carefully in daylight. A thick gray cord ran into the power socket on the wall,
elaborately locked into place so that nothing could accidentally dislodge it
and interrupt the power supply. Another, thinner, cord, plugged into the wall
higher up; the word AIR was printed above it in blue. The unoccupied sockets
said OXYGEN and SUCTION. Winter recoiled slightly. This room and what it
represented were frightening as no supernatural horror could be.

 
          
But
she was wasting time, and every moment of delay meant that Grey's
magickal
child
might be killing somewhere else.
Inspecting the respirator carefully, Winter saw that nothing connected it to
the man-Bobby?—in the other bed. What she did here would affect only Grey.

 
          
But
how? She couldn't unplug it, she didn't think she could just switch it off. . .
.

 
          
But
she could short it out. Somewhere inside this machine was an electrical motor,
and electric motors were something Winter knew how to break. She pointed a
finger at the machine.