Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales) (41 page)

Another pulse of power from Mist shook the lake like a depth charge. Albin’s creatures were thrown back. Then the two of them were surging through the water, free.

Rosie Sam Lucas …

She and Mist broke the surface and came up gasping into the soft air of Melusiel. Looking back, Stevie saw Albin’s tower far behind them, no more than a pale needle on the horizon. She felt a current pulling at her. Even as she looked back she felt the pull of the
antilineos
taking them farther away from their friends.

“We can’t leave them!” She coughed and gasped, pushing wet hair out of her face. Her skin felt reptilian, her hands abrasive on her scaly forehead.

“We have no choice,” Mist said. His aquatic face was slate-blue, his voice gruff. Red-gold Felynx eyes burned into her. She wondered if this was truly Mistangamesh at all.

“Our friends—we can’t leave them there!”

“We must.”

He spun in the water and let the current take him. Stevie did the same. He was right. They had no chance against the pull of the water. They tried to join hands but turbulence pulled them apart and they surged helplessly on, the lake narrowing to a river, then to a channel and soon to frothing rapids that ended suddenly on the edge of nothing …

They were falling, millions of tons of water plunging with them.

Falling off the edge of the Spiral itself.

17

Desert Springs

Stevie was in darkness, lying on a hard surface. There was a glow far above her and dust sticking to her wet skin. She was soaked through, hair dripping, clothes hanging heavy with the weight of water. Every cell of her body hurt. She began to shiver with the wet, piercing cold.

As she lay there nearly insensible, fragments of memory assaulted her: being carried for what seemed hours along the raging
antilineos
: losing sight of Mist; plunging off the edge of the world in a deluge of foam … falling, falling …

Visions of Rosie, Sam and Lucas assailed her: imprisoned by Albin, turned to ice and stone. But now they were unreachable, somewhere beyond a cosmic waterfall, in another realm.

Our fault
, she thought.
They came with us out of the simple goodness of their hearts and now they’re lost and doomed and it’s our fault, mine and Mist’s …

Her body shook but no sobs came out, only rasping coughs.

“Stevie.” She felt warm breath on the icy whorl of her ear. “Stevie?”

She raised her head and there was Mist’s beloved face above hers. His features were human again, shadowed with pain and shock as if he’d crawled from a shipwreck. She made out the dark bulk of a boulder behind him. The landscape felt stony and desolate. She was so cold that the water dripping from him felt warm on her skin.

“Are we back on Vaeth?” She used the Aelyr name for Earth; funny how fast she’d learned the habit.

“Yes, I think so.”

He helped her sit up, wrapping one arm around her. They sat clinging together for a while, silent with exhaustion. They were on a flat empty plain with low hills in the distance, luminous with starlight. A pool of water gathered around them and soaked into the bone-dry soil beneath.

“No tears,” he said, kissing her rat’s-tail hair. “Aren’t we wet enough already?”

“The others…”

“I know.”

“We can’t leave them there. We can’t!”

“There’s nothing we can do.” His voice shook. “I would if we could, but it’s too late.”

“We’ve got to try. We can’t abandon them.”

“I know, but we have to help ourselves first.”

“Yes. Okay.” She forcibly gathered her thoughts. “First we need to find out where the hell we are.” She began to stand up. Again the horror of Albin’s attack swept through her and she stumbled onto her knees. “Oh my god, Mist.”

“It’s all right.” He held her arm and they stood together, leaning unsteadily on each other. “There’s no sign of the portal we came through, only a boulder that looks like every other boulder. We can’t go back. We have to go on.”

Looking up, she saw the Milky Way spanning the dome above them, ablaze with billions of glittering stars. The sight made her feel tiny, lost and desperate. “We’d better start walking,” she said.

“Which way?”

“I don’t think it matters.”

There were stones beneath their boots, scrubby bushes catching at their clothes. She felt shocked relief that their garments had survived the ordeal, apparently having transformed to fur and fin and back again, as if altered reality acted on fabric as well as flesh. The subzero night did nothing to dry them out, but Stevie was past caring about her physical discomfort. She felt her jacket pockets; one small mercy, she’d remembered to close the zippers.

“I still have my wallet,” she said, teeth chattering. “That’s something. You?”

“Yes,” Mist answered. “But money won’t help us against Rufus, or find a way back into the Spiral.”

“No, but it will buy practicalities like food and transport and accommodation, without which we’d be
totally
stuffed.”

“I think we should avoid human habitation.”

“Why? We’re not wild animals. Even
finding
a human in this wilderness is going to be a miracle.”

“We’re Aetherial. We don’t need them.”

She looked at his stony profile and a chill went through her. “Mist, will you stop it? Maybe Albin’s superhuman, but we’re not. Have you forgotten you tried to walk the length of Scotland and woke up in a hospital bed?
We need help.
”

He closed his eyes, gave a faint sigh. “You’re right.”

After an hour or so, they reached a long straight highway that bisected the desert. A line of telephone wires dwindled into the distance in both directions. The road was empty, dark. Stevie’s heart was too heavy to give the smallest twitch of hope. She guessed the road might continue for a hundred miles before it hit a town.

“Even if a vehicle comes past, we can’t take the risk of stopping anyone,” she said. “If the police pick us up, we’re screwed. We’ve got no passports. If they find out we’re here illegally, I don’t know what they’ll do to us, but it will totally wreck our plans.”

“Now you see why I’m reluctant to ask for human help?” Mist looked up at the stars and said, “Let’s try north.”

“Is your Aetherial radar working? Can you sense Rufus, or even a small town?”

“No,” he said. “But it’s as good a direction as any.”

*   *   *

They walked through the scrub, keeping parallel with the endless road.

The distant hills seemed barely to change position. Now and then a vehicle swept past, headlights dazzling—and then Stevie would think, too late, that they should take a chance and flag down the driver. Yet they didn’t. The risk was too great.

They trudged on with the cosmos turning above them, dawn beginning to brush the horizon.

Stevie was asleep on her feet, hallucinating, so hungry that her stomach had contracted to a ball of pain. Her legs were agony, feet burning, her skin like ice. The thought of death seemed welcome … but where would she find herself next time? In Persephone’s chamber again, or in another new, mad existence without memories? Would Mist be with her, or would she never see him again?

A voice reached her. Realizing Mist had stopped, she came out of her stupor to see an array of lights. There was a gas station a few hundred yards ahead, with rows of parked trucks, a big wooden building with brightly lit windows, a sign announcing
MOJAVE MOE’S
24
-HOUR DINER
. An oasis.

“Oh, thank the gods,” she gasped, pushing her still-damp hair out of her face. The ends were stiff with ice. “Sanctuary.”

She pulled at Mist’s arm, but he resisted her. “We can’t go in.”

Her exhaustion flared into rage. “We are going in that fucking truck stop if it’s the last thing I do!” she growled. “You do what the hell you like. Find Rufus, kill each other, I don’t care.”

She hobbled away from him. It had been a mistake to stop; a minute’s pause was enough to turn her legs to rods of red-hot iron.

Mist hurried after her. “Stevie.”

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shut the fuck up and come with me.”

“I’m with you,” he said, his tone contrite. “It’s just … we’re a mess. I’m so sorry I brought you into this.”

With a start, she realized that Mist was as scared as she was, if not more so. “Hey,” she said more calmly. “It will be all right. If anyone asks, we’ll tell them we’re British tourists and our car broke down. And we have credit cards, which are waterproof, I hope. We can buy food while we sit and have a think.”

She put her arm through his, feeling how cold he was beneath the damp jacket. She felt his heartbeat shaking his ribs. He looked as rough as she felt, but there was a fierce and desperate glow in his eyes.

“Ready?” she said. “Come on. Just try to act normal.”

*   *   *

They crossed a wide parking lot and pushed open a glass door. Inside, heat enveloped them. The glare of fluorescent lights was dazzling. Stevie blinked, reeling from pure sensory shock. They were in a wide corridor with a convenience store on the right, a diner on the left, restrooms and some kind of amusement arcade at the far end.

There were perhaps twenty people in the place; enough to give a gentle air of activity, not enough for the open-plan space to feel crowded. No one seemed to take any notice of them. Stevie pulled Mist’s arm and said, “Let’s head for the ladies’ and gents’. We can dry our hair and check we’re not covered in dirt. Tidy up a bit. Look,” she said, as they progressed. “There’s a cash machine. See if you can get some dollars out, then go in the restaurant and order breakfast. Anything. I’ll meet you in there. I’ve had an idea.”

“What?”

“Just do it!”

In the restroom, Stevie washed her hands and face, looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a bloodless, haunted face staring back. She pinched her cheeks to raise color, tried to relax her expression and produce a carefree smile.

“Eugh,” she said to her reflection.

She bent her head under the hand-dryer to fluff up her bedraggled hair, then removed her still-wet jacket and stood in the hot-air stream to dry her clothes as best she could. She estimated she’d have to stand there for an hour before she was bone-dry, but it was better than nothing. The hot air burned. She stopped when another woman came in, passing her with a quick “Hi” and a smile.

No one’s interested in us
, she thought with a wave of relief.

Emerging, she headed to the store and found a rack of road maps. California. Nevada. The West Coast. Arizona. Promising, but she didn’t know which one to choose.

“Excuse me,” she said to the assistant, a wiry dark-haired woman who looked as if she’d been on duty all night. A badge labeled her Glenda. “I need a map of the state.”

“Sure, help yourself.”

“The thing is, we’re lost. Tourists. First time here. And, er, the map we had in the car wasn’t that good and we’ve driven off the edge of it. The road went on forever. Could you show me where we are?”

“Oh—no problem, hon.” Glenda, despite her weary demeanor, seemed pleased to help. “Where you from, Australia?”

“Er, no. England.”

“Man, I always get those accents mixed up,” she said, emerging from behind the counter. “You having a good trip?”

“We were, until we got lost.” Stevie smiled, hoping she didn’t resemble a grinning skull. “We’re so glad to find this place, I can’t tell you.”

“So here we are…” Glenda unfolded a map of southern California and Nevada onto the counter and circled her finger over an array of intersecting roads and contour lines. The area looked a long way inland. Stevie was so pleased to find herself in a definite location, she felt like crying. “So you’re near the top of the Mojave Desert, see, just inside the Nevada state line. Where are you headed?”

The question threw her. She stared at the map and picked a place at random. “Death Valley.”

“Oh, you like the deserts, then?”

“Love them,” Stevie said emphatically.

“They’re pretty spectacular. Death Valley’s amazing. The one thing you have to watch out for in the desert is freezing or roasting to death! We only do extremes. Did you know it was seventeen degrees around here last night?”

Stevie did a quick conversion in her head: that was about minus eight Celsius, well below freezing. “Really?” Trying not to look stunned, she refolded the map, grabbed some chocolate bars and paid for everything with her card, thinking,
If we weren’t Aetherial we probably would have died.
“Is there a telephone I can use? My cell phone isn’t working.”

“Sure, go down the aisle past the restrooms, you’ll see the booth on the right.” Glenda added as Stevie thanked her, “You take care, now. Have a good trip.”

Stevie hurried to the far end of the building again, realized she had no change, then saw that the pay phone accepted credit cards. She felt in her top pocket and extracted her poor notebook, which was swollen with water. The pages were close to disintegrating as she turned to the one she needed and read the blurred ballpoint ink.

“Any time you’re in the States, call me,”
Fin’s brother Patrick had told her on Christmas Day. But where had he said he lived? San Diego? San Francisco?

Hands shaking, she punched in Patrick’s number.

The ring tone sounded for so long that her heart fell. Then a voice answered, thick with sleep. “Yeah?”

“Is that Patrick Feehan?”

“Yeah, speaking.”

Her throat went into spasm and she could barely get any words out. “It’s S-Stevie…”

“Steve who?”

“Stevie. Fin’s friend. Christmas? Remember you said I could call you any time I was in the States?”

A pause. Her heart sank further. It was so easy, she thought, to say convivial things at a party that you didn’t mean in the cold light of everyday life, and the slurred voice was grumpy with displeasure. “Yeah, but d’you know what time it is? It’s six o’clock in the bloody morning! What, what…?” She heard a rustle of sheets, as if he was trying to wake up.

“I know, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you but I’m, I’m in a mess and I thought you might…”