The Forever Drug (26 page)
I shifted my vision for a heartbeat back to the physical world, and the girl disappeared. The driveway leading into the park was empty. The sign attached to the gate swung gently back and forth, but that was probably just the wind.
I shifted back to astral perception, and the girl appeared once more. She had passed through the gate in my direction, and now was standing with her back to me, passing her hand back and forth through the sign.
I had to know if it was really Jane. I reared up onto my hind legs, shifting into human form as I rose. "Jane!"
Perhaps I said it too urgently. Or perhaps it was the fact that I had forgotten, once again, that I was naked. The girl spun around, shrieked, and took a step back. Then she vanished.
I rushed forward, my hands extended like a blind person's. Had I accidentally allowed my focus to slip away from the astral plane? No—I could still see the auras surrounding the trees on either side of the drive, and the small hot glow that was a mouse scurrying through the grass. I was still perceiving the world through astral vision.
"Mareth'riel?" I said, using a calmer voice this time.
Nothing. No reply. The elf girl was gone.
I ducked under the gate and began walking up the drive, the pavement warm against my bare feet. I searched the fields on either side of the road, hoping to catch a glimpse of the elf girl again. I'd obviously frightened her off; she had ceased her astral projection as soon as I'd shouted. Had it really been Jane, projecting an idealized image of herself as a young girl wearing clothes that had been popular in the century in which she was born? Had she sought me out in astral form, projecting the image of a helpless child, because she needed my help?
Despite the questions that were whirling through my mind, I couldn't help but notice the beauty of the park as I walked further into it. In contrast to the rest of the island, with its depleted soil and weed-covered fields, Dragon Park is a garden of Eden. The fields on either side of me had an ethereal beauty that somehow managed to look cultivated and wild at the same time. The wind whispered over different types of grasses—some green, some a pale yellow, some bent with seed and others with broad, stiff blades. They had been planted to form patterns on the land— long, sweeping lines that bent and rustled with the wind, spiraling around brilliant red and yellow and indigo punctuations of wildflowers. Some of the lines ran arrow-straight, drawing the eye to a tree or a boulder; others meandered in complex patterns like a maze. I let my eye follow one pattern, trying to find the end of the complex line. Then I froze. The elf girl was walking along that line.
She hovered just above the grass, her toes lightly touching the bent stalks as she tiptoed across them. She held her arms out as if she were walking along a log at the beach; every now and then her foot would slip and her arms would waver as she caught her balance.
The line of paler grass that the girl was following led to a patch of waist-high poppies with brilliant orange flowers. At the moment, the girl had her back to me. I jogged out into the field and stood among the poppies, adopting a non-threatening posture and waiting for her to come to me. The flowers tickled my bare skin as they brushed back and forth in the wind.
The girl rounded a bend in the line and stopped abruptly. She stared at me for a long moment, teetering back and forth. Then she asked me a question in a language that sounded like music.
"I don't understand you," I said. "I don't speak Sperethiel."
Then I pointed a finger at her in a universal gesture. "Are you Mareth'riel?"
She smiled. "
Sielle
," she answered.
Frig. I'd been hoping for a simple "yes"—which was one of the few words of Sperethiel I understood. I had no idea what she'd just said—or even if she'd answered my question.
Behind me, I heard the sputter of small engines and smelled fresh exhaust. Was it the dwarf, arriving at the estate with Jane? I turned and saw a pair of Euroglyde scooters—the kind they rent to tourists— bouncing across the grass as they made their way around the park gate. I didn't recognize the people riding them.
I instinctively crouched, lowering myself to hands and knees in readiness for a shift. If I needed to attack, I wanted to be in wolf form. But within seconds, I had pegged the scooter riders as a non-threat. The riders were obviously tourists—a pair of ork males, dressed in clothes that must have been expensive, judging by the way they fit their bulky bodies. One of the orks had a minicam strapped around his forehead and was shooting trid of the estate. The other had a bouquet of cut flowers strapped to the back of his scooter seat. They were roses: I could tell from their scent.
The pair stared at me as they rode past—probably wondering why the frig a naked man was staring at them from a patch of poppies. One of them arched an eyebrow, then threw me a wink.
I'd only shifted my attention away from the elf girl for a moment. When I turned back to where she'd been, she was gone. I cursed the tourists for their bloody-mindedness at coming to the park during a national emergency. I noticed I was sweating—I could smell my own nervousness. The disappearing elf girl was really getting to me.
Shifting into wolf form, I loped after the scooters, intending to vent my frustration at them for causing me to lose sight of Jane with a few choice barks. When I caught up to them, I saw that the two orks had pulled their scooters up to the edge of a tiny bay that was almost circular in shape, with only a narrow exit to the sea. At least half a dozen cars—all of them with license plates from elsewhere in the UCAS—were also pulled up at the parking lot that fronted the beach. A number of people of various metatypes— only one of them human—were standing quietly on the shore, gazing down into the water with expressions of regret on their faces.
Specks of color floated on the water, nudged in and out by the waves as they lapped against the shore. Flowers. As I watched, one of the orks who'd ridden past me on a scooter lifted the armful of white roses that had been strapped on the back of his bike. He walked out along the beach until the waves were lapping at his designer loafers, and tossed the roses into the sea. Then he started to cry. His companion moved forward to comfort him by putting a burly arm across the crying ork's shoulders.
That was when I realized the significance of this tiny bay—and realized what holiday the sign on the gate had been referring to. I quickly counted off the days of the month in my head. It fit. Today was August 9—four years to the day since Dunkelzahn was assassinated. Claiming to be Dunkelzahn's "home," Prince Edward Island had declared August 9 a local day of mourning.
I recognized the beach from the tridcast documentaries that had been filmed on the estate, back when Dunkelzahn had first purchased this property. The original name of the bay had been Seacow Pond—a name given to it in the days before the walrus was extinct, when the bay had been filled with bleached bones of these animals. According to the tridcasts that had been filmed while the estate was being built, the bay also held the petrified bones of a great dragon—one of Dunkelzahn's ancestors. Together with the supposed ley lines that converged upon the estate—a rumor probably inspired by the patterned grass plantings—it was said to be the reason why Dunkelzahn had chosen this remote but beautiful spot as the setting for one of his homes.
After Dunkelzahn had disappeared in a magical explosion, there had been no body over which to mourn. That was when the rumors had taken a new twist: "Dragon Bone Bay" not only held the bones of one of Dunkelzahn's ancestors—it held the bones of the great dragon Dunkelzahn himself.
It was all nonsense, of course. But the pull of the legend of the dragon who had overcome the odds to become the first meta president of the UCAS was strong enough to draw fanatics out to this lonely spot in the middle of a national crisis.
I spotted the elf girl again, at the end of the line of mourners. She was looking at them quizzically, as if she didn't understand what they were so unhappy about. I barked, trying to draw her attention. Everyone on the beach turned and stared at me—except the elf girl. She ran up the beach as fast as her legs could go, then sprinted away along the road that led deeper into the estate.
This time I wasn't going to let her out of my sight. I charged after her, running as fast as I could. But she was quicker. Her legs weren't moving any faster than my own—I should have caught up to her by now. But she was an astral projection, not a physical being. I knew from questioning Dass about astral travel that an astral body could move at speeds of thousands of kilometers per hour, if the person projecting it wanted it to. But I didn't give up hope. There was a chance that a memory might fall into place, that Jane might suddenly remember who I was and stop to talk to me. I kept running, my tongue lolling as I panted.
My pursuit was taking me toward the sprawling mansion that Dunkelzahn had built. It was a huge place, built to dragon scale. It resembled a series of gigantic octagonal blocks, made from metal that had been buffed to a mirror finish and set with windows cut in trapezoid shapes. Above these were a series of ornamental white arches that looked like domes that had been hollowed out and then cut in half. Stark black girders projected from the edges of these halfdomes—perfect roosting places for a dragon.
The mansion had lain empty in the years since Dunkelzahn's death. After the dragon's will had been read, the Draco Foundation had packed up the furnishings, along with the works of art, magical foci, and personal effects, and had shipped these items to those named in the will. Now the mansion's doors were locked and its temperature-control windows set to a frosted glaze that prevented curious tourists from seeing inside.
Surrounding the mansion was a forest of windmills, their sleek white bodies thrusting out of the ground like the stems of plants. The vanes of the mills flashed in the sun as they turned, emitting an eerie whirring noise that rose and fell like a soft howl with the changes in wind speed.
So
that
was the weird noise I'd heard earlier. Nothing too mysterious about that. But the air still felt highly charged, unstable and dense. Something was happening here—or was about to happen.
Behind the mansion, the north cape jutted out into the ocean in a long, narrow point. Here, two ocean currents met, scouring the red sandstone bluffs into fantastic shapes and punching tunnels through the narrowest part of the point. I could hear the rumble of waves, and could smell the seaweed that was being churned against the pebble beach below.
Jane was running straight for the edge.
No!
I tried to yell, but the sound came out as a mournful howl. As I watched in horror, Jane plunged off the point of the cape, her arms flailing as she fell.
A few moments later I skidded to a stop on the very edge of the cliff. It was a crazy thing to do; the sandstone was soft and crumbling, and one of my paws slipped over the edge. I stumbled backward and sank to my haunches, panting so hard I thought my chest was going to burst.
I at last looked over the edge, my heart filled with dread as I imagined Jane sprawled on the beach below—and my head telling my heart that it wasn't possible for an astral body to be damaged by a fall. An astral projection could
fly
if it wanted to, for frig's sake.
The head won the bet. I saw a tiny speck, far out on the ocean, running gracefully across the wave tops. Jane.
Well, that was it. I couldn't follow her
there
.
Dejected, I turned and began walking back toward the empty mansion. Maybe I could find a caretaker or park interpreter who could tell me who or what Muirico was.
I hadn't been paying much attention to where I was running when I was chasing Jane, and so I decided to follow one of the paths back. But instead of leading to the mansion it wound into a copse of stunted evergreen trees. It was an eerie place: the trees had been twisted into weird shapes by the constant push of the wind, and the path circled back on itself time after time, like the scribble of a demented child. The further I followed it, the more lost and frustrated I became.
I was so keyed up after chasing Jane that I thought I heard a whisper, coming from behind one of the trees. I spun around and barked at it—only to find it was just the wind, rustling the needles on the branches.
Or was it? What was that I had just seen, ducking behind a boulder? I stopped and sniffed, my hackles raised and my feet braced to leap. But all I could smell was tree sap and earth.
I leaped back in alarm as something bulged up out of the ground, right in front of my paws. Dirt, root, and loam reared up in a living heap, forming itself into the shape of a tiny humanoid with earth-brown skin and eyes that glistened like dew drops. Evergreen needles grew from the creature's scalp, cheeks, and chin, giving it hair and a beard, and ropy filaments of root covered its forearms and hands. I could smell the sap pulsing through these veins and the crisp pine scent of the creature's needle hair.
I tensed, teeth bared, and growled softly at the thing. My entire body quivered as I prepared to hurl myself at the creature that had startled me. It was obviously a nature spirit of some sort, probably a forest spirit. And nature spirits were dangerous friggers— they could twist your mind into a confused knot, paralyze you with fear, cause terrible accidents to occur, or engulf you with earth and smother you. I crouched, ready to fight for my life.
