The Forever Drug (28 page)
I knew where I was. The Saeder-Krupp arcology in Essen. Lofwyr's corporate headquarters.
I whined in frustration. Jane's scent was gone. I'd lost her.
Somewhere behind me, in another world, I heard Muirico whisper in my ear.
"Memories." His voice was as faint as a breath of air. "Follow them in."
I paused to think. What memory should I choose? Something nostalgic from my childhood, like the smell of my mother's fur and the taste of her milk? Romping with my litter mates in the forest?
Or should I try to remember Jane? The smell of her was what I remembered most—and how lost she'd looked on the night we met. Her dark hair streaked with gray, the faint creases at the corners of her deep brown eyes, the fluid grace of her body. And the way she'd smiled at me in the darkened hotel room, when I curled up next to her on the bed.
I looked around. I was still in the same spot. None of these memories was taking me anywhere. I didn't see any jewel.
Then I thought about what Muirico had said. About how people accessed the Jewel of Memory each time they "re-remembered" something they'd forgotten. By remembering something, I could get inside it. The further back the memory, the deeper into the jewel I'd go.
I'd been on the wrong track. The memories of my mother and siblings went way back, but it was still inside my head. I needed something I had forgotten .. .
Something flashed through my mind. A partial image. The smell of fear. A buzzing noise. Hands. Laughter. The sharp pinch of something nipping my skin. A whining noise: me. The smell of blood. The smell of my bowels voiding.
No!
I
didn't
want
to
go
there!
My astral body was panting, its heart racing. My ears were back, my fur raised ...
My fur ...
The memory came back in one overwhelming rush.
They'd shaved me. Made me stand in front of the whole school, up on the gymnasium stage. I'd been so frightened I couldn't remember how to shift back into human form, how to do what they wanted. What they kept shouting at me to do. While the other children laughed, the teachers had held down my wolf body, scraped my skin bare with their electric razors. Scraped away my pride, my dignity, my luxurious wolf's pelt. Reduced me to a quivering, furless creature—a caricature of a hairless human. Then the headmaster held me up, my ungainly wolf body dangling from his large hands, and told the entire school what a bad boy I'd been, to shift into wolf form. He told them he'd continue to hold me there, in front of everyone, until I shifted back into my proper shape. Into a proper little human boy.
I threw back my head and howled my anguish. No!
I didn't want to remember that! I leaped to my feet and tried to run away.
I crashed into something smooth and hard. A glassy, reddish-yellow wall that curved up and over me, its faceted top forming a roof over my head.
I froze, realizing what I'd done. I was inside the Jewel of Memory.
I felt a familiar presence: Jane. Her scent washed over me. I turned and saw the elf girl who'd run past me on Dunkelzahn's estate. I nuzzled her hand with my nose, drinking in her scent and seeking comfort. But she didn't stroke me. Instead she looked at me with eyes filled with fear and confusion.
"Help me," she whispered. "I can't find ..."
Suddenly a host of moving shadows closed in on us. It was like being at the center of a huge crowd of people and animals, all pushing and shoving, forcing flashes of this memory, of that emotion, into your mind. I was buffeted by the confusion, by the swirls of thought. Images flashed through my mind. I was a human/fish/troll/cat/eagle. I was swimming/ being chased/shooting a gun/stretching my wings in flight/programming a cyberterminal. The confusion of images and experiences was almost overwhelming. In another second Jane and I would be swept away...
"Grab hold of my fur, Mareth'riel!" Somehow, even though I was in wolf form, I was able to make myself understood.
I felt the slim hand of a child knot into the fur at the back of my neck.
I closed my eyes.
I took a deep sniff.
There! A flash of something that smelled like Jane. I followed it, tugging the elf girl behind me. A memory streaked past my nose like a running cat. I jerked forward, snapped my jaws shut around it, then tossed it back over my shoulder at Jane.
I got just a taste of it—a faint glimmer of a thought that wasn't my own. The memory felt smooth and soft in my mind. It had the milky smell of human infant. It was the memory of holding a baby—a girl whose eyes were as brown as my own. Of suckling her at my breast, feeling her teeth worry my nipple, and marveling at the clutch of her tiny hands. Of tracing a finger over the soft round tip of her human ear, so like my own, now that I'd had it bobbed so I could pass as human...
Attached to it was a tangle of other memories— every thought Jane had ever had about her daughter Matilda, including the memory of her daughter's death. Matilda had been old, wrinkled, with gray hair and failing eyesight. She had walked with a cane until she collapsed from the stroke that finally killed her. Jane had buried her in the Halifax cemetery, a young woman standing over the grave of her elderly daughter.
Jane had been forced to pose as Matilda's granddaughter—just one of the personas she'd adopted to make her way in the world. In her long lifetime she'd posed as a man so she could attend medical school, had cultivated various accents, had changed her appearance and identity in a million different ways. As she stood over her daughter's grave, feeling the rain patter down on her bonnet, she'd sworn then that she'd never have another child—that she'd do whatever she could to prevent anyone else from experiencing the grief of watching someone they know grow old and die ...
I shook my head, clearing the memories that stuck to it like cobwebs. I pressed on through the whirlwind, following Jane's scent to the next cluster of memories.
And the next...
I let Jane pluck them out of the whirlwind herself. As she did, I felt the hand that gripped my fur changing, growing larger. When I sneaked a look behind me I saw that Jane's astral form had changed. She looked as she did in the physical world—a mature woman. Except that there was one vital difference. Her eyes had lost the confusion they'd held when I first met her. With each memory she grabbed, the look in her eyes became stronger, more confident. More knowing.
Soon the only place I could smell Jane's scent was on her own body. She'd gathered all of her memories. They still existed within the Jewel of Memory, were still etched within its multi-faceted depths—but now they were also back where they belonged. Inside Jane's head.
Jane crouched beside me and wrapped her arms around my neck. As she hugged me close, I nearly drowned in her scent.
"Thank you," she whispered, her breath warm against my hear. "And goodbye."
Suddenly her arms were no longer around my neck. Just as she had at the estate, Jane had disappeared.
Instinct took over. I ran after her scent, barking at her to stay. I chased her back across Europe, back across the Atlantic, back to the island that hung low in the water, a canoe just waiting to be swamped by the huge waves that were crashing upon its shores.
I woke up in my body, weak and trembling. Lightning stabbed down out of a cloudy night sky, so close I could smell the hot ozone in its wake. The boom of thunder followed almost immediately. The skies opened up, and a heavy smash of rain suddenly poured down onto the earth. In seconds my fur was soaked through.
I lurched to my feet. Muirico was gone. And so was Jane. I threw back my head and howled, my emotions in perfect resonance with the turbulence of the storm.
The storm was unlike any I'd ever seen before. Magic must have been driving it. The clouds boiled and churned overhead, forming incredible patterns against the sky. I could see faces, eyes, thrashing limbs inside the clouds. I wondered if they were the physical manifestations of elementals or powerful nature spirits. Most of the clouds were white or gray, but others— the thunderheads that thrust up through the rest like mushroom clouds—had a reddish tinge. Multicolored lightning flashed below the thunderheads, arcing down to the ground in explosions of sparks. The bolts were vibrant neon blue, sizzling yellow, cherry red, and a luminous green. A number of them were striking the windmills near the estate, shattering the vanes and sending fragments spinning down onto the ground. The smell of ozone and burnt plastic and metal hung heavy in the air.
I plodded out of Muirico's grove and wound my way wearily between the windmills, too exhausted to run, despite the danger of a possible lightning strike. My paws tingled from the electricity in the ground, and I prayed that one of the damaged windmills wouldn't topple over onto me. All the while I fought the wind, which was roaring with hurricane force, whipping back my fur. I had to lean heavily into it to make any headway at all.
Rain came down in soaking sheets, so thick it was impossible to see more than a few dozen meters ahead. It passed over the island in waves, first icy cold, then blood-warm, bouncing back off the ground in a stinging spray. I felt a heavy patter against my back as hail began to fall. There was something else, mixed with it, that turned the ground slippery beneath my paws. I smelled an oily, fishy odor, and when I glanced down I saw that the ground was covered in tiny silver fish. Most had been pulverized by their fall from the heavens, but some were still wriggling, flashing silver against the ground.
I wasn't sure how long I'd been jandering around in astral space. Germany was thousands of kilometers away—I'd probably been out of my body for a couple of hours or more. The skies were dark enough that it could have been early evening—or maybe it was just the thick cloud cover. I hadn't eaten in some time and felt incredibly drained; it was all I could do to put one paw in front of the other. I was so exhausted that even my whiskers drooped.
I wasn't sure where I was going. Just operating on instinct, I guess. I knew I couldn't sit out in the storm, that I had to take cover. So I headed for the nearest place of refuge: Dunkelzahn's mansion.
If I'd been thinking clearly, I would have realized that the building would be locked up—and probably also magically warded against trespassers. I would
have sought out some other shelter instead. But I just
plodded along until the mansion loomed over me, then followed the wall to the nearest door.
A scooter was parked outside it. The engine was still warm; I could smell the hot oil, even over the wet-grass-and-mud smell of the rainstorm. But the rain had washed the driver's scent away. It must have been one of the rental scooters the orks had ridden into the park. I guessed that they'd been caught in the storm and decided to wait it out somewhere dry. I wondered how they'd managed to get inside.
The door was human-sized—and unlocked. It wasn't even closed. All I had to do was paw at it, and it swung open. That set off warning sirens in my head, but I was too tired to listen to them. All I could feel was relief at the fact that I was finally out of the storm.
I found myself in a high-ceilinged room so large my claws produced
click-click
echoes as I padded across the marble-tiled floor. The room was filled with a cloyingly sweet odor that made my nostrils itch: sandalwood incense. A large chunk of it smoldered in the mouth of a dragon-shaped crystal pedestal at the center of the room, smoke rising from the nostrils of the dragon. It had probably been left burning by the mansion's caretakers. The storm must have frightened them into leaving the door unlocked.
Chandeliers tinkled overhead as lightning shattered another of the windmills outside, making the ground tremble. The flash of neon-blue lightning must have sent a surge of electricity through the mansion's electrical systems. The walls on either side of me suddenly flared in a crackle of brilliant static as the floor-to-ceiling monitors that were mounted on them flashed on, then off again.
I hunkered down, instinctively reacting to the flash of light. That brought my nose close enough to the floor to smell something other than the incense. A scent I recognized in a heartbeat: Jane's.
It was fresh—Jane has passed
this
way
only
minutes ago. My ears swung forward and my tail began to wag. Jane was here. She'd come to the estate to meet me, just as the dwarf had promised.
I followed her scent into a corridor and down a plush carpet whose nap was still dented from the heavy furniture that used to stand on it, then up a double-wide staircase whose walls had blank spots where paintings used to hang. The corridors were dark; the emergency lighting was flickering on and off, obviously a casualty of the storm. But I only needed my nose to find the way.
The trail led up a second flight of stairs, then down another hallway to a door that was fitted with a sophisticated maglock with a retinal scanner and microphone for voice-recognition activation. A light beside the scanner was blinking green. I heard a faint creak and realized the door was open—but was swinging shut, a whisker-thin distance away from closing. I hurled myself at it, striking the door with both paws. I forced myself through, pushing against the mechanisms that were trying to close the door, then heard it close behind me with a click.
I found myself in utter darkness, in a room that felt even larger than the one with the wall-sized monitors. I could hear breathing and could smell Jane's distinctive scent: she was no more than a few meters away. I broke into a wide grin. At last, the long trail had come to an end. My tail began wagging furiously in anticipation of seeing her again. I switched to astral vision so I could see her...
