A Host of Furious Fancies

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I’ve got it.” Ria stepped forward and placed her fingers on the tubing. The plastic grew cloudy, and the morphine stopped running into Jimmie’s veins. “Anything else?”

  “This is going to have to be fast, so no long good-byes, okay? She’ll say what she has to, and then I’ll help her go through the door. Ria, will you be my anchor?” Between them, she and Elizabet had practically rebuilt Ria from the ground up: Kayla knew Ria better than anyone else in the room, and that familiarity would help her to find her way back.

  “I will,” Ria said formally.

  Kayla reached beneath the sheet and took Jimmie’s bandage-swathed hand. No harm in that, now that Jimmie could no longer feel it. She summoned up her power and let the glow spill through Jimmie’s body, sweeping the drug from her blood. Almost at once Jimmie’s breathing changed, becoming deep and hoarse.

  “Elkanah?” she whispered.

  The others looked at each other. Her brother, Toni mouthed silently, for Kayla’s benefit. “We’re here, Jimmie,” she said. “Paul and José, and I. We’ve brought Hosea for you.”

  “Hosea.” Jimmie’s voice was slurred and seared, a damaged croak. “Hey, Toni, you didn’t have to clean out the basement after all. He can have my place.” She tried to laugh and started to cough, liquid and retching.

  Kayla put a hand on her chest, and Jimmie’s breathing calmed, but Eric could see the effort it cost the young Healer to ease Jimmie. “Hurry up,” Kayla said tightly.

  “Hosea?” Jimmie whispered.

  “I’m here.”

  “Take my hand.”

  He glanced at Kayla, who nodded, then slipped his hand beneath the sheet to clasp, very gently, the bandage covering what was left of Jimmie’s other hand.

  “Would’ve liked to know you better. Liked to explain. Never any time for that. Eric knows. Sorry. Your problem now. Sorry.”

  As Jimmie spoke, something happened. Kayla ignored it, but Eric and Ria stared at each other, neither quite sure what it was. There was the sense of Power in the room, just out of their reach.

  “Only four,” José said in a broken voice. “Always four.”

  “We should have known!” Toni said in fierce despair. Paul put a hand on her arm, quieting her.

  What just happened? Eric wanted to ask, but he was afraid he knew. There was a Power surrounding Hosea now, something Eric’s Bardic magic barely acknowledged. The same power that touched Toni and the others. Guardian power.

  :I didn’t want to tell you:, Greystone said sorrowfully, mindspeaking to Eric alone. :It might have come out another way. But it never does. Your boy belongs to the House now. To the Guardians.:

  “Good-bye,” Jimmie whispered. “Thank you, all.”

  “Okay, that’s it,” Kayla said fiercely. “She can’t take any more.” Kayla closed her eyes, willing herself to touch Jimmie’s spirit as she had before.

  This time the apartment was white, as if freshly painted. All the boxes were gone. The curtains—gray—were drawn across the windows, and the bare wood floor was gray as salt-bleached driftwood. Jimmie’s blue armor was the only color.

  “I’m ready,” Jimmie said.

  Geez, did you have to just dump all that on him and leave? You couldn’t have mentioned it while you were still walking around? “Okay,” Kayla said aloud. She turned toward the door. It wasn’t really a door. It was a symbol of what Kayla was about to do, severing Jimmie’s spirit from her ruined body, setting her free.

  Kayla opened the door.

  And forgot. Forgot her life and everything that called her to it, forgot her responsibilities and her name, all for the sight of that Light which held within it everything that had ever been, and everything that might ever be. Jimmie walked past her, into the Light, and vanished. There was a moment of piercing brightness as her armor merged with the Light, and Kayla saw echoes of that brilliance, as if Jimmie had gone to join a great host of her kindred, welcomed by all who had gone before her.

  Then she was gone, the body she had left behind starting to die, and Kayla was alone in the place that was a symbol of Jimmie’s dying body. Kayla heard her mother’s voice, calling for her from beyond the door, felt the love and the joy at their reunion. Her mother loved her, wanted her—everything else had all been a terrible mistake. She took a step toward the Light, following Jimmie—

  —and felt Ria’s fury, her implacable determination, dragging Kayla back into the world of the living.

  No—no!

  “No,” Kayla whispered, but she was back now, and could not even remember what it was beyond the door, calling to her. She shook her head, took a deep breath, the images and memories fading from her mind.

  “I’m okay.”

  One of the monitors started to keen. Ria silenced it with a chopping gesture, and all the equipment at Jimmie’s bedside went dark.

  “Good-bye, querida,” José said softly. “We’ll miss you.”

  Toni sobbed, a thick choked sound of fury and grief.

  “We’d better leave,” Paul said, his own voice far from steady. “I don’t know how long Ria can hold her spell, but its better if the hospital doesn’t have any unaccountable time lapses to explain. Come on, Toni. We have to leave. Jimmie’s gone. She isn’t here now.”

  The ride back to Guardian House in Ria’s Rolls was a silent one. Eric was stunned, aching with grief and the abrupt senseless loss. Jimmie had been his friend. They’d been talking together, laughing together, only that morning.

  Now she was gone. Dead. For nothing—no great battle, no great victory—just an accident of the kind that happened in New York a thousand times a day.

  And she’d named Hosea her successor.

  Eric glanced up at Hosea. The big man was withdrawn, contemplating something only he could see.

  “Eric knows,” Jimmie’d said back in the hospital room. The conversation they’d had a few weeks ago about the Guardians came back to him: “Once you get the Call, your life doesn’t belong to you any more. You never know where you’re going to be sent, or what you’ll have to do. There’s no way to train for this job. You can either handle it, or someone else comes along pretty quick to replace you. If we’re lucky, we get to meet our successor and pass on the Call in person, but that’s about it.”

  Does that make you one of the lucky ones, Jimmie? Eric wondered. Did you feel lucky? His eyes ached with unshed tears. Jimmie was gone. Everything they could have shared was gone. Over.

  ELEVEN:

  YOU WANT TO

  DRESS IN BLACK

  The suite of rooms was an elaborate fantasia upon death; a medieval memento mori elaborated by a big-budget madman with a flair for detail. Paintings and statuary depicted every possible way a person could die, and a series of pictures painted upon the ceiling showed every stage in the dissolution of a corpse, a motif repeated on the mosaic floor, so that whether you looked up or down, you saw decaying bodies.

  The bedposts were skeletons—elves might not sleep, as Jeanette Campbell knew now, but there were still some things they needed beds for—and the coverlet was jeweled and embroidered with more variations upon the gentle art of murder. Bed curtains of cobweb-fine black lace surrounded the bed, making it look even more like a catafalque. Imprisoned within this suite of rooms, Jeanette had nothing to do but contemplate the death, in all its forms, that was forever to be denied to her. And boredom was an additional torment.

  Invisible servants hovered around her to fulfill her every whim—fill her bath, bring her food, play music for her, dim or light the lamps. But there were no books for her to read, and all the music sounded like it came out of the Middle Ages: weirdly atonal and military, like funeral marches played on bagpipes. She’d asked for a guitar, but that request hadn’t been granted, and she thought the invisibles might not know what it was, because when she confused them, they simply ignored her orders: they wouldn’t bring her coffee either. When she got tired of trying to order them around—it was like dealing with a balky computer—she could look out the
window at the unchanging night and the eternally moonlit forest below. It had been a real shock when she discovered that she could see the same moon in the same position from windows on the opposite sides of the room.

  Other than that, she could sleep, or pace the floor—trying to avoid catching sight of herself in any of the enormous mirrors—or (as much as she hated her confinement) pray that Aerune wouldn’t come again to let her out. She could study the death images until she’d memorized every detail. And then, for a change, she could nerve herself up to try looking in the mirrors without flinching.

  The mirrors were Aerune’s other joke—funny, with all the time she’d spent imagining what elves would be like if they were real and she could meet them, she’d never imagined they could be so mind-numbingly petty. It was one thing for Aerune to still be in mourning for a girlfriend killed, as far as Jeanette could figure out, about five thousand years ago, and to be intending to wipe out the human race in revenge. That was almost dignified. Romantic, Byronic, all those things that she loved and hated at the same time. But at the same time, to have him invent this whole elaborate sniggering joke, not only on the way she looked now, but on her humanity as well. . . .

  That was cheap and petty, a symptom of an arrogance so vast it didn’t only not care how it appeared to outsiders, it couldn’t even imagine any point of view but its own. And that amount of self-obsession sort of took the edge off the whole romantic lost-love thing.

  She went over to the stained-glass windows and pushed them open wide, leaning out as far as she could. Damp smells of forest and water welled up out of the night, and in the distance she could hear the sound of a river. But aside from minor variations, the landscape was as unchanging as a photograph. The moon (or moons) never moved, the sun never rose—sometimes the place went to a foggy twilight, but on no particular schedule—and somewhere at the edge of the forest, the world stopped and turned back on itself, and the only way to get somewhere else was through a Gate that only a Sidhe could work.

  She had only the vaguest idea of how long she’d been here—even when Aerune took her out to hunt, she couldn’t get an accurate idea of the time, and the time where she went didn’t seem to have any relation to the time here—but she’d learned a lot during her captivity. About the nature of the Sidhe, about Aerune’s plans, about magic itself. Once she would have given up anything she had to see and do the things she’d done. Now, she only wished she’d been spared the disappointment of finding out what she knew. She hadn’t wanted to know that elves were so petty, so mean, so . . . empty.

  The whole place seemed as if it’d been assembled as a scrapbook of Gothic Evil Through the Centuries, with the emphasis on the High Medieval period. There was nothing new here, nothing exciting—nothing, in fact, that she couldn’t have made up for herself. Sure the creatures were weird—but no weirder than she could see in the movies. Sure the landscape was alien—but no more alien than she could see in a painting. Sure her surroundings were opulent—but you could get awfully sick of gold and jewels. Everything was grand, but nothing was comfortable. It was like trying to live in a museum.

  She should have turned herself in and gone to prison when she’d had the chance. At least they let you read in prison.

  But Aerune would have found her there, too. And Aerune still scared her, terrified her, frightened her on levels she didn’t know were in her. He was trite, but he was also monstrous. She forgot what he was like the moment she left his presence—a form of self-preservation, she suspected—but when he was near she resonated to him, like a crystal goblet that someone had struck. And that hurt, like a dentist’s drill that never stopped.

  That was what the T-Stroke had done to her—turned her into an Empath, and she resonated to the physical and psychic pain of anyone she was near. She had no control over it. And she was drawn to magic, to Talent, to what Aerune called Crownfire, most of all. That was what made her so useful to Aerune. She could no more not sense the presence of Talent than she could hold her breath forever, and try as she might, she couldn’t hide her reaction. All Aerune had to do was drag her within range of someone with Talent and she vibrated like a tuning fork. Every time he took her out of here, it was to find people like that.

  And then Aerune killed them. Sucked up their magic, their potential, their Talent, and killed them.

  And there was nothing she could do about that, either. She’d tried to kill herself. It didn’t work. It hurt a lot, and it scared her, and it didn’t work. She’d given up trying.

  She’d also tried to refuse to do what he wanted, but all it got her was pain—and if she still tried to refuse, he would begin to kill people. Surely it was better to give him what he wanted? That way, only a few people died. Fewer.

  Funny how I can’t seem to stop doing things like that. So much for good intentions.

  Time to try the mirrors again—that or throw herself out the window. She kept covering them up and turning them to the wall, but the invisibles always put them back again the way they’d been. Maybe she’d get used to what she saw in them eventually. She turned away from the window and crossed the room, her long heavy skirts swishing. She was dressed in what she guessed was Elvish haute couture, and it made everything even worse. These weren’t her kinds of clothes. They didn’t suit her, and she didn’t deserve to be wearing them. They made everything worse.

  She approached the mirror, eyes closed—after this long, she knew every inch of her prison and all its accessories well enough to navigate it blindfolded—and stood before the mirror for a long moment before she could force herself to open her eyes. A stranger stared back, looking like a caricature of the self she knew. This was what Aerune had made of her.

  Her eyes were now wide, the bright unnatural green of a child’s crayon, fringed with thick black lashes. Her body had been fined down to asexual slimness, stretched and remade. Her hair was long and thick and moon-silver, cascading down over her shoulders and back, giving her the look of some exotic bird. This was her the way she’d always wished she was, and that was the cruelest joke of all—that Aerune had taken her secret dreams and dragged them out into the light of day, making them dirty with his touch. She hated it, hated him, and hated herself most of all.

  As she watched, the elaborate silk gown she wore began to flow and change like melting wax, darkening and molding itself to her body until she was clad head to foot in a sheath of form-fitting black leather covered with matching silver studs along the shoulders, arms, and legs. Around her neck was a heavy leather collar with silver spikes, the kind a hunting dog might wear.

  This was her hunting costume.

  “No. Oh . . . no,” she whispered, backing away from the mirror.

  And then her image vanished as well, and Aerune stood within the ornate frame, holding out his hand.

  “Come, my hound. It is time to hunt once more—and this time, I have a special treat for you.”

  She made a sound in the back of her throat—a groan of utter despair. Useless to fight him, impossible to try. Hating herself, she held out her hand to him in response. There was a jarring wrench of translocation, and they were . . . elsewhere. Now she had a leash upon her collar, and Aerune held the end.

  “Do you like it?” Aerune asked her.

  She looked around herself, wondering where he’d brought her this time. Back to Earth, somewhere in daylight, in some sort of office building.

  No, not an office. The halls were filled with teenagers, wearing clothes that hadn’t been in fashion in a very long time. A school of some sort, she supposed.

  No one saw them. No one would see them unless Aerune wished them to. But Jeanette could see—and feel—everything. Emotions buffeted her naked senses like gusts of wind—despair, murderous anger, fear and pain and joy so intense it made her reel drunkenly, bathed in the emotional storms of adolescence.

  This was high school. Her high school.

  Recognition brought horror. James K. Polk High School, sometime in the late eighties. The same time
she’d been going there.

  “Why did you bring me here?” she demanded furiously.

  “To hunt,” Aerune answered. “Do you wish to see yourself as you were? There you are.”

  He pointed. A girl was walking down the hall. Her mouse-blonde hair was skinned back in an unflattering ponytail, and she wore no makeup. Her skin was blotched with acne. She was wearing a cheap leather jacket that didn’t fit very well and carrying an armload of books. Her head was down and her shoulders hunched, as though she expected somebody to hit her.

  Me. That’s me. But why don’t I stand up straight? Scuttling along like that, it’s practically like wearing a “kick me” sign.

  She stared at herself, feeling the faint recognition of Talent thrill over her skin. It was no surprise; the T-Stroke would have killed her outright if she didn’t have it. But it was stifled, suppressed, ignored. Covered over with a sullen anger that didn’t look outside itself, that poisoned everything it touched.

  Stupid. I was so stupid.

  Jeanette watched as her younger self stopped in front of her locker, awkwardly juggling books as she reached for the padlock. A boy in a cream and gold varsity jacket strode toward her, deliberately banging into her and spilling her books all over the floor.

  Cary McCormack. Oh, god, I hated him!

  As she bent to pick them up, one of the boys with Cary darted forward and slapped a sticker onto the back of her jacket. It was a promo sticker for a local rock band, and adult Jeanette thought it looked pretty cool. But she felt the flare of rage from her younger self like a spike in her guts as younger-Jeanette wheeled on her tormentor, hissing curses.

  All of the boys laughed, even Cary, but she could see into them as well as she could see into her other self, and there was none of the gloating joy she expected to see—just worry and uncertainty, boys feeling their way into adulthood just as her younger self was. And stuffed into Cary’s back pocket, a well-thumbed paperback novel, one that she had read and loved. He was watching her younger self anxiously, a little bit of him hoping for some other reaction than rejection and anger, an acknowledgement that he hadn’t meant her any real harm.