Spirits White as Lightning

by Mercedes Lackey

  Of course, it also killed them within hours, but neither she nor Robert had been too worried about that at the time. Neither had Aerune mac Audelaine, when he'd come riding out of Elfland to claim the drug—and the Talents—for his own.

  And Robert, like the idiot he was, had decided to declare war on the kingdoms of Faerie.

  Jeanette hadn't stuck around to see how that turned out. Everything she'd ever read told her that starting a fight with the Sidhe was all kinds of a bad idea. She'd taken a stash of the experimental drug, her guitar, some money, and her Harley and taken off before she got caught in the cross-fire. A copy of Time magazine she saw a few weeks later confirmed that she'd made the right decision.

  There'd been a blonde woman on the cover, executive chic. She'd been wearing an expression indicating she was bucking for Pope, and the banner on the cover had said something about New Corporate Ethics. The caption identified the woman as Ria Llewellyn, owner of Threshold Labs. That had been bad enough. The story inside had been worse.

  Threshold had gone down big time. Robert's black project was the lead story, along with Llewellyn finding out about it and taking full responsibility (and credit) for stopping it. There was even a photo of Jeanette's former lab assistant Beirkoff, "Llewellyn's man on the inside." Now there was a laugh. Beirkoff had been Robert's creature first and last, but apparently Robert wasn't on the game board any more. The article listed him as "missing." She only hoped Aerune had gotten him: it would serve Robert right. This was all his fault.

  It listed her as "missing"—and wanted—as well. Jeanette Campbell, the science behind Robert's ambition, wanted for questioning in connection with several hundred deaths last winter. There wasn't a photo, but thanks to Beirkoff there was a pretty good police artist sketch. She'd cut her hair immediately and dyed it black, but that wouldn't help if anyone took a close look—and with rich-bitch Llewellyn and all her money and power screaming for Jeanette's head, people would look and keep looking until someone found her. Jeanette's only hope was to lie low and keep moving, but for that she needed cash money, and her emergency stash was almost gone.

  She could have headed south, into Mexico, or made a run into Canada and hooked up with some of her contacts from the old desperado days. There was always work for a good outlaw chemist, and after her years at Threshold, Jeanette had gone from merely good to the best of the best. But leaving the U.S. would make her visible in a way she wasn't now, and she didn't want to take the risk if she didn't absolutely have to. She wasn't sure how long LlewellCo's reach was, or how personal Ria Llewellyn meant to get, and Jeanette still had a lot left to lose.

  Her choices were few. On the one hand, she could turn herself in to the authorities and cut some kind of deal. On the up side, if Robert was missing-presumed-dead, he wouldn't be able to say much to contradict whatever story she had to tell. On the downside, with Robert missing, the authorities would need a scapegoat. Jeanette didn't have a lot of interest in spending the rest of her life in a Federal pen.

  On the other hand, she could turn herself over to Aerune, if she could manage to find him. Aerune. A genuine, impossible-but-real Lord of the Sidhe. He had a use for the Talents Jeanette created with T-6/157—T-Stroke—and whatever had happened to Robert, Jeanette was pretty sure Aerune hadn't given up his plans. Once upon a time she could have asked for nothing more out of life than to meet a real live elf, but now the thought of ever running into Aerune again gave her nightmares. She'd used one of Threshold's Talents to tap his mind, and Vicky Moon had called Aerune "the Lord of Death and Pain." Jeanette had seen him up close. She believed it.

  But though the idea made her shudder in revulsion, it had marginally more going for it than the first one did. Aerune would have a use for her, and from all she'd seen, he wouldn't care how many people her drugs had killed, so long as he got what he wanted. The only problem there was that she wasn't entirely sure what it was he wanted, and if she couldn't give it to him, the penalties were apt to be a lot more severe than a long life in a small cage.

  The third choice, which had a certain horrible fascination to it, was to try the T-Stroke on herself and see what happened. That was why she'd wanted to create it in the first place, wasn't it? To give herself the powers she'd always dreamed of, the powers that would pay back everyone who'd ever teased and tormented her? She'd had a long time to go over her notes on her human test cases, and she thought she might have solved the sudden-death problem. T-Stroke didn't seem to create these powers, only develop the latent ones that were there. Her subjects had died because they burned themselves out, like an electrical circuit when you put a penny in the fuse box. It was as if they only got halfway through some kind of transformation—the body needed to tap into some outside source of power to use the Talents instead of cannibalizing its own resources, but it couldn't manage that before the initial dose of the drug wore off.

  But if she used massive megadoses of T-Stroke over a period of days or even weeks, would that give the subjects the ability to control their newly awakened abilities and use them without burning out?

  Maybe. And the only thing that was stopping Jeanette from testing her theory was the fact that only one in ten people seemed to have any innate Talent at all. It would be the blackest joke of all if she, who'd always thought of herself as so special, was a member of that humdrum ninety percent. And if you didn't have Talent for the drug to work on, it killed you outright.

  It was like a game of Russian roulette with five of the revolver's chambers loaded.

  Decisions, decisions. But a little long green makes them all easier. . . .

  Jeanette looked around the little one-room cabin. The walls were papered with yellowing sheets of what passed for the local newspaper: The Pharaoh Call and Record, Published Weekly for Lyonesse County, including the townships of Pharaoh, Morton's Fork, La Gouloue, Bishopville, and Maskelyne. Heat was a wood-burning stove; water came in bottles from the general store. Her cot was in one corner, along with a folding chair she'd bought from the store and an end table made out of a wooden crate. She had a table, courtesy of the previous tenant, and her provisions were stacked around the walls in battered cardboard boxes. It wasn't a lot, considering what she'd started with.

  But she could still make a living if she dared. She could go back to what she knew best—dealing. She'd always been on the production end before, not the street end, but she supposed she could manage. Only that would make her more visible, and probably put her on a collision course with whoever already had a corner on the local action. So that was her very last resort, when every other option had been exhausted.

  This is the scene where the heroine pages through her address book and decides to look up some old friends. Only I guess I'm not the heroine of the story, and I sure don't have any old friends, Jeanette thought grimly. She'd cut all her ties to people and places long ago—not that she'd ever had many—and now she was alone, her back to the wall. She could turn herself in to the Feds, turn herself over to Aerune, or take the T-Stroke and see what happened. Maybe under its influence she'd be able to see a way out of her problems, or at least a way to fix the formula.

  Maybe.

  Jeanette sighed, and went over to pick up her guitar. Music was the only thing that had never failed her, the only thing she could love unconditionally. She brushed her fingers across the silver strings, listening to the whispery chords. She'd play for a while. Nobody would hear her, and maybe she could figure out what to do.

  All I have to do is figure out which is the lesser of three evils. . . .

  * * *

  Greystone had told his story, all the while managing to entirely sidestep the subject of the Guardians, a feat of verbal terpsichore that Eric could only admire. If Hosea got the notion that the House had been built, and Greystone carved, to assist a group of protectors that no longer existed, Greystone had certainly never said so explicitly. And he'd certainly filled his narrative with a number of amusing anecdotes he'd never mentioned to Eric—like the night the S
tatue of Liberty had decided to go for a walk, why construction on the Second Avenue subway had been stopped, and the real reason the dirigible mooring tower on the top of the Empire State Building was never used. The gargoyle was a born storyteller, and he'd rarely had as appreciative an audience as Hosea.

  "Well, laddybuck," the gargoyle said, sitting back with a sigh of satisfaction around midnight, "that's my story, and I'm sure our Eric will tell you his, if he hasn't already. But what about you, Hosea Songmaker? How is it you come by your gift—and that banjo? And what brings you to the wicked city?"

  Hosea smiled and shook his head. "Reckon I owe you the round tale, but I guess it ain't gonna be all tied up as pretty as yours." He sat back and stretched ostentatiously, obviously settling himself to tell his story.

  "I was born and raised in a little place in the hills called Morton's Fork. I hear tell it's been a kind of a special place for as long as folks've lived there, but with everybody moving to the big city, the countryfolk are pretty much gone by now. My folks died when I was little, and I was drug up by my grandpappy and mammy. Grandpappy Jeb came by his shine honestly—got it from his daddy, and on back to where the first white folks came up into the Fork and settled down with the local folks. After he came back from the War—that'd be dubya-dubya-two—he settled down with my grandmammy Dora. They used to say she could play the devil up out of the ground with her fiddle; she was on the radio when she was a girl and everything. But she took one look at Grandpappy Jeb and said she hadn't any mind to making records and touring and suchlike, and Grandpappy, he said he'd seen enough working for Department 23—that's the OSS—to make him glad to settle himself in the place he belonged. Grandmammy said she'd got the banjo from her mammy, but she said it was just to hold it in trust, like. It's pretty old, and I guess just about every part of it's been replaced some time or another. She told me to always keep it strung with silver, and never to play it for any reason that was mean or unkindly."

  The OSS! Eric sat up a little straighter. Dharniel had always hinted that WWII had been fought on magical turf as well as the mundane, and this seemed to confirm some of the Elven Bard's cryptic hints.

  "So I'd guess you'd say I come by the music-magic naturally, but there wasn't no one in the Fork that could lesson me how to use it," Hosea continued. "Grandmammy had the music, and Grandpappy had the shine, but it'd take someone with the two of them together, he said, to really light me up, more than I could study out on my own account. So when I was growed, I went down to the flatlands to get me some more book-learning, but flatland folks don't know much about shining," Hosea said with a grin. "So I went back home to help out on my granddaddy's farm, as he and grandma was getting on in years. When she passed on last year, I knowed it weren't gonna be long afore he followed her, and so it wasn't. So I sold up for burying money, took me her banjo like she'd said to, and decided to follow my feet. I reckon somewhere in the world there's gonna be someone with the music-magic that can lesson me in what I need to know."

  "Well," Greystone said in his gravelly voice, "it looks like you've come to the right place." The gargoyle got to his feet and stretched, his wings nearly touching the living-room walls on both sides. "I think you're going to find living here an interesting experience, Hosea Songmaker."

  "Just about everything's interesting, if you come at it right," Hosea said. He stood, and offered his hand to the gargoyle. "It's been a fine evening of yarning, Mister Greystone."

  The gargoyle chuckled and shook Hosea's hand. "Just `Greystone,' boyo. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better get back to me post before someone counts gargoyles and comes up one short." He waddled over to the window and stepped out onto the fire escape. Hosea watched him climb up the side of the building to his perch before turning back to Eric.

  "Well, now, it's been a long day and you look plumb tuckered out, Eric. If you want to show me where to sleep, we'll call it a day, and maybe make us some music tomorrow," Hosea said.

  "Count on it," Eric said. A warm glow of contentment welled up in him. Things were working out so well! He had another Bard to gig with, and Greystone and the house both liked him. He wondered if Hosea might see a "Rooms to Let" sign in Toni's window sometime soon.

  As for him, there was a call he had to make, first thing Monday morning. . . .

  FOUR:

  THE GLASS CASTLE

  The carpenters hadn't quite finished, and the power still tended to flutter unpredictably at times, but it was a pretty impressive job of world-building for five months flat. Ria Llewellyn looked around her domain—corner office, executive suite, barricaded on the umpteenth floor of one of those soulless glass boxes that was taking over Midtown Manhattan. Her new home, and she had to admit that it was a better fit than L.A. had ever been. New Yorkers lived to work, and so did Ria.

  She hadn't meant to move LlewellCo's corporate headquarters to New York. That had been the last thing on her mind when she'd come out here last December chasing Eric Banyon. But after the Threshold debacle, there'd been no one else to put out the fires that sprang up all over LlewellCo East, and as the days stretched into weeks and started looking like months, the problem seemed to get worse, not better.

  It was bad enough that a couple of her subordinates had thought that buying Threshold was a good idea—she didn't know how far Baker and Hardesty had been in Robert Lintel's confidence, but they'd certainly known something was rotten there—and had kept on funding it. It was worse that Lintel had come up with the notion of whipping himself up a bunch of ninja-wizard super-soldiers with the help of a chemist who'd used to cook meth for a biker gang, and had decided to conduct field trials for his pet drug on most of the city's homeless population. But as she'd laboriously unwound the paper labyrinth that tied Threshold to LlewellCo, she discovered that wasn't, after all, as bad as things got.

  What was the worst thing was that buying companies like Threshold and letting them do whatever they wanted had become the sort of thing LlewellCo did.

  In a way, it was only to be expected. Ria's father, the power-mad elf-lord Perenor, had built the company to strike out at his enemies in a way that wouldn't draw attention from the other elves until it was too late. In its deepest essence, LlewellCo was fundamentally flawed: designed as a weapon, it carried destruction in the bones of its corporate culture.

  Not that anyone saw that but her. Ten years ago, she wouldn't have seen it either—or if she had, she wouldn't have cared. She was dazzled by Perenor's profane charisma in those days, still dancing to his piping. But all things—good and bad—come to an end. Hers had come courtesy of a blow from a Fender guitar that had put her into a coma for a very long time, followed by an even longer period of recovery with the help of some very good—in all senses of the word, for a change—people. And while she'd been gone, LlewellCo had continued on its corrupted way.

  She didn't blame Jonathan, her second in command, for what the company had done. Jonathan Sterling was principled and fiercely loyal. He'd done nothing she wouldn't have done if she'd been there. No one at LlewellCo's highest levels had really known what Threshold was up to, though maybe a more suspicious sort of person would have called them to account a little earlier. But returning after her long absence—and the wake-up call from Threshold—had made her see things in a different way than she ever had before. It made her see that LlewellCo needed to do more than simply clean up after Threshold. It needed to be reborn. And that meant giving everything—all their holdings, all their policies, all their plans—a very close look, and then changing the way they did things. Everything. Acquisitions, mergers, hirings, firings, R&D fundings, and venture capital outlay.

  It would have been easier to sack everyone, divest the company of all holdings, dissolve it, and start over, but Ria had never been a fan of the easy way of doing things. That way, the innocent would suffer along with the guilty, and besides, LlewellCo was hers. She would not abandon it.

  But—as someone once said about Hell—the paperwork went on forever.

&
nbsp; Ria set the report she was reading down on the leather top of her rosewood desk and sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. Monday morning—and she'd spent the weekend here as well, just as she had for the last six months. The Threshold debacle—the lawsuits, civil and criminal, the investigations that unfortunately seemed to lead right back to government at the Federal level—showed no signs of being over any time soon. If not for Eric, she'd be mired in the middle of it, guilty by association. As it was, she was the media's darling, the valiant corporate whistle-blower who'd stepped in the moment she'd suspected trouble and brought Lintel's evil empire crashing down.

  That particular urban fairy tale was pretty close to the truth for once, and if nobody knew she'd chased Lintel to Underhill and executed him there, it was just as well. There were plenty of other villains to chase. The government clients who'd bought Lintel's voodoo pharmaceuticals, for one.

  Jeanette Campbell, for another. The chemist who'd given Lintel the power to do so much harm.

  You can run, but you can't hide. I'll find you. And when I do—

  The intercom buzzed.

  "Claire MacLaren," Anita said. "Your two o'clock, Ms. Llewellyn?"

  "Sure. Send her in," Ria said with a sigh. "And send in some coffee, too, would you?"

  "Sure thing, boss," Anita said. Ria could almost hear the phantom popping of gum: Anita liked to project a persona straight out of vintage film noir, but Ria wouldn't have hired her if she hadn't been formidably competent. Anita Drake was Ria's personal assistant, watchdog, and gopher (as in "go fer this, go fer that . . ."). She wasn't a secretary. Secretaries worked for her. She'd come from someplace like St. Louis, and said she wanted to try a job where everyone wasn't out to kill you and suck your blood. Just wait till you know this world better, Ria thought. Corporate dueling made the kind done with swords or pistols look bloodless.

  The door opened, and Claire MacLaren walked in. She was a private investigator—Jonathan had found her and used her to locate Eric for Ria last year, and Ria had been impressed enough with her work to add her name to the little black book of utterly dependable specialists—some with quite exotic specialties—that she kept. Ria'd tried to hire her to come to work for LlewellCo full-time, but Claire preferred to keep her independence—"It's to your advantage, dear, especially considering the sort of thing you're sending me after."