Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02

by Witchlight (v2. 1)

  That's it then. I drive—unless and until I get through to Cassie and get some real information. And anyway, almost every major city has at least a small airport—even Indianapolis. No matter where I am, I'm only hours away from the West Coast if there's a real emergency.

  By evening Winter had crossed the border from Indiana into Illinois. She'd taken to trying Cassie every time she stopped, and had gotten no answer at either of the numbers. While Cassie might be out of town, surely the bookstore would still be open?

  Maybe they've gone out of business. Places like that do. Ramsey didn't tell me how long it had been since she called him—and I didn't think to ask, dammit.

  But that, at least, was easily remedied.

  A few hours after dark, Winter stopped for the night in a shabby little motel that offered a night's lodging for the price of a Wall Street lunch. The room she got was run-down and depressing—surprising partly in the fact that, unsatisfactory as it was, people would still pay to rent it—but it had a phone.

  The nearest restaurant was in the town beyond. Winter, reluctant to face food that might match her lodgings, settled for a Coke out of the machine. She shouldn't put off the call anyway. Picking up the phone, she dialed in the fourteen-digit access number, then Ramsey's number. A moment later she heard him answer.

  "Ramsey?"

  The sense of relief she felt when she heard his voice made her giddy; she realized that in some part of her mind she'd just expected him to be gone. Vanished without a trace, like her past.

  "Winter!" His voice was politely cheerful . . . and faintly slurred.

  He's drunk, Winter thought in surprise. "Hi, I'm in Illinois. I thought I'd call and see how you were."

  "It was good co see you. We'll have to do this again."

  Winter recognized the tone in his voice. Someone skating on the thin edge of memory, not quite sure of the context.

  "Maybe the five of us could have our own private reunion," she said. "And actually, that's sort of why I'm calling. I've been trying to reach Cassie all day and I haven't been able to get through to her either at home or at that bookstore you said she has. I'm hoping she hasn't moved on; when did you say you'd talked to her last?"

  The sudden strained silence at the other end of the line made Winter think she'd just said something wrong—but what?

  "Ramsey, you said you'd talked to her," Winter prompted, almost pleading. "When?"

  "A couple of weeks. Maybe a month. Or two. I didn't exactly write it down in my Day Timer." There was a sullenness in his voice she had not heard before.

  And I bet you forgot all about it—until this morning. And something about dead animals in the middle of your kitchen brought it right to mind, Winter thought grimly. The creature that stalked her—that seemed to stalk all of them—somehow played upon the memory, withholding recollection at will.

  But hadn't she read somewhere that the brain generated its own electric current? Winter remembered the ball of lightning that had destroyed Nina's car; the spark that had melted the lamp in Ramsey's guest room. Maybe she was what had made Ramsey remember. And if so, could she do it now—at this distance?

  "Well, of course not. Why would you do that?" Winter answered soothingly. "But I can't reach her at her home, and the bookstore doesn't answer, so I'm starting to worry. Was it after Christmas that she called you?" He'd said he exchanged Christmas cards with the others. It would be a logical time for a letter. But not if the situation were urgent.

  There was no answer from the other end of the line.

  "You said it was important, Ramsey—that Cassie had a problem. You asked me to look her up."

  "You told me you were going to go see her." Ramsey's tone was as near to hostile as she'd ever heard it. If she was the force that had made him remember, apparently she couldn't manage the trick from where she was now.

  "Of course I did. I'm just wondering, now that I can't reach her . . ." Winter tried to think of some question that would pierce the veil of forgetfulness that her disembodied opponent had woven around Ramsey Miller.

  "Look, Winter, I'm glad you called, but I'm pretty busy right now. Catch you later, okay?" The phone went dead.

  She called back immediately but the line was busy, and after half an hour she admitted to herself that Ramsey had probably taken the phone off the hook.

  That left Janelle.

  Winter stared at the phone doubtfully. Ramsey said that Janelle's memory was unreliable, but Winter had only Ramsey's word for that. On the other hand, Janelle hadn't seemed to be in touch with Cassie when Winter had asked before. There was probably no point in calling her at all.

  Since when did you become a coward? Winter demanded scornfully of herself. Balancing her Filofax on her knee, she quickly punched in the combined digits of her PhoneCard and Janelle's number.

  This time she'd work into things gradually. She could tell Jannie about visiting Ramsey; it was a reasonable call for old friends getting back in touch to make—

  "Hello? I'd like to speak to—"

  "She isn't here," Denny said, and slammed down the phone.

  At nine o'clock at night? Winter slowly replaced the receiver in its cradle. Whether Janelle was there, or out—Or dead, a chill inner voice added— Winter was not going to be able to talk to her. Not tonight, anyway.

  She tried both of Cassie's numbers again—it would only be 6:00 on the West Coast—and got, as she had learned to expect, no answer.

  No answers anywhere.

  They were in the apple orchard below Greyangels—somehow she knew that, although she had no conscious memory of the place. The close-planted rows of trees were covered with masses of pink-white blossoms, so new that the tightly clustered petals had not yet begun to fall to the ground.

  In his fringed white leather jacket and acid-washed jeans, Grey blended into them; a snow-leopard against a field of ice. His eyes were as pale as the rest of him—quicksilver mirrors of crystal and light.

  "Stay with me," Hunter Greyson said. "Stay with me, Winter." He reached for her.

  There was no reason for the words, the gesture, to frighten her so, but terror was a sudden cold weight beneath her heart. She began to back away, out of reach, but she was too slow. Grey grabbed her arm, and she could feel his fingers sinking into her flesh like hot iron into snow.

  "Stay with me. Stay with me, Winter. Stay with me stay with me stay with me—"

  She felt his fingers break the skin and knew that in a moment the blood would come—and that when it did, Grey would tear her to ribbons. She had to get away. If she did not, he would destroy her.

  She struggled against him one final frantic time, but it was too late. The sluggish blood flowed over her skin like cold acid, and as it did, Hunter Greyson began to change.

  His face elongated, the cool patrician features sliding sickeningly out of alignment, until instead of a mouth there was a muzzle, and his teeth were long and sharp. Helplessly she began to cry, and her tears burned, too, melting the flesh from her face.

  "Stay with me. . . ." He leaned toward her, raising his other hand to begin the flensing of her, and she could not bear it, not again—

  She screamed, and tore free of him, the blood was everywhere and would not stop. Grey snarled, and the scent of apple blossoms was gaggingly strong, like the smell of rot and decay. She ran, but the apple blossoms were falling now, and she slipped on their slick white softness and fell, helpless. . . .

  The sound of her own scream woke Winter moments before she crashed to the floor. For a moment she fought frantically against the cocooning sheets until the very ordinariness of her fruitless struggles brought her fully awake.

  A dream. It was only a dream.

  For a moment Winter lay there panting, almost whimpering with relief. She was soaked in clammy sweat and her heart hammered as if she had, indeed, been running.

  He'd wanted her. To stay with him always. He'd wanted her to stay, and the flowers had been everywhere. She hadn't been able to get the scent out of he
r hair afterward. . . .

  With hands that shook uncontrollably, she untangled herself from the sheet.

  Grey had wanted her.

  The memory of that nightmare hunger made her shudder. It was as vivid as if she still dreamed, and even now it seemed as if she could smell the apple blossoms. No wonder she hadn't even wanted to see the orchard behind the house, if that was what had happened there. . . .

  But how could it have?

  Winter frowned, confused, feeling the borders of sanity and unreason slide over each other in her mind. What she had dreamed could not have had any counterpart in reality. People's bodies did not shift like quicksilver; and when they killed, it was not with fangs and claws. She was not dead. She had dreamed. That was all.

  Only a dream . . .

  She kicked her feet free of the blankets and sat up to turn on the lamp. The warm illumination banished the last of the night shadows and cleared her head. She stood, stretching, and winced at the stiffness in her muscles. She must have been lying there rigid as a board until she'd knocked herself out of bed. But the nightmare was only a manifestation of her anxiety—a projection of her fears about the others. She could have dreamed of Cassie just as easily. Grey had not turned into a monster and tried to devour her alive.

  She thought.

  Wearily she ran a hand through her hair. Who could tell where reality ended any more? At Nuclear Lake and in the Bidney Institute Lab she'd already seen and experienced things that were starkly unbelievable by modern standards—and Winter was wise and honest enough to admit that if they happened to her, similar things probably happened to others as well. The world was a stranger and more frightening place than anyone was willing to admit; a place without limits, where wonders and horrors occurred every day and miracles were commonplace.

  Wonderful. A whole culture in denial. Is there a twelve-step program for the refusal to see ghosts?

  Winter stretched again. If she could not work the stiffness out of her muscles she might have to think about staying here an extra day—without rest, she'd be a danger to herself and anyone she encountered on the road.

  The nightmare was still too vivid to let her even consider sleep, but maybe a shower . . . ? And she supposed she should remake the bed, even if she didn't think she'd be getting back into it anytime soon. She reached down for the bedclothes, and stopped.

  The mattress and the floor around the bed were covered in apple blossoms.

  Winter left the hotel fifteen minutes later, driving west in the dark.

  By the time the sun had risen that morning, Winter—inspired by the same instinct that causes the prey to lead the hunter astray—had left the bland artificiality of the interstate for the blue highways, the thin twisting map-lines that led through real lives and real towns. By evening she had come to accept that there would never be an answer at the phone numbers she had for Cassie Chandler—and to realize, too, that this slow westward journey was necessary in itself.

  For the next week she worked her way slowly west, through Fayetteville, Fuller's Point, Antigua, Grimsby, Lemuria, Broken Choke ... a journey not through the Madison Avenue version of America, but through the real one, until Winter finally understood how far out of true her own life had been.

  Fayetteville. The waitress in the town's one restaurant had directed her to the justice of the peace, and Winter had spent the night in a spacious second-floor bedroom that looked out over a quiet street and the lazy river below.

  It was not even so much that the life she had was not what she could have expected to happen to the young college girl whose past she had so painstakingly researched. It was that, in the final analysis, even the life she'd had—that of Winter Musgrave, Wall Street broker and analyst— had been unfinished, incomplete. Just as Ramsey's life was, and Janelle's. She'd never built anything that could grow.

  Fuller's Point. An ancient rooming house on the edge of town, the sheets cool with long storage and smelling faintly of lavender and pine, where Winter continued to practice the gifts that came to seem more and more ordinary. She could summon the lightning with a touch, and slam a door from across the room, and knew it was nothing but meaningless theatrics.

  Because just like the others, she had staggered down some spiritual blind alley somewhere in the past she could not remember.

  Because of Grey? Somehow that felt right. The largest part of her unfinished business had to do with him. Ramsey had said how surprised they'd all been when she left college without a word to any of them.

  Antigua, and a brightly impersonal motel meant to serve the nearby Air Force base. Each night as she slept, Winter felt Grey waiting for her beneath the surface of sleep, and could no longer say which she dreaded more—the bad dreams or the good ones.

  Had she just walked off and left them—left him? What had he thought—how long had Grey waited before realizing she was never coming back? If that was what she'd done, then no wonder the dreams began with him begging her to stay, and ended in blood and terror.

  Lemuria. No town at all, simply a cluster of battered, time-bleached wooden buildings, and Winter too tired to go onward or back. She'd driven into the sagging barn and slept in cramped discomfort on the back seat of her car as coyote howls crossed and blended in the night. In the morning she had driven four hours down the ruler-straight desert highway before she saw a roadside cafe.

  She had wronged him. She owed both of them some closure to that part of their past, an ending in place of a thoughtless adolescent cruelty. And perhaps that closure could help her end the inhumanity that stalked all of them. Truth Jourdemayne had told Winter that she must take the magickal child back into herself to destroy it, but at the time she hadn't even known where to begin. She felt stronger now. Perhaps it was possible, Winter thought with dawning hope.

  She would ask Cassie.

  Cassie would know.

  There are two U.S. cities into which the Automobile Association of America earnestly advises its members not, under any circumstances, to bring their automobiles.

  Boston is the other one.

  Yesterday morning Winter had crossed the border near Needles, circled wide around the L.A. Metroplex, and headed north along California 1, the Pacific Coast Highway. Coastal California's amazing and dramatic beauty captivated her just as it did on every visit: the hillsides still green at the end of the rainy season, the mist-hung redwoods marching all the way to the ocean's stark edge.

  She'd stopped that night at a Bed-and-Breakfast just south of San Jose, and had a reservation for tonight in San Francisco at a B-and-B somewhere near a neighborhood called Russian Hill.

  The rest ought to have been easy. And it was, until she crossed the Oakland Bay Bridge.

  San Francisco, like Rome, is a city built on seven hills—and like the Eternal City, Winter discovered that the City by the Bay was a magic labyrinth of dead ends and one-way streets: of streets that vanished while she drove down them and streets that appeared on her map and nowhere else. She ended up down at Fisherman's Wharf almost immediately— learning in the process that cable cars always have right-of-way— and at the end of three frustrating hours she was back there again; no closer to Haight Street and Cassie's bookshop than she'd been to begin with.

  Winter pulled into a parking lot and rolled down her window. The ocean smell was strong and fresh—Winter, who lived in the country's other great seaport, could not remember ever having smelled the sea so clearly.

  Tourists seemed to be everywhere, carrying shopping bags full of sourdough bread or pennants advertising Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. The balloons carried by children and offered by vendors gave the Wharf the look of an open-air carnival, and seemed to underscore Winter's angry ungracious mood. She wondered if she ought to give up, if only for the day. Or stop for lunch, at least—the box of granola bars she'd consumed instead of breakfast was not an adequate substitute for two missed meals, or so her body told her.

  "Can I help you?"

  Winter glanced up. The voice belonged
to a young man with long brown hair, wearing overalls and a tie-dyed T-shirt and looking as if he was as much a part of this place as the fishing boats that clustered in the water beyond.

  "You look lost," he went on, smiling.

  Winter regarded him with habitual suspicion, resisting the impulse to roll up the driver's-side window in his face. On second glance, he wasn't as young as all that, but something about his friendly, open, features held the ageless grace of the High Elves—as if some woodland sprite had chosen to mingle with the tourists on a spring day in SF.

  "I'm actually trying to find the, um, Haight-Ashbury," she said. Make what you care to of that!

  "You are lost," he said ruefully. "And that isn't really such a good area for . . ."

  For a tourist, Winter mentally completed the sentence. "A friend of mine lives there," she added, unbending slightly. "Can you help me? The map I have says you can get there from here, but—"

  "There are a couple of streets closed because of the construction. Can I see your map?"

  Winter passed it over, and, looking to her for permission, the stranger pulled a felt-tip out of his pocket and marked a route. "This is the best way to get there. What address are you looking for?"

  Winter couldn't see any harm in giving him that information—the bookstore was a public business, after all—and rattled off the number of the Ancient Mysteries Bookstore.

  The man seemed to recoil for a moment, as if what she said had more than ordinary meaning to him.

  "Oh." The liveliness that she had heard a moment before in his voice was gone. "Oh," he said again. "I'm sorry."

  "Is something wrong?" Winter said, an edge to her voice.

  There was a silence, long enough that Winter wondered if she'd run into one of the loonies San Francisco was supposed to abound in.

  "Let me give you my card," the man said finally. "I have a shop in that area, right down the street. There's a map on the back that should help you get . . . where you're going. And you might stop by sometime. We'd like to see you. Really."

  When Hell freezes over, Winter thought grimly, but she took the card. As he'd said, there was a map on the back, and the directions looked fairly clear. She turned it over.