Handmade Music, Luthiers. And then, below, in smaller type: Antiques restored. Tuning—Harpsichord and Piano. Paul Frederick.
Winter relaxed a little. As a small-business owner he was a bit more respectable than the traveling street person and lunatic he acted like.
"Well, Mr. Frederick, thank you for your help," Winter said decisively. "I'm sure I'll find it now."
"Good luck," Paul Frederick said somberly, stepping back from her car.
He kneiv. He knew while he was talking to me!
But the anger at being mocked was a pale, reflexive thing in the face of what confronted her.
Winter pulled her car to a halt in the open space at the curb in front of the Ancient Mysteries Bookstore. She was blocking the fire hydrant, but that hardly mattered now. She got out of the car and walked slowly over to stand in front of the shop.
Large sheets of plywood were tacked up over the doors and windows, but streaks of soot against the pale storefront still showed where the flames had shot upward, scorching everything in their path. The sheets of plywood gave the ground floor a smooth anonymity, blotting out the evidence of destruction.
There were wreaths and bouquets nailed to the plywood front door, some draggled and withered as if they had been there for weeks, some bright and new. Their meaning was unmistakable.
Someone has died here.
Winter felt a wave of angry panic that blotted out every other sensation. There was no need to ask who had died—it seemed to her that she had always known. The one hope she'd had was gone. It had been too late to keep this appointment even before she had left Glastonbury, and now there would never be time.
Oh, Cassie. I didn't even get a chance to say good-bye.
A bitter heaviness descended upon her aching heart, as if all hope of reclaiming her past had been ripped irrevocably away. She came closer, her fingers brushing the laurel leaves of one of the wreaths. Laurel, that crowned triumphant athletes and victorious generals. Laurel, for victory and death.
The card beneath the wreath was enclosed in plastic to protect it from the rain. Water had leaked in, blurring the dates, but Winter could read the rest: Mary Cassilda Chandler—Born Again to the Goddess.
Cassie had loved her, understood her, cared about her. Cassie would have helped her now—giving herself freely without judgment to solve the misfortunes besetting Winter's life. And with her death, the mirror that Winter had hoped to see herself in was smashed forever.
The scene before her wavered, and Winter blinked back hot tears. The pain of her loss was so raw, so intense, so shocking in its force that even to acknowledge it was to court her own destruction. Desperately Winter sought refuge in glib flippancy. So this was it. The trail ended here. Cassie was dead.
Murdered.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LORD OF THE WILD HUNT
See, Winter comes to rule the varied year, Sullen and sad.
—JAMES THOMSON
WINTER HAD NO IDEA HOW LONG SHE STOOD THERE, grieving in her own bleak autumn. Cassie was dead, and Winter mourned for her as if they had been closer than sisters until the moment of Cassie's death.
Abruptly, without any saving sense of transition, Winter became aware of someone watching her.
She started up, as wild as if she were being stalked, but the only thing in sight was a rather ordinary woman in denim jeans, T-shirt, and a green down vest. The only thing unusual about her was the cloud of frizzy bright red hair that framed her face like some Pre-Raphaelite madonna's. It made Winter think momentarily of Janelle. How could she tell Jannie that Cassie was dead?
"Hello ..." the young woman said. "Are you Winter? Winter Musgrave?"
No! Winter's mind shouted in reflexive denial. She took a step backward.
"Don't run away!" the other woman said. "I'm Rhiannon—I was a friend of Cassie's! She told me to wait for you—that you'd come."
"When?" Even to Winter, her voice sounded hostile and grudging. Cassie was dead, and she didn't want to share her memories of her with anyone.
"Please," Rhiannon said. "Please don't run away. I just want to talk to you. Just for a moment."
Winter took another hesitant step backward, although if this woman was going to cause a really unpleasant scene, Winter doubted if she could make it to the safety of her car in time.
"There's a restaurant around the corner," Rhiannon said. "We could go there. We have to talk."
It was, Winter realized belatedly, long past lunchtime. Her body still wanted food, even if her heart was sick at the thought. And this woman seemed determined to talk to her. Nothing much could happen to her in such a public place—and if she didn't like what this woman had to say she could always get up and leave. Wondering if she was listening to her instincts or defying them, Winter made a grudging gesture of acceptance and followed Rhiannon around the corner.
The Green Man was a bright and rather archaic oasis in the middle of modern urban decay. The Haight-Ashbury district, though faddish thirty years before, had always been a shabby and neglected part of San Francisco. It had been precisely because no one else wanted it that the flower children had flocked to it in such numbers; despite their avowed desire to create a new world, most of them had found their homes in the cracks of the old one. But The Green Man was shining and defiantly welcoming, with polished wooden tables made out of discarded cable spools, cane-bottomed Bentwood chairs, and salvaged panels of stained glass hanging in the windows. There were plants everywhere, giving the cafe even more the look of a green oasis in the midst of the city's steel and stone.
The waitress greeted Rhiannon by name and showed her and Winter to a booth in the back.
"So," Winter said coolly, when the woman had taken an order for tea and departed. "What can I do for you?" Probably not much, her tone implied.
Rhiannon flinched away from her coldness and Winter regarded her scornfully, anger displacing grief. She knew Rhiannon's kind—meddlers, and incompetent ones at that, wandering through life like some self-proclaimed New Age secret agents, dispensing occult wisdom and psychic Band-Aids to anyone they could manage to catch.
Ice numbed her heart, but ice was better than the unbearable pain and guilt. Cassilda, oh, sister—
"Well, I thought—" Rhiannon stumbled over her words in the face of Winter's obvious disapproval. "You see, Cassie and I were friends. . . ."
Not as I was her friend!
Rhiannon's eyes reddened and began to fill. She groped in the pocket of her down vest for a wad of tissues as Winter watched implacably.
You've had a lot longer to get used to her death than I have, and you don't see ME sniveling! Is sympathy what you're after? You won't get it here; I've suffered more than you can possibly imagine. . . .
"Yes," Winter drawled mockingly, "I can see that."
Rhiannon flushed and glared at her. She opened her mouth to speak and reined herself in with an effort. "The point is," Rhiannon said, taking a deep breath, "we'd been friends for a long time. We met through Circle of Fire—-that's a Blackburn Work group that meets in the East Bay—but Cassie felt it was more important to take responsibility for your own life than to expect another set of gods to come to people's rescue—-which is what the New Aeon ought to be about, really. So she started a Wiccan coven based on the Blackburn Work, but more Goddess-oriented, really. ..."
Fortunately the tea arrived—if it hadn't Winter would probably have walked out right then. Cassie was dead, and in the face of that disaster Winter had no taste for listening to New Age drivel.
"We sort of worked as astral police, you know, like the Grey Angels," Rhiannon said, and with that phrase got Winter's entire attention. What did Rhiannon know about the Grey Angels? "So we knew it was coming."
"You'll forgive me," Winter said tightly, "if I ask what this has to do with anything?" She pushed the raw anguish of Cassie's murder from her mind, courting the blessed numbness that hovered on her mental horizon. This was how it could be, if she only surrendered to it: no more fear, no mo
re pain, no more weariness and tears. There was no need to wander in the wilderness looking for some better answer that she would never find: She could become winter in fact as well as name, and if she could not heal, at least she would never be hurt again.
Only surrender, surrender, sang the seductive serpent voice. . . .
"Cassie knew the Elemental was coming," Rhiannon said, and now her eyes glittered with anger as well as tears. "She knew she was going to die. We tried to stop it, to bind it, but Cassie said it drew power from the fact that the task it had been created for was undone. We put up the strongest wards we could. . . . Cassie thought you might be able to control it—she tried to find you but you never answered your phone; she called all your old friends and none of them could help. ..."
The fury in Winter blazed up until she felt clothed in invisible lightning, like a character in a book she'd read once, whose anger alone could kill. The power of the poltergeist struggled to break free, but she had chained it, chained it forever to her service and it would never be free.
"I've heard about enough," Winter said. How dare this . . . person drag her in here simply to whine that Winter had not been there when Cassie died? "Thank you for the tea." She got to her feet.
"No! Don't go—I'm sorry! But she knew it was coming for her for weeks and there was nothing she could do—she tried and she tried, she knew it would kill her, and I loved her—" Rhiannon was crying openly now, her pale freckled skin turned blotchy and unattractive by her tears. "She never blamed you—she knew you'd come, only you'd be too late— she knew what you needed; she told me to give you a message—"
"You?" Winter said in blazing contempt. Everyone in the cafe was staring at both of them, which angered her further. She dug in her purse for some money, and threw a handful of ones on the table. "I wouldn't trust you to deliver a pizza. Now leave me alone." Leave Cassie's memory alone!
Winter turned and strode from the restaurant. She heard Rhiannon scramble out of the booth behind her and walked faster, her heels beating a quick tattoo on the wooden floor.
Rhiannon followed her up the street. "She knew you'd be coming!" she shouted at Winter's back. "She wrote you a letter—to explain—it's in my apartment—it isn't far from here. I can get it if you'll wait. Will you at least give me some place I can mail it to?"
Winter managed to keep ahead of Rhiannon, but when she reached the car she had to stop in order to unlock the door. It took her three tries to get her key into the lock, and by that time the other woman had caught up to her.
"Won't you even read it?" Rhiannon said from behind her. "Please—" She put her hand on Winter's arm.
Winter shrugged her off with a gesture that was barely less than a blow. Rhiannon staggered back, staring at her in incredulity.
"Get your hands off me, you filthy little—coward!" Winter spat. Cowards, all of them, running away from Reality's hard truths with their fairy tales of specialness and purpose!
Rhiannon retreated another step in the face of Winter's white-faced fury, but stubbornly held her ground. "I'm not the one who's running away," she said shakily, as Winter climbed into the driver's seat and slammed the door in Rhiannon's face.
Winter tucked the ticket for Long-Term Parking into her purse and started in the direction of the distant airport terminal. As much as she strove for calm, every time she thought about Rhiannon, ghoulishly haunting the sidewalk in front of the burned-out bookstore, waiting for her, her hands began to tremble and invisible lightnings danced behind her eyes. . . .
Winter took a deep and steadying breath. It was over. Everything was over, and there was no point to dwelling upon it. What mattered was that now any hope she had of finding Hunter Greyson was gone, unless she wanted to hire a private detective.
And the magickal child—the Elemental? What about it? It killed Cassie.
No. The denial was automatic. There had been a fire; the bookstore had burned with Cassie trapped inside. The rest was lies. There was no vengeful ghost stalking the five—the four—of them.
A wave of vertigo washed over her, forcing Winter to clutch at a nearby car for support. She closed her eyes, willing herself to stay upright. After a moment the dizziness waned, but every time she tried to think things over it got worse.
There was a reasonable explanation, a logical one. Fires did not start of themselves, nor objects move—nor intangible monsters stalk the living. . . .
She could feel her heart beginning to race as—trapped and frightened by her own mind—Winter sought for a way out.
Breathe. Grey's voice in her mind was a calm demand. In—out—you've been doing it for years, remember? Breathe.
Winter filled her lungs, fighting not to gasp with sheer terror. The sense of threat receded, but not the feeling that there was something left undone, and little time to do it in.
Oh, Grey—help me! But this time there was no answer, and even the certainty of Grey's presence that Winter had come to expect—self-delusion or not—was missing.
This one she had to do on her own.
"I ... believe," Winter said. Her voice was a croaking whisper. She held a hand out in front of her, fingers spread, and was pleased to see how little it trembled.
/ believe in the Unseen World. I believe in the power of the mind to obliterate time and distance, to know what it cannot possibly know and do what it cannot possibly do. There was a creature at Nuclear Lake, and in the Bidney Institute laboratory. I saw it, and 1 saw what it could do. It was there, and then it was here.
And it's won. It killed Cassie.
Strength and anger drained out of her together, leaving only weariness and grief. She tried not to think of Cassie, dead and mutilated like the animal corpses that haunted all the survivors of Nuclear Lake. If the fire had killed Cassie before the creature reached her, that death would have been more merciful. Had Cassie set the fire herself to achieve the only escape she could?
Had it been Cassie's death that had been the creature's goal all along?
// that's true then I'm free, Winter thought. The thought was barely formed before it was drowned in a torrent of guilt. How could she bear to buy her safety at the price of Cassie's death?
It wasn't my choice to make, Winter told herself desperately. Oh, but once she'd held Life in her hands and been asked to choose, and then . . .
Winter gagged and swallowed hard against the sickness in her throat. She closed her eyes tightly; she did not understand where the certain knowledge of her personal guilt had come from, but its crushing weight was enough to drive her mad. . . .
Mad. How simple. How convenient. Oh, stop it—Stop It—STOP it! how
CAN I MAKE AMENDS WHEN I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'VE DONE —
"Lady, are you okay?"
Winter opened her eyes and stared at the man with the suit coat flung over one arm and his keys in an outstretched hand, obviously a businessman returned from his trip and on his way to claim his car.
"Lady? You okay?" he repeated dubiously.
Why do people keep asking me that when I'm not? Winter shook her head and began to laugh helplessly, the sound rising and falling in the evening air like jagged arpeggios.
"I must say, you look perfectly dreadful. When you called from the plane we didn't know what to think. Of course Father and I knew that you weren't at the spa any longer, but San Francisco—" "It isn't exactly Ultima Thule, Mother." "Don't be rude, dear. Now, where's your luggage?" / think I left it in Long-Term Parking. "I'm traveling light, Mother." "Well, I can loan you some things, especially now that you've lost a few pounds. I didn't like to say anything, dear, you know I don't meddle in my children's lives, but you were getting just a touch portly there for a while."
/ weighed a hundred and ten pounds, Mother.
The Mercedes was waiting, parking lights flashing, in the drop-off zone at the entrance to La Guardia Airport. A ticket already fluttered under the windshield wipers. Mrs. Musgrave snatched it and stuffed it into the pocket of her mink baseball jacket.
"Mother—" Winter said in exasperation.
"Oh, they don't mean it," her mother said, fishing for her keys. "And I suppose I was supposed to park in Ultima Thule? It's not as if the chauffeur could just circle the block, now, is it?"
"Let me drive," Winter said.
Her mother's brows rose in well-manicured surprise. "Oh, do you still have your license? I'd thought, after your accident ..." Mrs. Musgrave delicately let the sentence drop, and got behind the wheel.
Winter's jaw tightened, but after all these years it was reflexive habit rather than a feeling of true anger. When her mother unlocked the passenger-side door, Winter slid in across the leather seat, reaching for her seat belt. Mrs. Musgrave took off before Winter was belted in, sliding the car into traffic with the serene assurance of one who knows all traffic will stop for her.
Winter leaned back against the seat and glanced at her mother. Cole-Haan shoes and Pendleton slacks, the silly-lavish jacket over a taupe cashmere turtleneck and Mikamoto pearls; her mother had not changed a bit. There might be more gray in the perfect blond hair, but with weekly visits to the salon in Manhattan—an excuse for lunch with "the girls" and shopping, or maybe a show—no one including Mrs. Musgrave would ever know.
"You ought to take better care of yourself, darling. You really have let yourself go." Mrs. Musgrave tapped manicured fingernails on the steering wheel and watched the traffic as if she suspected it of cheating her.
In that case, I wonder where I went. And if I had fun there. "How have you been, Mother?" Winter said aloud.
"Oh, life goes on. Kenneth is very pleased about, oh, something-or-other at work—you know I haven't any head for business—we had to cancel the trip to Bermuda last winter because he wanted to stay on top of things, and of course it was impossible to get a refund at the last minute, so what could we do? We sent Kenny Junior and Patricia down, and then of course I had to hear your brother Wycherly hinting around about 'special' treatment—"
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