For anyone.
She pulled her latest rental car into the guest parking lot facing the Institute and parked, an action which brought back the memory of her previous visits here. Despite her constant overwhelming impression of inadequacy, Winter knew rationally that she had come a very long way in a few short weeks—from dependent ex—mental patient to a woman who could reclaim—and take responsibility for—the demons of her own past.
Now all that was left was to say good-bye.
Winter gathered all her poise and self-possession and walked up the steps and into the building.
School was in session; the Institute's outer office was filled with milling students, all of whom seemed to have some urgent business with the Bidney Institute staff. As she came in, Winter glanced at one girl with flaming red hair who wore a brilliant blue stone at her throat. CZ, Winter thought automatically—the pendant was far too brilliant to be blue topaz. With some difficulty, she pushed herself to the front of the crowd and got the receptionist's attention.
"Is Truth Jourdemayne in?"
Meg Winslow's startled glance was one more confirmation to Winter of how much she had changed—or perhaps only a tribute to her new wardrobe; Ralph Lauren instead of Calvin Klein; soft, romantic pieces in hopeful pale colors, like the flowers that bloomed in the spring. Winter smiled tightly to herself. Even if the rest of her life was to be a losing fight, she intended to make a good showing. Jack had always said that showing up for the fight won half the battle.
She wondered where he was now. Jack Thoroughgood, her earliest mentor, had retired from The Street after a career of many years a few months before she'd left for Fall River. He'd lasted at Arkham Miskatonic King long enough to become a legend; job burnout on The Street was nearly as high as it was for cops and air-traffic controllers, and to survive at all was itself a victory.
With a wrench, Winter brought her mind back to the present. She couldn't afford to go drifting off here.
"Just a minute, please," Meg said. She started to turn away to deal with someone else.
It was irrational, after Winter had come through so much, that a brush-off from a harried receptionist should have the power to upset her, but it did. As Meg turned away, Winter felt the thrill of power spider-walk up her spine. Ignore me, will you? She thought longingly of raising Cain— in a psychic storm Meg's phone would shatter, her computer explode, all the electronic marvels of the twentieth century turn against her. . . .
Suddenly Winter realized how easy doing just that would be: Her psychokinesis was truly an extension of her thoughts now. Hers was the power, under the control of her conscious mind at last: to punish, to avenge. . . .
Very slowly, Winter set her bandaged hand on the counter that separated them and pressed, welcoming the pain of her wounds. Yes, she could hurt Meg and everyone else in this room. With a snap of her fingers she could summon the lightning and turn this room to a storm of poltergeist rage worse than the one that had destroyed her apartment. But if she did, for the first time in her life it would be she, Winter Mus-grave, who was consciously responsible—not the hate-serpent, whose spasmodic bursts of psychokinetic rage had randomly tyrannized her through childhood and beyond. Her.
Winter drew a shaky breath. She had the sense of stepping back at the last instant from the brink of some unimaginable abyss that had opened just beneath her feet. She had claimed her power and acknowledged her anger. Now Winter had to admit that her anger could kill, and vow to chain it forever. Any other choice would make her no better than the monster who had sent the artificial Elemental to stalk her. With an effort, she stepped away from Meg and took a deep breath.
"Winter! I'm so glad you came back!" Truth cried warmly. She stepped through the press of students, holding out her hand in greeting. "Isn't it a zoo today? Dr. Roantree's running an opening screening, and everybody wants to be psychic," Truth finished with a sigh.
"Why do it?" Winter wondered.
"It's the closest thing to a cross-section we're going to get in this field, and if you don't have a statistical baseline, how can you tell when you've deviated from it?" Truth said wryly. "But come on back to my office; I'll get us both coffee."
Leaving Winter in her office, Truth headed back to the coffee machine. She'd actually been watching for long enough to see Winter win the struggle with her own anger. If it had been necessary, Truth would have intervened—in the last several months, she had set enough wards around the Institute to enable her to pull the plug on most consciously directed psychic assaults—but she was glad she had not had to. Self-control was the first step on the Path; to see that Winter had come so far on her own was a greater relief to Truth than she would have realized.
"I'm so glad you came back," Truth said, coming back into her office a few moments later with precariously balanced cups and a plate of cookies. "I like your new look," she added.
"I'm afraid my old look—what's left of it—is locked in a car trunk somewhere in San Francisco," Winter said.
"San Francisco? Was that where you went? I didn't know what to think when you went off that way. ..."
Winter made an abortive gesture, rising to unburden Truth. "I had to find the others," she said, setting the cups carefully on Truth's desk. The bandages made them slippery to handle, but she knew she was lucky to have escaped as lightly as she had. The glass on her apartment floor could have sliced through tendons as easily as through flesh. "Find them. Talk to them. Find myself—and doesn't that sound like something our mothers would say? Not that my mother ever would have," Winter finished with a trace of bitterness.
"It sounds as if you've been busy," Truth said neutrally.
Winter looked away, her manner suddenly stiff. "Not busy enough," she said roughly. "Cassie—I knew her in college—is dead."
Truth was nearly as familiar with Winter's Taghkanic days by now as Winter was. "Cassilda Chandler?" she asked carefully. Winter nodded. But Cassie, like Winter, was in her thirties.
"It killed her," Winter said, and there was no need to explain what "it" was. "It burned her to death in her bookstore in San Francisco. They said she knew it was coming. . . ." Abruptly Winter covered her face with her hands and wept; the fierce angry pain of one who took every loss as a personal failure. After a few moments she sat up and took a deep breath, wiping at her eyes. Truth pushed the box of Kleenex across her desk, and Winter pulled out a fistful and dabbed at her face.
"I'm sorry. But it's my fault she's dead."
"I don't know whether it is or not." Truth selected her words with careful honesty. "But I do know that you didn't deliberately choose her death. I know it sounds inadequate, but would you like to talk about it?"
"I don't know." Winter drew another deep breath. "I don't know if I can. Cassie was a—" She waved her hand helplessly. "I don't know what to call it without being rude. Her friend Rhiannon said she was a witch."
Truth smiled faintly. "They do call themselves that," she admitted. "But wasn't Cassie involved in the Blackburn Work when she was here?"
"With Grey," Winter agreed, pronouncing the name with only the slightest of hesitations. "Rhiannon said that Cassie—I'm not sure I'm remembering this right—had decided that it was more important to depend on yourself than on any gods at all, so she'd sort of adapted the Blackburn Work? I hope that doesn't offend you," Winter added dutifully.
Truth smiled to herself. "It's more or less what Thorne did with the magickal tradition he was trained in," she said. "Change is usually a good thing, when it helps people and organizations adapt to new truths. But tell me more about Cassie, if you can. You said she was still involved with the Work. Do you know if she tried to summon or stop the Elemental?"
Winter frowned, trying to remember what Rhiannon had said. At the time she'd been to caught up in her own emotions to listen. "I think it sought her out. I think it sought them all out." Winter drew another long shuddering breath. "Oh, Truth, everything's gone so wrong!"
It took nearly an hour for Winter to summar
ize the events of the last month—of her visits to Janelle, who had trapped herself in an abusive marriage out of fear of success, and Ramsey, whose life was another sort of failure. As Winter spoke, the Elemental's attacks and the daily lives of her college friends seemed to meld into one vast tapestry, events supernatural and natural blending together into one long tragedy.
"After I found that Cassie was dead I just lost my head—her friend Rhiannon said she left a letter for me, but I didn't even stop to see if she was telling the truth. I came back East, visited my family, and then went to my apartment." Winter laughed shakily. "It looked like a bomb had gone off in there, and while I was looking around, that thing came back and paid me another visit, just like at Nuclear Lake."
"You don't seem too upset, all things considered," Truth said, darting a glance at Winter's bandaged hands.
"You can't be terrified all the time," Winter said, a faint note of gallows humor in her voice. "And ... it wasn't the first time it had come back. I made it leave. But, Truth, I don't think I can do that again—and if I could, it would only mean I was giving it a chance to attack someone else."
Truth sighed. What Winter said was true. "I think you are the only one who has any chance of stopping it," Truth said slowly.
"But you don't think it's a very good chance." Winter stood, more to release tension than from a real desire to end the interview. "That's okay. Nobody lives forever. Ugh. I'm stiff from all that driving. Want to go for a walk?"
"I think this is where I was happiest," Winter said. At Winter's urging, she and Truth had walked across the campus, past the buildings, to where the tended manicured lawns of Taghkanic College gave way to the orderly ranks of gnarled old apple trees that marched down nearly to the river's edge. "Not any particular place. Just at college."
The water lapped at the shore of broken shale with a sharp choppy motion. It was May; the trees were in full leaf now, their branches spotted with hard green spheres that would become apples in the months ahead. The river was wide here, and on the far side the bank rose sharply, its canopy of trees a green vista matching the one on this side, except for a clearing or two that signaled the rolling lawns of a Hudson Valley stately home.
"Many people say that about their college years." Truth had gone to Harvard, spending six years as a hard-science workaholic. She did not remember her college years as being particularly happy. The best years of her life were now.
"It's just that everything after that went wrong somehow. You make choices in college that you aren't ready to make, that nobody tells you how to make. Every choice is built on those, and slowly everything just sort of goes out of control. . . ." Winter fell silent, inspecting some interior landscape.
Truth waited patiently to hear the real reason for Winter's return. Everything else, frightening as it was, could have been handled with a phone call.
Finally it came.
"Tell me what you think I ought to do about the Elemental. I have the feeling I'm only going to get one chance."
Winter's abrupt change of subject did not confuse Truth; it was only an attempt to deal with a subject that, by its very nature, was nearly impossible to deal with. Sacrifice. Self-sacrifice.
"You told me you'd gone looking for the other members of your Circle," Truth said. "You mentioned the others. Did you find Grey?"
Winter stooped and came up with a small handful of rocks, heedless of the bandages on her hands. Focusing intently on the task, she began to fling them out into the water one by one.
"I never saw him again after I went home from college that spring." Winter's voice was strained. "I don't think I treated him very well after that. I think he thinks so, too. Or else he's already dead."
No! her mind screamed silently, and a sick heaviness of grief throbbed in her chest. Never to see him again—never to talk, to touch, to kiss . . .
"Do you think—?" Truth began.
"No!" Winter's denial was hot and quick. "He ... I don't know," she faltered miserably at last. She closed her hands tightly over the last of the stones, and after a moment Truth saw red begin to seep through the layers of gauze.
"Winter!" The exclamation seemed to rouse the other woman; she dropped the stone with a hiss of pain and held out her hands. Rusty flowers of blood bloomed through the tape.
"That was stupid," she said with only a faint quaver in her voice. Truth saw her bite her lip, but her hands remained steady. "As I was saying," Winter continued in a tightly controlled voice, "I don't know where Hunter Greyson is or what he's been doing. I hope Cassie's friend Rhiannon can tell me; that's where I'm going next. After that, I imagine I have to let this occult thing of yours catch up with me." Her voice went flat on the last sentence. "You've said you could offer me some advice."
"Yes." Truth did not add to the statement with false words of reassurance. She had too little information—even the warning she had received that this battle was not hers to fight did not mean that Winter would survive it. "But first, let's go get that hand seen to—it looks as if you've reopened a very deep cut."
"Probably." Winter's voice was uninterested. "But the deepest cuts don't bleed, Truth. They don't bleed at all."
A quick stop at the campus infirmary got Winter's hands rebandaged and gained her a stern admonition from the campus nurse. Afterward, Truth steered them toward the faculty dining hall.
"You look like you could use some lunch, and I want to tell you what I've learned while you were gone."
Like most of the college buildings, the interior of the dining hall was done in the Gothic style of the great European universities, imparting something of an ecclesiastical tone to the long high-ceilinged room. The area reserved for the faculty's use was on the second floor of Taghkanic's cafeteria building, and doubled as the faculty lounge. Orders were sent down and meals sent up from the kitchen below by means of the dumbwaiter system that had been new when the college was built.
With the familiarity of long practice, Truth took Winter's order, and added a bottle of wine—a privilege granted only to senior faculty and those nonfaculty, like Truth, who used the dining room. Once the order had gone down she conducted her guest to a table.
"You'll feel better once you've had something to eat," Truth said.
"I can't stay," Winter burst out "—very long," she amended under Truth's level gaze. "Every minute I delay, something could happen. ..."
"I'll drive you to the airport myself—tomorrow," Truth said firmly. "For now—do you remember Dr. Atheling from Fall River?"
Winter frowned. "He was one of the other doctors, not mine. He was . . . very kind." She shook her head. "It's all jumbled; I'm not sure how much of what I remember really happened. I was on so many different drugs; you know, you never realize how far from normal you've gotten until you try to go back." Winter sighed and looked at Truth, willing her to go on.
"I went to Fall River and spoke with him." As she knew Winter had, Truth left some things unsaid. Winter could not yet have Truth's own hard-won acceptance of the realities of the Unseen World, and to confront her with things she would have to dispute would be needless cruelty. "He asked how you were; apparently he knew even while you were there that an Elemental had been constructed to stalk you."
"But he doesn't know who sent it, or how to stop it, any more than you do," Winter said with brutal insight. Just then, a chime from the dumbwaiter announced the arrival of the food, and conversation ceased while the plates were brought to the table and the wine was poured.
Winter drank thirstily, as if it were water—or as if she were trying to get drunk. "So now what?" she said, with a faint aggressive note in her voice.
"Now you confront it anyway, with Hunter Greyson's help or without," Truth said. "It's the only thing I can think of that might work. You have some sort of connection with it; you're the one it's trying to reach. Magicians don't exactly list in the telephone book, you know—and while I'm not a very good one, I have the feeling that Dr. Atheling is, and he said he couldn't control it."
But had he? Truth wondered. Or had he said he wouldn't?
"You said you've controlled it before; that's a start," she finished.
Winter looked down at her newly rebandaged hand with a rueful expression. "In a roomful of broken glass I had a lot of incentive. But all I could do was push it away—and that was the hardest thing I've ever done." She drank again, emptying the glass, and held it out for a refill. "It isn't gone for good. And it's going to come back."
In her situation, I'd drink, too. Truth refilled the glass without comment. Alcohol was well known for its depressive effects on the psychic centers; Winter's perceptions of the Unseen World must be spilling over into every facet of her daily life by now, and this was a last-ditch attempt to curb them.
"I just don't see that you have a lot of choice," Truth told her after a moment's silence. "You've said yourself that running away doesn't seem to work; it only finds other targets for a while and then comes back to you. You may have more of a chance against the creature than you realize, though: Elementals are surprisingly vulnerable under certain conditions. What you're going to have to do is choose your ground carefully."
"No moveable objects," Winter interjected mockingly.
"No moveable objects," Truth agreed. "And I'd stay away from power lines or other electrical sources, if I were you. But the Elemental should come fairly readily if you try to bring it—it wants something from you, remember."
"What if all it wants is to kill me?" Winter asked.
Truth met her gaze unflinchingly. There was a long moment's silence.
"Then killing you should make it leave," she said at last.
"Fair enough," Winter said, and drank again.
"When you call it, I don't know how fast it will come, but when it does you can expect the same sort of disturbance that followed you before. You'll probably feel cold and weak—it's linked to you; it draws its energy from you, at least in part."
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