Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Claire felt herself recoil in revulsion. Ever since she’d fallen victim to that cup of spiked punch at Toller Hasloch’s party, the thought of someone being drugged against their knowledge or will had held a special terror for her.

  Colin, bless him, took everything in his stride, and even managed to work a little old-fashioned charm on Barbara, though the indications that she had been a victim of the black coven for months—even years—were dark indeed.

  But that means they can’t be after Barbara because she’s Jamie Melford’s wife—or does it? Could they have targeted Barbara for some other reason that has nothing to do with the manuscript? How could they have known that Melford would be the book’s publisher—or even that Cannon planned to write it? Either way, it’s horrible—horrible! That poor woman …

  “Jamie!” Barbara gasped, wild-eyed. “Could they be doing anything to Jamie?”

  Claire simply stared at her. From what Colin had told her last night, the fact that Jamie Melford was already the black coven’s target was so obvious that Barbara’s cry could only have been a rhetorical question.

  Colin gestured her toward the phone. Barbara clutched at it as if it were a lifeline, her hands shaking as she dialed. Claire set down her teacup and got to her feet, ready to do what she could to help Barbara. No useful purpose would be served by a fit of hysterics, but frightened, endangered people rarely thought that clearly.

  But Barbara Melford did not have hysterics. Whatever she heard at the other end of the line caused the heavy receiver to fall from her nerveless fingers as she simply stood there, numb and white with shock.

  The three of them reached the Melfords’ apartment less than twenty minutes later—armed, Claire thought to herself, for bear. Jamie Melford was not there—and worse, it was clear that wherever he was, he was in the hands of the black coven.

  The malice—no, the evil—that Claire felt radiating from the very walls nearly did her in. It was as though something foul were being forced down her throat, and her stomach revolted spectacularly, leaving her nauseated and shaking.

  But the empty rooms yielded nothing—nothing, that was, except proof that Melford’s own mother was a member of the black coven, and had been for years.

  What a ghastly coincidence, if you could even call it that. No wonder they’ve seemed to be one step ahead of us all along, with a spy in the house of John Cannon’s closest friend.

  And now they were moving openly against Jamie Melford—and neither Colin nor Claire had the faintest idea of where their Temple was.

  It was nearly eight o’clock when the three of them left the Melfords’ Upper West Side apartment. Their only chance to save Jamie Melford’s life—and soul—lay in Claire’s erratic scrying abilities.

  Claire had been fortunate to be taught scrying by Alison Margrave. Alison had worked patiently with her for months under Colin’s aegis, guiding Claire to discover the techniques that unlocked her Gift. Every psychic was different, using items as disparate as fire and water, a deck of Tarot cards, or an astrological chart, to unlock clairvoyant powers, but scrying was one of the fundamental disciplines that all psychics stumbled into eventually. Claire had been trained in one of the oldest methods: that of the shewstone. The mineral crystal was a heavy weight in the pocket of her coat as Colin drove down the East River Drive.

  It was Christmas Eve and the traffic was heavy. Each time the van became stopped in traffic Claire winced as the tension inside it took a sharp upswing. She could almost hear Colin grinding his teeth in frustration.

  But Jamie Melford was not dead. Claire clung to that tottering certainty. She could not sense him at all, and had only the most wavering sense of place, but she clung to the conviction that he lived as desperately as his wife did. She could not bear to think that he had fallen into that Night which was eternal, but the clues revealed by Claire’s scrying were so muddled and few: explosions, alarm sirens …

  Thanks to Martin Becket, they’d been able to restrict their searching to only those areas where blasting was going on tonight—an emergency, indeed, to make men work on Christmas Eve, but the bank that had the advertising slogan “The city never sleeps” certainly had the right of it—New York was a twenty-four-hour town.

  The first site they tried was on Second Avenue, over on the East Side. They wasted forty minutes checking out a several-block area—uselessly—before heading downtown once more.

  “Hurry. Please … hurry,” Barbara Melford whispered under her breath.

  Colin turned off the East River Drive onto Houston Street, and within moments they were lost in the twisting maze of Greenwich Village streets. When she heard the dull crump of explosions, Claire felt a pang of relief so strong it made her giddy.

  “Well, there’s the blasting,” she said. “Now all we have to find is the firehouse.” Or whatever other source there might be for the sirens I heard …

  “That way!” Barbara said suddenly, pointing off to the left. Colin looked at her strangely, but followed her directions without comment.

  This was one of the oldest sections of New York, and many of the streets retained their original cobblestones. Claire rolled down the passenger-side window as the van drove slowly through the streets, straining her senses to search for the black coven’s hideout. The night air was sharp, with the mintiness of fresh snow on the air. She breathed deeply, trying to banish the nauseated faintness that had dogged her ever since the apartment, but she felt as if there was a tide of liquid garbage rising around her, and waves of sickness seemed to steal the oxygen from her lungs.

  As if from a great distance, she could hear Colin asking her to take the wheel. Barely conscious, Claire slid across the seat, but changing position seemed to make the sickness worse. It was horrible—like drowning, like dying—watching the faint clean light of life and air dim out far above.

  Suddenly, Colin placed a hand on her shoulder, speaking to her sharply. She tried to rally, but she could feel herself greying out … .

  “Barbara, can you drive?”

  The intent that coiled around them was like nothing he had felt in many, many years—Colin could well understand why a Sensitive was swooning just from exposure to it. There was a peculiar immediacy to the Evil that manifested through human intervention; something far more frightening than the sheer inhumanity of the Shadow. All men were born with a spark of the Light, and the deliberate destruction of that part of themselves was what gave their actions this extraordinary taint of ghastliness.

  He blessed the foresight that had caused Claire to place so many vital items into the emergency kit that she’d packed in Colin’s apartment, and he blessed his own prudence, that had made him store his ritual dress here in the back of the van—they’d be needing the biggest of big guns here tonight. He opened the door and got out of the van, walking around to the back and climbing in again.

  Barbara crawled over Claire across the bench seat and managed to navigate the van into a parking space along the curb. All up and down Houston Street, faceless warehouses presented indistinguishable unblinking facades. Any of them might be the hiding place they sought, and time was running out.

  Carefully, using a box of wooden matches that had never been used for any other purpose, Colin lit two tapers which had been blessed by a cooperative priest. As soon as the flames began to burn steadily, the crushing weight of the evil all around them lifted slightly in the presence of the holy light. He placed one of the candles in Barbara’s hand, and kept the other for himself.

  As the consecrated light shone down on her, Claire began to revive. By the time Colin had settled his heavy jeweled breastplate into place and began to tie on the complicated folds of his cap, Claire was sitting up again, bent forward and breathing deeply.

  “Good girl,” Colin said encouragingly. He pulled the hood of his plain outer robe up, allowing it to hide most of the ornate ritual finery beneath, and picked up the long wrapped bundle that would be his most formidable weapon in the struggle here tonight. “Let’s go.�
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  Colin strode up the block, holding his consecrated flame high, as if it were a torch. All around him, the air vibrated to silent shouting, and the icy wind off the Hudson River dragged at his clothes, making the long bundle he carried awkward and unwieldy. He was uncomfortably aware that the two tiny flames were all that stood between the three of them and suffocation in the sea of Darkness that surrounded them. While the force being raised here tonight by the black coven might not have the potency to actually kill them, Colin had enough experience of the world to know that there were many things worse than death.

  Claire was reeling along beside him almost as if she were drunk, moaning to herself painfully with each breath. Barbara was following behind, sheer nerves making her babble like a standup comic. She held the candle low against her body and sheltered from the wind with her free hand.

  “Quiet!” Colin barked at last. “Let her concentrate!”

  Barbara fell silent in midword, and Colin spared a moment of sympathy for her, but he could hardly afford more, as beleaguered as they were.

  “This one,” Claire whispered, lurching to a stop in front of one door that could not be differentiated from any of the others that lined the midnight street. “No … I’m not. I don’t—”

  “No, it’s this one,” Barbara said definitively, sounding a little puzzled that neither of them realized what was obvious to her. With the fearlessness of ignorance, she walked up to a door a few feet away and grabbed the handle, only to release it with a startled cry. She tore off her mitten, staring at the hand beneath as though she expected to see something horrible.

  “It must have been just … a shock. But it felt as if it were … hot?” she said, bewildered.

  So Barbara Melford is a Sensitive, too, Colin thought to himself.

  It would explain much about this whole affair, including why Barbara had fought so stubbornly for so many years to hold onto Jamie, even with all the forces of Hell arrayed against her. Many people fought and died for the Light without ever understanding that they were in a war at all; if not for this encounter, Barbara Melford would have been such a person. Colin vowed that if they all survived this night, Barbara would strive in ignorance no longer.

  “Get back, Barbara,” Colin said gently. He handed Claire the bundle that he carried. “Let me handle this. You take care of her.” He thrust the reeling Claire at Barbara, and turned to the door.

  He felt nothing when he reached for the handle—for once he blessed his lack of the Gift—but on the other hand, the door didn’t move, either. It was locked.

  He supposed it had been too much to hope for that the door would have been open, but Colin had brought his skeleton keys with him for just such a circumstance, and fortunately the lock was an old one that one of his blanks was likely to fit. He found the right master for it at just the moment when his ungloved fingers seemed about to go completely numb in the cutting river wind.

  He kicked open the unlocked door and took his candle back from Claire.

  “In normal circumstances, I’d say ladies first, but I think this is a special case.” He strode into the filthy building, and heard Claire and Barbara hurrying after him.

  On the fourth floor the smell of frankincense and asafetida seeping out from around the door was all the evidence he needed. There was a sickly sweet tang to the smoke that made his head spin—there was hashish in that incense, the black magician’s quick and dangerous method of opening the higher chakras.

  “Give me that,” he said to Claire, taking the wrapped parcel from her hands. He shook the sword free of its protection; the Seal of Solomon set into the quillons seemed to blaze like the sun in the dimness of the dingy loft.

  Then he took one step back and kicked the door in.

  The darkness seemed to roll out through the opening like ink diffusing through water. Colin heard Claire cry out with real revulsion in the moment before he ran forward into the gloomy haze. Jamie Melford was here somewhere, and their prisoner. God grant that he was still alive—and sane.

  When Colin crossed the threshold, he could see that the coven was gathered in the next room, crouched about its altar and the naked bound form of Jamie Melford that lay before it. The room was filled with a cold damp mist that stank of the herbs burning on the brazier, but—weirdly—the smoke stopped at the perimeter of the circle marked out in charcoal on the floor in the center of the room.

  The Satanists did not move. The lines of power were as visible in that room as if they had been drawn on the ground and the walls in chalk, and the force of the black coven’s focused intention was a solid weight and reality.

  Colin sweated and shook like a man in the grip of a malarial fever, but his Will, too, was unwavering as he forced himself forward, toward the edge of the circle. He could feel the Darkness and the Powers of Hell gathering around, summoned by pain, desperation, and fear, and it seemed as if dark and shadowy figures shifted slowly about the periphery of the circle, anxious for the climax of the rite enacted within. The weapon in his hands vibrated like a living thing; it was an act of determination to hold onto it.

  “In the name of God! In the name of the Lords of Karma and the forces of Nature! In the name of the Fatherhood of God, the motherhood of Nature and the brotherhood of Man, I scatter your forces!” Gritting his teeth, he brought the sword down across the edge of the circle, calling upon those Forces by Whose leave he operated.

  When his sword came down, there was a great soundless shout, and suddenly the swarming monkeylike shadows at the circle’s edge turned toward Colin, crowding toward him. The coven members, shocked from their trance, screamed and thrashed like victims of electric shock, and suddenly the silent loft was filled with the sounds of gabbling voices.

  The most important thing is to move fast once you’ve made up your mind. The voice of Colin’s first teacher spoke quietly in the back of his mind. If you wait to see what effect you’ve had on the Darkness, it may be the last thing you see.

  Colin strode through the screaming gasping bodies thrashing about the floor, and shoved over the double-cube altar. The black candles atop it—soft and misshapen because they were not made of honest wax—rolled stickily across the floor, and Colin grimaced with disgust as he stamped them out.

  “I spit upon the uncleanliness of the Pit. I spit on those who make unclean those things that God has ordained to the use of man!” Colin roared.

  He kicked over the brazier of incense, scuffing through the mess to extinguish the embers of charcoal. He heard a shriek behind him as Barbara ran forward looking for Jamie. He paused for an instant and watched, lightheaded, as she reached him.

  “Colin! He’s got a knife!” Claire shrieked.

  Colin spun around. A big man came shambling toward him, his lank black hair falling into his eyes. There was an inverted cross branded into his chest—an old scar—and in his hand he held the double-edged knife from the altar.

  The years between Colin’s combat training and this moment melted away in an instant. Hardly thinking, Colin flung down the sword and plucked up the skirts of his robes like a dowager preparing to waltz.

  The French called it la savatte; in Thailand it was known as kick-boxing. Americans, with a fine disregard for attribution, called it and every form of combat like it kung-fu. As the man charged, Colin pivoted on his other foot and lashed out.

  His leg traveled through a short arc to connect with the black priest’s chin. The shock of contact telegraphed through Colin’s bones; he felt the crunch and the sudden sickening slackness as the man’s lifeless body dropped to the floor. Suddenly the lights came on; Colin could hear the sound of the switches being flicked in another room.

  “Barbara,” Colin said, taking a deep breath. The sound of his own voice brought home to him how tired he was, and leftover adrenaline made his hands shake. “Run round to the firehouse and call the police—see if they can find Lieutenant Martin Becket; he works out of Manhattan South, and this is his case as much as it’s anyone’s. We’ll need so
me police here—and an ambulance.”

  Colin hoped that self-defense would be explanation enough for what he’d done. The coven’s priest—it was probably Walter Mansell—and God above knew how many more were dead here, and the survivors were in profound shock.

  Barbara left, running. Colin heard her footsteps echoing down the stairs as he knelt beside the body of the man who had attacked him and gently closed his eyes, murmuring the words of absolution. One of Father Godwin’s fallen angels had come home at last.

  In the distance, he could hear the sound of a siren wailing.

  It was a little after five, and the sky was beginning to lighten with Christmas dawn when Colin stopped the van outside the Melfords’ apartment and went around to the back to open the door. Jamie and Barbara climbed out, looking tousled and exhausted, like sleepy children who had been lost in the woods.

  “I don’t know how we can ever thank you,” Jamie Melford said awkwardly, “Not just for saving my life, but for everything.”

  “I think you know how you can repay me,” Colin said.

  “The Cannon manuscript,” Jamie said, embarrassed. “I’ll messenger it over to you first thing … uh, next year. I think that Bess will agree you can make any changes you want.”

  “There’s that of course,” Colin said. “But more to the point, I hope you’ll stay in touch. Barbara’s a Sensitive, you know, and we need people like both of you. Though this has been quite a battle, the war goes on.”

  The war goes on. The words resonated in Colin’s mind as he drove southward. Claire was asleep in the seat beside him, and it took him several minutes of shaking before he could rouse her enough to get her to her feet and started in the direction of her apartment door. He waited outside until he saw the light go on in her window, then drove off toward home.