“COME ON, CASSIE—give me that, would you?” Ramsey said, hopefully. He brandished his handful of candles and reached for the lighter. The rest of the ritual equipment was already spread out on the table behind him, and of course each of them had brought their own wand and dagger.
Cassilda clutched it to her chest, shaking her head and laughing at him. The motion made the wide sleeves of her tie-dyed dashiki flutter in the dim light of the battery-powered lantern.
“Not until Grey gets here, Ramsey—you can’t light them yet!”
“So when’s he getting here? He said he had a surprise for us. Oh, damn—did anybody think to bring a corkscrew?” Janelle asked in sudden alarm.
“That’s what you get for buying expensive wine,” Winter said, digging through the Danish Bookbag she carried as a purse. “Grey told me—oh, here it is.” She placed the folding tool in her friend’s hand.
“It wasn’t expensive—it was on sale!” Janelle protested.
“It’s got a cork, doesn’t it?” Ramsey said inarguably. “That makes it expensive.” The pendant he wore around his neck flashed in the lantern light. “Do you know what Grey has planned, Winter?”
“She should—she spent last night with him,” Cassilda said slyly.
“In his dorm room?” Janelle said, astounded.
“Cassie—!” wailed Winter in mock protest. “Can’t a girl have any secrets?”
“Only the greatest secret of all—the secret of Life Itself!” Grey’s trained voice filled the room with spooky echoes, punctuated by the rhythm of his snakeskin boots as he descended the stairs. “Fellow acolytes of Nuclear Circle—”
SHE FELL, hard, on the top step of the staircase, feeling the edge of the iron riser gouge bloodily into her skin. Winter’s hands slipped on the grit of the tile floor as she scrabbled to her feet again, fleeing without knowing why she ran.
How could she have forgotten—how could she have been stupid enough to forget? And now it was almost too late—there was danger, terrible danger, she had to hurry—
No! Winter careened into a wall and pulled herself up with an effort. Her entire body shuddered with the struggle to remain still, to stay where she was when she could see the red border of madness looming in her path.
Calm. She needed to be calm.
She breathed deep, filling her lungs until they ached, holding the air until the world around her took on an extra brightness, then letting it out slowly. It seemed to help, even if only a little.
Okay, now get out of here.
Winter forced her mind away from the flashback—the vision that had granted her another piece of her past. Of all the stupid, childish, juvenile things to be mixed up in—no wonder she’d felt an instinctive revulsion to Tabitha Whitfield and her store if she’d been a teenage Satanist.
Winter snorted derisively, all her fear buried now in a scalding rush of contempt and fury. If that was what her younger self had wanted, she deserved to be dead and buried!
Winter concentrated on her anger, letting it lull and strengthen her, erecting a barricade strong enough to seal off the awakened memories. When she’d retraced her steps to the exit again she found that the wind had picked up; the weather had shifted in mercurial Hudson Valley fashion and the day was now all scudding storm clouds against a freshening breeze. When Winter dragged the rock away from the door it had propped open, the wind slapped the heavy metal door shut with the sound of a pistol-crack. Winter looked around. There was no one in sight.
“Nina!” she shouted, before realizing Nina Fowler couldn’t possibly hear her this far away. She hurried around the corner of the building and, as she did, a blast of cold rain hit her in the face. There was a black squall line running up from the south, and the surface of Nuclear Lake was being whipped into a dirty froth with the force of the wind.
“Nina!” Winter shouted again, the icy chill of awakening terror almost enough to drown her anger. It was not the wind that was causing this turbulence.
The lake was boiling.
“Nina!” Where was she? Was she all right? Winter took a step back from the lake. There was nothing natural about what she saw: The surface of the water was bubbling, as if some unimaginable creature were forcing itself up out of the ooze at the bottom. Coming to the surface. Coming for her.
Winter looked around, looking for some way to escape. But there was nowhere to go except toward the lake or back into the building, and her past was waiting inside the building. Winter began to run along the path in the direction she’d come, in the desperate hope that she could reach the car before whatever was rising out of Nuclear Lake could reach her.
The leading edge of the storm broke. Rain lashed into Winter’s face, blinding her, turning the broken paving into a slick and treacherous shifting surface. Anger was gone, replaced by fear, and by some kind of tension that was building inside her, drawing every nerve achingly taut. The rain pounded down with growing force, and the roaring of the storm cut her off from her senses—blinded, numb, and deaf, Winter ran toward safety, gaining ground with the maddening slowness of a dream.
It was coming for her.
As if some part of her still stood watching the lake, she could feel that. What rose out of the lake was all blind terror and eternal appetite, and if it reached her it would leave her skinned and mutilated body as testimony to that hunger.
After a nightmare eternity Winter reached the far side of the lake, feeling as if there were a bar of hot metal transfixing her throat and her lungs. Every step was agony, but if she stopped, she would be lost. She gasped for air, knowing she had to warn Nina Fowler, knowing she lacked the strength even for that.
The storm’s force pressed her to her knees in the thin icy mud, and in a flux of irresistible phantom terror Winter glanced behind her, to see the bubbling surface of the lake bowed upward like a giant lens, its surface about to split and reveal …
Thrusting herself to her feet once more, Winter staggered onward, feeling the pain and pressure growing behind her eyes.
Nina’s Honda was right where Winter had left it, lights on and windshield wipers running. The promise of safety it represented brought tears to Winter’s eyes. The driver’s-side door was open and Winter could see a foot encased in a muddy running shoe; Nina was already inside, sheltering from the storm and waiting for her.
Winter felt the tautness inside her begin to uncoil and reach; flexing through her like electricity. An instinctive spasm brought one arm up and out in a parody of a pulp-magazine priestess’s mystic gesture, and as she stared in helpless horror, she saw the spark collect on her fingers in seeming slow motion and jump from her to the car.
No!
There was a blue flash and the car’s lights went dead and its wipers stopped moving—and behind her, Winter could feel the malevolence that churned up out of Nuclear Lake seeking its prey.
“Damn; it just stopped,” Nina said innocently as she looked up. “Good Goddess, Winter, you—”
“No time,” Winter panted, plucking at Nina’s arm with trembling fingers. “Come. You’ve got to run.”
“But it’ll just—” Nina began, and Winter, using the last of her strength, hauled Nina out of the car.
“Please,” Winter gasped, choking on her own need to breathe. “Hurry.”
There was a sharp tang in the air now, apparent even over the smell of rain and wet earth. A sharp ozone tang, as if lightning were about to strike—again—and as Winter began to despair, it seemed that Nina caught some of her fear from her. Nina’s brown eyes went wide and the freckles stood out on her face like dark raindrops. Without another word she grabbed Winter’s hand and the two women began to run up the path that led to the road.
Behind them there was a crash—a flash too bright for lightning—and a howling that could be heard even over the wailing of the wind.
THEY RAN until the exhausted Winter could run no farther, and crouched on the blacktop of the access road while Nina stood over her. Both women were soaked to the skin, b
ramble-torn, and covered in mud.
“Go—Go on,” Winter gasped, waving in the direction of the road.
“No.” Nina was nearly as winded. “No, wait. Can’t you hear?”
Winter raised her head. “Hear” was not the right word, but she understood what Nina meant. It was quiet now; even though it was still raining, the raging storm and the coiling sense of dreadful passion both gone as if they’d never been.
And now that they were gone, it was hard to believe that they ever had been.
Winter raised her head and looked at Nina. The younger woman’s round cheeks were flushed with running, her curly brown hair plastered flat against her head. Her eyes were wide and puzzled, as if she had just awakened from a deep sleep.
“Some kind of storm, eh?” she said, in cheerful tones completely divorced from her apprehensive mood of only moments before. “It’s a good thing you got me out of the car—I know it’s a good idea to stay in your car when there’s a lightning storm, but it’s not so good an idea to be in your car when a tree falls on it, is it?”
Is that what you think happened, Nina? Winter bit her lip to keep from saying the words aloud, a new and entirely mundane apprehension staggering the trip-hammer beat of her heart. Wasn’t Nina’s reaction just what her own had been—denial and some soothing, plausible story? Even now, the events of the past few hours tried to smudge and blur themselves in her mind, as if some malignant hand was wiping the slate of memory clean.
No! Winter concentrated on the image of that profane fetal shape rising up out of the storm-whipped blackness of the lake, and felt her lagging heartbeat increase in response.
“Maybe the car will start now,” Nina said uncertainly.
“No.” Winter stood up with painful effort, forcing her legs to hold her now that the danger was past. “It won’t start. The electrical system’s shot.” And I did that—me—not the thing in the lake. “We’d better see if we can flag down someone on the main road.”
“Yeah.” Nina straightened up and stretched, and regarded Winter with a guileless untroubled countenance. “And it isn’t really too far; we can walk back to town if we have to.”
FORTUNATELY THEY DIDN’T have to walk, though for Winter the worst part of what followed was that by the time they’d reached the County Road and flagged down a vehicle Nina Fowler had completely convinced herself that what had happened had amounted to nothing more than a brief but intense lightning storm.
It seems as if it would be safer to think that, Winter mused thoughtfully, sitting crowded next to Nina in the pickup truck’s cabin, just as I’d be happier thinking that all that happened was one of my panic attacks and a little overwrought imagination. But I don’t think it was.
And I don’t think it’s safe to pretend it was.
“I’LL CALL DAVE; he can take me back out there with the wrecker and pick up Old Reliable tomorrow,” Nina said cheerfully. Their ride—one of the villagers—had gone out of his way to drop them back up at the Taghkanic campus.
“Why don’t you take my car in the meantime,” Winter said, fishing in her jeans pocket for the keys. She held them out to Nina. “I’m too whipped to drive; I’m going to take a taxi home.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t!” Nina protested, but Winter could see her hesitate.
“Of course you can—didn’t it used to be your car? And it was my fault that you were out there in the first place, getting your car … struck by lightning.” And only luck that I didn’t get you killed, Winter thought somberly. And not by lightning.
“Well, if you’re sure,” Nina said, reaching for the keys. “Can I run you home, Winter? You really do look tired.”
“I’ll call Timmy Sullivan when I’m ready. There’s something I have to do first.” And if you want to live, Nina, you’ll stay far, far away from me.
5
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces.
—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
SHE’D THOUGHT she’d be more reluctant to come back here with another harebrained story, but it was amazing how much perspective nearly getting killed by The Creature From The Id could give you. If what Winter thought had happened at Nuclear Lake had really happened—if she wasn’t crazy—then she needed help. If she was crazy …
Then she wanted drugs, electroshock—all those things that Truth Jourdemayne had said would burn to ash the part of her brain that bred these chimeras. “The sleep of reason begets monsters …” Because she couldn’t bear to go on living with them inside her.
And if, as Winter had slowly begun to believe, they weren’t delusions, she might not have a choice.
Winter walked up the path that led to the doors of the Margaret Bidney Beresford Memorial Psychic Science Research Laboratory. The Neoclassical white marble façade looked serene as always, and the imposing oak, bronze, and glass doors gave it much the look of an ancient Greek temple.
She pushed open the door. There was no one in the reception area, and Winter glanced at her Cartier tank watch for the time, only to find that it had stopped sometime around two o’clock. But the clock on the wall said that the time was only a little after four, so where was the receptionist?
Winter walked past Meg Winslow’s desk in the direction she had gone the last time she’d come here, but instead of stopping at the interview room she’d been in before, some intuition drew her on past the closed doors of the offices, until she was standing in a huge open-plan area at the back of the building, obviously of more recent vintage than the Institute’s stern classical façade.
The room looked like the Hollywood version of a mad scientist’s laboratory, from the banks of monitors and recording equipment to the vaguely sinister padded couches. Overhead there were swags of power lines and connecting cable, and everywhere that Winter’s glance fell it rested on a dizzyingly dense array of technological objects. She looked around, confused. The lab seemed to be completely deserted.
“Can I help you?” The familiar voice came from above. Winter looked up, and saw what she had missed before: A catwalk crossed the space above, a door leading to it from somewhere on the Institute’s second floor.
“Truth?” To Winter, her voice sounded very small and childlike in the vast, echoing space.
“Who—Oh, Winter. Did you—Oh, wait just a moment, I’ll be right down,” Truth said. She crossed the catwalk to its end, and descended to the floor via one of the starkly functional white-painted metal staircases that edged the wall. When she reached the ground floor Truth hurried over to Winter, her face concerned.
“I was going to ask if you’d decided to come for tests, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? Something’s happened—is someone dead?”
Winter felt the same strange flexing inside herself that she’d felt just before she’d flung the lightning bolt at Nina Fowler’s car. But this time it was weirdly perfunctory, as if some vital resource had been temporarily exhausted.
“I’m losing my mind,” Winter said. Her voice shook with exhaustion and fear. “I don’t know who else to come to. I know I said I was losing my mind before—but this time I am—unless there’s a monster living beneath Nuclear Lake!” Winter finished raggedly.
“Come and sit down and tell me what happened,” Truth said calmly. She led Winter over to a corner, where two upholstered chairs with a small round table between them made an incongruously homey oasis in the forbidding technology of the lab. Winter sank into one of the chairs gratefully, all too aware that nerve and will could only carry her so far.
And desperate enough at last to trust someone. She took a deep breath.
“I remembered … that I used to go up to Nuclear Lake with my friends when I was a student here. So I decided to go up there again and see if I could jog anything loose—I didn’t really want to go alone, so I took Nina Fowler with me—from the alumni office?”
“I know Nina,” Truth said. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. She thinks—” Winter
swallowed hard, and realized, to her horror, that she was about to cry. “—She thinks her car was struck by lightning. That all that happened there was a storm.” Winter drew a shaky breath.
“I’m not a psychologist,” Truth said, “but even I know that denial is the mind’s first line of defense against something that just doesn’t fit with its preconceptions. Sometimes it can be pretty scary when other people say you didn’t see what you know you saw.”
Winter searched the other woman’s face closely, trying to see if she was being humored. She closed her eyes tightly, willing the impending tears away.
“I know what I saw—and sensed. It was real. But … I suppose that’s what the mad think, too. I need you to tell me if I’m crazy. I don’t need you to be kind.”
Truth’s eyes met hers, and in their searching blue gaze Winter felt as if her very soul was being weighed and measured.
“You don’t have to go all the way to crazy, Winter, to see what other people don’t,” Truth said gently. “Any number of things, from stress-induced hallucination to drug flashbacks to an old-fashioned psychotic break can explain it—and they’re all temporary conditions; nothing to be ashamed of in this day and age. Are you sure you want to pursue this any further?”
“I have to know,” Winter insisted stubbornly. If this were a challenge, it was one that Winter would meet if it took her last ounce of strength.
“Even if knowing won’t bring you either peace or happiness?” Truth persisted. “Even if what you discover changes your life permanently?”
She was being offered a choice, Winter realized—a choice between the truth and one last comforting lie.
“I want to know,” Winter repeated. “I have to.”
Truth stood. “All right. Let’s go back out to Nuclear Lake.”
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