Witchlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “You?” Winter said in blazing contempt. Everyone in the café 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.

  I 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 I 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?

  If 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?”

  I 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.”

  I weighed a hundred and ten pounds, Mother.

  THE MERCEDES was waiting, parking lights flashing, in the drop-off zone at the entrance to LaGuardia Airport. A ticket already fluttered under the windshield wipers. Mrs. Musgrave snatched it and stuffed it into the pocket of her mink 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—”

  Winter smiled a little bitterly at the mention of her brothers. Their names brought them to mind with almost painful clarity. Kenny was Kenneth Junior, the oldest, whose wife Patricia sold real estate for a Long Island broker. Wycherly was her younger brother, named, as Winter was, for the well-researched ancestors of the formidable Musgrave lineage.

  “You spoil Kenny, Mother.” And Wycherly resented the obvious favoritism shown to his golden and glorified elder sibling. “And you know that Wych—”

  “I suppose you think I ought to have sent Wycherly and Patricia?” her mother said with a silvery laugh. “Well, never mind. I know you’re tired and aren’t feeling well; we’ll be home soon, and then you can rest. I hope you’ll be planning to stay for a while; you’ve been quite the stranger these past few years, and though Father would never dream of mentioning it I know you’ve hurt him terribly. You really ought to think more of others, Winter, dear; but then you never did think of anyone but yourself.” Satisfied with the placement of her last barb, Mrs. Musgrave changed to another subject.

  Why did I come here? Winter wondered, half-despairing. Her mother’s voice purled on, like a quiet stream deep enough to drown in, but Winter tuned it out, watching the cars slide past them on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

  She’d gone home because she had no place else to go, because she’d owed this visit ever since she’d left Fall River, because they were her parents and deserved to know how things were with her.

  But nothing here had changed. Kenneth still got all the attention and the lavish marks of parental favor—and drank too much, as far as Winter remembered, though certainly that wasn’t something the family ever spoke of. Wycherly still drifted from this to that, looking for some position that would engage his talents and ending up living back at home more often than not—and at thirty it was becoming obvious that the youngest Musgrave sibling was what previous generations had not hesitated to label a wastrel.

  Mother tended her house, her wardrobe, and her friendships, serving on this committee or that, all indistinguishable from one another except for the names of the benefiting charity and the committee members she was fighting with.

  Father worked, eighty-hour weeks at the brokerage on Wall Street, barely home enough to interfere in the lives of his family.

  Nothing had changed.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Winter answered dutifully.

  “I said, you ought to see my doctor while you’re here. He’s very good, you know; keeps up with all the latest literature on depression and nerves. I don’t know if you really ought to even consider going back to work for a year or so at least. Your health has never been terribly good, you know, and work isn’t all there is in the world.”

  What alternative are you offering me? Winter wondered, knowing there was none. She reached for the comforting illusion of Grey’s presence, but it wasn’t there. All she had was the sick heavy outliers of a headache that owed nothing to poltergeists or the paranormal, and everything to coming home again.

  WHEN IT HAD been built in 1916, Wychwood had been considered a tiny jewel-box of a house—only twenty-six rooms, built as a wedding present by Great-Grandfather Wycherly for his daughter and her husband.

  With the Great Depression, the family fortunes had declined to such an extent that when a fire had destroyed the stables and one wing of the house they had not been rebuilt, and time had taken the tennis courts, the boxwood maze, and the formal gardens that Winter knew only from her study of old photo albums. But what remained of Wychwood was, by today’s standards, a stately home indeed, and as the Mercedes pulled in through the high iron gates—now rusted permanently half-open—and slid up the long graveled drive, Winter could feel privilege and expectation wrap her in bonds as unyielding as the grave.

  WHO’S THE COWARD now?

  Winter stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the archway that led into the dining room. Her encounter with Rhiannon in San Francisco was only a jumbled collection of impressions now, but the irony of that taunt remained: Winter couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this scared. The headache she had expected had never quite fulfilled its promise: The worst of the pain remained in the future, and its potential made everything in the house seem to be taking place under water. With damp palms Winter smoothed the thin silk voile of the borrowed Hanae Mori dress against her thighs and reminded herself that what waited at the foot of the stairs could not be so very bad. It was only her family, after all. What harm could they wish her?

  Coward. Coward, coward, coward. If you were going to run, you should have run away.

  Memories just beyond her grasp roiled the sluggish surface of Winter’s consciousness, troubling but not enlightening her. But if there were something here in the house where she’d grown up that she no longer remembered, it could hardly be Important—to her or to Grey.

  With that thought, a dull spike of pain began to throb monotonously behind her right eye. She really ought to go down. Waiting would not improve matters, and would only give Mother more ammunition in her campaign to render Winter a homebound invalid.

  And why not? Isn’t she right? All I proved by leaving Fall River was that I’m not capable of coping with the real world. I set out to remember the past, and all I did was confuse myself further. I don’t even know what’s real any more. I’ve lost Grey forever, and now I feel guilty about that, too. And as for whatever it is that’s chasing me …

  It wouldn’t follow her here to Wychwood. It couldn’t.

  There was something so disturbing about that certainty that it made dinner seem innocuous by comparison. Winter smoothed her dress one last time and hurried down the stairs.

  DESPITE HER penchant for continual redecorating, Mother had left the dining room alone. It was just as Winter remembered it: cream and Wedgwood blue, the colors echoed in the Aubusson carpet and the stiff damask curtains that stayed closed no matter the hour or the season. The first course was already on the table and five places were laid. Winter wondered who the holdout was, Father or Patricia; her mother and her two brothers were already there, waiting for her.

  “Winter! How good to see you.” Kenny came around the table, looking formidably stuffy in his three-piece Brooks Brothers suit in banker’s gray. He hugged her in a distant formal fashion, and Winter could smell the mingled scents of bay rum and expensive bourbon. Kenny was the eldest; in his early forties now. More whiskey, less hair, but otherwise unchanged from her last memory of him—how many years ago?

  “Kenny,” she said. “You’re looking well. Is Patsy joining us?” Those were the things people said, weren’t they? Normal people—and people passing for normal?

  An elaborate Waterford chandelier showered light on the silver and crystal on the table and the mirrors on the walls; a setting as pristine and inhuman as the surface of the moon.

  “Patricia had to stay late to show a house farther out on the Island. Father will be along when he can,” Mrs. Musgrave said from the foot of the table. She’d also changed for dinner, into something floaty and formal the color of ashes of roses. Heirloom diamonds glittered in her ears. “If only you’d let us know you were coming—”

  “He’d have had time to beat it out for Frankfurt instead of just a late meeting—but I forget, Winty, you were always his favorite,” the last of the dinner party guests said.

  The childish diminutive brought back an instant snapshot memor
y of her sixth birthday party—and of the toddler, crowing with delight as he buried his face and both hands in her birthday cake, ignoring Winter’s hysterical screams of rage.

  “Hello, Wych,” Winter said. “And it was Kenny who was his favorite, not me.”

  A ripple of surprise spread among the others at this plain speaking; Kenny coughed and Wych grinned maliciously and Miranda Musgrave sat up straighter in her chair. Disapproval etched stark lines into her face.

  “Do sit down, Winter. Father will want us to start without him. And you do need to keep up your strength.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Winter said meekly, her flash of defiance over. She sat down at the table across from her brothers. The ghosts of dinners past crowded around her as she picked up her soupspoon and tried to will herself invisible.

  “And how are things at the bank today, Kenneth dear?” Mrs. Musgrave asked, smoothly taking command of the conversation.

  Kenny began his reply—which would be exhaustive yet diplomatic, as always—and under cover of her mother’s ostensible absorption in the discussion with her elder brother, Winter studied her youngest brother. Everything else was the same—was he?

  Wych was dressed much too casually for a dinner at Wychwood, wearing a rumpled sport coat over an open shirt. His hair was several weeks late for a haircut. Like Winter, he possessed the pale chestnut hair and hazel-brown eyes of their Wycherly grandmother, but instead of the stubbornness that dominated Winter’s face and the set of her mouth, Wycherly’s features seemed forged by some streak of cowardly cruelty.