Witchlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The business card Paul Frederick gave me. If he was a friend of Cassie’s he’d know Rhiannon, too.

  Winter shook her head ruefully. She had a long way to go to become even half as brilliant as she’d always thought she was. Finding Rhiannon would not be that hard, and her message was Winter’s only possible link to Grey.

  And unless Grey was dead, she had to see him one last time.

  He isn’t dead. I’d know if he were dead. The inner certainty was slight-though-real comfort. She and Grey had been bound together by love and magic, once.

  Then why didn’t he come for me? her younger self wailed inside her, while an older Winter found the bleak and simple answer: Perhaps he had. That hideous summer she’d gone to Switzerland with her mother to “take care of things”; any New York clinic would have done as well, but that wouldn’t have gotten Winter out of the country. If Grey had come for her while she was gone, who knew what her father had told him—and what Grey had believed?

  And that September she’d started at the brokerage, using work as a drug to blot out all uncertainty and pain, until the work had taken on a life of its own and become her world.

  For as long as it could.

  She had to find Grey.

  Before the elemental found her.

  As if the thought had summoned it, Winter felt a sudden chill breeze skirl through the apartment. The vertical linen-weave blinds fluttered, exposing tightly closed windows.

  Something was here.

  Winter felt her hair stand up in a purely primal response to its presence. Her skin tingled, drawn tight by the lightning in the air.

  Just like Nuclear Lake.

  But this time she did not react with blind terror. Her panic had come from denial, and now at last Winter consciously knew the things she had been trying so hard to hide from herself. Now the fear she felt was the purely prosaic one of facing an elemental storm in a room full of broken glass. It would cut her to pieces …

  Time to leave. Perhaps the creature would not follow her out of the apartment. A few steps took Winter to the front door; she unlatched the dead bolt and turned the knob.

  Nothing.

  She twisted and pulled—the knob turned freely, but the door wouldn’t open. She slammed her fist against it in frustration—a sturdy, expensive, New York door, sheathed in steel, with three-inch dead bolts, and totally immovable.

  She was trapped. There was no phone to use to call for help, and help would arrive too late if she did. Winter heard the faint clicking of the blinds as they wavered in the ghostwind.

  I have to stop it. I have to make it go away.

  But how? Could she control it as she did her own psychokinetic abilities? The Elemental was not her, but Truth Jourdemayne had said it was linked to her somehow. Could the link run two ways?

  It better, Winter thought grimly, or she was dead and so was her chance of stopping it. The atmosphere in the room felt now as though she were standing directly in front of an air-conditioning vent—a stream of cold air playing directly over her skin. It did not matter that outside her windows it was high noon on a sunny spring day—Inside the apartment there was no time left.

  The force of the ghostwind increased: Now papers and scraps of cloth on the floor began to shift sluggishly. Soon heavier objects would move. The pressure of what was coming for her made Winter’s skin ache. She thought of the pressure building in the room, the windows bulging outward, to burst and shatter piercing fragments on the noon-hour pedestrians jamming the sidewalks below.

  No! Take me if you must, but not here! Not where there are other people to be hurt!

  The pressure strained to crush her, and Winter pushed back. It was a thousand times harder than shifting a book or a ring of keys—it was as if she struggled to lift the earth itself. The confrontation made her lose control of her own body; Winter sank to her hands and knees in the wreckage of her apartment and barely felt the shards that cut her hands and knees.

  She could not afford to lose. Sweat beaded up on her forehead and splashed down over her hands. She curled her fingers into the carpet, and resisted the elemental pressure with all the furious will she had once brought to denying the truth. She heard the crackle of glass as it was forced into the carpet around her, heard the splintering of glass and plastic, heard the walls groan with the pressure …

  And became, as Hunter Greyson had once taught her, pure will.

  The apartment was gone. She chose what was real. She chose the parts of reality that were used. Winter seemed to hear the roar of the trading floor around her: sheer information, flowing faster than thought, faster than reason, shaped and controlled by human desire. She could make and unmake the world with a thought, with a choice, with her wish to make it so—

  She curled her hands in the carpet, driving glass into her skin and never feeling the pain, and with the will that had triumphed over every circumstance in her life, Winter fought back.

  There was a yielding, a tearing; Winter was jerked back into the here-and-now, holding to consciousness in a world that seemed to pulse redly and swarm with dizzying black spots. Her lungs ached with breath too long held; she gasped for air, and as oxygen filled her lungs she finally became aware of the pain in her hands.

  Winter sat back and raised her palms from the carpet. Glass splinters showered from them like a dusting of sugar. Her right hand was cut across the palm, and bled freely; the other hand had several small splinters jammed into it. Winter swore, getting awkwardly to her feet, and only then noticed that one leg of her khakis was sliced open along the calf. Blood covered the surface of her skin and wicked into the ragged edges of the cloth. She was only lucky that she wasn’t cut more seriously.

  I’m just lucky I wasn’t killed. Reaction set in, the rush of nausea and adrenaline almost sending her to the floor again. The Elemental was gone. She’d won.

  Winter leaned against the wall and began to pick the glass out of her left hand, only then realizing that the bleeding in her other hand had not stopped. Blood ran down her wrist, staining her cotton sweater.

  I must look like every single nightmare on Elm Street.

  Winter tottered toward the bathroom and stopped, her attention arrested abruptly by the sight before her. The front door was open—now, when it wouldn’t do any good. She shook her head and continued toward the bathroom. The Elemental wasn’t coming back today, and unless she cleaned up a little before she went out, she’d probably be arrested.

  Fortunately the water still worked, even though none of the bathroom lights did. Winter ran her gashed hands under the cold water until the bleeding slowed, then picked the splinters out of her palm, wincing queasily at the pain. With a salvaged bit of towel she cautiously wiped the gash on her leg. It was clean and free of glass, but there was nothing she could do about the blood and the torn cloth. The bloody towel in her hand would be little use as a bandage.

  Oh, well. This is New York. Probably nobody’s going to notice, Winter told herself hopefully.

  Everything hurt. It was hard to believe that this was the same day that she’d stood in her mother’s kitchen and told her parents the truth. What she wanted most right now was a hot bath, a first-aid kit, and a lot of Room Service.

  Walking with stiff care, Winter went into the bedroom to see if there was anything else she could salvage for makeshift bandages.

  The smell was the first thing that hit her when she crossed the threshold. Winter flinched away from it before she understood what she was reacting to. Sharp, unmistakable …

  The bed, the floor, every surface was covered with drifts of apple blossoms. It looked like the ruins of a bombed city in winter.

  The shock was like a slap in the face, and only exhaustion kept her from crying out. Tears burned in her eyes. She walked slowly over to the ruined bed and scooped up a handful of the petals. They stuck to the blood on her hands, turning stickily pink. Apple blossoms. I can never see them without remembering telling Grey. And what came after. She closed her hand painfully ove
r the flowers.

  There was something else on the bed.

  Winter touched it gingerly, fearing it was something horrible. She recognized the knotted handkerchief as hers; she’d used to buy them by the dozen; you could use them for so many more things than you could a Kleenex.

  But she didn’t remember it being on the bed the last time she’d been in here.

  She untied the handkerchief and shook its contents out onto the spilled blossoms. Just before she got a good look at it she realized what it had to be.

  The porcelain had been smashed, as though struck with something heavy, but the pieces were large, and she could tell that it once had been a Limoges box, playful and delicate, painted blue and pink with swirling clouds. And on the top, the comical figure of a white-bearded wizard, pointed hat and star-tipped wand and long blue robe.

  Grey had sent this to her.

  She cradled it in her bleeding hands, trying to fit the pieces back together years too late, until the tears filled her eyes and spilled over. Too late. He’d sent it to her to wish her well—touching it, she could feel the faint echo of the icy fury that had broken it, that had sealed her pain off behind a wall of ice, hurting in order to avoid being hurt.

  Because she had been afraid. Because she had run away.

  Winter looked around the ruined bedroom. She’d been so certain she could go to Grey for help. She’d been sure Grey could have no reason to hate her this much.

  She’d been wrong.

  IN NEW YORK, money can buy nearly everything. Over the next forty-eight hours, it got Winter Musgrave a hotel room, some new clothes and a suitcase to carry them in, an industrial cleaning service to empty and repaint her apartment, and a realtor to sell it once it was ready to show. Money also hired a private detective to trace Hunter Greyson; Winter sat with reasonable patience through the long explanation of how they could not guarantee to find him, and how it would be weeks, perhaps months, before she could expect any information at all.

  I don’t have weeks-perhaps-months! I don’t even know if I have days!

  She didn’t say anything to the bored man behind the battered desk. The detective agency wasn’t her only hope; it was just that she couldn’t afford to overlook any means, however unlikely, that could lead her to Grey. While they worked, she was going to go back to San Francisco and see if she could find Rhiannon again. Maybe that strange musician who’d helped her find the bookstore and seemed to have known Cassie could help her. She couldn’t afford pride any more. She had to find Grey.

  And there was one more thing she could try.

  The last thing that money got for Winter Musgrave in New York City was another rental car. On a weekday afternoon toward the end of May she headed north along the Hudson River, to the only place left that she could call home.

  13

  Winter Soldiers and Sunshine Patriots

  A little rule, a little sway,

  A sunbeam in a winter’s day,

  Is all the proud and mighty have

  Between the cradle and the grave.

  —JOHN DYER

  TRUTH JOURDEMAYNE was not, as any of her colleagues could have confirmed, the sort of person who let sleeping dogs lie or well enough alone. Dylan Palmer, who knew her best, had said on a number of occasions that for a woman with advanced degrees, she had an amazingly poor grasp of English—particularly the phrases “for your own good” and “mind your own business.”

  Since he knew that much, Truth had told him the last time he mentioned it, he ought to realize it was a lost cause to ask her to just drop the Winter Musgrave investigation, even if—or perhaps because—it had nearly gotten her killed.

  “And she’s gone, anyway!” Dylan said, adding what they both knew already. “I tried to talk her out of it, but she’s gone off looking for—”

  “What?” Truth had asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dylan admitted. “The truth?”

  “What the truth is,” Truth had said, “depends on where you’re standing. But don’t ask me to give up on this one, Dylan.”

  “Why not?” her partner and colleague had asked suspiciously.

  “Because I won’t,” Truth had said simply. “And I’d hate to squabble with you.”

  “If you backed off from a fight, it’d be the first time,” Dylan had grumbled, but mercifully dropped the subject.

  And so, as Winter was driving toward New Jersey, Truth began an investigation of her own into Winter’s past.

  The place to start was obviously the Blackburn Circle at Nuclear Lake, where Hunter Greyson and his coven had conducted their slapdash rituals. Without, as Truth commented to herself, anything much of an idea of what they were doing.

  Normally it would not have annoyed her so much. After all, the Blackburn rituals that had seen print were harmless enough—it was only the last one, The Opening of the Way, that presented any danger in the wrong hands, and there was currently no printed copy of it available.

  No, the trouble was not so much in the experimenting—it was that Nuclear Circle had accidentally gotten its hands on a psychic to give their undisciplined playacting the psychic force that would otherwise have come only after years of dedicated study and practice.

  Truth wished Winter had remembered more about what she and her friends had done here—or that Truth herself had been luckier in trying to contact the others. Without knowing how closely they’d been following the dictates of the Blackburn Work, it was difficult to know just what sort of psychic residue she’d be dealing with here—but no matter what it was, a simple Banishing and Unbinding should take care of it.

  Unless, as Winter insisted, Nuclear Lake itself was the problem. In that case, Truth might be biting off more than she could chew.

  Truth frowned, navigating her Saturn slowly over the rocks and ruts of the dirt road leading into Nuclear Lake. Her working tools were in the plumber’s bag on the seat beside her. She did not really need them—the power was in her, not in these reminders—but they helped in focusing her will, just as using the pendulum focused the perceptions of her unconscious mind.

  Someone—not me!—really should sweep this whole area with some sort of psychic Geiger counter to locate the hot spots and shut them down. Most people would be much better off without a psychic locus running wild in their backyard …

  But most people would never know if there was one. The Unseen World truly did not exist for those without the senses to perceive it—and some lucky few had the power to choose whether they would see its manifestations or not.

  Truth was not one of them. She had chosen the middle ground between science and sorcery—a path neither black nor white, but gray as mist: Thorne Blackburn’s path, and now hers. She had sworn to walk it all the days of her life, striving to strike a balance between Light and Darkness—and in doing so she had forfeited her chance to remain ignorant, just as Michael Archangel had warned her would happen.

  Truth parked and got out of her car, following the track that led toward the abandoned building. She wondered what had been here back in the long-ago seventies, before this land had become part of Haelvemaen Park. But the history of Nuclear Lake didn’t matter as much now as what the basement of the building contained.

  Truth pushed the back door open, balancing her bag in one hand and her flashlight in the other. Once she’d cleaned up inside she really ought to see if the Sheriff’s Department would put a padlock on the door to keep trespassers out of the place. Abandoned buildings were perfect places for fires to start, and if the spring weather turned dry as it did so often in the Hudson Valley lately, a fire could rip devastatingly through hundreds of acres of woodland and perhaps endanger Glastonbury itself.

  Her footsteps echoed down the iron staircase as Truth descended into the basement, her bag of tools bumping at her hip. The beam of the flashlight cast a narrow pillar of light over the walls and ceiling, and the dampness here, away from the cleansing sun, made her shiver.

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Truth set
down the flashlight on one of the lab benches that still remained around the edge of the room and set her bag beside it. She unbuckled the top—it was a canvas plumber’s bag, chosen both for strength and capacity—and took out a pillar candle of beeswax, a shallow silver dish and the charcoal to fill it, and a small glass flask filled with a gleaming liquid. Truth had made the Universal Condenser herself, gathering the herbs and the morning dew herself over a period of several weeks and following the laborious and faintly silly recipe set forth in Thorne’s writings. As with so many appendices of the Blackburn Work, Thorne was merely passing down the soi-disant wisdom of other occultists, and Truth had already discovered that much occult “learning” consisted of fossilized coincidence—all outward symbols of greater truths, as her teacher, Irene Avalon, had assured her with the serene all-encompassing acceptance that Truth found so hard to emulate. What Truth herself thought was that while magick worked, it didn’t always work for the reasons magicians thought it did.

  Someone needs to field-test all of this “occult wisdom” to separate the sheep from the goats, Truth thought idly as she lit first the candle and then the charcoal. Once the candle was burning steadily she turned off her flashlight, and when the charcoal was glowing redly, she reached into her bag again and pulled out a fistful of incense. The lumps of resin glowed like cloudy amber in the candlelight. She sifted them over the coals; they sizzled and bubbled and began to distill into a column of pungent white smoke. She took a second bowl from her bag—this one of rock crystal, the faint clouds and bubbles beneath its surface proclaiming its origin far beneath the surface of the earth—and set it beside the first, filling it with the Universal Condenser. The liquid glowed with a faint violet fire to Truth’s otherworldly sight, but logically she could not tell whether this was an artifact of its intrinsic power, or of the effort she had put into making it. This was the reality of magick—everything had at least two explanations and often more.