Winter gazed at him steadily. “That isn’t what happened.”
Grey ran his free hand through his hair, holding tight to Winter’s hand with the other. She would have pulled loose from his grip, but she suspected that Grey was the one keeping her anchored here.
“I didn’t intend—I’ve been on the Path too long to say something like that, even if it’s true, but I don’t understand. Where did it get the power to become real? Even if it were to visit any of the rest of you—we all created it together, so there’d be a link—all that should have happened was a few bad dreams.”
“It killed her,” Winter said fiercely. “It drove me—It stalked all of us, Grey: me, Janelle, Ramsey, Cassie. Why did you do it, Grey?” she demanded.
“Because I didn’t want to stay like this until my body finally wore out! The silver cord is broken—I can’t find my way back to it, but my body’s still alive out there! This should have worked—”
“Well, it didn’t! Your singing telegram is very comfortable back in the real world—it started out killing squirrels, but it’s working its way up the food chain nicely. Every time it kills it gets stronger, and it doesn’t want to tell anybody anything. Don’t you think Cassie tried to find out why it was after her? Or Truth? I was there when it came after Truth—it nearly killed her—and she says it’s after me.”
“Truth … Jourdemayne?” Grey said in renewed horror. “It attacked Thorne Blackburn’s daughter?”
Winter didn’t know why the fact that Grey knew about Truth seemed to make him more real to her, but now Winter believed, both in Grey’s reality and in his innocence. His bewilderment was genuine enough to make Winter’s heart ache.
“I never meant … And I didn’t think you’d help me anyway, even if you knew,” he finished quietly.
“I—” Winter began, but everything she could think of to say sounded like self-justification, and there was no time left for that. Only one thing mattered.
“You created it. Can you stop it?” Winter said.
Watching Grey’s face, she saw him hesitate; his robes—the robes of an Adept in the Blackburn Work—darkened further, from ivory and burgundy to gray and umber. Far away, upon the horizon, flashes like heat lightning played across the sky.
“Maybe,” Grey said at last. “There’s one thing I can think of to try. If you trust me.”
“Trust you?” Winter said suspiciously. “Why do I have to trust you?”
“Because for this to work,” Grey said, “you’ve got to kill me.”
IT WOULD be nice to pack it all in and decide that she was actually crazy, Winter thought to herself several hours later. Then all of this could be just some elaborate mental spasm, a sequel to her problematic nervous breakdown. But the hard truth was that she simply didn’t care about other people’s definition of sanity any more.
She’d signed the papers that afternoon taking legal responsibility for Grey’s care. Meaningless signatures, falsely given, but they bought her the few hours that was all the time she would need. By tomorrow—next week—whenever they discovered her deception—it wouldn’t matter any more.
Under other circumstances, this would have been a beautiful spring night. It was after midnight; a waning moon rode high in the sky, and the loudest sound was the rhythmic rush of the surf against the beach ahead. She’d left her car parked on a quiet street several blocks away, a few miles into town from the motel where she’d spent the day and evening. No one would be expecting a car to drive up to the facility at this time of night; even a lone pedestrian would rouse suspicion, but that much couldn’t be helped. This was something that had to be done at night.
The afternoon’s events seemed wavery and unreal, but Winter clung to what he had told her. Stopping the Elemental was what mattered and, tied as he was to a body he could not awaken, the magickal power Grey could wield was almost nil. Once dead—or, as Grey had kept referring to it, discarnate—he would be free to move beyond the Astral Plane with much greater power.
But once dead, he would no longer be tied to what he called the Plane of Manifestation, the real world—unless there were someone holding him here. Someone who could be his anchor, lending him the animal power of the physical body and the Plane of Manifestation to blend with the power of the Mental and Spiritual Planes that Grey would have.
Winter.
I’d rather be crazy. It’s much more restful.
She didn’t know if Grey’s plan would sound sensible to another magician; to her it was voodoo, plain and simple. Leaving aside what was going to happen if Grey had been telling her the literal truth, the least of what Winter was going to do here tonight was, by any legal definition, murder—and a hospital full of life-support equipment wasn’t the place Winter would have chosen to summon the Elemental’s psychokinetic storm to if she’d had a choice. But her choices had been stripped away from her one by one, until she had only one choice left:
Win or die.
Winter walked around to the back of the building and chuckled softly as she reached the back door. She’d expected it to be locked, and it was, but she’d come a long way in the past few months, and it was a small step from moving keys across a table to moving pins in a locking cylinder. This much, at least, she was confident of her ability to do.
The heavy door shuddered under her fingers for a few moments, and when Winter turned the knob again, the door swung open. She stepped into a sort of vestibule, and walked past the cartons of liquid nutrient and the time clock with its row of punch cards. She glanced at the rack. According to the cards, there were only two people here on this shift. She hoped she didn’t run into either of them, because even in a Donna Karan white linen duster over gray flannel man-tailored slacks and a beige wild silk shirt, Winter didn’t think she had much hope of convincing anyone that she was a doctor making a late-night visit to a patient.
She walked to the inner door and pushed it open.
The lights were lowered for night, and in the darkness and quiet the institution had a bleak, untended air. Wheelchairs and other pieces of equipment lined the halls. Winter looked around dubiously. Where was Grey’s room? She’d memorized the room number when she’d been here before, but in the dark, coming at it from this unfamiliar direction, everything looked different and whatever else she did, she didn’t dare find herself going past the nurse’s station.
She reached Grey’s room at last, slipping inside and pulling the door halfway shut with a pang of relief. She couldn’t risk a light that might be seen from the hall, but fortunately someone had forgotten to close the window curtains, and the pale moonlight streaming in through the window was enough to see by. Winter crossed the room, pulling the privacy curtains around the bed by the window to shield her further.
“Grey—?” she whispered.
The body on the bed did not respond, and, looking down at Grey lying there, Winter experienced a wrenching sense of disorientation. This wasted body in a hospital bed was not the Hunter Greyson she knew and had spoken to just this afternoon.
But the Grey she had spoken to was a ghost, a sort of psychic echo of the man on the bed, with no more tangible reality than a picture on a television screen. She stood gazing down at him, hesitating. When she turned off the respirator, he’d be gone, just like blowing out a candle.
But that wasn’t really true. He was gone already. He’d been gone ever since that rainy night on the coast road when a hit-and-run driver had taken away all of his choices. All that remained was to allow his body to accept that fact.
Winter closed her eyes against the sudden burning of tears, but she knew she was luckier than she really deserved. At least she got the chance to say good-bye.
And, with luck, she might even survive to grieve for him.
She reached for the tube that covered his throat. Removing it should be enough—the respirator was breathing for him; without it, he would suffocate quickly. She closed her fingers around the plastic to pull it free and stopped.
Alarms. There must
be alarms of some kind that would go off the moment this thing stopped working, and discovery would be a disaster she could not imagine explaining away. Could she turn the machine off first? Winter walked around the bed and stood in front of the ventilator that breathed for Hunter Greyson. It was as tall as she was, boxy, dark, and threatening. Lights flickered on and off in time to the sounds it made; a bellows worked; there was some sort of dial with the words negative pressure on it, and a needle fluttered in the middle of the white zone. She looked further. The respirator had a box plugged into the side that had a red light and a green one on the side and a round speaker grille on the front. The green light burned steadily. That must be the alarm, but she couldn’t see any way to turn it off.
Winter continued studying the machine, wishing she’d thought to look at it more carefully in daylight. A thick gray cord ran into the power socket on the wall, elaborately locked into place so that nothing could accidentally dislodge it and interrupt the power supply. Another, thinner, cord, plugged into the wall higher up; the word air was printed above it in blue. The unoccupied sockets said oxygen and suction. Winter recoiled slightly. This room and what it represented were frightening as no supernatural horror could be.
But she was wasting time, and every moment of delay meant that Grey’s magickal child might be killing somewhere else. Inspecting the respirator carefully, Winter saw that nothing connected it to the man—Bobby?—in the other bed. What she did here would affect only Grey.
But how? She couldn’t unplug it, she didn’t think she could just switch it off …
But she could short it out. Somewhere inside this machine was an electrical motor, and electric motors were something Winter knew how to break. She pointed a finger at the machine.
“Bang. You’re dead.”
The fat blue spark that exploded out of the respirator’s casing made her jump back and yelp in startlement, and then hiss in disgust at her own fright. But, to Winter’s relief, no one came to investigate, and that was all that happened. The respirator was unmoving, dark, and silent, and so was the alarm box.
She went back to the bedside and looked down at Grey. It was over.
“Good-bye, Grey,” Winter said. She swallowed hard. “I could have loved you—if I hadn’t been such a damned coward.” She reached out and pulled the hose away. Then she took his hand. The room was utterly silent.
“Okay. What are you waiting for?” she said aloud. Come on, nightmare—here I am.
When the vertigo struck she realized that she still expected with some part of her mind to hear the bell that signaled the opening of trading on the floor of the Stock Exchange.
SHE WAS on the Astral Plane, and it was dark. But the Otherworld, Truth Jourdemayne had said, was created as much from their expectations as by any external force.
Let there be light. Winter willed light and her surroundings brightened, sharp with an eerie blue-gray illumination that made the place look like the Twilight Zone.
—Winter!—It was a summons her mind did not recognize as sound; sharp and urgent as the sudden remembrance of a thing forgotten. She turned toward it and saw Grey, farther away from her than he’d ever appeared before, wavering like an image seen through water. She ran toward him, reaching out as he drifted farther away, concentrating on feeling his hands grasping her own.
She touched him; her fingers grazed his as she yanked at him, clutching him tightly. With a sob of relief, Winter dragged him back into reality once more.
“Grey!” she said inadequately. He’d seemed almost insubstantial when she’d touched him, but moment by moment he was becoming more solid beneath her touch.
He freed one hand, brushing the hair back from her face. He smiled, and Winter felt her heart clench in a promise of grief to come.
“Don’t let go, whatever you do,” Grey said. “Without you, I’ll just fade away.” His supercilious expression mocked the literal truth of his words.
“All right.” Winter held his hand as if they were orphans in a fairy tale about to walk into the dark forest. How does being dead feel, Grey? “What else do you want me to do?”
“This is going to sound really simple. We need to walk over there—see the stones?—to where Nuclear Circle’s astral temple used to be. Getting there’s going to be harder than you think, but then comes the easy part. We rebuild Nuclear Circle’s astral temple, and then—”
Winter almost pulled free. “In God’s name, Grey—you brought me here for that? I make lightbulbs explode—I can’t do anything like, like—”
Grey shook his head in frustration—at least, so Winter saw him. “You have to. Just imagine it the way it was; this is the Astral Plane: Wishes are horses here, and thoughts are real. You remember the image we all worked on? Just hold that in your mind.”
Yes, thoughts were real, Winter thought, at the edge of panic. And how could she tell Grey that out of a past edited by trauma and drugs, the memory of imagining Nuclear Circle’s astral temple was one she didn’t have?
“Come on!” Grey pulled at her, impatient. Helplessly she let him lead her toward the circle of cairns.
It was like moving through water. Each step was an effort, and Winter quickly understood why Grey had said it would be hard to reach the temple: If she did not concentrate with all her will on the tumbled stones, Winter found herself forgetting where she was going; veering off in another direction, or stopping altogether.
It was her anger that saved her. Not the killing rage that, uncontrolled, brought on the psychokinetic storms that for so long she had ascribed to an outside agency, but a cold quiet determination to do what she had said she would do, no matter how great the odds were against her.
At last Winter was able to lay her free hand atop the nearest cairn of stones. At once the pressure and disorientation ceased, and she and Grey, still holding hands, were able to walk quickly and easily into the center of the circle.
Grey looked around. From the expression on his face he was seeing something different than she was—or perhaps remembering.
“Well, here we are, at the death of hope,” Grey said. His voice was cutting, and Winter flinched away inwardly from the anger in it. “You know, for years I hoped you’d come back.”
“I forgot,” Winter said, and the bare truth sounded far uglier than she’d intended.
“I know,” Grey said, and now he only sounded tired. “I looked for you in dreams, on the astral—hell, even on the Internet.”
“Did you try New York?” Winter shot back. Why were they arguing now? Wasn’t it years and lifetimes too late to matter?
“I got tired of getting thrown off the family estate and then picked up for vagrancy,” Grey said. He shrugged and tried to smile, but couldn’t quite manage it. “I’ve got to admit that an arrest record makes a dandy souvenir when you try to get a job, though.”
Her parents had done that. Casually. Efficiently. Damn them. In this bodiless realm, her spiraling outrage had the seductive force of a jolt of speed. “I didn’t do that,” she said quietly. “I didn’t even know.”
“I know.” Grey’s smile was gentle now. “But it took me too many years to figure that out. I’m sorry. But hurry now. We’ve got to rebuild the temple—it’s coming, and if we can’t restrain it when it gets here …”
It’s going to kill us. Winter’s mind supplied the words Grey didn’t say.
And it was coming. A darkness on the horizon, the heaviness of a mindless hostility that Winter had glimpsed twice before. Grey cried out in a language that, for a confused moment, Winter felt she knew, and where the circle of tumbled stones had stood in the sourceless silver light, the walls of the temple began to rise, shadowy in the wavering air. Winter felt Grey draw power from her living body, but he needed more: her mind, her will, and her heart.
She tried to give him what he needed—and realized, with sinking despair, that she couldn’t. There was some fundamental quality that she lacked—if she’d ever had it at all.
“Winter,” Grey plead
ed. She clutched his hand tighter, wordlessly shaking her head. He wanted her to fly, but her wings had melted long ago.
It was nearly here, and they had no defenses. Grey had said the Elemental had more reality here; in this world Winter could feel the ground shake as it approached, and the storm that heralded its coming gained force. Beside her, Grey fought to raise the walls of the temple by himself, and Winter knew he wasn’t going to make it.
How could she expect—how could Grey expect—to create alone what it had taken five people once to make?
And then it reached them. The storm broke over Winter like a towering wave: an icy vortex that chilled and deafened her, leaching the strength from her body until she could no longer feel Grey’s hand. This isn’t so bad, was Winter’s first, false, reaction. She’d been expecting a monster, some kind of movie alien, not just darkness and crushing pressure.
But her sense of relief was gone before it had truly been, gone in the realization of the true nature of the creature that Hunter Greyson had made.
First came the pain. It was worse than the migraine headaches that had left her sick and dazed for days, worse than she could imagine pain could be. But even that was endurable, was welcome in comparison to the icy needles that slid into her eyes, her brain, carrying with them the knowledge of inhuman hunger and loss. Pain—and the soul Winter was not sure she possessed howled its despair. The Elemental had reached her, and here was its message: grief and pain, anger and betrayal, ripping away her sanity and self as easily as she might disjoint a chicken, destroying all that Winter was but leaving behind some screaming spark to know and suffer and sorrow.
Forever.
She didn’t know when it stopped, only that she was running. Grey pulled her along, away from the temple, his hand in hers so hot and solid that Winter knew with a distant pang of wonder that even in this unreal place she was nearly on the edge of death.
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