Black Swan Rising (16 page)

“But why? What does he get from creating so much horror in the world?”

Will shook his head. “I’ve never been entirely sure. He seems to feed off chaos and horror. He grows more powerful with each war, each genocide, each atrocity . . . and now that the box has been opened, he’ll be more powerful than ever. He’ll use it to summon the demons of Despair and Discord.”

“Maybe it’s too late already,” I said.

“That’s your despair talking. No. Opening the box was only the first step for Dee. He couldn’t do it himself, he needed a descendant of Marguerite to do it for him. He waited centuries for one who didn’t know that the box must stay closed and then he tricked you into opening it away from him. You remember the light that came out of the box? That would have destroyed Dee. He had to use his mindless minions to retrieve
the box. Even now it’s very dangerous for him to be near the box when it’s open, but he must keep it open for seven days in order to bring the demons of Despair and Discord into this world. You opened the box two nights ago—so you only have five days to find him and close the box, or Despair and Discord will gain control of the city.”

I gaped at him, trying to absorb all this fantastic information. It was one thing to accept the existence of a supernatural world, it was quite another to believe I had such an important role in it.

“But as you’ve pointed out, I’m untrained. My mother died before she could teach me what to do—” I felt my eyes filling up with tears. The shadows around us seemed to creep nearer. I smelled copper in the air and heard something hiss in the bushes.
Poor orphan,
it seemed to say,
poor motherless orphan
.

Will took me by the shoulders and turned me to face him. “You can’t let yourself give in to despair. That’s what he
does
. There are others who can teach you,
guides
. They’re all around you. You just have to open your eyes and you’ll see them.”

“But can’t you help me?” I asked, instantly hating the whiny tone of my voice. I wouldn’t blame him if he turned from me in disgust.

“I’ve done as much as I can in opening your eyes. I’ve done more than I should. You’ll have to find other teachers. I promise you, though, that I’ll protect you when I can . . .” He stopped and tilted his head, listening. I listened too, but all I heard was a bird singing—a pure sweet sound that reminded me of that French poem I’d read in the Cloisters library only a few hours ago. So much had passed since then—so many horrors and wonders—that it felt like years since I’d read those
lines:
The nightingale sings no more; it is the lark greeting the break of day.

I turned around to look toward the eastern sky and saw that it was beginning to pale. When I turned back, I was alone on the stone wall. Will Hughes had vanished as swiftly as the night.

Walking back to the 190
^th
Street station, I noticed that the last of the heather, which had glowed indigo and violet last night, had faded to pearly gray and mauve, blighted by frost. I looked around for the light sylphs, but they were gone. Drunk on color and light, no doubt. But where did they go in the daytime? And what did they live on when they’d drunk all the colors, and winter turned the landscape barren and pale?

I paused at the park entrance and turned back to look at the gardens, struck that
these
were the questions preoccupying my mind, not whether all that had happened last night was real. My hand slipped underneath my scarf, which I’d tied tightly around my throat to hide the marks of Will Hughes’s teeth. When I touched the torn flesh, I felt a tremor throughout my body. No, I hadn’t imagined what had happened. I readjusted the scarf. Will Hughes had said I would find guides. But how? Where?

Not here,
a voice inside my head said. A supernatural voice? I wondered. Or just the voice of reason reminding me that I was tired and hungry and cold and that it was time to go home? I couldn’t tell—and if I couldn’t tell
that,
how was I ever going to find the guides to teach me what I needed to know?

I left the park feeling as if the minute I stepped outside its gates I might never again find entrance into the world I had glimpsed last night. Certainly nothing could have felt more mundane than descending into the subway station and waiting on the platform with early-morning commuters for the A. Plugged into iPods, clutching their paper coffee cups, eyes fixed on the track for the approaching train, which one of them would believe me if I told them what had happened to me in the last forty-eight hours? Certainly not the woman in a gray suit texting on her iPhone, or the yawning high school student trying to focus on her AP chemistry book. And how could I tell anyone about being in the Cloisters when Edgar Tolbert was killed? They’d think I was as crazy as the man wearing the Daniel Boone cap muttering to himself as he went from person to person holding out a worn paper cup asking for spare change. He was dressed in layers of tattered clothing in a rainbow of faded plaids and prints that hung loosely from his slight frame and shook like quaking aspen leaves as he shambled along the platform. As he got closer to me, I heard a bit of his patter.

“You’re looking as lovely as the queen of Egypt,” he said to the woman in the gray business suit. “Purple the sails,” he cried out, “and so perfumed that the winds were lovesick with them.” He performed a pirouette, his loose clothing billowing out like Shakespeare’s perfumed sails and turning into a blur of color as he spun. When he came to a stop, the blur remained—trembling bars of color like a rainbow caught in a sprinkler on a summer day. I almost cried out in delight at his trick, until I realized that the woman in the gray suit clearly didn’t see what I saw. She was staring right at the beggar, but her face was empty of emotion and as gray as her suit . . . or . . . I looked at
her more closely. The gray didn’t end where her clothes ended. A shimmer of gray, about an inch thick, surrounded her like a second skin.

The beggar performed another pirouette and this time the woman relented and smiled. The gray changed to sky blue. She dug in her purse and found a handful of coins to drop in the beggar’s cup. He swept his hat off and bowed low, plumes of color sparking the air around both of them. I looked around to see if anyone else on the platform was witnessing this light show, but everyone else was studiously ignoring the exchange. I saw now, though, that each person was surrounded by a faint glow—a corona—each a different color. For many the glow was low and muted, for some it was muddied. I had seen these coronas before, only I had dismissed them as symptoms of ocular migraine.

My yoga teacher was always going on about auras, about how to see your own aura and others’, about how to recognize from a person’s aura if he or she was balanced and happy or depressed or sick. I’d always thought it was a bunch of New Age hooey, but once when I was sitting in TekServe waiting to get my laptop fixed, a man sat down next to me and after a few minutes turned to me and asked, “Are you an artist?”

I knew it was probably just a pickup line, but what struck me was that I happened to be dressed very conservatively that day because I was going to an auction at Sotheby’s with my father later. Nothing about my clothes or accessories looked particularly artistic.

I told him no, but that I designed jewelry and used to draw and sculpt.

“You’re an artist,” he had said. “I can tell from your aura.”

We chatted a few more minutes—he made no attempt to
pick me up or ask me for a handout—and then my number was called. My good mood lasted through learning it would cost $800 to repair the damage to my hard drive incurred by spilling a glass of white wine on it the previous night.

Now as I got on the subway and sat down, I wondered what he’d seen. The green glow that surrounded a young Latina woman in scrubs and thick-soled sneakers sitting across from me? The yellow flares that emanated from a pretty, dark-haired girl whose head bobbed to the music from her iPod? I hoped he hadn’t seen the murky gray miasma that seeped from the elderly man hunched into his overcoat and matched his skin tone, or the mustardy yellow that hovered over the head of an elderly woman who winced in pain and touched her right temple each time the brakes screeched. It wasn’t hard to see who was well and who was sick, who was happy and who was sunk in despair. What I noticed, too, is that sometimes one person’s aura touched another’s and each changed.

I saw it first at the 175
^th
Street stop. The train was beginning to get crowded, so that when a middle-aged man in a brown raincoat got on, there were no seats. When he reached his arm up to hold on to the overhead bar, he winced. He wasn’t so old that anyone would automatically give up his or her seat for him, but he was clearly in some discomfort. He was surrounded by a dark red cloud—a bloody haze that seemed to envelop him. I noticed that several people who came close to him moved away, as if aware of some contagion. I was just getting up to offer him my seat when the Latina woman in scrubs got to her feet and gently touched him on the arm. He glared at her so angrily that I was afraid he was going to hit her, but then she lay her hand more firmly on his arm and gestured with her hand to her vacated seat. He muttered something under his
breath, still scowling, but he took the seat anyway and as he leaned back, I saw the angry red glow subside to a pale pink. The woman who’d given up her seat still had the green glow around her, but now it shone brighter and extended farther out around her. It touched the elderly woman with the headache, turning her mustard yellow into a clear daffodil gold. The girl who’d started out with the yellow aura sang a line from a song on her iPod, which made the old man with the gray aura laugh out loud. Colors rippled down the car, turning brighter and clearer, as if that one act—the woman in the scrubs touching the sick man’s arm and giving him her seat—was a pebble cast into the water radiating out into widening circles. I wondered how far it would go and what, if anything, could stop it. I soon found out.

At 168
^th
Street the woman in scrubs got out—going to New York Presbyterian Hospital, I figured—and the car got more crowded. An overweight man lost his footing and bumped into the knees of the gray man, who muttered a derogatory remark about fat people. The overweight man blushed, his aura flaring magenta, and he pushed his way farther along the car, knocking his elbow into a well-dressed woman, who scowled and sent out sparks of sulfurous yellow that filled the air with a murky smoke. I could feel the tension rising in the car and considered getting off at the next stop and catching a cab, but at this time in the morning it would take forever to get downtown and cost a fortune. At the thought of the expense of a cab ride, all my money worries came rising up. The events of the last two days had eclipsed such mundane worries, but when the dust settled, we’d still be left with colossal debt. And it certainly wouldn’t help the gallery any if my father was suspected of insurance fraud. I wondered too, what would happen
to the paintings that the police had confiscated from the burglars. Would they be held as evidence? Would we be able to sell them if we had an offer on them?

My mind reeled with all the complications. The idea that I was supposed to be saving the world from the evil John Dee seemed absurd—even more absurd than believing in the existence of manticores, vampires, and fairies. I couldn’t save my father and myself from financial ruin. I hadn’t been able to save Edgar Tolbert. A great tide of shame washed over me at the memory of Edgar Tolbert. Here I was being entertained by fairies and auras and a man was dead because of me. What kind of monster was I? And how could someone as puny and selfish as me possibly do anything against someone as powerful as John Dee?

By the time the train reached the Fourteenth Street stop I felt mired in the same muddy gloom that I saw all around me. My mood didn’t improve when I’d climbed to street level. The day that had dawned so brightly had turned gray and overcast. The people I passed on the street were huddled into their coats, heads bowed, eyes on the pavement, a wreath of gray or brown fug hovering over their heads.

It was even worse in the hospital. When I reached the front door of St. Vincent’s a woman stepped out, her skin white and drawn. She covered her face with her hands and turned toward the wall beside the door. The man following her stood helpless by her side, one arm lifted to stroke her back, but arrested midair. I had no idea what horrible news they had just received but I could taste their grief in my mouth—a taste like pennies and blood.

The whole hospital had that smell. Crossing through the lobby, I felt such waves of fear and despair that I could barely
stand. The people sitting in the waiting room were sunk into pools of dark muddy red and brown. Here and there, though, a flash of brighter color and light appeared. A man who held his elderly wife’s hand glowed violet, a child who held up her doll while reciting her ABC’s to her mother was surrounded by a halo of pink. And when I reached the floor my father was on, I immediately felt a lightening in the air.

There shouldn’t have been one. Patients in critical condition were on this floor, but there was a feeling of calm here that I hadn’t felt on the other floors. I took a deep breath, realizing it was the first really full breath I’d taken since getting off the subway. The air still smelled like stale disinfectant, but beneath that smell—or maybe it was
above
that smell or
all around
the smell—ran a fresher current, as if air that had moved through pine trees and fresh water. It grew stronger as I neared my father’s room. I could see it—a green glow emanating from his room. I stopped for a moment and just breathed it in. I felt myself grow calm and hopeful once more. What did all the money problems in the world matter as long as my father was still alive and I was still alive? One of my favorite Latin mottoes—which I’d found on an old signet ring I’d used to make one of my medallions—ran through my head.
Dum spiro, spero
. “As long as I have breath, I have hope.” I’d find a way out of our problems and I’d do what I could to stop Dee. But first I’d find out who was spreading this healing aura.