Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (33 page)

 
          
The
sudden strained silence at the other end of the line made Winter think she'd
just said something wrong—but what?

 
          
"Ramsey,
you said you'd talked to her," Winter prompted, almost pleading.
"When?"

 
          
"A
couple of weeks. Maybe a month. Or two. I didn't exactly write it down in my
Day Timer." There was a sullenness in his voice she had not heard before.

 
          
And I bet you forgot all about it
—
until this morning. And something about dead
animals in the middle of your kitchen brought it right to mind,
Winter
thought grimly. The creature that stalked her—that seemed to stalk all of
them—somehow played upon the memory, withholding recollection at will.

 
          
But
hadn't she read somewhere that the brain generated its own electric current?
Winter remembered the ball of lightning that had destroyed Nina's car; the
spark that had melted the lamp in Ramsey's guest room. Maybe
she
was what had made Ramsey remember.
And if so, could she do it now—at this distance?

 
          
"Well,
of course not. Why would you do that?" Winter answered soothingly.
"But I can't reach her at her home, and the bookstore doesn't answer, so
I'm starting to worry. Was it after Christmas that she called you?" He'd
said he exchanged Christmas cards with the others. It would be a logical time
for a letter. But not if the situation were urgent.

 
          
There
was no answer from the other end of the line.

 
          
"You
said it was important, Ramsey—that Cassie had a problem. You asked me to look
her up."

 
          
"You
told me you were going to go see her." Ramsey's tone was as near to
hostile as she'd ever heard it. If she
was
the force that had made him remember, apparently she couldn't manage the
trick from where she was now.

           
"Of course I did. I'm just
wondering, now that I can't reach her . . ." Winter tried to think of some
question that would pierce the veil of forgetfulness that her disembodied
opponent had woven around Ramsey Miller.

 
          
"Look,
Winter, I'm glad you called, but I'm pretty busy right now. Catch you later,
okay?" The phone went dead.

 
          
She
called back immediately but the line was busy, and after half an hour she
admitted to herself that Ramsey had probably taken the phone off the hook.

 
          
That
left Janelle.

 
          
Winter
stared at the phone doubtfully. Ramsey said that Janelle's memory was
unreliable, but Winter had only
Ramsey's
word
for that. On the other hand, Janelle hadn't seemed to be in touch with Cassie
when Winter had asked before. There was probably no point in calling her at all.

 
          
Since when did you become a coward?
Winter
demanded scornfully of herself. Balancing her
Filofax
on her knee, she quickly punched in the combined digits of her
PhoneCard
and Janelle's number.

 
          
This
time she'd work into things gradually. She could tell
Jannie
about visiting Ramsey; it was a reasonable call for old friends getting back in
touch to make—

 
          
"Hello?
I'd like to speak to—"

 
          
"She
isn't here," Denny said, and slammed down the phone.

 
          
At
nine
o'clock
at night?
Winter slowly replaced the receiver in its
cradle. Whether Janelle was there, or out—
Or
dead,
a chill inner voice added— Winter was not going to be able to talk to
her. Not tonight, anyway.

 
          
She
tried both of Cassie's numbers again—it would only be
6:00
on the West Coast—and got, as she had
learned to expect, no answer.

 
          
No
answers anywhere.

 
          
They were in the apple orchard below
Greyangels
—
somehow
she knew that, although she had no conscious memory of the place. The
close-planted rows of trees were covered with masses of pink-white blossoms, so
new that the tightly clustered petals had not yet begun to fall to the ground.

 
          
In his fringed white leather jacket and
acid-washed jeans, Grey blended into them; a snow-leopard against a field of
ice. His eyes were as pale as the rest of him
—
quicksilver mirrors of crystal and light.

           
"Stay
with me," Hunter
Greyson
said. "Stay with
me, Winter." He reached for her.

 
          
There was no reason for the words, the
gesture, to frighten her so, but terror was a sudden cold weight beneath her
heart. She began to back away, out of reach, but she was too slow. Grey grabbed
her arm, and she could feel his fingers sinking into her flesh like hot iron
into snow.

 
          
"Stay with me. Stay with me, Winter.
Stay with me stay with me stay with me
—"

 
          
She felt his fingers break the skin and knew
that in a moment the blood would come
—
and
that when it did, Grey would tear her to ribbons. She had to get away. If she
did not, he would destroy her.

 
          
She struggled against him one final frantic
time, but it was too late. The sluggish blood flowed over her skin like cold
acid, and as it did, Hunter
Greyson
began to change.

 
          
His face elongated, the cool patrician
features sliding sickeningly out of alignment, until instead of a mouth there
was a muzzle, and his teeth were long and sharp. Helplessly she began to cry,
and her tears burned, too, melting the flesh from her face.

 
          
"Stay with me. . . ." He leaned
toward her, raising his other hand to begin the flensing of her, and she could
not bear it, not again
—

 
          
She screamed, and tore free of him, the
blood was everywhere and would not stop. Grey snarled, and the scent of apple
blossoms was
gaggingly
strong, like the smell of rot
and decay. She ran, but the apple blossoms were falling now, and she slipped on
their slick white softness and fell, helpless. . . .

 
          
The
sound of her own scream woke Winter moments before she crashed to the floor.
For a moment she fought frantically against the cocooning sheets until the very
ordinariness of her fruitless struggles brought her fully awake.

 
          
A dream. It was only a dream.

 
          
For
a moment Winter lay there panting, almost whimpering with relief. She was
soaked in clammy sweat and her heart hammered as if she had, indeed, been
running.

 
          
He'd wanted her. To stay with him always.
He'd wanted her to stay, and the flowers had been everywhere. She hadn't been
able to get the scent out of her hair afterward. . . .

           
With hands that shook
uncontrollably, she untangled herself from the sheet.

 
          
Grey
had wanted her.

 
          
The
memory of that nightmare hunger made her shudder. It was as vivid as if she
still dreamed, and even now it seemed as if she could smell the apple blossoms.
No wonder she hadn't even wanted to
see
the
orchard behind the house, if that was what had happened there. . . .

 
          
But
how could it have?

 
          
Winter
frowned, confused, feeling the borders of sanity and unreason slide over each
other in her mind. What she had dreamed could not have had any counterpart in
reality. People's bodies did not shift like quicksilver; and when they killed,
it was not with fangs and claws. She was not dead. She had dreamed. That was
all.

 
          
Only
a dream . . .

 
          
She
kicked her feet free of the blankets and sat up to turn on the lamp. The warm
illumination banished the last of the night shadows and cleared her head. She
stood, stretching, and winced at the stiffness in her muscles. She must have
been lying there rigid as a board until she'd knocked herself out of bed. But
the nightmare was only a manifestation of her anxiety—a projection of her fears
about the others. She could have dreamed of Cassie just as easily. Grey had not
turned into a monster and tried to devour her alive.

 
          
She
thought.

 
          
Wearily
she ran a hand through her hair. Who could tell where reality ended any more?
At
Nuclear
Lake
and in the
Bidney
Institute Lab she'd already seen and experienced things that were starkly
unbelievable by modern standards—and Winter was wise and honest enough to admit
that if they happened to her, similar things probably happened to others as
well. The world was a stranger and more frightening place than anyone was
willing to admit; a place without limits, where wonders and horrors occurred
every day and miracles were commonplace.

 
          
Wonderful. A whole culture in denial. Is
there a twelve-step program for the refusal to see ghosts?

 
          
Winter
stretched again. If she could not work the stiffness out of her muscles she
might have to think about staying here an extra day—without rest, she'd be a
danger to herself and anyone she encountered on the road.

           
The nightmare was still too vivid to
let her even consider sleep, but maybe a shower . . . ? And she supposed she
should remake the bed, even if she didn't think she'd be getting back into it
anytime soon. She reached down for the bedclothes, and stopped.

 
          
The
mattress and the floor around the bed were covered in apple blossoms.

 
          
Winter
left the hotel fifteen minutes later, driving west in the dark.

 
          
By
the time the sun had risen that morning, Winter—inspired by the same instinct
that causes the prey to lead the hunter astray—had left the bland artificiality
of the interstate for the blue highways, the thin twisting map-lines that led
through real lives and real towns. By evening she had come to accept that there
would never be an answer at the phone numbers she had for Cassie Chandler—and
to realize, too, that this slow westward journey was necessary in itself.

 
          
For
the next week she worked her way slowly west, through Fayetteville, Fuller's
Point, Antigua, Grimsby,
Lemuria
, Broken Choke ... a
journey not through the Madison Avenue version of America, but through the real
one, until Winter finally understood how far out of true her own life had been.

 
          
Fayetteville
.
The waitress in the town's one restaurant had directed her to the justice of
the peace, and Winter had spent the night in a spacious second-floor bedroom
that looked out over a quiet street and the lazy river below.

 
          
It
was not even so much that the life she had was not what she could have expected
to happen to the young college girl whose past she had so painstakingly
researched. It was that, in the final analysis, even the life she'd had—that of
Winter Musgrave, Wall Street broker and analyst— had been unfinished,
incomplete. Just as Ramsey's life was, and Janelle's. She'd never built
anything that could grow.

 
          
Fuller's Point. An ancient rooming house on
the edge of town, the sheets cool with long storage and smelling faintly of
lavender and pine, where Winter continued to practice the gifts that came to
seem more and more ordinary. She could summon the lightning with a touch, and
slam a door from across the room, and knew it was nothing but meaningless
theatrics.