Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (39 page)

 
          
Why
had no one called to complain when this had happened—about the noise, if
nothing else? Not that she would have been around to take the message if they
had, Winter noted scrupulously. And somehow she didn't think her answering
machine had survived to record any messages, either.

 
          
There
was glass everywhere—from the broken dishes, from the splintered television,
from the posters under now-shattered glass. Her dining room table had been a
sheet of industrial glass on a granite pedestal. Only the pedestal remained,
surrounded by what looked at first like uncut diamonds.

 
          
So much anger. , .
Winter thought
wonderingly. Her own, or that of the creature who stalked her? It hardly
mattered now, did it? Whoever had done it, there was nothing left intact in the
entire living room.

 
          
The
bedroom was no better. The mattress and box spring were broken and gutted. The
lamps and tables were smashed. The sheets and blankets were shredded. There
were papers everywhere, blasted into confetti-sized snow, and Winter breathed a
sigh of relief that all the really important papers that defined her life were
split between a box at the bank and a file at her lawyer's.

 
          
If
even they were safe.

 
          
With
a forbidding sense of dread Winter opened her closet, and quickly wished she
hadn't. Her
cedarwood
hangers were a splintered,
tangled mess, and her suits lay on the floor beneath them in tatters.

 
          
Twelve hundred plus a pop and you could
stuff pillows with them now. I wonder if my insurance covers "poltergeist
rage"?

 
          
Even
her shoes—expensive leather pumps in an entire spectrum of neutral shades—were
all somehow mangled: bent and folded, heels torn off, leather gouged.

 
          
Nothing
salvageable was left.

 
          
It's just as well that they aren't really
"me" anymore,
Winter told herself bravely. In truth, if her work
wardrobe—those rigid, colorless suits—had still been intact she probably would
have just donated it to some charity boutique.
Ungaro
and Calvin Klein didn't really fit her new look.

           
Whatever it was going to be.

 
          
Maybe even colors,
Winter thought
sarcastically.
"When I am an old
ivoman
, I shall wear purple.
..."

 
          
Grimly,
she finished her catalog of havoc. The destruction was the same in the
kitchen—though messier—and none of the lights worked. Knives and forks were
warped and bent and even tied into knots. Her microwave seemed to have . . .
melted.

 
          
The Getter Effect. What a pity I can't
repeat it on demand and earn a million dollars. . . .

 
          
The
only fortunate thing about the whole disaster was that she or someone had
cleaned out her refrigerator and kitchen cabinets before she'd gone to
Fall River
, but in the bathroom she wasn't as lucky.
The bathroom was spattered with a dried rainbow of shower gel and grooming
products. The glass bottles were-—predictably—shattered, but the plastic
bottles were turned mysteriously inside out, something that Winter was not
entirely sure was even possible.

 
          
She
tossed a shampoo bottle, the outside caked with the dried slime of its former
contents, into the tub. There was nothing here to salvage, and no point in
searching the wreckage. Whatever had destroyed the apartment had been
thorough. It saved her the time and labor of packing, really—all Winter had to
do was call someone to empty the place to the walls and then repaint.

 
          
And
then live here?

 
          
No.
Whatever else she knew, Winter knew
also that she could never take up her old life again. Nothing in it seemed to
matter now. What mattered was to make what reparations she could for the
damaged lives she was responsible for. Winter sighed, making one last survey of
her demolished apartment. If she had needed any final proof of the danger stalking
her, it was here, in this smorgasbord of destruction. The thing that Truth
Jourdemayne
had named "Elemental" had killed
Cassie. It had invaded the lives of everyone Winter had known—and, it seemed,
Winter was the only one who could stop it.

 
          
But
to do that she had to confront it—as Truth had, as Cassie had.

 
          
She
didn't think she'd survive the encounter.

 
          
Grey
could help her, but Winter was no longer sure he would. He might even already
be dead—perhaps that had been Cassie's message to her, that the creature had
killed and would kill again?

           
There was no point in guessing—not
when she could know.

 
          
Winter
thought of Rhiannon, blushing with shame as she remembered the meeting.
"Won't you even tell me where to send
it?"
the girl had cried—but now that Winter was willing at last to
accept the message, she didn't know how to get in touch with Rhiannon.

 
          
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
.

 
          
/
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
rilled
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.