Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (40 page)

 
          
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.

           
/
must look like all six Nightmares 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 over 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.

 
          
/
don't have weeks-perhaps-months
7 /
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.

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.

 
          
Fire
and air; living and
unliving
earth; water and
will—the symbols of the three dualities that the
sidhe
must call upon to work their will. All the Blackburn Work was
built upon this central mystery: that of the Bright Lords whose realm this once
had been. Truth felt her own
sidhe
blood—her
father's gift to her, as the control of the Gates had been her mother's—waken
in answer to this summoning.

 
          
Easily
Truth shifted her consciousness into this larger reality, and now all darkness
was gone from the basement. In its place were the colors and shifting auras of
the real world—the world of rock and wind and sky.

 
          
Truth
looked around, sorting through the shifting presences and traces of use until
she found the red-and-silver image of the
magick
worked here so long ago. The images of the hours Hunter
Greyson's
Circle had spent here fluttered past her senses like the shuffling of a deck of
cards.

           
Yes, there had been power raised
here once. Dormant now, its echo could be activated by the presence of any
uncontrolled psychic—or by deliberate triggering. Easily Truth isolated the
trace of Grey's male energy—youthful and untrained, but holding the promise of
mature strength. She looked further, and found to her surprise that there were
two
complimentary female resonances—one
powerful but undisciplined, one showing the first signs of an Adept's training.
She wondered which of the two had been Winter. This many years distant, there
was no way to tell.

 
          
Once
Truth had located the psychic remnants she sought, she reached one last time
into her bag and pulled out a slender rod about eighteen inches long.

 
          
One
half of it was iron, its surface dark and
sheened
with the oil that kept it from rusting. The other half was glass, clear as
water and gathering light like a lens. A thick ring of pure gold bound the two
halves together.

 
          
Truth
handled it warily, careful not to touch the iron and disrupt the symbolic
language she was building. There were times when she thought that her mother's
earth witchery and her father's
sidhe
blood were
an even worse mix than logic and
magick
.

 
          
In
quick succession Truth passed the rod through the candle flame and the incense
smoke and over the surface of the liquid in the crystal bowl, reminding herself
of the things they symbolized and gathering their attributes into the wand via
the Law of Contagion. When she was ready, Truth touched the iron end of the rod
to the nearest tinge of red in the room's mingling auras.

 
          
She
was the iron, and the iron was her will. The rod shuddered in her fingers,
pulling to be free.