Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (50 page)

 
          
"Hello,
Winter."

 
          
Dr.
Luty
was
right. Everybody was right. I've been crazy all along.

 
          
Winter
Musgrave turned around and looked into Hunter
Greyson's
eyes.

 
          
He
was dressed as she'd seen him in her dreams, in the white buckskin jacket and
jeans he'd worn in that springtime orchard so many years ago.

           
As she watched, the jacket darkened,
became rain-spotted motorcycle leathers, and the lines of age flickered across
his face like summer lightning.

 
          
She
was not seeing Grey, Winter realized with a horrified pang. She was seeing the
idea
of Grey—and she had not seen him in
so many years that her mental picture of his appearance was only confusing
things.

 
          
She
was terrified, exhausted, and sick with grief. But more than that, Winter was a
woman who refused ever to fail. Deliberately she forced herself to relax, to
let go.

 
          
Grey's
blurred image steadied; a vigorous man of her own age, in his thirties, and not
the wasted ghost in the hospital bed. His pale blond hair, still long, was
pulled back into a silky ponytail. Instead of anything resembling street
clothes, he wore a long white robe with an open-fronted red robe over it. The
inner robe was belted in with what looked like a jeweled serpent, and resting
on his hair was a laurel-leaf crown made of gold. On his right wrist he wore an
iron bracelet set with red stones, and there was a signet ring on his finger.
He looked . . .

 
          
He looked like the picture of Thorne
Blackburn from the front of Truth's book.

 
          
"Grey,"
Winter said wonderingly, and then, with the inanity that was sanity's only
possible defense: "What do you
do
for
a living?"

 
          
Grey—or
his image—laughed. "I'm an unemployed actor, what did you think?" He
came forward and took her hands in his, and possibly the greatest shock since
her arrival was that his skin seemed warm and living against her own.

 
          
"You
came. I thought you'd forgotten me," Hunter
Greyson
said.

 
          
/
did for a while. But not any more.
"Grey,
what is this place? Where am I? How did I get here?" Winter babbled.

 
          
"You
aren't here; not really. Your body is right where you left it. This is only a
dream. Do you remember, Winter? We built our stronghold here, a long time
ago."

 
          
Winter
looked over his shoulder. The flat featureless light that allowed her to see
came from nowhere and everywhere, illuminating a universe as unnatural as a
movie sound-stage. In the middle distance she could see twelve
cairns
of stone, half crumbling and seemingly very
old, set in a circle.

 
          
"Yes,
Grey. I remember." And as she said it, the words were true.

           
"Help me, Winter. You're my
last hope," Grey said. "No one else came."

 
          
Once
more there came that sick flutter of uncertainty: the night, the road, the
glare of the oncoming headlights, and then the cold. . . . She shuddered,
pulling closer to him, and Grey embraced her as if her presence could warm him.

 
          
"It
took me a long time to realize I wasn't dead," Grey said against her
cheek. "If I'd been dead, I would have known what to do; after all, I'd
been preparing for it all my life. Death isn't the end. It's only a way-station
on the journey."

 
          
"You're
in a coma," Winter said pulling back to look into his face. "Hooked
up to a respirator." She felt like
Alice
having a conversation with the Red Queen—no
matter what she said, it would sound totally surreal. As long as she didn't
think about where she was or who she was talking to, she was okay, but nothing
in the bizarre manifestations of the last several months had come even close to
preparing her for this.

 
          
"A
coma." Grey nodded. "I thought it might be something like that. I
can't go on, I can't go back. I'm just . . . here. Not even as real as a ghost.
I tried to reach some of the people I knew, but the way I am now, things don't
work the way they should. The only way I could reach the physical world at all
was to call back the
magickal
child
that
Nuclear Circle
created, and—"

 
          
"You
sent it? It was you all along?
You
killed Cassie?" Winter
interrupted. She jerked away from him and stepped back, putting as much space
between them as she could. Anger called to her; a fury that here, in this
world, would be as tangible as their two bodies. Cassie was dead and Grey had
killed her. He'd sent the
magickal
child that
had
started the fire. He'd said so.

 
          
Betrayal
fed her anger—only now did Winter realize how much she had been counting on
Grey to live up to her dreams of him.

 
          
"Killed
—
?"
Grey's face went pale with shock. He threw up his hands,
sketching a figure in the
aethyr
—

 
          
—and
Winter was back in the hospital room, staring down at Grey's body across their
clasped hands, her heart hammering with fury and shock.

 
          
"Grey!"
she cried. The body in the bed did not stir. "Grey, answer me!" She
took him by the shoulders, shaking him. His head lolled limply on the pillow.

 
          
"Is
everything all right in here?" Ms. Taylor came into the room, starched and
efficient in her nursing whites, and looked down at Grey. "Is there
anything I can do for you?"

 
          
Leave my patient alone.
Winter heard
that unspoken rebuke as clearly as if it had been uttered aloud.

 
          
"No,"
she said, summoning a smile with an effort. "Everything's fine. Could I be
alone with my—with Grey, please?"

 
          
She
didn't dare claim a relationship she couldn't prove, dearly as she wished to.
The moment she did there'd be papers to sign and questions she didn't dare
face—not someone whose recent treatment in a "sanatorium" could too
easily come to light. She had to stay calm, or she could help no one.

 
          
"We've
always called him Hunter," Ms. Taylor said, seeming to accept the
explanation that was no explanation. She smoothed the hair back from Grey's
brow. Winter felt a flare of jealousy before realizing that this woman had as
much right as she did to touch him—and maybe more.

 
          
"The
family always called him Grey," Winter said, skating perilously close to a
lie. "He hated—
hates
—to be
called Hunter." With reflexive pragmatism, she wondered who was paying the
bills to keep Grey here, if he really had no family.

 
          
"I'll
tell the girls, then. We try to call them by name as much as possible. People
have come out of comas much longer than this one, Ms.
Greyson
,
you mustn't give up hope. Please stay as long as you want. Oh, and could you
stop by the administration office on your way out? Mr. Peters needs to talk to
a member of the family about what to do with the billing once the Medicaid runs
out." Ms. Taylor smoothed Grey's hair back one last time before she left.

 
          
Alone
once more, Winter stared down at Grey. If she touched him again, would she find
herself back in the Twilight Zone talking to a ghost?

 
          
Just
how much credence could she give to everything she thought she had heard Grey
saying, anyway? Wasn't it so much more likely that the whole thing had been
some kind of delusional flashback? No matter how much reason she'd had for it,
she'd still had a nervous breakdown—or the next best thing to one.

           
"Well," Winter said aloud,
"you can't have it both ways." Either what had just happened was a
hallucination—in which case she had no more reason to believe that Grey had
killed Cassie than she'd had before—or it wasn't.

 
          
And
Grey had killed her friend.

 
          
No,
Winter told herself.
Think about it. He
said he'd sent the
magickal
child.
He didn't seem to know about Cassie's death
at all
—
in fact, he seemed pretty
shaken up by it when I told him.

 
          
What
was she supposed to believe?
Who
was
she supposed to believe?

 
          
"Why trust anybody, Winter?"
Grey
spoke to her our of her memory.
"It's
a free country. Doubt everything. Question authority."

 
          
"Okay,"
Winter said. "You're the authority, and I'm going to question you."

 
          
She
dragged the chair she'd been sitting in before over beside Grey's bed and
reached through the guardrails to clasp his hand once more. /
need to know. If you hate me enough to kill
me I need to know.

 
          
It
was like choosing to step off a high-diving board. She let go and fell through
that strange kaleidoscopic disorientation once again; scenes and sensations
bizarrely disconnected from all familiar context.

 
          
And
then, faster than before, the flicker through the orchard—
there's something here I need to understand
—and Grey, the plain,
the ruined citadel in the distance.

 
          
He
was dressed as before, only now the bright scarlet of the outer robe had cooled
to a dark wine color, and everything about him seemed less bright. For a moment
her senses rebelled against the compelling
reality
of all of this—this—this Stephen King fantasy world that was as concretely
here
as a New York City street.

 
          
As
she fought it, the world around her flickered and vanished, and the sounds and
smells of the hospital room welled up around her once more. She heard Grey cry
out—from that world or this?—and belatedly understood that the Otherworld was
not something forced on her, but a thing that she was somehow helping to create.

 
          
How can this be?
a part of her mind
cried out, terrified. But this was a part of reality that Truth and others
Winter had met on her travels accepted as simply as they accepted the physical
world around them, and Winter was out of options. Accept and use it
unquestioningly, or more people would die.

           
She relaxed, and the only world Grey
had left came real once more.

 
          
She
could feel the cold sinking into her bones, and wished, for a ridiculous
moment, that she'd brought a heavier coat. But no earthly garments could warm
her here.

 
          
"Take
my hand." Grey's fingers closed over hers, and the world steadied around
her. Winter looked up into his face.

 
          
He
was not the way she had remembered him. Too many years had passed for that. But
traces of the boy she'd known remained in the man, and for a moment the memory
of how much she'd loved him threatened to overwhelm everything.

 
          
For
a moment.

 
          
"You
killed Cassie," Winter said, tightening her grasp on his hand.
Determination made a cold weapon of her heart. The answer was here after all.

 
          
"No."
Grey's denial was slow, uncertain. "I ... But . .
.you're
here, Winter. Why you? You didn't have any more interest in
the Work—" his tone was bitter "—and Cassie did, at least a little;
enough that I thought a message from the astral had a chance of reaching her.
How did she die?"