Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (9 page)

 
          
The
killer instinct. Abruptly Winter felt as if a cold breeze had spilled over her
skin.
Was
she a killer—and using some
kind of psychic power to do it?

 
          
"I
heard something funny back there." She heard her own voice, bright and
high with tension, talking to block out the voice within. "The woman who
owns the store—
Inquire Within?
—said
something about 'Grey Angels.' What are they—some kind of local folklore?"
The Hudson Valley was rich in folklore, Winter remembered from another
lifetime, from the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow to the ghostly galleon
that plied the Hudson on moonlit nights, scaring hell out of the local maritime
traffic.

 
          
"That's
right; you live out on
Greyangels
Road, don't you,
ma'am?" Sullivan said. "I don't know much about it myself," he
went on, "it's more a local thing, and Dad just moved up here in
'eighty-seven. The old-timers say there's supposed to be angels haunting this
part of the Hudson Valley. Like ghosts, you know, only good—most of the
time."
How appropriate,
Winter
thought to herself. "Gray ones?" "I guess so." Sullivan was
dubious. "All I know is, I've never seen them—but we do get pretty heavy
fogs from time to time, being so near the river and all. Maybe that's them.
Here we are."

 
          
She
could always call for another cab if the loaner car failed to materialize, so
Winter sent Tim Sullivan on his way after assuring him she really
had
meant him to keep the fifty dollars.
Walking around the building, she found Dave Kelly out in back, leaning into the
engine compartment of a car that had rolled off the Detroit assembly lines five
years before Winter had been born, in the company of a boy who was a younger,
slenderer version of himself.

 
          
"Hi,"
Winter called.

 
          
Dave
straightened up out of the engine. "Oh . . . hi." He didn't look
particularly happy to see her. He wiped his hands on a rag. "You just keep
after that, Paul; I've got to tell this lady about her car."

 
          
The
body under the hood made a noise that might have been either sympathy or
contempt. Winter followed Dave back around to the front of the garage, thinking
that if she didn't get a chance to sit down soon she'd probably fall down.

 
          
"It's
like this," Dave began, and sighed. "BMW's a damn fine car; German
engineering and all. I've had it up on the lifts, and I don't know what the
hell happened, if you'll pardon my French,
Miz
Musgrave, but there's not a thing I or anybody else this side of Bavaria can do
with it. Only time I've ever seen anything like what happened to your
electrical system's on a car got struck by lightning up in The Angels a few
years back."

           
"The Angels?" Winter
asked. Anything to avoid a discussion of what had destroyed her car. She was
afraid she knew.

 
          
"Local
mountain range—well, foothills, really, but high enough; me and my boy Paul go
rock-climbing there weekends. It's called The Angels; the first guy to get
this far upstate was French; the original name was
Aux
Anges
."

 
          
Aux
Anges
—the
Heights. And
The Angels
was simply a
mistranslation into English. Maybe the explanation for the Grey Angels Tabitha
Whit-field had mentioned was as simple.

 
          
"So
that's what I'd do, if I were you," Dave finished, and Winter realized
with a pang of alarm that while she'd been woolgathering she'd missed
everything he'd said.

 
          
"I'm
. . . sorry?" she said hesitantly.

 
          
"I
said, if you want a rental you're going to have to go all the way down to
Poughkeepsie
to get it. It's going to be at least a
month before you can get an insurance adjuster up here, and all he's going to
tell you is the same thing I have. When the battery melted, it ruined just
about everything else in the engine that hadn't already fried. They might not
even pay up; you know how those insurance guys are."

 
          
And what do you think melted my engine, Mr.
Kelly ? The
twee
little fairies in the bottom of the
garden?
Winter drew a deep breath. "Okay."
So they don't pay. I can take that hit.
"I'm going to need
something to get around in until I can get down to ...
Poughkeepsie
?" Winter said, stumbling over the
outlandish and unfamiliar name. "Tim Sullivan said you might have some
kind of a loaner car?"

 
          
"Nothing
I really want to offer a lady," Dave Kelly said. "Because it isn't
fancy, and it isn't what I'd call dependable, either."

 
          
"I've
got to have something," Winter said desperately. "Look, I'll
buy
it."

 
          
"I
couldn't sell it to you," Dave Kelly said, shaking his head. "Not in
good conscience. Tell you what, I'll loan it to you for a couple of weeks.
Better get Timmy to run you down to
Poughkeepsie
, though."

 
          
"I
will," Winter promised.

 
          
"Great.
I'll go get you the keys." There was a brief hesitation; Dave looked at
her as if she'd forgotten something. "And, uh, what do you want me to do
about the BMW?"

 
          
"Keep
it," Winter said. "Use it for a planter. The registration's in the
glovebox
. I'll sign it over." /
never want to see that car again.

           
There was a delay while Dave took
the plates off the BMW and wrapped them up for her, but forty-five minutes
later, Winter pulled out of the garage and started up Main Street in a battered
yellow Chevy Nova with one blue and one red door and no backseat at all.

 
          
And now I don't have to worry about the
Beamer,
she told herself in self-congratulatory mental tones.
"There's no problem so big it can't be
run away from."
Who'd said that? Someone she knew? Someone she'd
known
—
somewere
in the lost seasons of her past?

 
          
It doesn't matter,
Winter told herself,
and even in her mind the words had the forlorn gallantry of someone whistling
in the dark.

 
          
Though
she'd left the
Bidney
Institute before noon, it was
late afternoon as Winter stepped through her own front door again, her purse
slung over her shoulder and the sack from
Inquire
Within
clutched in one hand. Despite its having been the scene of so much
terror, the farmhouse on
Greyangels
Road
welcomed Winter back with an apologetic air
of reassurance, like the family pet begging forgiveness for some recent
transgression and offering the hopeful promise that it would not happen again.

 
          
If only that were true,
Winter thought
somberly. In the last day or so it seemed as if some sort of veil had been
lifted from her will—
maybe those drugs
took longer to wear off completely than I thought
—and she was thinking
clearly at last.

 
          
Even
about the unthinkable.

 
          
From
ghoulies
and
ghaesties
and long-
leggedy
beasties, the Good Lord deliver us. Amen.

 
          
She
locked the door firmly behind her: dead bolt, chain, and the key-turn bolt that
was part of the door's lock. A circuit of the remaining ground-floor
rooms—front parlor, kitchen, mud room, and bedroom parlor—revealed that the
windows and doors of each were firmly locked, just as she'd left them. No
problems there. She looked into the bathroom and set the enormous cast-iron
Victorian tub to filling, dropping in a generous dollop of Joy
de Bain
from the round black bottle on
the win-
dowsill
. The luxurious scent of jasmine
followed her as she headed into the kitchen.

 
          
The
kitchen was tight and tidy, just as she'd left it this morning, the ancient
speckled linoleum clean and dry.

           
Nope.
No monsters here. And if it would just
STAY. . . Sudden tears of weakness
prickled at the corners of her eyes, and Winter felt the day's exertions catch
up with her in a rush.

 
          
Some of that silly woman's tea. That's what
I need. And maybe a good book.
She filled the teakettle and set it on the
stove, willing the tears away.

 
          
But
the farmhouse's previous inhabitants weren't readers, apparently, although any
place that was rented as furnished ought by rights to include a shelf of books
or two. She even ventured upstairs again, tiptoeing as if she were in enemy
country, and didn't find so much as a magazine.

 
          
Which
left her with a choice between
Venus
Afflicted
and the pamphlet Tabitha Whitfield had tucked in with the tea.
Winter stood beside the bathtub, weighing them both in her hands and wondering
why she'd never noticed the house's lack of reading material before. A large
mug of Centering Tea, dark-steeped and liberally dosed with honey, stood
waiting on the windowsill beside her bottle of bath oil.

 
          
Well,
the so-called biography was longer, at least. She could look through the
pamphlet later, before using it to start the bedroom stove. Winter tossed it
aside and stepped into her bath, then opened
Venus Afflicted and
began to read.

 
          
The
author—could it really be the same dark-haired young woman she'd met this
morning?—made it clear in the preface that this book would deal in names and
dates, facts and figures, which was much to Winter's taste—at least until the
preface went on to refer to Thorne Blackburn as an important figure in
twentieth-century Occultism, just as if all this sort of Dungeons & Dragons
stuff ought to be taken seriously.

 
          
She
set the book aside and picked up her tea, regarding it with equal wariness. It
was a deep red, nearly the color of
Burgundy
, and had a woody, almost briny, scent that
Winter found paradoxically appetizing. The taste of it went well with the honey
she'd used to sweeten it—she realized it was the same tea Dr. Palmer had
served her at the Institute, and as she sipped it, Winter finally understood
Tabitha's insistence that she use honey or molasses in the tea. With plain
sugar, the taste would have been unbearable.

 
          
Winter
lay back in the bath, relishing the warmth within and without, letting her
mind drift where it would. Hadn't there been more than a little bit of
whistling past the graveyard in her scornful dismissal of Thorne Blackburn, boy
wizard? If she was going to have poltergeists, she probably ought to take books
like this more seriously. She picked up
Venus
Afflicted
once more, and despite herself, this time Winter found herself
becoming interested in the
Blackburn
bio.

 
          
Fortunately
there wasn't too much—at least in the early chapters of
Venus Afflicted
—that was particularly hard to swallow. She read
about the history of the Western Mystery Tradition and people with names like
Dion
Fortune and
Aleister
Crowley, and about the start of
Blackburn
's
own career as a fortune-teller in
New Orleans
, and by the time she came to herself again,
the room was dim, the tea was gone, and the bath was cold. She felt better than
she had in longer than she could remember.

 
          
Stepping
out of the bath and wrapping herself in a large white towel, she addressed an
invisible opponent.

 
          
You won the first rounds
—
but that's just because you caught me off
guard. I'm ready for you now, who- and whatever you are, and if you think I'm
just going to He down and give up, you picked the wrong Winter Musgrave. I will
beat this. I will survive. I will be. . . whoever I wish to be.