Seeker (18 page)

“Hold on to me tightly, Mother!” she said. She could see Fiona’s arms around her waist, but she couldn’t feel them.

Shinobu had covered only half the distance to her, and now John was back on his horse, kicking it into motion. John himself was injured, but he was in a desperate fury. Quin knew she could end this now; she could give the athame to him. He was begging her to help. But she couldn’t do it. He had hurt Fiona and tried to shoot Shinobu, two people who had never done him harm. And if he could injure them in his attempt to get his hands on the stone dagger, what would he do once he possessed it?

“Hold on, Mother!” she cried again, and she kicked Yellen toward Shinobu. “Hurry, Shinobu!”

She managed to strike the athame down against the lightning rod, despite the fatigue creeping through her muscles.

Beneath the sound of John’s horse racing toward them and her own labored breath, she could feel the vibration of the stone dagger. She was getting dizzy and her arms seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds, but she pulled Yellen to a stop. Grabbing his mane, she leaned forward and used the athame to cut a huge circle in the air in front of the horse.

Shinobu was almost to her, his red hair streaked with ash, his eyes fierce as he ran all out. John was not far behind.

The tendrils of light and dark were growing together, forming a circular doorway in front of them, the edges thrumming with energy that pulled inward, toward blackness.

“Quin, no! Please wait!” John yelled.

She could not feel her chest, and the numbness was spreading to her arms. There was pressure at her waist as her mother’s grip tightened. Quin dug her heels into Yellen, and the horse leapt forward, a high, perfect jump, like Quin was taking him over a fence. He brought them neatly through the opening, just as the tendrils began to grow soft, hissing as they undid themselves.

“Shinobu!” She was trying to yell, but her voice came out muted.

Shinobu was there. He threw himself through the closing anomaly behind her. The black-and-white tendrils were now like a ragged river, carrying Shinobu with them into the darkness. Quin turned her head in time to see John, who had ripped off his mask and was still galloping toward them. His face was anguished as he looked at her through the diminishing doorway, his eyes not on her face now but on her chest.

“Oh, God, no … Quin …” she heard him say.

She looked down and saw a huge patch of red growing darkly across her shirt. She had been shot.

Then the anomaly mended itself, closing out the world of the estate and leaving them in darkness.

Quin fell from her horse and landed on nothing.

Her mother was there with her, somewhere. Quin could feel Fiona’s arms groping to find Quin’s body.

“I can’t see you … I can’t see you …” Her mother’s voice already sounded odd, an echo of her real voice, thin and stretched out.

Quin couldn’t feel her chest, but she could tell the numbness would not last forever, and when it ended, she would be in agony. She was starting to shiver, and her breath came raggedly.

“I’m shot,” she breathed. “Maybe it’s just as well …”

“Shh, shh,” Fiona said.

There was a confusion of arms and legs, as though ten people had come through the anomaly with them.

“John might have killed you … It’s all ruined …”

“Hush, Quin.” Fiona sounded far away, though Quin was pretty sure it was her mother’s hand on her stomach. “What’s ruined, girl? You’re here with me. We got away.”

“I did bad things, Ma. So many. I can’t get rid of them.”

“A clear picture of, where I came from, where I will go …”
She heard Shinobu whispering the time chant. He was getting closer.

Her own sense of time was changing. “How long …”

“How long what?”

“… have we been here?” Quin finished weakly.

“I don’t know,” Fiona said from far away.

A hand connected with Quin’s right arm, then another with her left. She could tell it was Shinobu, even in the darkness. There was something intelligent and sure about the way his hands moved as they traveled down her arms, taking the athame and lightning rod from her. She was getting so cold, and he felt warm.

“I don’t know where to go,” she whispered.

“I do,” Shinobu told her. He pulled her close to him. “Can you stay awake?”

“I don’t know …”

“Try. You have to try.”

“It’s all wrecked,” she whispered.

“It is,” he agreed.

In the faint glow of the athame, she saw his hands moving over the dials, adjusting them to a new set of coordinates.

The vibration engulfed her as Shinobu struck the stone dagger. Her eyes drifted shut.

“Quin, please stay awake.” She felt him moving. “Fiona, you have to take her feet. Fiona!”

Quin forced her eyelids open, saw the new anomaly, heard its hum. They were carrying her. There was fresh air on her face. The next time she opened her eyes, they were outside, in an open space somewhere, with bright sunlight on her skin.

She was on the edge of consciousness. There were sirens, other voices, speaking a different language. Asian faces around her. Her
chest was filled with a hot red ache that was overwhelming in intensity.

Her eyes stayed closed for a long while. Then a quiet room with candles, and a small man with gray hair, slanted eyes, a bright face. The pain was starting to go away. How long had she been here? Minutes? Hours? Days? Maybe she wasn’t here at all; maybe she was still
There
. She could hear herself talking. Her eyes would not stay open.

The small man was murmuring something to her. Quin was not sure she had heard him right. Her ears seemed to be stuffed with cotton. Even so, a feeling of happiness enveloped her, and then she was unconscious again.

Shinobu waited until late at night, when the Bridge seemed most dead. He found his way through twisting corridors and dark stairwells. Eventually he was among the outer rafters, walking to the very edge like a gymnast on a balance beam.

From there, he could see the harbor and the hundreds of thousands of city lights on either side of the Bridge, more lights than he had ever seen in one place. The ocean water was bright near shore, reflecting the glow from buildings so slender and high, they seemed like monstrous blades of grass, waving gently in the night. But here, under the Bridge, the water was dark.

The image of his father was burned into his mind: Alistair with teeth gritted, face contorted in pain, covered in blood and scratches from beating his head against the ground. Again and again he felt Alistair thrusting the hilt of the knife into his open hand, trying, with his last trace of sanity, to help Shinobu. And Shinobu had done nothing for him.

It was John’s fault. The attack was John’s fault. But could he blame John for hating Briac? Could he blame John for attacking them? He
couldn’t. He might have done the same in John’s position. He too had dreamed of going after Briac.

And he, Shinobu, was Alistair’s son. He could have given his father mercy when it mattered most, and he’d refused. That had been his own choice.

He put a hand on a steel beam above him, bracing himself as he leaned out over the deep water running with the tide beneath the Bridge. He pulled out the lightning rod, concealed under his clothing, and flung it as far as he could into the depths. Then he leapt to another rafter and another, moving along the outer Bridge structure. When it appeared he’d reached the very center of the Bridge’s span, he took out the athame. He threw it in a high arc out into the night air, then watched as it curved down and hit the water, immediately disappearing from sight.

Let the ocean take them and swallow the memory of those sparks. Let it swallow everything
 …

He made his way back to the Bridge’s central road, and to the home of Master Tan. After moving up an outer staircase, he looked through the second-story window. Quin lay on a table in a candlelit room, her chest wrapped in a complicated bandage, acupuncture needles with burning herbs at their ends placed all over her body. He could see Fiona in another room beyond, asleep on a couch, bandages around her neck.

Quin had been dead, he was sure of it. When they’d carried her onto the Bridge, she had not been breathing, and she had gone cold. Now her eyes were closed, but there was a flush to her cheeks. As he watched, she even appeared to be speaking.

Master Tan was leaning over Quin’s head, saying something quietly. Shinobu pressed on the window with his hands, sliding the glass up a few inches so he could hear.

“Child, child,” Master Tan was saying, his voice like the words in
a fever dream, “there is no need for this.” One hand smoothed away the lines of worry creasing Quin’s forehead. “You may forget if you wish … all of it.”

Quin tossed her head from side to side.

“Forgetting is … as simple as deciding, as gentle as sinking into a warm bed,” Master Tan murmured. “Child, you have gone and come back. Reinvention is the gift I can offer.”

Quin’s brow creased again above her closed eyes.

“The choice can be as quick as a heartbeat, or as long as a life. You may leave all of it behind,” Master Tan whispered. “How do you choose?”

A troubled expression crossed her face, and then, as Shinobu watched, Quin muttered something to Master Tan and her features relaxed. After a short time, it looked like she had fallen into a natural sleep.

Was it possible? Could you wipe the chalk from the board and begin to draw anew? Shinobu pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to force out the vision of his father, head bloody, lying on the forest floor.

That was Quin in there, his cousin. (
Distant cousin!
he had always wanted to point out.) He should stay by her side. Maybe, when she finally recovered, she would see him the way he’d always seen her. After the night when they took their oath, he’d wanted to take her away, but he had not. Now there were too many unpleasant things he would have to remember every time he looked at her. And the truth was, he could no longer see himself the way he wanted Quin to see him. He had gone along on all of Briac’s assignments. He had abandoned his father. He wasn’t the man he was supposed to be.

He would leave. Quin would heal here with Master Tan, and then she and Fiona would be free to disappear into the world somewhere far away, where no one, including Shinobu, would ever find them.

“Goodbye, Quin.” He whispered the words, and then he ran back down the stairs.

He walked quickly off the Bridge and out into the night in this new and strange city where his mother might be waiting for him, and where he hoped it was possible to begin life again.

INTERLUDE

O
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