He was as thorough in the rest of the house as he had been in the kitchen, and just as chatty. He commented on the afghans she'd crocheted, on the stenciling she'd done around the ceiling and doors in the living room, on her taste in decorating, on the size of the upstairs bathroom. She appreciated the fact that he was taking his time and taking her concerns over hidden intruders seriously, and he was kind and he never crossed the line between casual conversation and nosiness, but by the time he finished checking in her closet, she was looking forward to seeing him go.
He stepped out of her bedroom and walked to the dormer window at the top of the stairs; he looked down at the front yard. "Nobody here but us chickens, young lady. I'm done, and it looks like Bobby's done, too. I don't see him out there; he must be back in the car." He looked over at Kate and smiled. "You going to be all right, then?"
Kate nodded. "I'll be fine."
"We'll call Animal Control about the horse. They can take care of moving it for you unless you got other plans."
She pressed her lips together tightly and inhaled. "No other plans." Tears blurred her vision for an instant, but she blinked them back.
"Then we'll be on our way." He headed down the stairs and Kate followed him.
"Thank you."
"That's what we're here for."
She walked him out. From her doorstep, she could see the other deputy, Bobby, sitting in the driver's seat of their car, talking on the radio. He glanced up when he saw them step outside, and just for an instant he looked into her eyes; then he looked down so that the wide brim of his hat hid his face, but in that instant she'd gotten a clear look at him. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, and he had two black eyes and a tremendously swollen nose. "What happened to him?" she asked.
"Stepped in between a couple of fighting drunks off duty. They quit fighting each other and started fighting him."
Off duty. That meant Merritt might not have been with him when the fight occurred. "When did that happen?"
"Some time yesterday. Last night, I reckon." Merritt gave her a long, level look and said, "He might have been fighting the same bunch of troublemakers tried to hurt you. I'll ask him about it—if he thinks there's any connection, we might be able to look into it a little. It's really city's case unless we can say for sure this incident and that one are connected."
Kate nodded again. When Merritt walked down the path she closed the door behind him and locked the deadbolt and hooked the security chain into place. Then she stood in her entryway shaking, watching through the peephole in the front door as the county car backed down her driveway and moved out onto the road.
The other deputy, Bobby, had done everything he could to keep her from seeing his face. She'd seen it when he was surprised into looking up at her. Maybe he was just embarrassed about the way he looked. She was probably jumping to stupid conclusions. The county was large, and there had to be people besides the ones she'd hit who had black eyes and swollen noses.
But if Bobby was one of the men who attacked her, she couldn't even count on help from the sheriff's department. She wasn't safe anywhere.
She hurried to the stairs; eight up, right turn on the landing, and eight more. When she reached the top landing, she went to the dormer window and looked down, half expecting to see Bobby back in her yard skulking around. But of course he wasn't there. Nothing moved in the yard. No traffic moved on the highway. She was alone.
She went left, into the bathroom she'd remodeled; she stood over the sink and rinsed her face. She stared at herself in the mirror. Her long blond hair was caked with blood. Blue-purple bruises mottled her right cheek and her jaw and built up swollen half-moons beneath both eyes. The sclera of her right eye was bloody. She opened her mouth, checked her teeth, and stuck out her tongue—she could see the deep, bloody marks where her attackers had slammed her bottom lip into her teeth. She opened the medicine cabinet, pulled out some Neosporin with lidocaine, and smeared it onto the cuts on her face. It stung.
She wanted to take a bath, but she wasn't going to undress or do anything that made her as vulnerable as soaking in a tub until she had the shotgun beside her.
She looked in the linen closet again, just to be sure. No one was in it, of course.
She walked across the landing to her bedroom, eased the door open, and went in. She didn't have much furniture in the room; just the bookshelves, a Queen Anne wingback chair in the left corner opposite her, a solid walnut chest of drawers on the far wall, and her bed, a high, elaborately carved spindle bed that had cost her two show saddles in barter. She could see from where she stood that no one was under the bed. She felt ridiculous for even looking.
She walked around the foot of the bed and past the dresser and went into the closet. She slid her hand along the left closet wall until she felt the slight depression of the hidden panel she'd built into the closet when she remodeled. She pressed and the panel door popped out, and she reached in and took out the shotgun. It didn't look like much—Mossberg was a big believer in black plastic. The ribbed pump and the stock were molded of it. She thought of the guns she'd learned to shoot when she was little: the Browning over-and-under shotgun with the hand-checkered stock and engraved silverwork on the breech; the little Remington .22 rifles; the 30.06 pistol that nearly took her arm off the one time her father let her try it. Those had been sporting guns. Her father liked to shoot targets, and occasionally he went hunting for their dinner.
She'd had no such intention when she bought the Mossberg. She'd been suddenly a woman alone in a house a long way from anyone, and when she bought the shotgun, she'd gotten it with only the defense of her home and her life in mind.
The Mossberg held five shells plus one in the chamber, but she didn't leave it that way when she wasn't home. She kept it locked. Now she unlocked the wire breech lock and removed it, grabbed two extra shells from the ammunition shelf, loaded the fifth, pumped it into the chamber, and thumbed the sixth shell into place. With the safety on, she stepped back into her bedroom. She checked her watch. Five A.M.. The sun would come up right around seven. She had two more hours of darkness, and she thought once she got through that, she might be able to crawl into her bed and sleep for a while. She was going to have to call either Lisa or Paul and have one of them open for her. She didn't think she would go in to work that day. But it was still too early to call anyone.
In the meantime, she wanted a bath.
She laid the shotgun across the bed and got some clean underwear and a pair of flannel pajamas with teddy bears on them out of her top right drawer. She took her watch off and dropped it on top of the dresser. When she turned back to pick up the shotgun, she noticed something she'd seen the time she came in with the deputy, but this time she really saw it.
On the nightstand nearest her, between the telephone and the reading lamp, lay a book. It was a Fodor's Guide, a travel book.
Gold with black lettering, a photograph on the lower portion of the glossy paper cover. The photo was gorgeous: a gleaming white fairy-tale castle; a dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty leading a donkey over a cobblestone road that ran through a field of flowers; a blue lake in the background that reflected the mountains that lay behind it. The cover read, Fodor's Guide to Glenraven: A Complete Guide to the Best Mountain Walks, Castle Tours, and Feasts.
Kate always had a book or two sitting on that nightstand, so she hadn't really paid attention to that one. But she had never owned a Fodor's Guide. Had never borrowed one. She had never had the urge to be a tourist, to go someplace where she didn't speak the language and didn't look like everyone else and didn't know where things were and didn't understand the customs. She figured she was enough of an outsider anyway; she didn't see where adding to that feeling of alienation would enhance her life experience in any way.
She stared at the book. It was proof that someone had been in her house. But what did its presence mean? It didn't seem like the sort of thing the thugs would have left…
Unless they'd used its pages to cut
out the letters of the note they'd nailed to Rocky.
Unless they'd left a note for her in it.
Heart pounding an erratic roulade, hands trembling, she picked up the book.
It felt like it was purring. The sensation so startled her that she almost dropped the book, but the vibration died away. She riffled the pages, wondering if the tiny thrill had come from a bomb hidden inside, but the book hadn't been hollowed out. She decided to go through it more slowly. She opened to the first page. For an instant she saw a typical cover page. Then the paper cleared as if someone was erasing it while she watched.
No sooner were the last words gone than new ones appeared.
Hello, Kate. I know the timing is terrible, and that you probably don't feel like dealing with this now, but now is when we're going to have to do it. You need to take me outside, and you need to do it quickly.
She dropped the book and stepped back from it. Be logical, she told herself. You've been through a lot in the last few hours. This could be any of several different, perfectly rational things. You could be having an allergic reaction to the Darvon you took. You could be suffering from some delayed effect of trauma to your head. This could even have been a hallucination resulting from post-traumatic stress. If you pick up the book again, it's just going to be a book. It won't purr, it won't hum, and it won't write little messages to you.
She picked up the book again. This time it didn't hum. So far, so good.
She opened it to the first page.
The hell I won't. You're dealing just fine with your stress, you aren't injured, and you aren't allergic to your medicine, but if you don't get me outside fast, you are going to have a mess in your bedroom you'll never get clean.
Kate nodded. It would have been nice to have found a rational explanation for the book, but she wasn't willing to insist on one. She had always prided herself on her ability to take the unexpected in stride. As a Wiccan, she accepted the reality of magic in the universe—she just hadn't anticipated having it intrude so blatantly on her. She'd spent much of her life making herself as self-sufficient as she could, though. She believed she had the tools she needed to survive just about anything that life threw at her. Now she was going to find out if she was right.
"On the positive side," she told the book, "if you got here by magic, then at least the bastards who beat me up didn't leave you here."
I'll take the good news when I find it, she thought. She held onto the book, picked up the shotgun, and headed downstairs. She couldn't imagine why a book would need to go outside, or what could possibly be urgent about the request, but sometimes survival became a matter of knowing when to shut up and follow instructions.
Until she saw evidence to the contrary, she was going to assume this was one of those times.
Chapter Two
Rhiana Falin trotted across Allier's Bridge and reined in her mount at the base of an enormous oak. She reached out to rest her hand on the trunk of the tree. "Here," she said.
The rest of the riding party halted. Val Peloral, eldest son of the local Kin lord, shook his head. "Lady Smeachwykke, this place is too far from the current boundaries of your town. If you expand Ruddy Smeachwykke this far, you will eventually more than double the current population within the city walls. You will destroy Hier's Plot and Little Greening and much of the Kin-Hera Triad with these new boundaries."
Rhiana brushed the hair back from her forehead and looked around at the forest. If the Kin negotiator and his associates had any idea how frustrated Rhiana had become, they would end the talks without reaching an agreement, and the Machnan of Ruddy Smeachwykke would continue to live on top of each other, to scrabble a meager living from too-small plots of land, and to resent the Kin who claimed the vast forests all around them.
"Lord Faldan," she said, trying to keep her voice pleasant, "historically, the Kin-Hera Triad was home to the Beling dagreth and to several families of tesbits. The Alfkindir Lord Hier used Hier's Plot as a hunting ground for stags. And a few Kin lived in the cotha in Little Greening." She smiled. "But all three of these pieces of ground have been abandoned for the last fifty years. Both Kin and Kin-hera have moved south into the Faldan Woods or east toward the cothas above Sinon. This portion of the Great Golian Forest is empty and unused."
"But it's ours," Val said.
"We know. We have always respected your claims to the ground. Now we wish to know what we can offer in exchange for it." She leaned forward in her saddle. "We aren't asking to expand to the south or to the east. We aren't asking to move into territory your people occupy. But I ask for my people, and for their children, that we be permitted expansion to the north and west, in exchange for such goods and favors as both our peoples find agreeable."
Val Peloral turned to discuss the matter with his associates: a second Kin man, a dagreth and a warrag. The other man was named Caet something; he was lower Kin, and was probably a companion rather than a fellow negotiator. The warrag was a massive black-furred yellow-eyed male whose leather tool harness bore the embossed crest of the Grallagg clan. The bearish dagreth Rhiana knew socially. His name was Tik and he came into Ruddy Smeachwykke from time to time to visit the market. Such visits weren't unheard of anymore, not since the arrival of the new Watchmistress had given the Kin and the Machnan opportunities to deal as allies instead of enemies. Still, Tik was something of an anomaly; a progressive among the usually backward-thinking Kin-hera. Rhiana considered his presence among the Kinnish representatives a good sign.
She turned to her own colleagues, Bron Egadon, who had been her advisor since the death of her husband earlier in the year, and Tero Sarijann, the architect who had designed the expansion plans for Ruddy Smeachwykke. She raised an eyebrow. Bron nodded slightly; he thought the Kin would deal. Tero, though, just as subtly shook his head; he anticipated no deal. She kept herself from giving any audible or visible response, and returned her attention to the Kinnish party.
Val and his colleagues came to some sort of decision, and all of them looked to Rhiana. "Let's ride back," the Kin lord said.
"You can feed us and we will discuss the concessions we would like in exchange for granting you the land."
"So you'll do it?" Rhiana couldn't hide her smile.
"If you're willing to meet our price."
Rhiana nodded. She didn't dare let the Kin think she'd agree to anything, but she was willing to accept some fairly sweeping concessions in exchange for the land. "With work, we'll find something that will please everyone," she said. She thought that sounded neutral and not like self-abasement or groveling. "By all means, let's return. We've roast suckling pig and wild boar and stag on the groaning board."
They recrossed the Great Ruddy River and rode south and west on Allier's Road, through the deep gloom of the forest. The horses' hooves thudded on the hard-packed earth; the warrag and the dagreth made no sounds at all as they trotted alongside. Rhiana listened to the jingle of the bridles and the pleasant creak of leather saddles, and thought of beginning the expansion of Ruddy Smeachwykke in the next few days, before spring came and brought with it the urgency of tilling and planting and the endless cycle of calving and lambing. She imagined Tero's new streets spreading out to either side of her, replacing the endless darkness of the forest. They would be streets that didn't terminate in walls as the old ones had done, but that looked out over the fields beyond them. She imagined the new houses Tero planned, neat and narrow and double-storied, and the new guild halls and trade centers, like the ones the Watchmistress, Jayjay Bennington, was establishing down south in Zearn and Rikes Gate. She was just wishing for the hundredth time that Haddis had lived to see the changes that were coming to Glenraven when a scream ripped her out of her reverie. She turned in time to see an enormous gray-winged monstrosity pull Caet off his horse's back, rip his head off with a single bite, and swallow it. The monster kept the dead man locked in its claws and lifted with ponderous flapping of its wings for the forest canopy high overhead.
"No!" Tero shrieked.
She twisted around in her saddle and found that another of the monsters had grabbed him.
She looked up and saw the shadowed forms of more of the creatures lurking in the branches high above; some were spreading their wings to drop down on the people below.
"Ride," she shouted, and dug her heels into her horse's flanks. The warrag took the lead with the dagreth at his shoulder. Rhiana and Val rode neck and neck behind them, but Bron lost ground. His horse had been chosen because it could carry Bron's great weight, but it could not carry it quickly.
Why didn't we bring weapons? Rhiana wondered. We were so eager to show our trust in each other that we left ourselves helpless against anything else that might find us, and now something has.
Rhiana heard Bron scream once. His scream, like those of Caet and Tero before him, was short and horrible, but quickly silenced. Rhiana glanced at Val and saw that the Kin man was as frightened as she.
She heard one of the monsters bellow from behind them. They fled faster, taking bad risks by galloping on the uneven surface of the dirt road, but putting distance between themselves and the flying nightmares behind. Then an answering bellow erupted from the road ahead. Rhiana sawed on her reins so hard her horse nearly sat down as it skidded to a stop. Rhiana felt herself start to slide over her mount's neck. She tightened her thighs and locked her toes under the horse's belly and gritted her teeth.
She didn't lose her seat. Val made a more graceful stop, and the warrag and dagreth skidded around and took up positions facing in opposite directions, growling and snarling.
"What now?" Val asked.
Rhiana had an answer, but her answer didn't allow time for words. She was busy casting a gate spell. The spell was new to her; she'd learned it a few months ago and had only had two opportunities to use it since. She had to open a path into the spirit plane and locate and hold an anchor at the destination to keep the path in place until the traveler was safely through. The spell required intense concentration, and under the circumstances Rhiana fought for that. She created the gate, then struggled to find an anchor within Smeachwykke Castle. Briefly she latched onto the stone pillar in the central courtyard, but she was having a hard time maintaining her focus.
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02] Page 2
