Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02]

by In the Rift (v1. 5) (html)

"Of course."

  He gave her the number and expiration date and his name. "Can you have them in tomorrow's paper?"

  "Yes."

  "I'll look for them."

  They hung up and he dialed another number.

  "Rickman, Rickman, Slater, Stern and Brodski."

  "Is this Elaine?"

  "Yes, it is. To whom am I speaking."

  "This is Callion Aregeni, dear."

  "Mr. Aregeni! How good to hear from you. Have you gotten settled?"

  "I have indeed. South Florida is lovely, and seems to be good for my health. Is Daniel in?"

  She laughed. "For you, always. Hold on, please, and I'll connect you."

  A moment later, Daniel Stern came on the phone. "Callion? I'd begun to worry. How are you feeling?"

  Callion managed to inject the faintest hint of the sickroom into his voice, and a touch of forced cheer. "I can't complain. I thought I'd see how my little project was turning out."

  "You're a saint, Callion. A regular saint. Three more of the girls delivered since I last heard from you. Janni Tucker, a boy; Elonia McSavity, a girl; and Sharon French, another boy. Mothers and babies all healthy, no complications. The trust funds are set up and the checks are going out like clockwork."

  "So that's eighty-seven babies total."

  "It is indeed."

  "And all of them and their mothers are provided for completely—educational opportunities, housing, transportation. I don't want them living like paupers, Dan. These are some bright young women and they'll have some bright children. I want them to have opportunities they wouldn't have had without me."

  "Absolutely, Cal. Everything is taken care of."

  "Excellent." Callion leaned back in his chair and templed his fingers so that the heavy digging claws arced to meet in two smooth semicircles. He sighed heavily. "I'm not dead yet, Daniel, and I think I'm doing something worthwhile. I'll have a few more deserving young ladies to put on the program before my time runs out. South Florida seems to be agreeing with me. Perhaps my heart will hold out for another year. It's a lot to hope for, but…well, I can always hope, can't I?"

  "I'll hope with you, Cal. The world needs more people like you, people who get involved on a personal level—people who aren't afraid to step in and do something."

  "It'll get them," Callion said with a little chuckle. "If you and I succeed with these girls and their children, the world will have them."

  When he and Daniel hung up, Callion hopped down from his chair and walked to the mirror at the corner of the room. He smiled at himself and admired the sleekness of his striped fur, the sharpness of his muzzle, the brightness of his black-button eyes.

  He said to the absent Daniel, "More people like me. Isn't that a lovely idea?"

  Chapter Eleven

  The phone went off beside her left ear like the detonation of a bomb, and Kate's hand whipped out from under the covers and jerked the receiver to her ear before she was even fully awake. "Yeah, uh…hello," she muttered, squinting at her clock. She felt like she'd only been asleep for minutes, but sunlight no longer poured into her bedroom. So it was afternoon. Three, the clock said. Plus a few minutes.

  She hadn't had enough sleep. She'd slept from four A.M. until a little before eight. Then the sheriff had come by—in person, this time—and once he left, she went grocery shopping and picked up her prescriptions and called her insurance agent and checked with Lisa to see how things were going at her shop. She managed to get back into bed at noon.

  She was expecting a return call from her insurance agent, with whom she had both her homeowner's policy and her car insurance. The agent, Janey Callahan, had already been out to get pictures and said she would let Kate know what the settlements were going to be on the door damage and the graffiti, and when she could take her car in to the shop. Kate was hoping she'd get good news.

  "Hello," she said a little louder, starting to wake up, thinking that maybe she hadn't answered clearly enough to be intelligible.

  She didn't hear anything, but the line was open. Maybe Janey had switched to another line, she thought. Or maybe not. Her heart beat faster.

  "Janey? Hello?"

  "You know those words on your house?" a familiar, frightening voice said. "We're going to carve them into your ass. Bitch."

  Before she could even think of how to respond, a soft click broke the connection. She slammed the phone down, flung herself onto her back, and stared at the ceiling.

  They weren't going to go away.

  She got up and showered, feeling filthy even after she scrubbed herself. Her body ached and her bruises looked horrible, and the water hurt like hell. She swallowed the giant antibiotic tablets and took a Darvon, then studied the bite marks, noticing the beginnings of redness around the wounds that indicated infection.

  Damn them. They weren't going to go away. They would keep calling. Keep sneaking up on her. Keep escalating. Sooner or later, one of four things would happen. The police would catch them. They would chase her off. They would kill her. Or she would kill them.

  Dressed, tense, queasy from lack of sleep and fear, she went down the stairs to find Val pacing from the kitchen into what was left of the dining room and back. He'd already eaten; she could see the mess he'd left.

  He studied her as she walked into the room. "You had some success last night."

  She didn't really feel like talking. "Some."

  "You don't sound excited."

  "I'm not." She wasn't going to say anything else, but then she thought that maybe talking about what she and Rhiana were doing would help her get her mind off the things that frightened her. She shrugged and gave him a halfhearted smile. "We finally managed to keep from blowing ourselves up. That doesn't mean the work went well."

  He watched her. He stood all the way across the kitchen near the back door with his back to the counter, coiled, tight, his spine unnaturally straight. In the dim light, his pale eyes looked vividly yellow, lemon-yellow. He brushed his hair back from his forehead. She had seen his hair before, of course, but now she noticed that it was both thick and fine, and that it was perfectly straight. It fell forward again, covering the points of his ears, hiding some of the wrongness of his exotically beautiful face. "You doubt that we'll leave here, don't you? You don't think you can do the magic."

  Kate sensed both fear and anger underlying the question. She sat down on one of the barstools, so that the bar lay between the two of them and the expanse of the kitchen with it. "I have no way of even venturing an educated guess. I know nothing about the sort of magic Rhiana does. She's learned a great deal about what I can do. We'll work together, we'll learn everything we can, and we'll do whatever we're able to do."

  "That isn't much reassurance." The anger in his voice became more overt.

  Kate didn't want to sound curt. She tried to imagine how she would feel if she found herself trapped in a world other than her own, a world where none of her kind existed…a world she'd ended up in accidentally, and because of someone else's mistake or someone else's scheming. She nodded. "I understand, but that's the best I can offer."

  Val looked away from her, nodded stiffly. His face changed, then changed again. She could see that he wanted to speak, but he didn't. The lines of his body altered subtly, fluidly. When he looked at her again, it wasn't as if he had gotten his anger under control, but as if he had never been angry. The totality of the shift unsettled her. He watched her in silence, and she broke first.

  "What?"

  He said, "I'm sure I'll find a way to make a life for myself here. At least I'll have plenty of potential mates."

  Of all the things he might have said, Kate could never have anticipated that one. "What? You will?"

  He stared off into space, showing no sign of having heard her question, giving no indication that he realized he'd shocked her. He murmured, "Resign myself to living in this stinking hole…find some isolated wilderness…take a woman as a breeder—"

  Kate interrupted him. "Wait a minute!" Her p
rotest was loud enough to cut through his self-absorption. "I thought you and Rhiana and Tik and Errga were the only Glenraveners in this world."

  He cocked his head at an angle and gave her a long, searching look. "We are," he said, and his voice was emotionless. "What point are you trying to make?"

  "You said you could find a mate here."

  "I said breeder, but except for matters of emotional involvement, you are essentially correct."

  "Breeder…" She shook her head and frowned. "How. Do you have some way of bringing one of your women through from Glenraven?"

  "No. Of course not. Any road traveled in one direction can be traveled as easily in the other. If I could bring a Kin here, I could go there."

  Kate said, "Then what the hell are you talking about?"

  But he wasn't listening to her. His gaze was locked on something far away, something that only he could see. "In fact…" Both his voice and his expression became thoughtful. "In fact, you could be my breeder." The flat dispassionate timber of his voice and the way he began to stare at her made her skin crawl.

  Kate laughed, trying to defuse the situation. The laughter sounded hollow and nervous and stupid, and she stopped herself. "I'm not Kin. I'm human."

  "Yes. But humans are the progeny of the outcasts of Glenraven." The Kin was watching her intently now. "Since the first gate was formed, Glenraveners who were no longer welcome in Glenraven were made to leave. Aregen, Kin, Kin-hera, Machnan: they were all thrown through the gate into this world. Here—" He wrinkled his nose, and paused. "Here they mated with each other, and the result was a mix of all the bloods. Your people. Mongrels. Humans."

  "That's ludicrous," Kate said. "Genetically, there's no way such divergent species could cross and have fertile young. It isn't even possible to cross a horse with a donkey and get something that can bear young, and those two species are closely related. Yet you believe that you and a Machnan or a warrag or an dagreth could have children and they would look like me? And be able to have children of their own?" She decided he thought she was gullible, or perhaps just stupid. "You expect me to believe that?"

  "I don't expect you to believe anything. I only tell you the truth. What you think of it concerns you alone. Or perhaps you and me, if you became my breeder."

  "I'm not going to be your breeder." You pig, she thought. You creep. You asshole.

  He walked over to the other side of the bar and leaned down to rest his elbows on the counter top. Leaning forward like that, his face was no more than two feet from hers. She leaned back on the barstool to put distance between them, but she didn't want to show her fear openly. She stayed seated.

  Val said, "For all our external differences, the Aregen, the Kin, and the Kin-hera, including the Machnan, are the same inside." He smiled an oily smile. "Which means that you are the same, too."

  "Right." Kate looked him steadily in the eye and crossed her arms over her chest. "How can that be?"

  "The Aregen created the Kin, and the Kin created the Kin-hera. This is not fairy tale. It is fact. The Aregen didn't create the Kin out of the air. They took those of their own children who displeased them, altered their bodies into the form of the Kin, and made them servants. When the Kin won their freedom from the Aregen, they took with them the magic that helped them conquer their parent-masters and the magic that allowed them to create. So the Kin changed their out-of-favor children into the Kin-hera. The Machnan finally fought their way to freedom, but they have not yet attempted to create a slave race. Perhaps they've learned what my people didn't know or refused to see—that slaves do not remain downtrodden forever. That is irrelevant, though. What is relevant is that the Aregen, the Kin, the Kin-hera, and the Machnan share the same blood."

  "So you're all really human, are you?"

  "No. But you and I would be cross-fertile. Our children would look human. If the Kin histories have the details right, and I have every reason to believe that they do, deeper characteristics, such as length of life and magical aptitude, would hold true, though. If you and I had a child, it would look like you, but would live longer. Perhaps not as long as a full-blooded Kin, but much longer than a human. It would have some of my other strengths, too. Improved stamina. Increased intelligence—"

  "I think you flatter yourself," Kate said coldly. "In any case, I'm not remotely interested in becoming your breeder. I'll help you get back to your home if I can. And I'll be glad to see you go."

  "She's much politer than I would have been if you had approached me with such an indecent proposal." Rhiana moved from the shadows in the entryway into the dining room, skirting the hole in the floor and the sunflower, and coming over to sit beside Kate at the bar. "He didn't tell you about the Kin and their eyran, did he?"

  "I didn't take his proposal seriously," Kate said. She kept reminding herself that she had to remain on good terms with all of the Glenraveners. More than her own feelings were at stake. She tried to smooth over the incident. "I understand that he's afraid he won't ever get home again. I know he's under pressure. As you are. As I am. And I know all of you are alone here—that there probably isn't anyone else in the world who's like you…"

  "Don't make excuses for him," Rhiana said, glaring at Val. "You don't know what he is. You don't know how treacherous his sort is, or what liars they all are, or how manipulative they can be. They haven't been seducing and impregnating the young girls in your world for thousands of years, lying to them and manipulating them and playing on their trust, using the magic in their voices to break down their resistance." Rhiana's face tightened into a mask of fury. "You don't know what bastards they are, Kate."

  Val's eyes narrowed. "And you do, dear Rhiana? By personal experience, perhaps? Futtered a Kin lordling in some enchanted glade and came away with a mongrel brat, I expect."

  Rhiana was on her feet and snarling when Kate slammed the flat of her hand on the counter and shouted, "That's enough, dammit!"

  Val and Rhiana turned to stare at her, both of them looking as angry with her as they had looked with each other an instant before.

  "You don't tell me that's enough," Val said at the same time that Rhiana said, "Lady Smeachwykke doesn't take orders from a mongrel."

  Kate stood up and said, "I don't give a good goddamn who you are or what you think you ought to have to take, or how you think you deserve to be treated. I don't care who you were before you got here, or what you think of each other, or what you think of me for that matter. We have a job to do and we need each other to do it. And if you ever want to get home you need me. So shut up, both of you." She felt like punching both of them in the face. Tired, she thought. I'm too tired. I'm too scared. I have too many other things to worry about.

  Not the least of which is the survival of my world.

  Rhiana and Kate worked themselves as near to exhaustion as they dared. Kate thought they showed some improvement in their teamwork—Rhiana said she was learning how to handle the magical energy Kate sent her, while Kate believed she was developing a feel for controlling the amount of energy she drew and passed on.

  She'd come up with a new way of handling the energy. She thought her solution was a silly one, but it seemed to be working. She had to give up on the water metaphor she had always used before to visualize magic. It was too slippery and fluid, too impossible to quantify. Instead, she ended up visualizing a large black Bakelite rheostat that she could set anywhere from zero to ten. She gave herself a hundred submarks between the zero and the one. And she and Rhiana successfully moved from the point zero five mark to the point three five mark before they wore out. At the point, though, where they had two explosions inside of Kate's circle, both of them decided they'd done enough for one night and called quits to the experimenting.

  Rhiana went out to clean the stables and feed and exercise the horses, something Val had taken care of the night before. Errga went with her, saying that he thought someone ought to stay with her in case the thugs showed up again.

  Tik and Val ventured into the kitchen to ge
t something to eat.

  It was only eleven thirty. Kate settled in on the couch and turned on the television. She switched to ESPN2 to pick up the hockey scores and highlights. Barry Melrose was going on about the Buffalo Sabers, who weren't even going to make the playoffs—again—and how the rest of the league needed to be afraid of them, saying how he liked them because they were a hitting team.

  "Come on, Barry," she told the television set. "Your career average was under .500 and you had Gretzky playing for you. If you knew what you were talking about, you'd still be coaching." She wished he would wash his hair, too, but that was only a minor quibble compared to the fact that every time he opened his mouth, nonsense poured out of it.

  She saw clips from the Rangers, who took out the Flyers with a gorgeous goal by Adam Graves and two from Messier, one of which five-holed Hextall from the blue line through a wall of legs and sticks. The final score was three-nothing, with the Flyers held to eighteen shots total and Eric Lindros to a mere two. Richter had another shut-out to add to his record, and the Rangers inched closer to finishing the regular season with better than a hundred points. It was a great game—as much as Kate loved the Rangers, that was how much she couldn't stand the Flyers.

  She yawned her way through wins by the Ducks and the Stars, then gloated when a vastly improved Islanders team humiliated the Penguins seven to one. Kate couldn't stand the Penguins, either. But it wouldn't have mattered if that score had been reversed. The Rangers beat the Flyers and for one brief, perfect moment, all was right with the world.

  She switched off the television, thinking she could go to bed at a normal hour and get up in the morning in time to enjoy some daylight, but as she was heading out of the living room, Val stopped her.

  "Wait a moment, will you?" he said.

  She stopped just inside the archway and crossed her arms over her chest. "Look," she said, "I'm willing to take the circumstances under consideration, but that doesn't mean I want to be your friend. And I certainly don't want to be your mistress. So while we're still on speaking terms with each other, and while we can still work together, why don't you leave well enough alone?"