The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

  The best Jo could hope for was, she wouldn't open the door to Mom's room to be greeted by a respirator wheezing and beeping next to the bed, holding death at arm's length and recording the battle on a paper chart. The best she could hope for was, her mother might know her own name, might blink twice in code as if she recognized Jo as one or the other of her interchangeable daughters. Or maybe the best she could hope for was an empty bed waiting for its next victim. Death.

  Jo thought she'd rather die than end up where Mom was now. The first time, just seeing her had been a punch in the gut. As if that wasn't bad enough, Dad was in there. Dad, putting on the loving, "worried husband" look in between squint-eyed drooling stares at the nurse's butt and legs as she bent over the bed, adjusting pillows and the tubing of the IV drip. Head nurse had complained that he'd even groped her once when she squeezed past him to check the catheter bag.

  Dad. That cheerful word carried some heavy chunks of psychological baggage Jo hadn't cleared away, between her and Maureen. The little twit had probably wiped it from her memory, burned it to ash and buried it under Buddy and then buried him under a rock the size of Mount Katahdin.

  Jo ran her fingertips over the lumpy spot on her left side, the place where a couple of broken ribs had healed crooked. David had asked her about that once, making love. She'd told him it happened playing soccer. Like she'd ever played soccer in her life. She shook her head. We get so used to hiding, it's a reflex.

  The rain and wind moved on to bedevil some other dumb pedestrian, leaving cold damp drizzle behind. Jo pulled the hood of her jacket back over her hair, gritted her teeth, and forced her feet towards the waiting morgue. Hospital. Whatever.

  She trudged unwilling past the acres of cars -- clapped out rust-buckets like Maureen's old Toyota and dented, mud-splashed, backwoods pickups parked cheek by jowl with yuppie Beemers and SAABs wearing the wash of road grime like a barely tolerated insult. Naskeag Falls might be a backwoods hick village with delusions of grandeur, but it was still the closest thing to a city for a hundred miles in any direction. Rich or poor, you wanted medical services, you came here. Same for the airport and the shopping malls.

  Security cameras recorded her face as she walked up to the entry. Rent-a-cops opened doors for her while meditating on her psychological balance and morals. She had to sign in at the reception desk and show picture ID. She was mildly surprised that they didn't run her through a metal detector.

  Jo followed echoing tiled hallways, passing banks of elevators that either led to the wrong wing or were marked "Staff Only," turning corners marked by cryptic initials and moving through three different room numbering systems before she reached the proper wing and the proper set of elevators.

  She wondered how long it took the staff to learn just what led where and how you got from one ward to another without going outside and starting in again from the beginning. She knew that she wouldn't have a clue which way to run if they had a fire while she was there.

  And then she faced the almost-shut door of her mother's room and her brain couldn't dodge any more. She swallowed and pushed through. Dad was there.

  She felt herself cringing, automatically. But again he was smaller than her memories, not much larger than she was, and somewhere he'd lost that sense of dominance. Maybe it was the touch of the Summer Country, and her living through other battles fought and won. He looked thinner, almost scrawny, with bony hands and big ears and brown hair rucked up into a blue jay's crest where he'd run his fingers through it, almost comical.

  Then she met his eyes, and the clown image died. His eyes weighed her and squinted into a frown. Ice-cubes touched her spine. She remembered that frown. It meant pain.

  She stiffened and slipped to the other side of the hospital bed. She'd learned very young that she was safer with Mom between them. Mom had shrunken as well, small and frail and suddenly old, lying there with her pale thin immobile face and eyes unfocused in the general direction of the ceiling. Wrinkles spider-webbed the corners of her eyes and mouth. More gray in the hair and the stubble covering the shaved patch on one side of her head, gray hair streaked with red now rather than the other way around.

  Mom's hand felt cold. Her fingernails were blue-tinged, almost like a corpse. The nurse had said there was nothing wrong with her heart and lungs, but that sometimes the body just started to shut down when things went seriously wrong. Mom still lived somewhere down underneath that husk. Maybe she'd just decided to quit. Prayed to her God to take her home.

  Jo wondered if faith helped when you ended up like this. If she'd still believed in God, she would have been pissed off at the old bastard. Hospitals sure made you question the concept of a loving deity.

  Hospitals and men like Dad. He was staring at her again, and she had to fight the automatic cringe he was expecting. He wanted evidence of her fear. She could feel the hunger in him, could see it in his eyes. Some of Maureen's problems had roots far older than Buddy Johnson.

  Jo shuddered. She'd learned a few things in her visit to the Summer Country. If Dad tried anything, he'd find out that the rules had changed.

  But she'd learned other uses for her power, bright gifts of the Old Blood as well as dark. She closed her eyes and let her mind settle into the calm pool of her breathing, relaxing, slowing her own heartbeat and cutting loose from the world. Cutting loose from the ugliness of hospital and unemployment and Dad.

  She let the room fall away from her, silencing the intercom and the gurneys in the hall, washing the disinfectant and vomit and bedpans from the air, pulling on the clear warmth and crystal air of the Summer Country, flowing the yellow glow of her thoughts down her arms and through her hands into the cold hand of her mother. She let her glow beat with the pulse she found there, weak and reluctant, and spread the warmth of her light through blood and veins flowing back to the heart and lungs and brain.

  {I'm here, Mom.}

  Something stirred. It slid away from her, confused and fearful. It refused to trust her.

  {It's Jo, Mom. I might be able to help you.}

  The reluctance strengthened. {Evil.} It turned from her. {Hail Mary, full of grace . . .}

  Jo pushed herself against the wall of prayer. It resisted and then retreated rather than breaking. Jo backed off, afraid of chasing this timid strength, afraid of frightening it rather than soothing it. It puzzled her for a moment, and then she remembered something Brian had told her. Power was inherited. The Old Blood was inherited. Mom knew about witches. And feared them.

  She reached out again, offering a vision of herself holding a cool damp cloth on Mom's head, vision of herself taking Mom's hand, vision of herself lifting Mom to stand beside the hospital bed and then walk and dress and leave the hospital smiling and healthy.

  {Witch blood! Demon blood! Get thee behind me, Satan!} The Mom-figure turned away, fingering a rosary so hard Jo expected to see smoke curling up from the beads. {Our Father, Who art in heaven . . .}

  Jo blinked and stared at the Mom in the hospital bed. It showed no change. Then, slowly, jerkily, the head turned towards Jo and away from Dad. Sweat beaded its face. The eyes focused. The lips trembled on the right side, tongue licked, stuttering consonants and vowels tumbled over each other, vainly trying to give meaning. The brow furrowed in frustration.

  Mom's right hand twitched, and Jo took it gently in hers. The fingers pressed against hers, warmer than they had been, and Jo closed her eyes and let her soul flow down her arm again to seek her mother and give healing.

  {Demon-spawn!}

  A vision exploded in Jo's face, flashing views of a goat-man standing on his hind legs, penis rampant, with Dad's face crowned by the classic devil's horns. The choking reek of brimstone filled the air. She staggered back, shielding her eyes.

  Shit. So this was what you got when you mixed a rigid Catholic upbringing with the Old Blood, and then topped it off with Dad. The girls finally grew up and escaped, but Mom wouldn't find refuge short of the grave. No divorce. Jo swallowed bitterness and took a deep
breath.

  Back into her center, back into the calm. Send gentle waves of hope and love through the bond of touch between them. Think warm, think peace, think healing. Ride the pale yellow flow up past the walls and into Mom's inner sanctuary, gently, gently, through onion-layer after onion-layer of defenses and evasions.

  Aftermath of blood clot and swelling. Dead tissue. Marks of surgery. Spread soothing. Touch the thoughts cowering deep inside the bunker.

  Dad's face, red with rage, breath reeking of whisky. Shouted words. A woman's face, painted and street-wise. The fist. Sudden red pain, and falling, and terror, and blessed darkness.

  Jo staggered back, shoved away by the force of her mother's will slamming the door on this intrusion. She leaned against the wall of the hospital room, panting, sickened by what she'd found in her vain attempt at healing. It hadn't been a stroke. Mom's brain had been damaged, yes, but not by stroke or fall. She didn't want to come out and face the world. Not that world.

  She caught her breath and straightened up. Dad's rat-face stared at her from across the bed, crafty, nervous, too aware of what had happened. Old Blood. Brian had said they must have inherited it from both sides.

  So that was how he controlled us.

  Jo took another breath, deep and slow, feeling the power building within her like a lighting charge. Hair rose on her head like that time she'd drawn on the magic of the Summer Country and her blood to blast two slugs from a pistol that defied the laws of faery. Guns weren't supposed to work, under the rules of that land. She'd made one work, and damn near killed that slimy fucker Sean in the process.

  Her father caught the rage on her face. He seemed to shrink as her anger swelled to fill the room, and he slid furtively towards the door.

  "You bastard!" Space twisted around them, shoving her into the doorway and leaving him cornered. Her shout echoed between hard plaster walls, but she knew the sound was trapped in here with them. Whatever happened between them, no stranger could hear.

  "You did this." Her rage narrowed and turned quiet, hissing like a welding torch adjusted to pure blue flame for burning straight through steel. "You've hit her a hundred times, a thousand times. Never again. You'll never hit any of us again."

  He cringed away, deeper into the farthest corner of the tiny room. "Sh-sh-she fell," he stammered. "Sh-sh-she hit her head. It was an ac-ac-accident."

  "Bullshit!"

  She stared down at him, huddled there like a child trying to escape a beating, like her trying to escape him. Contemptible. She'd lived in fear of that?

  "She found out about another one of your ten-buck syphilitic street-crawler whores. What was that, the hundredth time? You were drunk, like you've been drunk six days out of seven of your life. You hit her. You hurt her, without thought or care like you've lived your whole life without thought or care for others. You'll never hit her again."

  The magic took her then, flashing up through her legs and spine to the back of her skull to send shivers down her arms. She raised her right hand and pointed dead between his eyes as if she was carrying out an execution.

  "If you ever touch another woman, may your manhood fail you. If you take strong drink, may it twist your guts into knots and leave you puking sober. If you raise your hand against her or any woman, may your own hand turn against you and be your death. I lay this curse upon you by the blood tie between us. I call on the stones and trees and waters to witness it, I call on the winds to spread it wide, I call on the sun and moon and stars to guard it. If you break this doom, may you be called to judgment before the altar where you swore faith to God and to that woman lying wounded by your blows."

  Then the Power released her, and she nearly staggered with the sudden weakness that washed over her. Where had those words come from? Where had they come from, in the Summer Country, when she'd been taken by the magic and shaken and wrung dry?

  She stepped to one side, allowing him to scuttle past sideways like a retreating crab. "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out."

  The plaster wall felt cool against her forehead, gritty, reassuring in its strength and hardness. She leaned against it, trying to draw that cool soothing in to quench her headache. The room seemed to pulse around her in time with her pounding heart.

  Jo turned and leaned back against the wall, staring at the rainbow auras that lined the hospital bed and side stand and IV pole. Gods above and below, I thought I'd escaped from that. I killed a man. I strangled him with the twisting vines of Maureen's forest and enjoyed every twitch that he made dying, and I ran away because of what I'd found in my own heart. And it's followed me here, like a wolf I made the mistake of feeding.

  Her mother had turned slightly, to stare across the bed at her. Her right hand stirred. Jo felt her purpose through their shared blood, the bond of the Old Blood flowing in their veins. Her mother was trying to cross herself.

  Trying to guard her soul against the demon that had left the room and the more dangerous demon that had scared him away.

  Chapter Seven

  "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense."

  Was that the third time they'd read the Miranda card at him, or the fourth? At least they hadn't read it in Spanish or Ukrainian, to make sure they'd stopped up all the mouse-holes. Brian shook his head. The cop across the table looked so young and neatly crewcut and earnest and upright, the whole scene was bloody pathetic.

  Under arrest? I could stare into your eyes, snap my fingers, and you'd escort me out through that locked door with a smile on your face. Or I could just lean across the table and kill you with one strike, then step through the edge of the world into Maureen's forest.

  Cop procedures weren't designed to deal with the Old Blood. For that matter, cop procedures and cop stations and county jails weren't designed to deal with SAS commandos. Brian let his mind float, ticking off the worn scratched gray metal doors with their electric locks, the laminated glass judas windows smoke-dark so that you only saw anonymous shadows of the watchers on the other side, the concrete block walls with their dingy off-green paint designed to calm the inmates. He mapped the halls and cameras and checkpoints and the total lack of weapons inside the jail. They even had weapons lockers for beat cops coming in with a prisoner.

  Three men, five minutes, I could take this place apart and be back out through the wire with my choice of prisoners.

  He focused back on the cop in front of him, sheriff's deputy, really, corporal by the collar tabs. The man looked a bit twitchy now, with squint-wrinkles next to his eyes as if some of Brian's thoughts had leaked through to his face.

  "And the charge would be . . . ?"

  "Possession of forged documents, violations of the Immigration and Naturalization laws, and weapons violations. Those are enough for the hearing."

  Brian relaxed a touch. They were all bail offenses. No murder charges or planted drugs. Spend a night or two in jail, hand them some fairy gold -- or more accurately, a fairy check that would evaporate in mid-transfer -- and walk away. He'd eaten prison food before. No worse than field rations and a hell of a lot better than gnawing on cold mutton in a Falkland Islands trench. The place was even warm and dry.

  The corporal guided him through a maze of corridors and rooms, booking and mug shot and fingerprints, change into an orange jump-suit and inventory of prisoner's possessions with signed receipt. Doors clicked and banged and echoed. He wrinkled his nose as they passed a trusty hosing down the holding cell and the drunk inside it, sour with puke, battered from a fight or the arrest, still screaming abuse at some distant bint named Carla. He mapped it all and rated it, compared with other prisons he'd seen in Burma and Turkey and Mexico and England. About a seven, he thought, on a scale of ten. I've stayed in worse hotels.

  And he didn't kill anybody. After
all, he was here to take pressure off Jo and David, not add to it. The cops had demanded to see first Maureen and then him, proof that they were still alive and kicking. Otherwise, they would just keep on sitting in their cruisers outside of Jo's apartment and idling, calling them in for questioning every day or so, tapping phones and presenting search warrants at odd hours, tracking bank transactions. Cops had a million ways to make themselves obnoxious, all within the law.

  A final buzz-click and hollow clang behind him, and he stood inside a dormitory cell. A thick stale mix of male bodies and disinfectant washed over him. Six metal bunks, two of them didn't match the other four. Over the design capacity, your tax dollars at work. A metal table, bolted down to floor and wall, with some sort of card game going on, five pairs of cold cynical eyes measuring him and then looking away as they decided they were not going to shake down the fresh meat. Wise choice.

  He ignored them, didn't try to reset or even read the cell's pecking order, and sat down on the single unused bunk. He let his aura expand, testing the walls, and decided they didn't have enough iron reinforcing in them to be any problem at all. Cold iron. Only prison that had ever slowed him down was that cockroach cesspit in eastern Turkey, an iron cage. That one, he'd had to control one of the guards to escape. Amazing, the places that Queen and Country sent a man. Or the Pendragons, for that matter.

  Meanwhile, he had some thinking left to do. Jails were good for that, nearly as good as a monastery or a hermit's cave. The charges stank. "Forged papers?" "Immigration laws?" Those meant some serious balls-up in the works. He'd handed the cops a good passport, true government issue with his own name and photo and real seals. Only way that could have broken down was with a three- or four-layer search, not just consul records but back to the Home Office and even field checks at the Cornwall address he'd claimed. That meant trouble for the Pendragon's inside man. Or trouble with the inside man, one or the other. Either meant a can of Grade A worms. He needed to get a report back to Duncan, soonest.