He was bound to them, by choice and by love. He could not imagine living without Beth’s warm laugh, or the slow smile that often lighted Eric’s face.
And how will I live without them, a scant hundred years from now?
That was the thought that terrified him, that he would have to watch them grow old, as humans do. It was a thought that he had not shared with either of them, not knowing what he could say.
There were answers, of course. He could ask them to join him Underhill, journeying across the veil between worlds into the elven realms where time moved slowly, if at all. But somehow, he didn’t think they would accept that offer. Life in Faerie was a quiet and unchanging existence, nothing like the unpredictable life in the human world. He wasn’t certain that he, himself, could return Underhill without longing for the human realms. That was why so many of his kind had chosen to live here, among the mortals. Beth had once described his inability to sit still as being “stir crazy”—somehow, he suspected that phrase also described how he would feel after several years of life in Faerie.
Until these last two days, the thought of his friends’ mortality had not haunted him so. But seeing Beth so ill, with a human malady unknown to elvenkind, had brought home the differences between himself and his friends. Without warning, without explanation, they could be taken from him, simply because of their nature: they were human.
Then again, all of us could die tomorrow, fighting this demon-creature that wishes to destroy this entire city.
Worry about this in another ten years, Korendil, he told himself.
For tomorrow, you concentrate on surviving a battle.
“Korendil, do you have any opinion on that?”
He looked up, realizing that everyone was watching him, waiting for a reply, and shrugged. “Decide as you see fit,” he said, and stood. “I will be back shortly.”
Outside the house, standing in the garden, he breathed in the night air, letting the moonlight wash over him. Through the open door, he could hear the arguments over strategy and tactics continuing.
Beth yawned again, and rubbed at her aching eyes. Enough already. “Guys, I can’t keep my eyes open anymore; I’m going to call it a night. Susan, we’ve set up the other bed in the office for you, whenever you want to get some sleep.”
Susan Sheffield also looked exhausted, but she only nodded. “Not just yet,” she said. “I’m used to late nights at the office ... but I probably ought to get some sleep soon.”
“I’ll probably be up in a little while,” Eric said.
Beth headed wearily up the stairs. It had been a very strange, surreal evening—long discussions of magic and battle, the best methods for infiltrating the complex, and how to link with the Mount Tam witches. Throughout the evening, Eric had been strangely quiet, not contributing much to the discussion.
Probably still in shock over what’s happened in the last few days.
She hoped he’d get over it, and quickly. Their plans depended on him, and his Bardic abilities. If he couldn’t do the job…
She stripped off her shirt and jeans, and pulled on an old caftan, climbing into the large waterbed. The bed squished beneath her, rocking slightly, a gentle rhythm…
…the floor tilting beneath her, everything vibrating and shaking as long cracks zigzagged down the walls, plaster falling onto her…
Beth grabbed onto the edge of the bed for support, fingers whitening. She felt as though she was teetering on the edge of a dark chasm, hearing the screams of lost souls echoing up from below her. That way lies madness. She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing slowly in through her nose, out through her mouth. The whirlwinds caught at her, trying to pull her down, but she held on tightly to the bed, refusing to let go.
After a long moment, the storm died away, leaving her alone again on the bed with only an echo of distant noise in her head.
She buried her face in her hands, as the tears silently leaked from her eyes. She wanted to scream from terror and frustration, and bit her lip instead.
She’d never thought this could happen to her. She’d always thought of herself as tough, independent, able to deal with anything. Except that it wasn’t true—now she knew that it had never been true. Now she knew just how fragile her reality was, and what lurked out beyond the edges of sanity.
There was no way to understand this, to guess when she’d recover from it. Maybe she’d linger on this line between madness and waking for years. Maybe she’d never recover. That thought was the most terrifying of all—to continue this nightmare existence for the rest of her life. She remembered Ria Liewellyn’s face after that terrible morning at Griffith Park, the awful blankness of a body without a mind, someone lost in the depths of insanity that now threatened her. She couldn’t imagine herself that way, alive but not living. Trapped within her own mind, her own nightmares. It was inconceivable.
I’d rather die.
The more she thought about it, the more certain she became of that idea: better not to live, not this way. Just the thought of trying to sleep tonight, knowing what nightmares awaited her, was more than she could bear. She crossed to the bathroom door, taking two Tylenol-with-Codeine pills from the medicine cabinet. That would work as well as sleeping pills, at least for tonight. She slid back into bed, pulling the covers tightly around her.
The fear was like a fist around her heart; despite her exhaustion, she didn’t want to close her eyes, even for a moment. She knew what waited for her in the darkness.
To live like this, for years… maybe forever…
Well, tomorrow we’re heading into a major fight. A lot of things can happen in a fight. Maybe I won’t have to worry about this anymore.
She didn’t want to die. But she wasn’t too certain that she really wanted to live, either. She could feel the tenuous wall between herself and the terrors coiled beneath her, and knew that they were waiting to drag her down, bury her alive. That wall was so thin and fragile, it could break at any moment.
She knew she didn’t want to live this way.
Tomorrow, they would try to save the city. She and Eric and Kory and their friends, Elizabet and Kayla, the elves of Mist-Hold, the San Francisco witches. She had a responsibility to them to help them in any way she could, and she knew she wouldn’t shirk that responsibility. Somehow she would hold herself together, until the Poseidon Project equipment was destroyed, and Warden Blair was no longer a danger to anyone, and San Francisco was safe.
But afterwards…
* * *
CHAPTER 15:
Frosty Morning
The house was very quiet at 8 am., no sounds except for the faint noise of cars driving past, half a block away. Eric sat in the kitchen staring down into a mug of coffee that had been warm once, maybe an hour ago.
“You’re up early,” Dr. Sheffield said from behind him. He turned quickly. The lady scientist, wearing one of Beth’s bathrobes, walked into the kitchen and sat down on one of the other chairs next to him.
“There’s more coffee in the pot,” Eric offered.
“Thanks.” She reached across the table for a clean mug and the coffee pot. “Did you get much sleep?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Too much to think about. All of this happened so fast—things used to be so easy for us. Uncomplicated. No problems, not in the last couple years…”
“You mean, you don’t usually go around summoning monsters and consorting with elves?”
He smiled. “Consorting with elves, sure. All the time. Summoning monsters, not if I can avoid it.” The smile faded. “I didn’t want to… to do what I did, at the Labs. But you know that, right?”
She didn’t answer at first, swirling the coffee in her mug. “Friends of mine are dead or brain-dead because of you, mister. I can’t say I could ever forgive you for that. But what Blair was doing, it was illegal and evil. Even if he hadn’t gotten hold of my project, he probably would’ve graduated to some more extensive levels of cruelty eventually. I’ve read enough on psychopat
hic sadists to know that they never stop until they’re arrested or dead. Fourteen people died that night at the Lab… yeah, and we don’t know how many people ‘disappeared’ under Dr. Blair’s tender care.” She shook her head. “The man was already sick and dangerous, and the truth is that even without the Poseidon Project, if Blair continues unchecked, he’ll beat that record of fourteen eventually if he hasn’t already. Just a matter of time.”
Eric’s mouth opened; he closed it again.
“Besides, it’s not like the Lab people don’t know that they’re at risk, always. Working at the Labs, you know you’re a target. It’s one of the first places a nuclear would hit, if we ever got into that kind of war, and it’s a constant target for terrorists. Those scum probably think of all the plutonium in that complex and can’t stop drooling.” She took another long swallow from the mug. “And then there’s the possibility that something could go wrong from the inside, that some Lab technician could press the wrong switch and the entire place could go up in smoke. Colonel Steve—my boss—he thought that what happened with the monsters could’ve been an internal accident, that all of us were hallucinating from a chemical accident or something like that. So you know you’re a target when you work there, in more ways than one.” She stared down into the mug. “It’s just when it happened, when something did go wrong, somehow I wasn’t expecting it. I mean, I was expecting some lunatic guys with automatic rifles, not an army of monsters.”
“Sorry about that,” Eric said sourly. “Next time, I’ll leave the demon army at home and bring a squad of terrorists instead.”
She gave him a sharp but steady look. “There won’t be a next time, kid, because you and your army of Tolkien fans are going to get it right the first time. That’s why I’m still here, instead of taking off in the middle of the night and heading for Sheboygan until all of this is over. I’m going to make sure you do it right.”
“We’ll try.” She’s a good lady, Susan Sheffield. She didn’t deserve this. It’s the least I can do to make sure that she doesn’t get hurt.
He looked up and around, wondering where Kayla was. She ought to get up soon; they’d need to head out as soon as the morning traffic was over. He set his coffee mug down, and refilled it from the pot.
The mug rattled once on the table, then again, more insistently. The windows began to vibrate, one window swinging open. He could feel the ground moving beneath him, gentle swells that felt like floating on the tides of the ocean, close enough to shore to feel the motion of the waves.
“Oh shit, is that ...?“ Eric turned to Susan Sheffield.
The rattling noise ceased, as suddenly as it had begun.
Susan drank some coffee. Eric could see the unsteadiness of her hand as she lifted the mug. “Well, it could be natural. But—”
“But you don’t think so.”
She shook her head. “I’d say he’s testing the engines, so to speak. Calibrating the probes. He’s moving faster than I had expected… still, it’ll take him a fair amount of time to calibrate the system, if he wants to do it right the first time. He has my notes and all my project files to work from, but Frank and I were the only ones who really lived with the system. He’ll have to absorb a lot of information very quickly. And the physical calibration, even with the system computers to plot the resonance intersection points, that’ll take time.”
“How long?” Eric asked.
She was quiet for a few seconds, thinking about it, before she answered. “Definitely all day. Maybe by sometime tomorrow, if he works through the night. He might be able to do something tonight, but if he rushes too much, an improperly triggered earthquake could destroy the probes and he’d have to start over with the recalibration.”
“Maybe we should’ve destroyed the probes ourselves, last night.”
Susan shrugged. “Wouldn’t have mattered that much. There’s a roomful of them back at the Labs, though most of them still need some assembly work. We could’ve slowed him down a little, but not much. Maybe an hour or two. That’s why I didn’t suggest it at the time. What we need to do is stop Blair, not the project. In fact, I’m hoping we can do that without damaging the project equipment or laboratories—it’d sure be nice not to have to sacrifice most of my last two years’ work tonight.”
Kayla vaulted into the kitchen, still wearing a long flannel nightgown. It looked strange on her, now that Eric was so used to her leather clothing and studded jewelry. “Was that a real earthquake?” she asked.
“Just Warden Blair warming up the engines,” Eric said. “Shouldn’t you, like, get dressed or something?”
“Oh, yeah.” She dived back through the doorway, and they could hear her feet pounding up the stairs.
“She’s a good kid,” Susan observed. “Why are you letting her get involved in this mess?”
Eric thought of Kayla after the battle in Griffith Park, soaked in blood up to her elbows, and tried to remember that this lady didn’t know them, didn’t know anything about them and what they’d already been through together. “She’s very important. Kayla is a healer, a genuine ‘lay on hands and fix what’s broken’ healer. If anyone gets hurt during this fight, it’ll probably be Kayla who saves their lives.”
“But she’s just a kid!” Susan protested.
“She’ll do fine. I’m more worried about the flaky Wiccans that Beth dug out of the woodwork, to be honest. From what she was saying, some of those people need to consult a crystal ball before they can tie their shoe laces in the morning. I’m not so worried about the elves; they believe in the danger and know what they’re fighting for.” But with luck, none of them will need to go anywhere near the labs. I started this mess, and I’ll deal with it. “But I don’t need to tell you about elves, you know enough about them already.”
“I’d rather not talk about that,” she said.
That was something of a surprise. “Why not? I thought you had a good experience with the Mist-Hold elves that summer.”
“I did.” She looked up to meet his gaze. “But then it ended, and they left me.” She stood up abruptly. “Well, I’m going to shower and get dressed. I’m not certain what kind of clothes one is supposed to wear to Armageddon, but I’ll see if I can borrow something from your friend Beth.”
She set her mug down in the sink before leaving the room. Eric contemplated pouring another cup of coffee, and wondered if adding a shot of whiskey to it would help clear the blurriness from his mind. Probably not, he decided.
He’d never been a morning person, ever. Morning was that awful thing that happened every day before noon, something to avoid if possible, endure if not. But today he had a schedule to keep, if he wanted to keep his friends out of danger as well as the rest of San Francisco.
Maybe a little more caffeine would help…
“Hey, pour me one of those,” Kayla said, sliding onto the chair recently vacated by Susan Sheffield.
“It’ll stunt your growth, kid,” Eric said, pouring her the last cup of coffee in the pot.
“Hell, I’m tall enough already. So, are you ready? Did you eat breakfast?”
“I never eat breakfast,” he said grimly. “Breakfast is for people who wake up before lunch.”
“Look, Bard, you have to take care of yourself. You’re about to go burn a lot of magical energy, you need something to replace it.” Kayla hopped off the chair and began rummaging through the refrigerator. “How does scrambled eggs and toast sound?”
“Awful.”
“I can add some cheese and salsa, if you want.”
“That’s worse. Kayla, make whatever you want for breakfast. I’ll stick with coffee, thanks.”
“Better to watch your nutrition. That’s what Elizabet always tells me. Well, it’s your funeral, Bard.” There was an awkward silence between them. “I didn’t mean it quite that way, Eric,” Kayla said after a moment. “I’ll cook up some eggs, and then we can get out of here.”
“Right. I’ll get my things together.”
He headed up
stairs, quietly opening the bedroom door. Beth and Kory were still asleep. He took his flute case from the top of the dresser, and slipped it into his gig-bag. His leather wallet was lying on the window seat; he checked to make sure that he had his BART card in the pocket for the subway fare, and change for the bus, enough for Kayla and himself. There was a ten-dollar bill with the BART card—maybe Kayla and I can stop for lunch at Gordo’s Burritos in Berkeley after we save the world, he thought with a wry smile.
On the other hand, Kayla knew how to drive. Maybe they should take Beth’s elvensteed.
A last look at the waterbed:Kory, sleeping with his arm flung out wide, as relaxed in sleep as he always was when awake. Beth, frowning slightly in her sleep. He knelt and kissed her gently, careful not to wake her. I might never see them again. The thought was like a physical pain. He hurried downstairs to where Kayla was waiting, already wearing her black leather jacket and boots.
“Listen, Eric,” she said, a little hesitantly. “There’s something I need to tell you… I don’t know how to say this, exactly, but… you’re kinda visible. I can see it, and I know the elves can, too. I’d bet the bad guys could see you that way as well, so I thought you might want to do something about it.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“It’s a little difficult to explain ... you kinda… glow, a little. Well… more than a little. You glow a lot, to be honest. When I close my eyes, I can still see you.”
This was a bad time for a joke. Or maybe it wasn’t a joke. “Are you serious?”
She nodded vigorously. “Scout’s honor, Bard. You look like a neon light at five hundred feet.”
He thought about that for a minute. “Okay. Let me try something.” He closed his eyes and reached inside, to that still pool of power within him. With an odd mental twist, he switched it off, like a light switch, or like opening the floodgates and letting it all pour out instantly.
The wooden floor was pressed against his cheek. That was the first conscious thought that registered, that and the fact that Kayla’s hands were bright with a pale blue light. He sat up slowly, waves of dizziness washing over him.
Summoned to Tourney Page 24
