Black Swan Rising

by Lee Carroll

  “Nor had I anticipated that you would be able to communicate with former Watchtowers who might explain to you why you shouldn’t let me have the box. Your mother was bad enough, but once you were able to contact Marguerite Dufay, it was only a matter of time before you found out that I’m not supposed to have the box again.”

  If I could have gasped and widened my eyes in surprise, I would have, but I couldn’t even breathe . . . I wasn’t breathing! How long could I stay alive in this state?

  “For about an hour,” Oberon said, apparently reading my thoughts. “Now what was I saying? Oh, yes, Marguerite Dufay—now there was a most uncooperative Watchtower and, like you, foolishly attracted to that vampire.”

  An image from Madame Dufay’s memories replayed before my frozen eyes: a man in a peacock-blue coat and feathered mask bowing low and then sweeping us into the dance, familiar silver eyes behind the mask . . . it was Will! He’d been the man whom Madame Dufay had loved.

  “I had no choice but to keep them apart,” Oberon said.

  Now I recalled the rain-soaked Paris street, but when I looked at the fogged-over apothecary’s window, I recognized the figure at the counter—it was Oberon. It was he, not John Dee, who had sold the painter the magic paints to paint the lover’s eye.

  Oberon smiled. “Sometimes I think I will spend eternity keeping you two apart. A hundred years will go by and I’ll think I’ve finally broken the bond between you two and then—” Oberon reached his hand up to my neck. I couldn’t feel a thing, but from the tilt of his head I guessed he was looking at the bite marks on my neck. When he moved his head, I saw something else out of the corner of my eye—a flutter of wings. “Voilà! Here you two are again!”

  He sat back. The flutter of wings moved closer. It was Lol, hovering on top of a bookcase a few feet behind Oberon.

  “You keep finding each other, life after life.” I was paying more attention to Lol than to what Oberon was saying, but that comment distracted me. What did he mean that we kept finding each other? Will had said he’d had almost no contact with Marguerite’s descendants since they’d parted in the early seventeenth century. But I couldn’t very well ask Oberon what he meant. And then my attention was taken up by Lol, who looked as if she were doing some kind of yoga pose on the top bookshelf. She was bent over at the waist, both her arms stretched out behind her like a swimmer warming up for a race. Then she lifted herself onto the tips of her toes and sprang off the bookshelf into the air, soaring so fast that she became a blur of yellow and orange—a meteor hurtling toward my forehead. She was going for the Post-it note, to remove the spell, only before she reached me, Oberon raised his right hand and without even so much as breaking eye contact with me swatted Lol aside.

  I heard a sickening thud as she slammed into something, but I couldn’t even turn my head to see if she was still alive.

  “Poor Lol,” Oberon said, clucking his tongue, “she’s always been attached to you. But she knows the price of taking the side of a human over one of her own.”

  He got to his feet and I lost sight of his face, but then he bent down to look at me and I was surprised to see the pain and regret on his face. “As should you by now.” Then his face disappeared and I heard his footsteps going down the stairs and the front door opening and closing.

  Oberon had left me in front of the TV set, as if I were parked there to watch my favorite show. The image on the set was as frozen as I was, though, and not on a channel I would have chosen: John Dee in his guise as Robert Osborne sitting by the fire, with Marguerite Dufay looking down at me with her sad eyes as if waiting for me to expire. Oberon had said I could live like this about an hour—and already five minutes had gone by. The clock on the cable box read 5:34 . . . then 5:35. I had until sometime around 6:30. Had he purposely left me here in front of the clock so I could watch the last minutes of my life slip away? It seemed cruel. How had I so misjudged him? In the hospital he had seemed so kind. I’d watched him use his green aura to heal Zach Reese and my father—damn! My poor father! Who would take care of him if I died?

  I felt a prickling in my eyes, but even my tear ducts were frozen. I couldn’t cry. I could still think, though. And what did I have to think about but to wonder why Oberon had done this to me? He had looked genuinely grieved, as if he were doing something he was forced to do. What had he said? It was only a matter of time before you remembered that I wasn’t supposed to have the box again. Dee had said that Oberon wanted the box to gain control over the human race and gain power for the kingdom of the fey. Apparently he had been using me all along to find the box, and now that I’d told him where it was, he didn’t need me anymore. And once I’d made contact with Madame Dufay he was afraid I would learn why I had to keep him from getting the box. All that made a sort of sense, but I still found it hard to understand how he could kill Lol and leave me to die.

  Nevertheless the clock now read 6:03. I had only half an hour left. Maybe Jay would come back from the hospital—he’d been there since the middle of last night, surely he’d come back to shower and change. But then I remembered Jay’s grief-stricken face as he sat beside Becky’s bed and realized that he probably wasn’t going anywhere. And no one else had the key to get in the town house.

  There was one person, though, who wouldn’t need a key. Will had said he’d see me tonight, but when tonight? The sun had already set, but he’d have to feed. How long would that take? Where did he find his victims . . . or did he have willing donors? The thought of him taking blood from some other woman while I sat here dying would have brought tears to my eyes if my tear ducts hadn’t been frozen.

  If I could have moved my fingers I could have sent up a flare, but all I could do was think about him and hope that some vampire radar picked up my mental distress signal. After all, Oberon had said that Will and I kept finding each other life after life. Didn’t that mean we shared some spiritual bond?

  That bond hadn’t helped Madame Dufay any, I reflected. She’d run to Will’s rescue and been killed.

  The numbers on the cable box melted from 6:15 to 6:16.

  I tried to picture Will’s face as he’d looked last night in the glow of the firelight, his eyes hungry for me . . . I saw Will, but it wasn’t as he’d looked last night. This man had longer hair, tied back in a ponytail, and there was lace at his throat. The glow on his face came not from the firelight, but the orange of the setting sun. His eyes were filled with grief, not hunger. Somehow I knew that this was Madame Dufay’s last memory of him—a remnant of her sight that she’d left for me—her lover arriving seconds too late to save her.

  Is that what would be my last memory as well?

  I banished the picture and focused on the man—well, vampire—I’d been with last night.

  The clock read 6:23.

  Will, I love you, I said to myself, surprised that the words were true. Come quick.

  Upstairs in my studio came a metallic clang, like wind chimes. The wind knocking something over?

  The clock moved soundlessly from 6:25 to 6:26, the red numerals glowing like the last light of the setting sun.

  I heard the wind now. It was inside the house, whistling down the staircase. Perhaps this was what death sounded like when it came for you. A great wind. But didn’t I still have a few minutes? I could no longer read the clock. A shadow had fallen between me and the TV set, like an enormous black wing spreading itself over me. Death come to take me away. And why not go with it? Death had a beautiful face . . . like an angel . . . white as marble, eyes the silver of new coins.

  Death touched my forehead and I could feel my soul pouring out of my body through a spot between my eyes. My yoga teacher was right—the third eye was the seat of enlightenment and vision! I could see everything now. A million memories—from my own life and a dozen others—flashed by me with astounding speed, but I recognized all of them. I was all of the Marguerites that had come before me. At last the slide show stilled on one image: the round pool beneath the stone tower, the black swan g
liding on the water. Yes, I heard myself—all my selves—thinking, it always came back to this. An arrow split the still air, an anguished cry broke the silence . . .

  “Garet!”

  The sound mingled with the swan’s cry, both anguished. I could feel myself slipping under the dark water, but then I felt strong hands pulling me out, shaking me, calling my name again.

  “Garet!”

  I opened my eyes and saw Will’s face above me. “You came,” I said, my voice as hoarse as if I hadn’t spoken in a hundred years. “You heard me.”

  “I did hear you,” he said, shaking his head in wonderment that I’d been able to summon him. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “From Marguerite Dufay, I think,” I said as he helped me sit up.

  “Dufay?” Will whispered the name. “But how?”

  I opened my right hand and found the eye brooch looking up at me. Will looked down at it. His skin, already white, turned a shade of pale blue. He picked up the brooch and held it up to his eye. I noticed that unlike Oberon he wasn’t afraid to touch it. “Where did you get this?” he asked, his voice as hoarse as mine had been a moment ago.

  “From Dee’s shop. I realized it matched the portrait in Dee’s lair and I used it to find out where he was.”

  “I thought he might have taken it. I suspected that he was the one who gave poor Auguste Regnault the ability to paint it.”

  “Dee must have stolen the brooch at some point, but it was Oberon who gave the painter the magic to make it.”

  “Oberon?” Will frowned.

  “Because he wanted to keep you two apart.”

  Will shook his head. “But Oberon wouldn’t have wanted Marguerite dead.”

  “Well, he certainly wanted me dead . . . and I think he might have killed Lol!” I jumped to my feet, dismayed that I hadn’t thought to look for Lol immediately. I scanned the floor and finally found her behind a potted fern, her body limp and her wings crumpled like discarded cellophane wrappers. I touched the tip of my index finger to her sternum and felt a faint flutter.

  “I think she’s still alive,” I said to Will, who knelt beside me. “Is there anything we can do for her?”

  “I saw Marguerite tend to a wounded fairy once. She said they could heal themselves with the energies from certain plants.” He reached over my shoulder and yanked out a handful of fern fronds. “Here, you’d better do it. I don’t think a vampire’s touch will do her much good.”

  I wrapped the fronds around Lol’s limp body as gently as I could, not wanting to jar any broken bones. Then I lay her in the pot beneath the fern. She looked a little like the Vietnamese spring rolls they served at Saigon Grill. After a moment I heard a faint humming noise and saw a pale green glow surround her.

  “I think it’s working,” Will said. “The best thing we can do is let her rest. You say Oberon did this? I’ve seen him be ruthless before, but to harm one of his own . . .”

  “He said it was what she deserved for siding with a human, and then he said something else.” I frowned, trying to remember Oberon’s parting words to me. “He said I should know well the price of taking a human’s side. Did he mean the first Marguerite’s decision to become mortal in order to be with you?”

  Will looked away, a pained expression on his face. “I suppose. Sometimes I think that the reason Oberon hates me so much is that he was in love with Marguerite and he blames me for her decision to become human. But still, I’m surprised he would hurt you.” His eye fell on the crumpled Post-it note that he’d peeled from my forehead. He picked it up and unfolded it. “See,” he said, pointing at the symbol, “he only drew half an infinity sign through the octagon. If he wanted you dead, he would have drawn a full one. He knew I’d get here in time.”

  “Really? He could have told me that.”

  “Maybe he wanted you to have to call me, or maybe he was just messing with you.” Will shrugged his shoulders. “Oberon is fond of tricks, but not evil. He wanted a head start. You say you were able to find out where Dee is?”

  “He’s in the High Bridge Tower—or at least he was an hour ago—here, give me the brooch.”

  He seemed reluctant to part with it—or maybe, I thought, reluctant to have me looking through Marguerite Dufay’s eyes again. He needn’t have been. Madame Dufay didn’t treat me to any of her memories this time; she took me straight to Dee’s lair. Dee was sitting in the chair beside the fire. He seemed curiously still.

  “He’s there,” I told Will.

  “Is the box still there?” Will asked.

  I looked down at the table beside the chair. “Yes.”

  “And Oberon?”

  “No, I don’t see him”

  “Then I’m afraid Dee has already disposed of him. Come on, we have to hurry.”

  I took the brooch from my eye and slipped it into my pocket. “But how are we going to get up into the tower. Can you scale it?”

  Will had been watching where I put the brooch. He looked up, distracted, then smiled. “I’m afraid not, my dear. I know another way.” He looked down at my feet. “Ah, good, you’ll need those,” he said, pointing to my Doc Martens, which I’d put on earlier today because Oberon had told me to wear my welding clothes. “The way we’re going is a bit damp.”

  Will’s driver was waiting outside in the Rolls. The fog was so thick that I wasn’t sure how he was going to drive through it, but he seemed unperturbed when Will told him to drive to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.

  “Why are we going there?” I asked Will, who was sitting in the backseat to my right as the car glided down Jane Street. “The High Bridge Tower is in the 170s in Manhattan.”

  “If we try to approach the tower from the ground, Dee will see us.”

  “How can he see anything in this pea soup?” I asked. We’d come to the corner of Jane Street and the West Side Highway. To our right was the SRO hotel where Oberon lived, the corner tower lost in the heavy fog. A man came out of the lobby and shivered when he breathed in the fog. He pulled up the corduroy collar of his Barbour raincoat and coughed into his hand, his face turning a sickly gray. With a start, I recognized him as the man whom I’d bumped into on Twelfth Street a few days ago, the one who’d called me an asshole for going “the wrong way.” He started walking to the corner, but then abruptly lurched into the street and fell against the hood of the still stationary Rolls.

  “Is he all right?” I asked, starting to open the door. “He looks like he needs help.”

  Will reached his arm over me and pulled the door shut. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he hissed.

  The man’s face was suddenly at my window, his features contorted with rage. “You’re going the wrong way, asshole!” he screamed, pounding his fists against the glass. “D’ya think ’cause you have a fancy car you can just run people over?”

  “Go on,” Will instructed the driver. “And don’t stop for any reason.”

  As we turned onto the West Side Highway, I looked in the rearview mirror. The man in the Barbour coat had run out into the middle of the highway and was waving his fist in the air and shouting obscenities at us and at the other cars that careened around him.

  “You asked how Dee could see us in this fog, well, there’s the answer.” Will pointed to a plume of fog pouring out of a manhole cover beside the raving man. The fog billowed above the man and assumed the rudimentary shape of a creature with great bearlike arms and legs. The only clearly delineated part of the fog-monster was its glowing yellow eyes. “The fog has eyes,” Will said. “John Dee’s eyes.”

  I shuddered as the fog-monster wrapped its paws around the man and began pulling him down through the holes in the manhole cover. Even as the man disintegrated, I could still hear his voice shouting, “You’re all going the wrong way, assholes!”

  The Transmigration of Atoms

  We rode uptown a few minutes in relative calm, though I was startled in the West Forties by a large foggy smear in the middle of the Hudson River, to our left from the
highway. Gazing at it, I saw that it had enough substance to it to be floating up and down with the river’s tidal swell—the Hudson was moved by ocean tides for a hundred miles of its length—and that in a vague way it resembled an airplane. It was a cylinder at least a football field in length with two winglike protuberances midlength and a tail-like upward swing at its end. How bizarre, I initially thought, but then it occurred to me that many planes flew not very high over the Hudson after taking off from La Guardia. And this fog could rise into the air without warning.

  “Will.” I nudged him with my elbow. “What is that thing in the river?”

  He glanced out the window so swiftly I could barely follow the motion of his eyes. His pupils widened in alarm, nearly effacing the silver glow of his irises. “Dee’s nearing mass murder now as part of his mayhem. Despair and Discord made that fog. But I don’t think 911 will believe us if we call in to get all flights grounded. All the more reason . . .” He urged his driver to speed up. The driver stepped on the gas so hard that even the Rolls, smoothest of all cars, lurched ahead. But the acceleration didn’t last long.

  Already I could see a dim, large shape looming up about a half mile ahead in the moon-silvered road. Brake lights were glimmering in front of it, blooming like little luminescent flowers. At first faintly, then more distinctly, I could hear a series of thudding crashes from beyond the shape. I nestled closer to Will as the Rolls slowed sharply. “What the . . . ,” he muttered. His eyes brightened and his gaze penetrated the darkness ahead as if transformed to a searchlight, but it shed no light for me, and he hushed me when I asked him what was going on.

  In another ten yards or so I could see for myself. The shape was a growing pyramid of mangled cars—their front and rear ends all badly crashed in—centered in the opposite, southbound side of the road but spilling over onto our side now. From a greater distance to the north, I began to hear the high-pitched sirens of emergency vehicles. The pyramidal shape of the wreck surprised me, as if it displayed some tendency to order in even the most twisted and jumbled metal, and I also couldn’t understand why the crashes seemed to be occurring only on the southbound side of the road.