He felt a pricking in his left wrist and looked down. An IV line snaked into it, held in place by white surgical tape. He didn’t like the sight of metal piercing his flesh, so he looked the other way instead – just in time to see Ariane push aside the privacy curtain.
Her eyes were red. She’d been crying. Over me? he thought, and felt a wave of tenderness and affection. “Hi,” he said.
She gasped, and then flung herself at him. “You’re all right!”
She was hurting his shoulder but he didn’t mind a bit. “Well,” he said, his voice muffled by her head, which, pressed to his chest, made it hard to open his jaw. Her hair smelled like flowers. “I guess so.”
She drew back, brushed the hair out of her eyes, and then kissed him on the mouth for...
Well, he wasn’t sure how long, since his brain suddenly seemed to not be working again, even though he was fully conscious, but it was definitely a long time. A good, long time. A freaking excellently long time...
When she drew back, he gulped air, then said, “Wow.”
“You’ve been unconscious for a whole day,” she said. “I was so worried – the doctor said he couldn’t find anything wrong with you, but you wouldn’t wake up.”
“Nothing wrong with me?” Wally touched his head again. “My head hurts. Isn’t it a concussion?”
“The doctor didn’t think so.”
“Then what...?”
“Rex Major,” Ariane said. “Merlin. He did something. Knocked you out somehow. And then he –”
“Stole the shard.” Wally closed his eyes, feeling sick in a way that had nothing to do with whatever had put him in the hospital. “Ariane, I’m so sorry. I tried –”
“Don’t you dare apologize, Wally Knight,” Ariane snapped. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. For getting you involved. For abandoning you at the cave. For –”
“I involved myself,” Wally said. “I wanted to be involved. And I abandoned you first. I left you to face Major. I thought if I could get out, hide, I could come back later and do something to help. And I tried. I knocked Major into the water, jumped in, wrestled with Felicia, got the shard, ran out again. Major came after me, and I remember seeing Felicia wearing a towel around her waist...” He frowned. “I wonder why? Anyway, that’s the last thing I remember.”
“I found you on the path up to Lake Tanama,” Ariane said. “When I came back from rescuing my mother.”
Wally blinked. “You rescued your mom?”
“Major’s men kidnapped her from the Empress. They were holding her at some kind of camp in the woods. But I could feel her, Wally, like I can feel the sword – like you can feel the sword. I had a magical connection. I followed it.”
“But it should have taken you hours to –”
Ariane shook her head. “It didn’t. It doesn’t, anymore. I think that was just a...mental block on my part. Why should it take that long? Why should it take any time at all? It’s magic. I reached Vancouver Island in minutes, got Mom to Medicine Hat and handed her over to Emma in minutes, and got back to the island in minutes. But it was still too long. Major was gone, Felicia was gone, I thought you were dead. I transported you back to Medicine Hat, and they called 911.”
“So this is Medicine Hat?” Wally said, staring up at the acoustic tile.
Ariane nodded.
And then Wally suddenly sat up. The motion brought a sharp pain to his head, but he ignored it. “Wait! They will have admitted me...using a computer.”
“Yes, but –”
“Major will find out I’m here!”
“He left you for dead. He won’t even be looking!” Ariane protested.
Wally shook his head. “No. He left me for you. If I died, fine. But if you found me, he knew you’d have to take me somewhere for medical attention. He’ll have his feelers out through all the networks his software has infiltrated – and it’s everywhere. My admittance will have raised a red flag.”
“They can’t grab you out of the hospital,” Ariane protested.
“They grabbed your mother out of the Empress,” Wally pointed out. “If Merlin Commanded them to do so – and he will have – they’ll do whatever it takes to grab me. Including hurting other people.” He pulled the tape from his wrist, yanked out the IV drip, wincing as he did so.
“Wally!” Ariane said. “You can’t –”
“He’s in here, doctor,” a voice was saying in the hall. “A fascinating patient. We can’t find anything wrong with him, but he’s unconscious. All tests have been negative. It’s very kind of you to fly in from Toronto just to take a look. May I ask how you found out about the case?”
“You could say a little birdie told me,” said a deep voice, and Wally’s eyes jerked wide. He knew that voice.
Emeka! He should have still been in the hospital from his own head injury, but there he was, outside, in the hall, now!
“We have to go,” he whispered frantically to Ariane. He swung his bare feet over the side of the bed. He was wearing a hospital gown over hospital-issued pajama bottoms. “Hurry!”
Ariane, after one horrified glance at the door, didn’t hesitate. She took his hand, pulled him into the en-suite bathroom, and locked the door. She turned on the tap. “Hang on –”
Whirling nothingness, but very, very short this time. Wally barely had time to register how disturbing the process was before he was coughing and spitting chlorinated water.
The Medicine Hat Lodge waterslide pool. Again.
But dark and empty, shut down for the night. For once they wouldn’t face any startled looks. He climbed out, the thin hospital clothing clinging to him like a second skin. Ariane ordered the water off of both of them, and then they hurried through the hotel to Emma’s room, the one she’d been sharing with Ariane. Ariane’s mother sat in one of the chairs by the round table, gazing out the window. Emma was reclining on the bed, propped up by pillows, reading a book. Both of them looked toward the door as it opened. “Wally?” Emma said. “What –”
“We have to go. Now!” Ariane said. “Get packed.”
“What’s happened?” Ariane’s mother said.
“Rex Major’s man, Emeka,” Wally said. “At the hospital. We got out the...usual way.” He nodded at Ariane. “But he’ll be here next – they’ll know I was brought to the hospital from the waterslide. Major may already have someone watching the hotel. We have to get out of town and get back to Barringer Farm without being followed.”
Emma had already put down her book and stood up. She stared narrowly at Wally. “Are you sure you’re all right? You were unconscious –”
“I’m all right.” In truth, his head hurt worse than ever and the way his stomach felt he was glad he hadn’t eaten anything recently.
Grown-ups, in Wally’s experience, were maddeningly slow when leaving a hotel room – you threw your stuff into a suitcase, you headed out the door, what could possibly take so long? – but Emma and Ariane’s mother moved remarkably quickly for their ages. Wally couldn’t help noticing how little Ariane said to her mother, and wondered what that was all about: she’d been looking for her mom for two years and already she was doing the tetchy teen-girl-with-her-mother thing he’d seen Felicia go through for years.
Well, they could sort it out at Barringer Farm. First they had to get there.
Fifteen minutes after Wally and Ariane reached the hotel room they were all heading down the hall. In the lobby, Emma stopped to check out. Late afternoon was an unusual time to do so, but Emma paid the one-day penalty she had to swallow without complaint, and the four of them hurried to the lobby doors.
A big black SUV had just pulled up outside under the overhang.
Golden letters on the door read, “Excalibur Computer Systems.”
“Crap,” Wally said.
<•>
Ariane had been overjoyed when Wally woke up, horrified when Emeka had shown up outside his room, and in complete agreement they had to get out of the hotel at once.
She could
n’t stand another night in there anyway, with her mother.
She’d been so happy to find her mom, so determined to save her when Rex Major had threatened her, but now that she had her close at hand, now that they had to start living together again...
Every time Ariane looked at her she thought of the night Mom had shown up wet and distraught on the doorstep, the horrible days when she’d been in the psych ward at the hospital, screaming whenever Ariane tried to visit her, insisting she didn’t have a daughter, that she didn’t know who Ariane was, every word a knife to Ariane’s already scraped-raw heart. And then the worst blow of all: she’d disappeared, escaped somehow, taken all her money out of her account, in cash, and fled.
Aunt Phyllis had been all but convinced her sister was dead. Ariane had never believed it. She’d been sure her mother was still out there somehow, and that if only she could find her, they could go back to the happy life they’d had before the night the Lady of the Lake offered Ariane’s mother her magical power – and her mother had rejected it.
But they couldn’t go back, could they? She could never forget the hell her mother had put her through. And now that she was the Lady of the Lake, she had some measure of the Lady’s contempt for the heir who had rejected her inheritance. If her mother had accepted the Lady’s power, and the Lady’s quest, she could have rounded up the shards of Excalibur before Rex Major could have even begun. He hadn’t had the power then that he had now. His skein of magic hadn’t yet been draped around the world via the Internet. The sword could have been quickly reforged, handed back to the true Lady of the Lake in Faerie, and the door between the worlds closed and sealed for good.
Ariane would never have known anything about it, unless her mother chose to tell her many years after the fact. She would have grown up as a normal teenager in a normal home, not bounced from foster home to foster home and school to school, bullied, an outcast, rarely finding friendship and never keeping it as she moved on yet again.
She had longed with all her heart for her mother to be returned to her. And now that her mother had been, she discovered she had very little to say to her.
Which was a particularly uncomfortable state of affairs when you were locked into the same hotel room, which was one reason Ariane was looking forward very much to returning to Barringer Farm.
But now here they were at the doors of the hotel – and Rex Major’s men were pulling up outside.
She stared at the SUV, saw the faces of the men in it, and felt anger kindle inside of her, her own anger providing the initial spark, the shards fanning the flames. So often she’d tamped down that rage, afraid of what she would do if she gave into it.
This time she did not.
“All right,” she said, under her breath. “You want trouble? I’ll give you trouble.”
The Lady’s power roared up inside her. Her senses expanded. She reached out through the magic, seeking water – and found it.
The heavy snow had collected on the flat roof that sheltered the front entrance of the hotel: collected, and melted, forming puddles beneath ice and more snow. There wasn’t a lot of water...but there was enough.
The lobby faded around her as she reached out with the power, took hold of the water, and turned it into a weapon. She drove it down through stone and wood and metal, spread it out, turned some of it to ice, and then pulled...
...and just as the doors of the SUV opened and two men started to get out, the roof above them collapsed.
The deluge of debris poured down around them, burying the vehicle, crushing its roof, smashing in the hood, shattering the windows. After a moment’s shocked silence in the lobby, people started screaming, hotel staff ran for the doors, someone was shouting into a phone.
“Wow,” Wally said.
Ariane turned her back on what she had just done. “We’ll use another door,” she said.
“Ariane –” Her mother whispered.
“Now!” Ariane snapped the word with all the force of the anger that still filled her, and her mother, Emma, and Wally followed her along one of the ground-floor corridors to another exit, and then out into the snowy parking lot. They piled into the Ford Explorer. Emma started the engine as, with sirens blaring and lights flashing, a police cruiser, a fire truck and an ambulance poured into the parking lot. Emma put the vehicle in gear and they drove out.
Ariane found herself shaking, still filled with rage and power. Wally, beside her in the back seat, put out his hand and touched hers. “Ariane,” he whispered. “Come back.”
And suddenly the rage drained away. She let the Lady’s power subside, and she took his hand – then she turned to him and laid her head against his shoulder, sobbing.
He put his arm around her and ran his hand across her head. “We got away,” he said softly “It’s over. We escaped.”
We escaped, Ariane thought, but it’s not over. Rex Major has two shards. I have two shards. He has Felicia. And I... She pushed her head harder against Wally, like a cat rubbing up against a trusted human. I have Wally.
Now we have to find the hilt. And then, maybe, it will be over.
But what other horrible things will I have to do, what other horrible things will have to happen, before we reach that point?
She had no answer. She felt drained, now, drained of energy and emotion and everything else, and as the Explorer took them home, she kept her head on Wally’s shoulder, and slept.
<•>
Golden and steaming, smelling delicious, the turkey could have been a prop in a made-for-TV Christmas movie. Artfully arranged around it on the festive red tablecloth were dressing and cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, buns and butter, glazed carrots, and (the only sour note as far as Wally was concerned), a bowl of brussels sprouts.
Bing Crosby crooned, “White Christmas” in the background, a fire crackled in the fireplace, and snow fell gently outside in big, fluffy flakes.
Wally sat next to Ariane on one side of the dining-room table at Barringer Farm, across from Ariane’s mother and Aunt Phyllis. Wally grinned at both of them. The moment when Emily and Phyllis Forsythe had been reunited, that night Emma drove them all back from Medicine Hat Lodge, had been one of the happiest things he had ever seen.
Emma herself sat at the head of the table. In addition to all her other skills, she’d proved to be a remarkable cook, and had taken charge of their Christmas dinner a week ago. Pumpkin pie and chocolate chip macaroons – Aunt Phyllis’s contribution, much to Wally’s delight – still awaited them, assuming they had any room left after this feast.
Holly hung from the beams of the dining-room ceiling, and in the living room, just visible to Wally through the archway to his right, the big Christmas tree glowed red and green and blue and yellow, close – but not too close – to the crackling fire in the giant hearth. Presents awaited their opening after dinner – a form of delayed gratification Wally wasn’t sure he entirely approved of – but, he told himself, when in Rome...
He smiled at Ariane, who smiled back. She’d become more like her old self in the past couple of weeks. Hearing on the news that the men in the SUV hadn’t been seriously injured in the roof collapse she’d engineered had helped. So had knowing, through the Lady’s power, that Merlin had not yet found the hilt of Excalibur. Apparently he was as unable to feel its location as she was.
But the biggest difference was that she’d finally had time to talk to her mother. Wally hadn’t listened to those conversations, but Ariane had told him that she now realized her mother had only acted for her benefit: all that Emily Forsythe had done had been meant to protect her daughter.
“How can I blame her?” she’d told him one night as they’d cuddled on the couch in front of the fireplace in the living room. “It’s not like I’ve made perfect decisions since I got caught up in this whole mess. She may even have been right. Rex Major might have kidnapped me the moment he found out I existed. In which case he might already have Excalibur and be working on taking over the world.”
/> She and her mother seemed easier with each other, at any rate. Wally liked Emily Forsythe, and thought she liked him, and that made him happy.
He hadn’t contacted his parents again; he didn’t dare. He didn’t know if they had the police looking for him. He assumed Rex Major continued to Command them not to worry about Felicia; he didn’t know what Major had Commanded them regarding him.
He and Ariane would continue their home-schooling under Emma while they waited for the fifth and final piece of the sword to reveal itself. They’d remain at Barringer Farm, not even venturing as far as Maple Creek or Elkwater. As long as they remained hidden away, off the grid, Rex Major could not find them.
For the time being they were safe, they were warm – and they were about to be well fed.
Ariane’s hand found his knee under the table. Wally covered it with his own, and gave her a grin.
It couldn’t last. Eventually the last piece of Excalibur would reveal itself, either to them or to Rex Major, and the final confrontation would have to take place. Both Ariane and Major had greater power than ever before. When they faced each other again, who knew what cataclysmic forces would be unleashed?
Magical combat, danger, terror, and pain – all of it was coming. It could not be avoided.
But it wasn’t here yet. Today was Christmas. Today, he was with friends. Today, there was peace on Earth. Peace – and an absolutely amazing feast. He reached out and picked up his glass of ginger ale, and held it up. “Merry Christmas!” he said. “God bless us, every one.”
Ariane squeezed his knee with her right hand, and lifted her own glass with her left. “Merry Christmas,” she said.
“Merry Christmas!” “Merry Christmas!” “Merry Christmas!” echoed the others.
They drank and put down their glasses, and then Emma reached for the carving knife and fork. “White meat or dark?” she said to Wally.
“Both!” he said.
And the feast began.
Cave Beneath the Sea Page 19
