Their Rose. He tried not to remember how still, how terribly still, her tiny body was. Gone before he’d even had a chance to hold her. But Joy…
“Again the father shouts. Look to the mother, he begs. Something is wrong.”
Something is wrong, he shouted. Please, something’s wrong with Joy. Joy’s eyes were glazing over as she looked into his for one last bewildered moment before she lost consciousness. He was pushed aside as the team surrounded her, checking, testing, barking things at each other. She’s bleeding out… Get the Pitocin drip started, we’re losing her…
“Women do still die in childbirth. It still happens, even now.” Joy herself had told him something like that—so long ago, it now seemed. “Tragic, of course—but not rare.”
“Finish it.” He forced the words out through his teeth. “Finish me.”
“Ah, but do I want to? I’m enjoying myself. You’re far more entertaining to me alive.”
“I’m not entertainment,” he snarled. “If you want to fight, I’ll fight. Otherwise, shut your stupid venomous mouth and—”
“Enough.” Her voice went cold, ominous. “I’ll not be spoken to that way. Perhaps it is time to decide what your story shall be.”
“You can’t do anything worse to me than what you’ve already done,” he said, and was answered by a soft, mocking laugh.
“How little you know me, then.” The voice sounded closer, as if she was advancing on him, and he gritted his teeth and forced himself to stand still. If she would just come close enough that he could grab her… but the throbbing in his wounded hand was worse now, so bad that he didn’t know if he could use the hand. Suddenly he felt woozy and weak.
And then something grabbed the back of his collar and yanked, bodily pulling him off his feet and through the air, so that he hit the ground with a jar that knocked the breath out of his lungs.
“Gotcha,” said a man’s voice, before Tanner blacked out.
Chapter 25
Tanner was lying on something comfortable. More comfortable than the ground. He felt around with his hands and realized that his left hand was bandaged where it had been scratched by the thorn. It still throbbed slightly, but the pain had lessened. He cautiously flexed the fingers: it wasn’t useless, though still weak.
When he felt around him he touched fabric that gave slightly when he pushed at it. A mattress? Cushions? Certainly not the ground in the garden. “Hello?” he said cautiously.
“Ah, good, you’ve regained consciousness.”
Who in real life actually said regained consciousness? he wondered. Well, evidently this man did. He sounded educated, a touch formal—not unlike Steven, but younger, with more of a smile in his voice.
“Where…” No, he was not going to be the cliché and ask, Where am I? “Where is this?” he said instead. He was feeling his head with his fingers. No obvious bumps or wounds, aside from what Melisande had done to him before setting him free.
“You’re at my house,” said a new voice, a familiar one. “I’m Maurice Marzavan. According to”—there was a hesitation there, and now Tanner realized how strained he sounded—“according to this gentleman, you know me from a different context, as Mo.”
The man Maddie had christened Alterna-Mo. “Are Maddie and William here?” he asked, hoping against hope.
A slight pause. “I’m afraid not,” said this Mo gravely. “They were, well, removed.”
So Melisande had told the truth. They were gone too.
But something seemed to be muffling the pain—some merciful instinct of his brain to shut itself down in shock. “How did I get here?” he asked, not certain how much he cared.
“Apparently my rose garden is an exact duplicate of one on the campus of your school,” said Mo. “I’m told that there exists a portal of sorts between them. One can enter my garden and exit the Ash Grove garden, and vice versa.”
“Especially when provided with assistance,” said the first voice. “Mr. Marzavan very capably pulled you through the portal when we saw that you were in peril. He also cleaned your wound. It looked quite nasty—probably poisonous.” The voice grew regretful. “I never thought I’d see my garden transfigured in such a monstrous fashion.”
The shock was starting to wear off now, and he felt ominous flickers of the pain that was waiting to rush in on him. “You couldn’t have pulled Joy and Rose through as well?” he demanded. “You could have saved their lives.”
“You mustn’t let your anger and grief take over,” said the first voice, gently. “The succubus can use them against you. If you are going to prevail against her—”
“Prevail? How in hell do I prevail? She’s won. She’s taken everything—everyone I loved.” He was almost shouting, and a hand came to rest on his shoulder as if to restrain his emotion. “She beat us,” he said bitterly. “It’s over.”
“Not yet,” said the first voice. “Not if you can help me.”
“Help you? I don’t even know who you are. Just leave me alone.”
The man was saying something else, but Tanner wasn’t listening. If only Melisande had killed him. He couldn’t live with this pain—with those heartbreaking, agonizing memories of his wife and daughter dying. He drove his knuckles into the empty spaces where his eyes had been, as if he could force tears out where they could no longer be shed. She had cheated him even of that.
End this. End me. I can’t take this. I can’t stand remembering Joy’s face that way, in agony…
Joy’s face.
In the arbor on Samhain night, as she stood before him determined, stubborn, fierce in her love for him and her belief in him. Her splendid chin held high like a battle flag, her blue eyes steady on his even though they shone with tears, as she refused to accept any future that he wouldn’t fight to be a part of.
The remembered beauty of her passion sent a rush of hot pain into his heart—but it shocked him into clearer thinking. Didn’t you learn anything from her? Joy would want you to fight.
Sacrificing himself, or worse yet, waiting to be killed—that would have horrified and grieved her. That wasn’t what she believed in. She believed in his future.
With or without her.
Slowly he sat up, feeling his feet settle and sink into what must have been carpet, feeling the cushions of the sofa against his back. The room smelled like varnish and Pine-Sol and pipe tobacco, and these concrete things calmed him a little. Whatever this place was, it was real. It showed there was still a little left of the world he understood.
His voice, when he spoke, sounded as old and battered as his heart felt. “I’m listening,” he said.
“Excellent,” said the first voice, pleased. “Perhaps I should have begun by introducing myself. I am Josiah Cavanaugh.”
Tanner’s stunned brain didn’t quite know how to respond to that. “Uh… aren’t you dead?”
“In some planes, yes.”
“Mo? Is this guy for real?”
There was a throat-clearing sound, as if Mo was embarrassed at what he was going to say. “What I’m looking at,” he said, “is a, er, transparent man wearing early 20th-century formal clothing. Also transparent.”
“Transp…?”
“I can no longer take corporeal form in this plane,” explained the voice that called itself Cavanaugh.
“So you’re a ghost.”
“Ghostlike, let us say.”
A hairsplitting spirit. Awesome. “What do you want from me?” he asked.
“I need you to do what I cannot: immobilize the creature. Once she is captive, incapable of moving or speaking, I can right the wrong that was done centuries ago. I can remove her from this world’s collective past.”
“But—” He had so many objections and questions he didn’t know where to start. “Steven tried that once, and it just messed everything up.”
“That is in part because Dr. Sumner didn’t go back far enough in removing her. Even had he tried to do so, however, he would not have had the power to. I do have that power.�
� He didn’t sound as if he were boasting, just stating a fact. “I am one of the few who can stand outside time and see its structure. That is how I am able to be with you now, even though in your world I died decades ago.”
It was all very dreamlike, listening to this bizarre account from some disembodied person. Cavanaugh’s voice sounded calm and pleasant, as if everything he was saying was perfectly reasonable. Tanner wished passionately and for the thousandth time that he could still see. He wanted to be able to size this guy up, see if there was any visual proof for this outrageous story.
Failing that, he could at least try to follow the logic, make sure he understood what he was getting involved in. “Steven said a balance had to be struck,” he said, with a great effort recalling their ritual. “Does that mean putting someone new into history to take Melisande’s place?”
“Ah. There again Dr. Sumner was working from incomplete information. The succubus, in fact, is an anomaly. Her absence will leave no void in the fabric of history.”
“You mean… she was never supposed to exist in our world?”
“Exactly.”
“So why does she?”
There was a faint exasperated exhalation of breath—Mo’s or the ghost’s, Tanner couldn’t be sure. “Tanner,” said Cavanaugh, “I can give you the complete account, or I can prepare you for battle. Which do you think is more urgent?”
Tanner’s mouth set. “Battle,” he said.
The most important thing, said Cavanaugh, was also the most difficult: to keep his emotions in check.
“I don’t see why I should,” Tanner said. Enough pain and bloodlust were surging through him now that he would have no problem killing the succubus. In normal times he might not be capable of killing something, especially something that seemed so human. But now, now that she’d killed Joy and Rose and everyone—everyone else in his life—he felt he was actually capable of murder. Or execution, because that’s what it would be.
“The succubus feeds on love, as you know,” said Cavanaugh.
“Exactly. So hate should be just what I need to go up against her, and I have a full tank.”
A ghostly sigh. “My dear boy, hatred, as you should know, does not cancel out love. They are not opposites. The violent emotion you feel shows that the succubus evokes a passionate response in you. That means she has power over you still.”
The injustice of it made him want even more to lash out. But trapped in this sightless world, he couldn’t even see if there was some target it would be safe to unleash his fury at. A VW door to kick, say, or knickknacks to hurl into walls. He practically twitched with the thwarted urge to fight. “How can I possibly feel anything else?” he demanded. “I’ve never hated anything so much. I want to tear her to shreds and spit on them. She’s destroyed everything I cared about.”
“Try,” suggested Cavanaugh. “Try to find some detachment.”
Tanner growled wordlessly. Then a hand patted his shoulder. “Let me make a suggestion,” said the substitute Mo. “If I may.”
“Be my guest,” said Cavanaugh courteously, and Tanner wanted to roar with frustration. The two of them sounded as if they were at a goddamned tea party with their Victorian courtesy. Feeling boxed in and thwarted, he found his hands clenching into fists until his wounded hand twinged in pain.
“I’ve been in combat,” said Mo. His voice came from near by, as if from a chair drawn up close to the sofa. “It’s not something I like to talk about, but I’ve seen my fellow soldiers injured. I’ve even seen them die. And what I found I had to do to keep going was to find a place beyond anger and emotion.”
“I can’t stop hating her.”
“I’m not asking you to. Just… set it aside for the moment. It’ll be there when you’re ready to come back to it, believe me,” he added soberly. “No, what you do is try to take a bigger view. As if you’re a god on top of Mount Olympus and she’s a pathetic little antlike creature you can see in all her limitations and futility.”
“But she’s not like that. She’s so damned powerful. Look at everything she’s done.”
“Look at what motivates her, then. Love of power, maybe, or love of herself? Either way, such a small-minded creature doesn’t seem worth hating, does she?”
The thoughts were slowly, slowly pushing their way into Tanner’s tormented and resisting mind. “You mean… feel sorry for her?”
“Not exactly. Just detached. Indifferent.”
“That’s impossible.”
There was a silence, as if the two men were exchanging troubled glances.
“Nevertheless,” said Cavanaugh, gravely, “it is your best chance of overpowering her.”
“Mo would be the better guy for the job,” Tanner said suddenly. “Why doesn’t he go up against her? He doesn’t have the history with her. Plus he can see.”
“Yes, Mr. Marzavan has his sight.” Cavanaugh’s voice was still measured and calm. “But it’s precisely because he has no history with the succubus that he would not be as effective at combating her.”
“I don’t have any experience with succubi,” said Mo, “so I haven’t been inoculated, as it were.” The shamefaced tone told Tanner that Mo meant he couldn’t promise to be immune to her seductive spell. “In fact, I’d probably be more use if I couldn’t see—according to Cavanaugh here, the succubus relies to a large extent on her appearance to snare her victims.”
“Also, even if he was able to maintain indifference to her, it wouldn’t weaken her the way yours will,” Cavanaugh added. “A former lover—worshipper, even, if I may say so—whose feelings for her have died so completely that he can’t even be troubled to seek revenge against her? You are the warrior we need, Tanner.”
He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t flake out on them; he had to try to save at least the little bit of his world that she hadn’t yet snuffed out or warped beyond recognition. There were other people, innocent people, ones he’d never met, and they didn’t deserve for this doom to come on them.
If he only had some time to prepare, to practice this Jedi mind-trick or Zen thing… but there wasn’t time. There just wasn’t.
But if there was a chance… “Did you say that she’ll be removed from the past?” he asked suddenly.
“If we are able to prevent her making any further progress, then yes, we have a chance of doing so. And that means—”
“Joy and Rose will be alive again? And everyone else?”
“All her victims will be alive again if we succeed.”
A wild surge of hope rose in him. If there was even the chance of bringing back those he loved, of seeing Joy’s smile again…
“Don’t let yourself be taken over by hope,” Cavanaugh said warningly. “I know how great a temptation it is, but it can unbalance you just as much as anger and grief, and you must keep your mind clear and focused. Right now we need to construct a field in which you can hold the succubus. We need four metals to define the space. The best would be silver, copper, brass, and lead.”
“Silver I have,” said Mo. “Old flatware that belonged to my mother. As for the rest…”
“The fire tongs look to be brass,” Cavanaugh observed. “Now, for copper. Tanner, any thoughts?”
“Uh… pennies?” said Tanner, forcing himself to focus. “Or old copper-bottom cooking pots? There’s always the wiring.” He knew Cavanaugh was deliberately giving him something more manageable to think about than his wild hopes and agonized fears, and he tried to concentrate. “Lead is trickier. Do you have any old lead pipe, Mo?”
“Well thought,” said Cavanaugh, but Mo grumbled, “My wiring and my plumbing? I’ll have to gut the place.”
“Okay then, maybe there’s something else that would be just as good,” said Tanner, doggedly holding to the topic. “Cavanaugh, you said those were just the ideal metals, didn’t you? So there are others we could use?”
Brainstorming with the other two helped occupy his mind and keep him from lurching from one emotional extreme to the othe
r. So did talking strategy—even when he learned that part of this would be using him as bait.
“She’ll be furious that she was robbed of the chance to torment you further,” Cavanaugh informed him. “We’ll use that to entrap her. She’ll come after you as soon as she’s through the portal, so it will be up to you to lure her into the field and keep her there. And to keep from breaching the boundary yourself—and, obviously, that task will be rendered more delicate by your inability to see where it is.”
“You can say that again.” Especially since at the same time he’d have to prevent the succubus from narrating any new alternate histories.
“With any luck, she’ll be too angry to think of that,” Cavanaugh assured him when he voiced this fear. “Her mind will probably revert to more primal means of avenging herself on you.”
“Oh, terrific.”
“I assure you, the more occupied her mind is with physical violence, the better chance we have.”
That was easy for Cavanaugh to say; he had no body to be injured. And the last time Melisande had used violence, she’d taken Tanner’s eyes; what might she go for next? He was conscious suddenly of how close to exhaustion he was. “If you two are ready, we’d better get to it,” he said. “I think the only thing keeping me going now is adrenaline, and I don’t know how much longer that’ll last. I don’t suppose you have any Red Bull on hand? Or meth?” Blank silence. “Little joke,” he said. “Never mind.” Maybe he was starting to lose his grip. Better get on with it, then, before he went full Renfield. “Let’s do this,” he said.
With Mo serving as his guide, and both of them loaded down with the metal objects with which they’d build the magic containment field, they left the house and proceeded to the rose garden. Tanner could hear crickets and an occasional distant car passing. Was this the suburbs? How crazy that they were making a stand for all of humanity in such a bland and ordinary setting.
Among the Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles) Page 30
