Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02

by Witchlight (v2. 1)

  "Fourteen years ago I came to you for advice. I was pregnant, as you'll remember. I will not speculate about your reasons for the choices you made then; I will only say now, as I did then, that Grey was willing to marry me and help me raise the baby. I loved him then, and I still love him. If I find him, I will ask his forgiveness for what I did.

  "I am to blame for giving in to you; I'll take responsibility for that. But I trusted you, and you betrayed me. I have no intention of giving any of you that kind of power over me or my life ever again. So, good-bye."

  Wycherly was staring at her, stunned. Looking at him, it was impossible to believe he'd known. She glanced at her parents. Her father's face was bland, but her mother's was a mask of fury startling in its intensity.

  "How dare you come into my house and speak to me like that?" she hissed.

  "Now, Randa." Her father's voice was unhurried; in control. "Winter. Sit down, sweetheart. Nobody's going to hurt you. I'll call a friend of mine and you can be back at Fall River by this evening. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

  His voice was steely and soothing, with an undercurrent of threat: Whether you'd like it or not, you're going back there until you learn to behave.

  "No," Winter said simply. "I'm not crazy and I'm not having a nervous breakdown. I'm just angry. And if institutionalization is your idea of how to deal with family problems—"

  She stopped, looking at Wycherly, and with sudden intuition knew more than she'd ever wanted to know about her family's way of dealing with family problems.

  "I'm leaving now. Good luck, Wych. Good-bye Father. Mother."

  She turned and walked out.

  "Winter!" her father shouted after her, showing anger at last. But neither of her parents followed her—all the anger and the veiled threats were only bluster: They lacked the will to act.

  The monsters only have the power you give them. Dylan and Truth had both said that, and they'd been right. Now she'd taken back her power.

  She was free.

  Winter picked up her purse from the table in the front hall and walked down the drive to the waiting taxi. Just as she'd walked up the drive, fourteen years before.

  It was a good twenty minutes before the three locks on her Upper East Side apartment door yielded to Winter's keys. The set she'd remembered keeping in her purse had been gone when she'd looked for them, which had necessitated a quick stop at her lawyer's to pick up her spare set. She made a mental note to stop by her accountant's as well—after a year and a half her emergency financial arrangements were in desperate need of an overhaul, but even at her most overwrought she had not wanted her parents to have control of her money, and now Winter blessed that stubborn paranoia. She suspected it was the only thing that had made her able to leave Fall River.

  Winter pushed open the apartment door—it seemed to be stuck—and walked in, locking the door behind her. After so long an absence she saw her expensive apartment as a stranger might: a sterile place of gray carpet, white walls, white leather sofa. White vertical blinds masking the view of West Seventy-first Street. Chilly modern art for the walls.

  Only now the art wasn't on the walls anymore, nor was the sofa on its legs. Winter stepped cautiously into the living room. Her shoes grated on broken shards of glass. She flipped the switch that should turn on the track-lighting. Nothing happened.

  The sofa—what was left of it—was lying on its back in the middle of the room. The arms had been yanked from the frame, the springs pulled out, and the leather shredded. Cotton batting was everywhere. She didn't see the cushions at all.

  Why had no one called to complain when this had happened—about the noise, if nothing else? Not that she would have been around to take the message if they had, Winter noted scrupulously. And somehow she didn't think her answering machine had survived to record any messages, either.

  There was glass everywhere—from the broken dishes, from the splintered television, from the posters under now-shattered glass. Her dining room table had been a sheet of industrial glass on a granite pedestal. Only the pedestal remained, surrounded by what looked at first like uncut diamonds.

  So much anger. , . Winter thought wonderingly. Her own, or that of the creature who stalked her? It hardly mattered now, did it? Whoever had done it, there was nothing left intact in the entire living room.

  The bedroom was no better. The mattress and box spring were broken and gutted. The lamps and tables were smashed. The sheets and blankets were shredded. There were papers everywhere, blasted into confetti-sized snow, and Winter breathed a sigh of relief that all the really important papers that defined her life were split between a box at the bank and a file at her lawyer's.

  If even they were safe.

  With a forbidding sense of dread Winter opened her closet, and quickly wished she hadn't. Her cedarwood hangers were a splintered, tangled mess, and her suits lay on the floor beneath them in tatters.

  Twelve hundred plus a pop and you could stuff pillows with them now. I wonder if my insurance covers "poltergeist rage"?

  Even her shoes—expensive leather pumps in an entire spectrum of neutral shades—were all somehow mangled: bent and folded, heels torn off, leather gouged.

  Nothing salvageable was left.

  It's just as well that they aren't really "me" anymore, Winter told herself bravely. In truth, if her work wardrobe—those rigid, colorless suits—had still been intact she probably would have just donated it to some charity boutique. Ungaro and Calvin Klein didn't really fit her new look.

  Whatever it was going to be.

  Maybe even colors, Winter thought sarcastically. "When I am an old ivoman, I shall wear purple. ..."

  Grimly, she finished her catalog of havoc. The destruction was the same in the kitchen—though messier—and none of the lights worked. Knives and forks were warped and bent and even tied into knots. Her microwave seemed to have . . . melted.

  The Getter Effect. What a pity I can't repeat it on demand and earn a million dollars. . . .

  The only fortunate thing about the whole disaster was that she or someone had cleaned out her refrigerator and kitchen cabinets before she'd gone to Fall River, but in the bathroom she wasn't as lucky. The bathroom was spattered with a dried rainbow of shower gel and grooming products. The glass bottles were-—predictably—shattered, but the plastic bottles were turned mysteriously inside out, something that Winter was not entirely sure was even possible.

  She tossed a shampoo bottle, the outside caked with the dried slime of its former contents, into the tub. There was nothing here to salvage, and no point in searching the wreckage. Whatever had destroyed the apartment had been thorough. It saved her the time and labor of packing, really—all Winter had to do was call someone to empty the place to the walls and then repaint.

  And then live here?

  No. Whatever else she knew, Winter knew also that she could never take up her old life again. Nothing in it seemed to matter now. What mattered was to make what reparations she could for the damaged lives she was responsible for. Winter sighed, making one last survey of her demolished apartment. If she had needed any final proof of the danger stalking her, it was here, in this smorgasbord of destruction. The thing that Truth Jourdemayne had named "Elemental" had killed Cassie. It had invaded the lives of everyone Winter had known—and, it seemed, Winter was the only one who could stop it.

  But to do that she had to confront it—as Truth had, as Cassie had.

  She didn't think she'd survive the encounter.

  Grey could help her, but Winter was no longer sure he would. He might even already be dead—perhaps that had been Cassie's message to her, that the creature had killed and would kill again?

  There was no point in guessing—not when she could know.

  Winter thought of Rhiannon, blushing with shame as she remembered the meeting. "Won't you even tell me where to send it?" the girl had cried—but now that Winter was willing at last to accept the message, she didn't know how to get in touch with Rhiannon.

&
nbsp; The business card Paul Frederick gave me. If he was a friend of Cassie's he'd know Rhiannon, too.

  Winter shook her head ruefully. She had a long way to go to become even half as brilliant as she'd always thought she was. Finding Rhiannon would not be that hard, and her message was Winter's only possible link to Grey.

  And unless Grey was dead, she had to see him one last time.

  He isn't dead. I'd know if he were dead. The inner certainty was slight-though-real comfort. She and Grey had been bound together by love and magic, once.

  Then why didn't he come for me? her younger self wailed inside her, while an older Winter found the bleak and simple answer: Perhaps he had. That hideous summer she'd gone to Switzerland with her mother to "take care of things"; any New York clinic would have done as well, but that wouldn't have gotten Winter out of the country. If Grey had come for her while she was gone, who knew what her father had told him—and what Grey had believed?

  And that September she'd started at the brokerage, using work as a drug to blot out all uncertainty and pain, until the work had taken on a life of its own and become her world.

  For as long as it could.

  She had to find Grey.

  Before the elemental found her.

  As if the thought had summoned it, Winter felt a sudden chill breeze skirl through the apartment. The vertical linen-weave blinds fluttered, exposing tightly closed windows.

  Something was here.

  Winter felt her hair stand up in a purely primal response to its presence. Her skin tingled, drawn tight by the lightning in the air. Just like Nuclear Lake.

  But this time she did not react with blind terror. Her panic had come from denial, and now at last Winter consciously knew the things she had been trying so hard to hide from herself. Now the fear she felt was the purely prosaic one of facing an elemental storm in a room full of broken glass. It would cut her to pieces. . . .

  Time to leave. Perhaps the creature would not follow her out of the apartment. A few steps took Winter to the front door; she unlatched the dead bolt and turned the knob.

  Nothing.

  She twisted and pulled—the knob turned freely, but the door wouldn't open. She slammed her fist against it in frustration—a sturdy, expensive, New York door, sheathed in steel, with three-inch dead bolts, and totally immovable.

  She was trapped. There was no phone to use to call for help, and help would arrive too late if she did. Winter heard the faint clicking of the blinds as they wavered in the ghostwind.

  / have to stop it. I have to make it go away.

  But how? Could she control it as she did her own psychokinetic abilities? The Elemental was not her, but Truth Jourdemayne had said it was linked to her somehow. Could the link run two ways?

  It better, Winter thought grimly, or she was dead and so was her chance of stopping it. The atmosphere in the room felt now as though she were standing directly in front of an air-conditioning vent—a stream of cold air playing directly over her skin. It did not matter that outside her windows it was high noon on a sunny spring day—inside the apartment there was no time left.

  The force of the ghostwind increased: Now papers and scraps of cloth on the floor began to shift sluggishly. Soon heavier objects would move. The pressure of what was coming for her made Winter's skin ache. She thought of the pressure building in the room, the windows bulging outward, to burst and shatter piercing fragments on the noon-hour pedestrians jamming the sidewalks below.

  No/ Take me if you must, but not here! Not where there are other people to be hurt!

  The pressure strained to crush her, and Winter pushed back. It was a thousand times harder than shifting a book or a ring of keys—it was as if she struggled to lift the earth itself. The confrontation made her lose control of her own body; Winter sank to her hands and knees in the wreckage of her apartment and barely felt the shards that cut her hands and knees.

  She could not afford to lose. Sweat beaded up on her forehead and splashed down over her hands. She curled her fingers into the carpet, and resisted the elemental pressure with all the furious will she had once brought to denying the truth. She heard the crackle of glass as it was forced into the carpet around her, heard the splintering of glass and plastic, heard the walls groan with the pressure. . . .

  And became, as Hunter Greyson had once taught her, pure will.

  The apartment was gone. She chose what was real. She chose the parts of reality that were used. Winter seemed to hear the roar of the trading floor around her: sheer information, flowing faster than thought, faster than reason, shaped and controlled by human desire. She could make and unmake the world with a thought, with a choice, with her wish to make it so—

  She curled her hands in the carpet, driving glass into her skin and never feeling the pain, and with the will that had triumphed over every circumstance in her life, Winter fought back.

  There was a yielding, a tearing; Winter was jerked back into the here-and-now, holding to consciousness in a world that seemed to pulse redly and swarm with dizzying black spots. Her lungs ached with breath too long held; she gasped for air, and as oxygen rilled her lungs she finally became aware of the pain in her hands.

  Winter sat back and raised her palms from the carpet. Glass splinters showered from them like a dusting of sugar. Her right hand was cut across the palm, and bled freely; the other hand had several small splinters jammed into it. Winter swore, getting awkwardly to her feet, and only then noticed that one leg of her khakis was sliced open along the calf. Blood covered the surface of her skin and wicked into the ragged edges of the cloth. She was only lucky that she wasn't cut more seriously.

  I'm just lucky I wasn't killed. Reaction set in, the rush of nausea and adrenaline almost sending her to the floor again. The Elemental was gone. She'd won.

  Winter leaned against the wall and began to pick the glass out of her left hand, only then realizing that the bleeding in her other hand had not stopped. Blood ran down her wrist, staining her cotton sweater.

  / must look like all six Nightmares on Elm Street.

  Winter tottered toward the bathroom and stopped, her attention arrested abruptly by the sight before her. The front door was open—now, when it wouldn't do any good. She shook her head and continued toward the bathroom. The Elemental wasn't coming back today, and unless she cleaned up a little before she went out, she'd probably be arrested.

  Fortunately the water still worked, even though none of the bathroom lights did. Winter ran her gashed hands under the cold water until the bleeding slowed, then picked the splinters out of her palm, wincing queasily at the pain. With a salvaged bit of towel she cautiously wiped the gash on her leg. It was clean and free of glass, but there was nothing she could do about the blood and the torn cloth. The bloody towel in her hand would be little use as a bandage.

  Oh, well. This is New York. Probably nobody's going to notice, Winter told herself hopefully.

  Everything hurt. It was hard to believe that this was the same day that she'd stood in her mother's kitchen and told her parents the truth. What she wanted most right now was a hot bath, a first-aid kit, and a lot of Room Service.

  Walking with stiff care, Winter went into the bedroom to see if there was anything else she could salvage for makeshift bandages.

  The smell was the first thing that hit her when she crossed the threshold. Winter flinched away from it before she understood what she was reacting to. Sharp, unmistakable . . .

  The bed, the floor, every surface was covered with drifts of apple blossoms. It looked like the ruins of a bombed city in winter.

  The shock was like a slap in the face, and only exhaustion kept her from crying out. Tears burned in her eyes. She walked slowly over to the ruined bed and scooped up a handful of the petals. They stuck to the blood on her hands, turning stickily pink. Apple blossoms. I can never see them without remembering telling Grey. And what came after. She closed her hand painfully over the flowers.

  There was something else on the bed.
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br />   Winter touched it gingerly, fearing it was something horrible. She recognized the knotted handkerchief as hers; she'd used to buy them by the dozen; you could use them for so many more things than you could a Kleenex.

  But she didn't remember it being on the bed the last time she'd been in here.

  She untied the handkerchief and shook its contents out onto the spilled blossoms. Just before she got a good look at it she realized what it had to be.

  The porcelain had been smashed, as though struck with something heavy, but the pieces were large, and she could tell that it once had been a Limoges box, playful and delicate, painted blue and pink with swirling clouds. And on the top, the comical figure of a white-bearded wizard, pointed hat and star-tipped wand and long blue robe.

  Grey had sent this to her.

  She cradled it in her bleeding hands, trying to fit the pieces back together years too late, until the tears filled her eyes and spilled over. Too late. He'd sent it to her to wish her well—touching it, she could feel the faint echo of the icy fury that had broken it, that had sealed her pain off behind a wall of ice, hurting in order to avoid being hurt.

  Because she had been afraid. Because she had run away.

  Winter looked around the ruined bedroom. She'd been so certain she could go to Grey for help. She'd been sure Grey could have no reason to hate her this much.

  She'd been wrong.

  In New York, money can buy nearly everything. Over the next forty-eight hours, it got Winter Musgrave a hotel room, some new clothes and a suitcase to carry them in, an industrial cleaning service to empty and repaint her apartment, and a realtor to sell it once it was ready to show. Money also hired a private detective to trace Hunter Greyson; Winter sat with reasonable patience through the long explanation of how they could not guarantee to find him, and how it would be weeks, perhaps months, before she could expect any information at all.

  / don't have weeks-perhaps-months7 / don't even know if I have days!