She didn't say anything to the bored man behind the battered desk. The detective agency wasn't her only hope; it was just that she couldn't afford to overlook any means, however unlikely, that could lead her to Grey. While they worked, she was going to go back to San Francisco and see if she could find Rhiannon again. Maybe that strange musician who'd helped her find the bookstore and seemed to have known Cassie could help her. She couldn't afford pride any more. She had to find Grey.
And there was one more thing she could try.
The last thing that money got for Winter Musgrave in New York City was another rental car. On a weekday afternoon toward the end of May she headed north along the Hudson River, to the only place left that she could call home.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WINTER SOLDIERS AND SUNSHINE PATRIOTS
A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam in a winter's day, Is all the proud and mighty have Between the cradle and the grave.
—JOHN DYER
TRUTH JOURDEMAYNE WAS NOT, AS ANY OF HER COLleagues could have confirmed, the sort of person who let sleeping dogs lie or well enough alone. Dylan Palmer, who knew her best, had said on a number of occasions that for a woman with advanced degrees, she had an amazingly poor grasp of English—particularly the phrases "for your own good" and "mind your own business."
Since he knew that much, Truth had told him the last time he mentioned it, he ought to realize it was a lost cause to ask her to just drop the Winter Musgrave investigation, even if—or perhaps because—it had nearly gotten her killed.
"And she's gone, anyway!" Dylan said, adding what they both knew already. "I tried to talk her out of it, but she's gone off looking for—"
"What?" Truth had asked.
"I don't know," Dylan admitted. "The truth?"
"What the truth is," Truth had said, "depends on where you're standing. But don't ask me to give up on this one, Dylan."
"Why not? " her partner and colleague had asked suspiciously.
"Because I won't," Truth had said simply. "And I'd hate to squabble with you."
"If you backed off from a fight, it'd be the first time," Dylan had grumbled, but mercifully dropped the subject.
And so, as Winter was driving toward New Jersey, Truth began an investigation of her own into Winter's past.
The place to start was obviously the Blackburn Circle at Nuclear Lake, where Hunter Greyson and his coven had conducted their slapdash rituals. Without, as Truth commented to herself, anything much of an idea of what they were doing.
Normally it would not have annoyed her so much. After all, the Blackburn rituals that had seen print were harmless enough—it was only the last one, The Opening of the Way, that presented any danger in the wrong hands, and there was currently no printed copy of it available.
No, the trouble was not so much in the experimenting—it was that Nuclear Circle had accidentally gotten its hands on a psychic to give their undisciplined playacting the psychic force that would otherwise have come only after years of dedicated study and practice.
Truth wished Winter had remembered more about what she and her friends had done here—or that Truth herself had been luckier in trying to contact the others. Without knowing how closely they'd been following the dictates of the Blackburn Work, it was difficult to know just what sort of psychic residue she'd be dealing with here—but no matter what it was, a simple Banishing and Unbinding should take care of it.
Unless, as Winter insisted, Nuclear Lake itself was the problem. In that case, Truth might be biting off more than she could chew.
Truth frowned, navigating her Saturn slowly over the rocks and ruts of the dirt road leading into Nuclear Lake. Her working tools were in the plumber's bag on the seat beside her. She did not really need them—the power was in her, not in these reminders—but they helped in focusing her will, just as using the pendulum focused the perceptions of her unconscious mind.
Someone—not me!—really should sweep this whole area with some sort of psychic Geiger counter to locate the hot spots and shut them down. Most people would be much better off without a psychic locus running wild in their backyard. . . .
But most people would never know if there was one. The Unseen World truly did not exist for those without the senses to perceive it—and some lucky few had the power to choose whether they would see its manifestations or not.
Truth was not one of them. She had chosen the middle ground between science and sorcery—a path neither black nor white, but gray as mist: Thorne Blackburn's path, and now hers. She had sworn to walk it all the days of her life, striving to strike a balance between Light and Darkness—and in doing so she had forfeited her chance to remain ignorant, just as Michael Archangel had warned her would happen.
Truth parked and got out of her car, following the track that led toward the abandoned building. She wondered what had been here back in the long-ago seventies, before this land had become part of Haelvemaen Park. But the history of Nuclear Lake didn't matter as much now as what the basement of the building contained.
Truth pushed the back door open, balancing her bag in one hand and her flashlight in the other. Once she'd cleaned up inside she really ought to see if the Sheriff's Department would put a padlock on the door to keep trespassers out of the place. Abandoned buildings were perfect places for fires to start, and if the spring weather turned dry as it did so often in the Hudson Valley lately, a fire could rip devastatingly through hundreds of acres of woodland and perhaps endanger Glastonbury itself.
Her footsteps echoed down the iron staircase as Truth descended into the basement, her bag of tools bumping at her hip. The beam of the flashlight cast a narrow pillar of light over the walls and ceiling, and the dampness here, away from the cleansing sun, made her shiver.
When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Truth set down the flashlight on one of the lab benches that still remained around the edge of the room and set her bag beside it. She unbuckled the top—it was a canvas plumber's bag, chosen both for strength and capacity—and took out a pillar candle of beeswax, a shallow silver dish and the charcoal to fill it, and a small glass flask filled with a gleaming liquid. Truth had made the Universal Condenser herself, gathering the herbs and the morning dew herself over a period of several weeks and following the laborious and faintly silly recipe set forth in Thorne's writings. As with so many appendices of the Blackburn Work, Thorne was merely passing down the soi-disant wisdom of other occultists, and Truth had already discovered that much occult "learning" consisted of fossilized coincidence—all outward symbols of greater truths, as her teacher, Irene Avalon, had assured her with the serene all-encompassing acceptance that Truth found so hard to emulate. What Truth herself thought was that while magick worked, it didn't always work for the reasons magicians thought it did.
Someone needs to field-test all of this "occult wisdom" to separate the sheep from the goats, Truth thought idly as she lit first the candle and then the charcoal. Once the candle was burning steadily she turned off her flashlight, and when the charcoal was glowing redly, she reached into her bag again and pulled out a fistful of incense. The lumps of resin glowed like cloudy amber in the candlelight. She sifted them over the coals; they sizzled and bubbled and began to distill into a column of pungent white smoke. She took a second bowl from her bag—this one of rock crystal, the faint clouds and bubbles beneath its surface proclaiming its origin far beneath the surface of the earth—and set it beside the first, filling it with the Universal Condenser. The liquid glowed with a faint violet fire to Truth's otherworldly sight, but logically she could not tell whether this was an artifact of its intrinsic power, or of the effort she had put into making it. This was the reality of magick—everything had at least two explanations and often more.
Fire and air; living and unliving earth; water and will—the symbols of the three dualities that the sidhe must call upon to work their will. All the Blackburn Work was built upon this central mystery: that of the Bright Lords whose realm this once had been. Truth f
elt her own sidhe blood—her father's gift to her, as the control of the Gates had been her mother's—waken in answer to this summoning.
Easily Truth shifted her consciousness into this larger reality, and now all darkness was gone from the basement. In its place were the colors and shifting auras of the real world—the world of rock and wind and sky.
Truth looked around, sorting through the shifting presences and traces of use until she found the red-and-silver image of the magick worked here so long ago. The images of the hours Hunter Greyson's Circle had spent here fluttered past her senses like the shuffling of a deck of cards.
Yes, there had been power raised here once. Dormant now, its echo could be activated by the presence of any uncontrolled psychic—or by deliberate triggering. Easily Truth isolated the trace of Grey's male energy—youthful and untrained, but holding the promise of mature strength. She looked further, and found to her surprise that there were two complimentary female resonances—one powerful but undisciplined, one showing the first signs of an Adept's training. She wondered which of the two had been Winter. This many years distant, there was no way to tell.
Once Truth had located the psychic remnants she sought, she reached one last time into her bag and pulled out a slender rod about eighteen inches long.
One half of it was iron, its surface dark and sheened with the oil that kept it from rusting. The other half was glass, clear as water and gathering light like a lens. A thick ring of pure gold bound the two halves together.
Truth handled it warily, careful not to touch the iron and disrupt the symbolic language she was building. There were times when she thought that her mother's earth witchery and her father's sidhe blood were an even worse mix than logic and magick.
In quick succession Truth passed the rod through the candle flame and the incense smoke and over the surface of the liquid in the crystal bowl, reminding herself of the things they symbolized and gathering their attributes into the wand via the Law of Contagion. When she was ready, Truth touched the iron end of the rod to the nearest tinge of red in the room's mingling auras.
She was the iron, and the iron was her will. The rod shuddered in her fingers, pulling to be free.
A member of the Astral Lodges would have called upon the White Light and the Word; a Black Magician upon the powers of Death and Hell. Truth was neither.
"In the name of Time and the Seasons, by the power of the Wheel and the Way," she said in a low voice, "remake this place in the image of this place: All that has been since Time began, Begone!"
She unbound the last echoes of energy, sweeping the rod before her, and, turning, began to walk in a spiral, pushing cleanliness and emptiness before her, as though the slender wand in her hand was a broom.
When she reached the walls, she ran the rod along them as well, draining away the power they had absorbed until they were as neutral and empty as the day they had been first erected.
It was very quiet when she was done.
To a natural psychic or other trained sensitive, the present condition of the room would be more unusual than its previous one, for no place on earth is innocent of contagion by the life that inhabits it. This place, too, would begin to collect impressions again almost immediately—Truth's power was not harsh enough to seal it off completely, nor did she wish to—but the traces the Blackburn Work had left were gone: swept away.
"My work here is finished," Truth said aloud, smiling to herself. Unlike her encounter with the magckal child that had attached itself to Winter Musgrave, this exercise of her ability left her vibrant, filled with energy.
Truth wondered—not for the first time—who had sent the artificial Elemental, and why. It seemed murderously furious, out of control—but nevertheless the work of a powerful Adept, and it was hard, looking at Winter, to think of her as anyone who might be familiar with the hidden world of magicians and magickal lodges. Carefully Truth slid the wand back into its protective case and then slipped it into her bag.
With a pang of regret for the work that replacing the liquid would entail, Truth took the bowl of Condenser and sprinkled it all around the room before wiping the bowl dry and putting it, too, back into her bag. She snuffed out the beeswax candle and filled the silver bowl with sand to smother the burning charcoal, then emptied the bowl, ground the last smoldering embers into dust against the floor, and put both objects away. Soon the only evidence that anything uncanny had ever happened here would be a smudge of dirt and a painted figure—now meaningless—on the floor.
Truth went back up the stairs.
The sky was overcast when she got back outside, and the damp wind off the river promised rain in the not-too-distant future. Truth sighed. It was an unfortunate fact of life that her father's magick tended to bring bad weather with it, as well as deriving its greatest power from violent storms. As she made her way toward her waiting Saturn, Truth's mind continued to mull over the odd puzzle of Winter Musgrave and the magickal child.
While it was true that Winter was a psychic, and a powerful one—as an adult poltergeist she would have to be, whether her power extended to setting fires or not—it was hardly the same thing as being a trained occultist, and if Truth knew anything for certain, it was that Winter was not trained. Yet someone, somewhere, in her life must be—trained and Adept both.
Was it Hunter Greyson, Colin MacLaren's golden boy? Truth had already spoken to Lion Welland and some of the other faculty who had been at Taghkanic when both Grey and Professor MacLaren had been. Those who remembered them had all said the same thing: that Grey had been planning to do postgraduate work at the Institute directly under Professor MacLaren. And, though it was not widely known at Taghkanic, Irene Avalon, Truth's teacher, had told Truth that MacLaren had made no secret of being an Initiate of the Right Hand Path. Had Hunter Greyson been intending to follow MacLaren in more things than one?
But then Winter left, then Grey left, then Professor MacLaren left, and nobody knows why. Truth frowned. Winter was looking for Grey now, that much Truth knew, but could she find Hunter Greyson first?
The wind riffled the reeds along the edge of the lake, and the dimpled surface of the water turned to hammered silver. Truth sighed, shifting her grip on the bag in her hand. The supercharged atmosphere of the ritual in the basement seemed light-years away now in both time and tone.
Find Hunter Greyson? Maybe. If he were still alive, or tied somehow to this world. If he had continued his forays into the Otherworld. If he were willing to be found.
If.
But once she had thought of the possibility, Truth could not simply dismiss it, and so midnight found Thorne Blackburn's daughter once more engaged in her own peculiar blend of magick and science.
The candle she lit this time had a purely pragmatic use—its reflection in the shewstone she intended to use would give her a point to focus on visually.
Truth sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her living room coffee table, an oval of polished jet resting on her palms. The candle burned brightly, and she could see the gold sheen of its flame reflected in the mirror's polished black surface.
The theory and technique of scrying was extensively documented; whether the focus was a crystal ball, an ordinary mirror, a bowl of water, or a speculum of polished jet such as Truth now held, the object of the exercise was to see pictures of distant people and unknown events; a form of external-projection clairvoyance. As with most divinatory systems, the tool—whether a mirror, a candle, a pendulum, or cards—was only a focus, and had no intrinsic power. The Institute frequently used an entire range of them in their tests, trying to fit the potential psychic expression to its most comfortable tool. Dylan's favorite trance psychic used gaming dice to overcome her occasional clairvoyant blocks.
The living room was dim and quiet, and the only other illumination came from a light in the kitchen. Truth had deliberately chosen the witching hour to work because the psychic background noise that people usually took for granted was much diminished at a time when most of the p
eople in the immediate surrounding area were asleep—one of the many reasons that most hauntings and similar psychic manifestations took place at night.
Truth settled herself more comfortably as the jet—an organic material, just as amber was—warmed in her hands. She wasn't really sure how well this would work; clairvoyance wasn't her strength, even though her mother and her aunt had both been psychics. Her father had once told Truth that her magickal technique consisted mainly of dragging the Powers into compliance by yelling at them until they cooperated in self-defense.
Truth smiled at the memory, trying to relax enough to let her mind float free. She hoped Thorne was right; if yelling was what it took to find Hunter Greyson, that's what she'd do. Winter was outclassed and Truth was all but helpless—somewhere there had to be an ally against the pursuing Elemental and its monstrous, destructive hunger, and Truth didn't think she could afford to be too scrupulous about recruiting him.
At last the material world fell away; the constant insistence of Reality that it was the only truth dimmed, and Truth was able to rebuild the world out of the fires of her own conviction and belief. With practiced ease she set the four Otherworld Guardians about herself, so that her spirit had reference points to return to. Once that was done, out of her father's magick, Truth called up her servants and Guardians on this plane: the Red Stag and the White Mare, the Black Dog and the Grey Wolf.
These creatures were the shapes of her power, the astral servants who would do her bidding in this realm; creations of earth magic and sidhe magic both.
She mounted the mare and began to ride, with the wolf and the dog loping at her heels and the stag bounding along before, its red coat shadowy in the mist.
Here were the landmarks of the astral temples the other Blackburn Circles had erected; there, less visible to Truth's psychic senses, were the marks of other travelers through this realm; Adepts and wicce and others. Beyond that, all was mutable: the Otherworld—called the Inner Planes or the Astral Realms in the books Irene had forced upon Truth—was very much a creation of the observer, taking on the shape its visitors expected.
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