Winter stretched again. If she could not work the stiffness out of her muscles she might have to think about staying here an extra day—without rest, she’d be a danger to herself and anyone she encountered on the road.
The nightmare was still too vivid to let her even consider sleep, but maybe a shower … ? And she supposed she should remake the bed, even if she didn’t think she’d be getting back into it anytime soon. She reached down for the bedclothes, and stopped.
The mattress and the floor around the bed were covered in apple blossoms.
Winter left the hotel fifteen minutes later, driving west in the dark.
BY THE TIME the sun had risen that morning, Winter—inspired by the same instinct that causes the prey to lead the hunter astray—had left the bland artificiality of the interstate for the blue highways, the thin twisting map-lines that led through real lives and real towns. By evening she had come to accept that there would never be an answer at the phone numbers she had for Cassie Chandler—and to realize, too, that this slow westward journey was necessary in itself.
For the next week she worked her way slowly west, through Fayetteville, Fuller’s Point, Antigua, Grimsby, Lemuria, Broken Choke … a journey not through the Madison Avenue version of America, but through the real one, until Winter finally understood how far out of true her own life had been.
Fayetteville. The waitress in the town’s one restaurant had directed her to the justice of the peace, and Winter had spent the night in a spacious second-floor bedroom that looked out over a quiet street and the lazy river below.
It was not even so much that the life she had was not what she could have expected to happen to the young college girl whose past she had so painstakingly researched. It was that, in the final analysis, even the life she’d had—that of Winter Musgrave, Wall Street broker and analyst—had been unfinished, incomplete. Just as Ramsey’s life was, and Janelle’s. She’d never built anything that could grow.
Fuller’s Point. An ancient rooming house on the edge of town, the sheets cool with long storage and smelling faintly of lavender and pine, where Winter continued to practice the gifts that came to seem more and more ordinary. She could summon the lightning with a touch, and slam a door from across the room, and knew it was nothing but meaningless theatrics.
Because just like the others, she had staggered down some spiritual blind alley somewhere in the past she could not remember.
Because of Grey? Somehow that felt right. The largest part of her unfinished business had to do with him. Ramsey had said how surprised they’d all been when she left college without a word to any of them.
Antigua, and a brightly impersonal motel meant to serve the nearby Air Force base. Each night as she slept, Winter felt Grey waiting for her beneath the surface of sleep, and could no longer say which she dreaded more—the bad dreams or the good ones.
Had she just walked off and left them—left him? What had he thought—how long had Grey waited before realizing she was never coming back? If that was what she’d done, then no wonder the dreams began with him begging her to stay, and ended in blood and terror.
Lemuria. No town at all, simply a cluster of battered, time-bleached wooden buildings, and Winter too tired to go onward or back. She’d driven into the sagging barn and slept in cramped discomfort on the back seat of her car as coyote howls crossed and blended in the night. In the morning she had driven four hours down the ruler-straight desert highway before she saw a roadside cafe.
She had wronged him. She owed both of them some closure to that part of their past, an ending in place of a thoughtless adolescent cruelty. And perhaps that closure could help her end the inhumanity that stalked all of them. Truth Jourdemayne had told Winter that she must take the magickal child back into herself to destroy it, but at the time she hadn’t even known where to begin. She felt stronger now. Perhaps it was possible, Winter thought with dawning hope.
She would ask Cassie.
Cassie would know.
THERE ARE TWO U.S. cities into which the Automobile Association of America earnestly advises its members not, under any circumstances, to bring their automobiles.
Boston is the other one.
Yesterday morning Winter had crossed the border near Needles, circled wide around the L.A. Metroplex, and headed north along California 1, the Pacific Coast Highway. Coastal California’s amazing and dramatic beauty captivated her just as it did on every visit: the hillsides still green at the end of the rainy season, the mist-hung redwoods marching all the way to the ocean’s stark edge.
She’d stopped that night at a Bed-and-Breakfast just south of San Jose, and had a reservation for tonight in San Francisco at a B-and-B somewhere near a neighborhood called Russian Hill.
The rest ought to have been easy. And it was, until she crossed the Oakland Bay Bridge.
SAN FRANCISCO, like Rome, is a city built on seven hills—and like the Eternal City, Winter discovered that the City by the Bay was a magic labyrinth of dead ends and one-way streets: of streets that vanished while she drove down them and streets that appeared on her map and nowhere else. She ended up down at Fisherman’s Wharf almost Immediately—learning in the process that cable cars always have right-of-way—and at the end of three frustrating hours she was back there again; no closer to Haight Street and Cassie’s bookshop than she’d been to begin with.
WINTER PULLED into a parking lot and rolled down her window. The ocean smell was strong and fresh—Winter, who lived in the country’s other great seaport, could not remember ever having smelled the sea so clearly.
Tourists seemed to be everywhere, carrying shopping bags full of sourdough bread or pennants advertising Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. The balloons carried by children and offered by vendors gave the Wharf the look of an open-air carnival, and seemed to underscore Winter’s angry ungracious mood. She wondered if she ought to give up, if only for the day. Or stop for lunch, at least—the box of granola bars she’d consumed instead of breakfast was not an adequate substitute for two missed meals, or so her body told her.
“Can I help you?”
Winter glanced up. The voice belonged to a young man with long brown hair, wearing overalls and a tie-dyed T-shirt and looking as if he was as much a part of this place as the fishing boats that clustered in the water beyond.
“You look lost,” he went on, smiling.
Winter regarded him with habitual suspicion, resisting the impulse to roll up the driver’s-side window in his face. On second glance, he wasn’t as young as all that, but something about his friendly, open, features held the ageless grace of the High Elves—as if some woodland sprite had chosen to mingle with the tourists on a spring day in SF.
“I’m actually trying to find the, um, Haight-Ashbury,” she said. Make what you care to of that!
“You are lost,” he said ruefully. “And that isn’t really such a good area for …”
For a tourist, Winter mentally completed the sentence. “A friend of mine lives there,” she added, unbending slightly. “Can you help me? The map I have says you can get there from here, but—”
“There are a couple of streets closed because of the construction. Can I see your map?”
Winter passed it over, and, looking to her for permission, the stranger pulled a felt-tip out of his pocket and marked a route. “This is the best way to get there. What address are you looking for?”
Winter couldn’t see any harm in giving him that information—the bookstore was a public business, after all—and rattled off the number of the Ancient Mysteries Bookstore.
The man seemed to recoil for a moment, as if what she said had more than ordinary meaning to him.
“Oh.” The liveliness that she had heard a moment before in his voice was gone. “Oh,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”
“Is something wrong?” Winter said, an edge to her voice.
There was a silence, long enough that Winter wondered if she’d run into one of the loonies San Francisco was supposed to abo
und in.
“Let me give you my card,” the man said finally. “I have a shop in that area, right down the street. There’s a map on the back that should help you get … where you’re going. And you might stop by sometime. We’d like to see you. Really.”
When Hell freezes over, Winter thought grimly, but she took the card. As he’d said, there was a map on the back, and the directions looked fairly clear. She turned it over.
Handmade Music, Luthiers. And then, below, in smaller type: Antiques restored. Tuning—Harpsichord and Piano. Paul Frederick.
Winter relaxed a little. As a small-business owner he was a bit more respectable than the traveling street person and lunatic he acted like.
“Well, Mr. Frederick, thank you for your help,” Winter said decisively. “I’m sure I’ll find it now.”
“Good luck,” Paul Frederick said somberly, stepping back from her car.
HE KNEW. He knew while he was talking to me!
But the anger at being mocked was a pale, reflexive thing in the face of what confronted her.
Winter pulled her car to a halt in the open space at the curb in front of the Ancient Mysteries Bookstore. She was blocking the fire hydrant, but that hardly mattered now. She got out of the car and walked slowly over to stand in front of the shop.
Large sheets of plywood were tacked up over the doors and windows, but streaks of soot against the pale storefront still showed where the flames had shot upward, scorching everything in their path. The sheets of plywood gave the ground floor a smooth anonymity, blotting out the evidence of destruction.
There were wreaths and bouquets nailed to the plywood front door, some draggled and withered as if they had been there for weeks, some bright and new. Their meaning was unmistakable.
Someone has died here.
Winter felt a wave of angry panic that blotted out every other sensation. There was no need to ask who had died—it seemed to her that she had always known. The one hope she’d had was gone. It had been too late to keep this appointment even before she had left Glastonbury, and now there would never be time.
Oh, Cassie. I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye.
A bitter heaviness descended upon her aching heart, as if all hope of reclaiming her past had been ripped irrevocably away. She came closer, her fingers brushing the laurel leaves of one of the wreaths. Laurel, that crowned triumphant athletes and victorious generals. Laurel, for victory and death.
The card beneath the wreath was enclosed in plastic to protect it from the rain. Water had leaked in, blurring the dates, but Winter could read the rest: Mary Cassilda Chandler—Born Again to the Goddess.
Cassie had loved her, understood her, cared about her. Cassie would have helped her now—giving herself freely without judgment to solve the misfortunes besetting Winter’s life. And with her death, the mirror that Winter had hoped to see herself in was smashed forever.
The scene before her wavered, and Winter blinked back hot tears. The pain of her loss was so raw, so intense, so shocking in its force that even to acknowledge it was to court her own destruction. Desperately Winter sought refuge in glib flippancy. So this was it. The trail ended here. Cassie was dead.
Murdered.
11
Lord of the Wild Hunt
See, Winter comes to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad.
—JAMES THOMSON
WINTER HAD no idea how long she stood there, grieving in her own bleak autumn. Cassie was dead, and Winter mourned for her as if they had been closer than sisters until the moment of Cassie’s death.
Abruptly, without any saving sense of transition, Winter became aware of someone watching her.
She started up, as wild as if she were being stalked, but the only thing in sight was a rather ordinary woman in denim jeans, T-shirt, and a green down vest. The only thing unusual about her was the cloud of frizzy bright red hair that framed her face like some Pre-Raphaelite madonna’s. It made Winter think momentarily of Janelle. How could she tell Jannie that Cassie was dead?
“Hello …” the young woman said. “Are you Winter? Winter Musgrave?”
No! Winter’s mind shouted in reflexive denial. She took a step backward.
“Don’t run away!” the other woman said. “I’m Rhiannon—I was a friend of Cassie’s! She told me to wait for you—that you’d come.
“When?” Even to Winter, her voice sounded hostile and grudging. Cassie was dead, and she didn’t want to share her memories of her with anyone.
“Please,” Rhiannon said. “Please don’t run away. I just want to talk to you. Just for a moment.”
Winter took another hesitant step backward, although if this woman was going to cause a really unpleasant scene, Winter doubted if she could make it to the safety of her car in time.
“There’s a restaurant around the corner,” Rhiannon said. “We could go there. We have to talk.”
It was, Winter realized belatedly, long past lunchtime. Her body still wanted food, even if her heart was sick at the thought. And this woman seemed determined to talk to her. Nothing much could happen to her in such a public place—and if she didn’t like what this woman had to say she could always get up and leave. Wondering if she was listening to her instincts or defying them, Winter made a grudging gesture of acceptance and followed Rhiannon around the corner.
The Green Man was a bright and rather archaic oasis in the middle of modern urban decay. The Haight-Ashbury district, though faddish thirty years before, had always been a shabby and neglected part of San Francisco. It had been precisely because no one else wanted it that the flower children had flocked to it in such numbers; despite their avowed desire to create a new world, most of them had found their homes in the cracks of the old one. But The Green Man was shining and defiantly welcoming, with polished wooden tables made out of discarded cable spools, cane-bottomed Bentwood chairs, and salvaged panels of stained glass hanging in the windows. There were plants everywhere, giving the café even more the look of a green oasis in the midst of the city’s steel and stone.
The waitress greeted Rhiannon by name and showed her and Winter to a booth in the back.
“So,” Winter said coolly, when the woman had taken an order for tea and departed. “What can I do for you?” Probably not much, her tone implied.
Rhiannon flinched away from her coldness and Winter regarded her scornfully, anger displacing grief. She knew Rhiannon’s kind—meddlers, and incompetent ones at that, wandering through life like some self-proclaimed New Age secret agents, dispensing occult wisdom and psychic Band-Aids to anyone they could manage to catch.
Ice numbed her heart, but ice was better than the unbearable pain and guilt. Cassilda, oh, sister—
“Well, I thought—” Rhiannon stumbled over her words in the face of Winter’s obvious disapproval. “You see, Cassie and I were friends …”
Not as I was her friend!
Rhiannon’s eyes reddened and began to fill. She groped in the pocket of her down vest for a wad of tissues as Winter watched implacably.
You’ve had a lot longer to get used to her death than I have, and you don’t see me sniveling! Is sympathy what you’re after? You won’t get it here; I’ve suffered more than you can possibly imagine … .
“Yes,” Winter drawled mockingly, “I can see that.”
Rhiannon flushed and glared at her. She opened her mouth to speak and reined herself in with an effort. “The point is,” Rhiannon said, taking a deep breath, “we’d been friends for a long time. We met through Circle of Fire—that’s a Blackburn Work group that meets in the East Bay—but Cassie felt it was more important to take responsibility for your own life than to expect another set of gods to come to people’s rescue—which is what the New Aeon ought to be about, really. So she started a Wiccan coven based on the Blackburn Work, but more Goddess-oriented, really …”
Fortunately the tea arrived—if it hadn’t Winter would probably have walked out right then. Cassie was dead, and in the face of
that disaster Winter had no taste for listening to New Age drivel.
“We sort of worked as astral police, you know, like the Grey Angels,” Rhiannon said, and with that phrase got Winter’s entire attention. What did Rhiannon know about the Grey Angels? “So we knew it was coming.”
“You’ll forgive me,” Winter said tightly, “if I ask what this has to do with anything?” She pushed the raw anguish of Cassie’s murder from her mind, courting the blessed numbness that hovered on her mental horizon. This was how it could be, if she only surrendered to it: no more fear, no more pain, no more weariness and tears. There was no need to wander in the wilderness looking for some better answer that she would never find: She could become winter in fact as well as name, and if she could not heal, at least she would never be hurt again.
Only surrender, surrender, sang the seductive serpent voice … .
“Cassie knew the Elemental was coming,” Rhiannon said, and now her eyes glittered with anger as well as tears. “She knew she was going to die. We tried to stop it, to bind it, but Cassie said it drew power from the fact that the task it had been created for was undone. We put up the strongest wards we could … . Cassie thought you might be able to control it—she tried to find you but you never answered your phone; she called all your old friends and none of them could help …”
The fury in Winter blazed up until she felt clothed in invisible lightning, like a character in a book she’d read once, whose anger alone could kill. The power of the poltergeist struggled to break free, but she had chained it, chained it forever to her service and it would never be free.
“I’ve heard about enough,” Winter said. How dare this … person drag her in here simply to whine that Winter had not been there when Cassie died? “Thank you for the tea.” She got to her feet.
“No! Don’t go—I’m sorry! But she knew it was coming for her for weeks and there was nothing she could do—she tried and she tried, she knew it would kill her, and I loved her—” Rhiannon was crying openly now, her pale freckled skin turned blotchy and unattractive by her tears. “She never blamed you—she knew you’d come, only you’d be too late—she knew what you needed; she told me to give you a message—”
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