Winter’s eyes brimmed with the unshed tears of a grief too long deferred. She had built her self-image on her risk-taking and courage, and all of it was a lie. She wasn’t brave. She’d betrayed everything and everyone she really loved. Unforgivably. Irrevocably.
Winter climbed shakily to her feet, wondering how long she’d been lying on the floor. She no longer wondered why no one had come to look in on her and see if she was all right—she knew all of Wychwood’s secrets now. Automatically she looked out the window, but could tell nothing of the time. It was late, that much she knew. The rain spilling from the gutters was a silvery waterfall in the house’s security lighting, and the rest of the house’s inhabitants must long since be in bed. Low blood sugar made Winter’s hands shake, and her skin felt cold and clammy. That much, at least, she could fix.
ALL TRACE of use had been cleared away; the cloth changed, Grandmother Winter’s sterling centerpiece returned to its accustomed place. Winter walked into the dining room. Everything was where it should be. Nothing was out of place—not the furniture, not the children. Any exceptions were swiftly dealt with.
And they kept at me and at me—they were my parents—they were supposed to know what was best—not just what was convenient!
But that wasn’t true. She hadn’t been a child any longer by the time she’d come home to Wychwood that spring. She should not have given them the kind of control an adult took of a child’s life over hers.
But she had. She’d given them that power through fear or cowardice or even stupidity. She’d known she wanted something different than her mother’s life and her father’s, but in the end she hadn’t trusted herself enough to take charge of her own future.
She’d paid for that.
But she wasn’t the only one.
She—and Grey—and the child who had never been born—all of them had paid. And the girl she’d been, like some spell-cursed princess, had been doomed to dream away her life inside the arctic armor Winter had forged about herself to numb the pain of that disastrous choice.
Until …
Winter felt the flickering feeble attempt of the destroying angel to rouse beneath her skin. She pushed it away, back into the world of dream. She had made her power into a dream—a bad dream—and had dreamed on, insensible, until something had come looking for her.
Something that was tithed in blood. Something Winter had retreated into madness to escape, not knowing that to do so would free that long-denied, long-betrayed, part of herself—or that, freed, it would fight to reach her across the borderland of her unconscious mind.
With one last clutch, Winter felt the coils of her hate-born shadow-self relax forever. All that was left was Winter Musgrave.
Who’s a fool.
For a moment she allowed the self-hatred to well up, then let go of that, too. Even after her mother had gotten her way about the baby, Winter could still have taken back her life—but grief and self-hatred had paralyzed her and she had let others choose her future for her—choices that had not been made out of love, but out of anger. Wychwood held little love within its walls.
Winter laughed a little shakily, and flipped on the dining room lights. By all means, let’s have all the demons out of the box in one go. She walked through and into the kitchen and began opening cupboards, her body’s demands uppermost in her mind. She found a box of raisins and began stuffing the fruit into her mouth, swallowing almost without chewing.
But even while her body concentrated on the food, her mind refused to stop spinning. Something inside her wanted her to understand everything she’d refused to face for all those wasted years.
Parents were supposed to love their children. But love didn’t necessarily make someone wise. God knows I’m living proof of that … . And anger at their own missed choices had become anger for its own sake, anger that, like the serpent, was willing to strike at any target.
Even at their own children.
So no one could be allowed to escape. Because if someone did manage to break free, it proved there was another way, another life possible, and all the sacrifice and pain would have been for nothing …
There was a sound behind her. Winter turned around just in time to see Wycherly walk through the dining room into the kitchen.
He was rumpled and disheveled, his hair as wet as if he’d been walking outside in the storm. His jacket was gone and his feet were bare; with a small disinterested part of her mind Winter wondered what he’d been doing. He glared at her balefully before seeming to recollect that she was his sister and there was no particular cause for enmity between them.
“What are you doing here?” he asked ungraciously. Without waiting for an answer he crossed to the enormous built-in refrigerator and pulled open one of the doors.
“Leaving,” said Winter, and as she said it, it was true. The mistake that had led to everything that followed had been lack of faith. She would not make it twice. It wasn’t too late; she could still change, take back the life she’d relinquished.
And even if she couldn’t, at least she could keep from hurting anyone else. She could stop the rage, the hunger …
“I doubt it.” Malice gleamed in Wycherly’s eyes—the only honest expression of his feelings she’d seen since she’d come back. But without the poltergeist-gift, the expression of Wych’s anger would be controlled by his conscious mind. He made a mocking salute with the bottle of orange juice in his hand, and drank.
“Believe it. I have what I came back for,” Winter said. Even if I didn’t want it very much. “I have nothing more to say to any of … them.” She hesitated on the last word, mentally absolving Wycherly of any part in the events of that horrible summer. He’d been eighteen, then, on the verge of his own life.
And was still, fourteen years later, on the verge of his life.
“Wych, get away from here,” Winter said impulsively. “I know it seems like staying is the only way, but it isn’t. If you—”
“That’s rich coming from you, sister dear. Isn’t it supposed to be the cuckoo that throws the other chicks out of the nest? But you’re a true-born Musgrave, right enough: our motto, ‘Expediency über Alles.’” He closed the refrigerator with a careless slap and strode over to her. This close, she could see the faint red-golden stubble along his jaw.
“You haven’t had much use for us while you were feathering your Wall Street nest, but now I suppose you think it’s time to make amends in order to be on hand for a favorable redrawing of the will. Well, go ahead! Let Mother pick you out a trophy husband—something chic, a thirty-eight-long in legal sharkskin—and Pats can sell you a crackerbox palace nice and close, so Mommy Dearest can manage your life, too—”
Wycherly stopped, but more from lack of breath than because he’d run out of things to say.
Winter shook her head, holding up her hand as if she were calling a time-out. Somehow the venom in Wych’s words only strengthened her faith in her choice. They carried no pain with them—It was as if they were addressed to someone else.
“No.” I had a lover, once, and I threw him away. “Wych, I think you should leave, but I’m not going to run your life for you. But I’m leaving. Things happened here—” And I can’t forgive my parents for them, even though they’re partly my own fault. She shrugged. “I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning and I’m never coming back here again. That’s all.”
“I don’t believe you,” Wycherly said uncertainly.
Winter laughed, and felt the crushing weight on her heart ease slightly at last. “Oh, Wych! As the man said about life after death, sooner or later you’ll know, so why fret about it? Believe me or don’t—I don’t care.”
She watched doubt and sullen anger chase each other across Wycherly’s face until he settled on a guarded blankness.
“Mother will have a fit,” he pronounced with faint satisfaction.
“Let her,” Winter said. It’d be a shame to waste all that practice.
WHEN WINTER finally returned to her room, her sl
eep was too deep for dreams; the felled coma that followed an emotional purging. The alarm clock she’d set jangled her awake at 5 a.m.; moving with machinelike precision Winter dressed quickly in the clothes she had worn on the airplane yesterday, made one quick phone call, and then hurried downstairs.
As she had believed, her parents still had morning coffee together before the car came to bring Kenneth Musgrave into the city. As Winter stepped into the breakfast nook, she saw that this morning they were not alone; Wycherly was with them.
Well, what did you expect? she scolded herself, sighing. Theirs was not a family for loyalty; Wych had been right: “Expediency über Alles” would be an appropriate family motto.
“Winter! Come in, dear,” Miranda Musgrave cooed.
A less suspicious person than Winter would have heard the tension in Mrs. Musgrave’s voice. Her mother’s rings flashed as she twisted her hands nervously.
Winter took a deep breath.
“Mother, Father. I have something to say to both of you. It won’t take long, but I’d rather it was private. Wych, you really ought to pick a side and stick to it; it’s much less confusing. Now go away.”
“I think he should stay,” her mother said tightly.
Winter looked at her father. Kenneth Musgrave glowered back, his baleful eyes piercing.
“I don’t think you have anything to say you can’t say in front of your brother,” he rumbled. Only last night his displeasure would have terrified her, but not now. Never again.
“All right.” Now that she was committed, a curious peace settled over Winter, akin to that which she’d once felt on the Street, on the trading floor. It was almost as if she was being reminded that some good things could be salvaged from even the worst mistakes. She took another steadying breath.
“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 woman, 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 Geller 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 befo
re 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.
Witchlight Page 25
