FEAR, RAGE, and sudden isolation drove me from pleasant dreams to madness. I reached into the darkness with all the strength I had in me, seeking to break bonds I could sense but not touch.
A slap shocked me awake, bringing the metallic taste of blood to my mouth. I opened my eyes to see Eliza silhouetted above me, open hand drawn back to deliver another blow. I rolled away from her and to my feet in one motion and looked out into the shadows and moonlight of Eliza’s glade. I felt the ingathering power welling up within me. Trying to contact the Legion felt like fighting an eiderdown quilt, but I could feel the White Wolf reaching through from his side. I stood in the tangle of blankets and gave some direction to the power surging up through me.
That power called to the storm clouds roiling in the darkness above. Lightning flashed down, blowing one of Eliza’s trees to splinters and nearly deafening me with the hot crackling fury of the strike. More power rose up from the fortress of my spirit, so I molded it, the White Wolf’s paws over my hands like spiritual gloves, and hurled it from me.
A mighty wind swirled around the mossy bed where Eliza stood next to me. It whirled, rose to the clouds, then dropped back in a funnel to touch delicately to earth less than two hundred paces away from us. The funnel uprooted trees and smashed them down against their fellows in a fearsome display of strength. Then, as abruptly as it had all begun, the winds subsided and peace slowly descended on the forest. A swath of destruction had cut through the middle of Eliza’s glade. Thick, dark red droplets seeped from split trunks and broken branches.
I felt Eliza’s hand run along my shoulder. “Trying to impress me?” Her expression and tone were light.
I shuddered and turned away from the carnage. I fought nausea. “Digestion problems, I think. It’s never been this bad.”
She started rubbing the tension out of my neck. “Tell me about it.”
So we sat back under the trees, looking out over the wreckage of the lightning and the wind, and I told her about my recent encounters. At the same time, I held a discussion with Blade and the White Wolf.
“It’s from within.” The White Wolf didn’t look happy.
“But it’s not focused.” Blade’s expression was even less cheerful.
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t isolate it,” Blade said grimly. “There’s a single force behind it, something that would be as happy to see you dead as anything else, but the source of the attacks … it doesn’t feel like one entity. It feels spread out.”
I thought about that. “That would fit with the Gold’s technique: every member of the Legion absorbed a significant amount of unfocused energy when we took down the Gold’s legion. What if it’s working through them?”
“It doesn’t feel like the Gold,” the White Wolf growled. “And that’s not the only problem.”
“Explain.”
Blade answered first. “I agree with the White Wolf. It doesn’t feel like the Gold’s work. There’s a consistent element of deception here, and considerable subtlety. Do you remember the dream?”
I fought back a shudder. “Not clearly.”
“The dream was twisted, and you were slowly cut off from your surroundings by mounting filth,” Blade said. “Deception and decay were not tools the Gold used. The Jigsaw Man, Vincent’s ghost, was another story. The attack was subtle. The dream turned and bound you, and a barrier rose between you and your own Legion, and then something called up power from the Legion.”
That startled me. “From the Legion.”
The White Wolf snarled assent. “From myself among others. It felt as if my own power had gained an independent will.”
“You’re communing with your ghosts,” Eliza said.
“We’ll finish this later,” I told the two of them, and gave her my full attention. “My apologies.”
“No need for apologies,” she answered. “I can understand your concern and need to investigate. What happened?”
I shifted uncomfortably. “Good question. I consumed some considerable power recently—more at one time than I ever have before. I think that may be causing me some problems. I may have an internal insurrection brewing.”
“Bad timing,” Eliza noted, her gaze sharp and attentive. “You need to quell that insurrection before you’re too deep in the process of dealing with your hunters. You have too many distractions now—this matter of the Whitesnakes, Fetch on your trail, and all the rest. This time you were with me. I felt your power rousing and woke you, which wasn’t as easy as it could have been. Considering the damage to the trees, I’m glad that you had enough control to redirect what was called. Next time you might not be so lucky.”
“You have a point.” She seemed a little stiff, a bit more rigid where her body brushed against mine. I knew how she felt. Neither of us had any particular inclination to reveal too much to anyone else, and what she had seen left us both a little uncomfortable.
I spared a glance for the devastation. Tiny, naked humanoids, their pale skin lambent in the moonlight, were emerging from the shadows to lap at the fluid seeping from the broken ends of branches with long, thin tongues. I shuddered and looked away.
“You should stay here until you have laid this matter to rest,” Eliza said. “I can protect you from Fetch. His strength is death and age—I can resist him. I could teach you to resist him as well, if you would let me bring you over into the Night. Together, we could face him down. I would help you, if you would let me. Is the price really so high? It’s not such a bad existence. And I would make the passage easy for you.”
I smiled at her, thinking of what it must cost her to make that offer outright. I traced a line down Eliza’s cheekbone from eye to mouth, and denied her gently. “You never give up, do you? This isn’t the way for me. I want it all, you know. Life, youth, enough power to be independent. And I don’t want to pay too high a price.”
“You don’t know what you’re risking,” Eliza argued. “You don’t know what you’re up against. I fear that if you chase this thing too far, you’ll find only death. Think about Corvinus. He was older than you, stronger, more subtle. He staked it all and lost. Why don’t you settle here until this blows over? Or take sanctuary with CrossTerPol, the Union, or Emerantha Pale if you’re not comfortable here?”
“The reason I live in CrossTown is because of all it has to offer,” I told her bluntly. “If I can’t settle with Fetch and the Whitesnakes, I’ll have to give up everything I’ve worked for. I’ll never be able to live freely in CrossTown, or walk the Ways without always looking behind me. If I can’t live this life I’ve chosen, that’s just as good as dying.”
I thought about that. Even if I did not have an obligation to my late master, I knew I had no choice anymore. I had to resolve this problem with the Fae and the Whitesnakes if I meant to go on living in CrossTown. At the same time, I suspected that there must be some connection between Corvinus’s murder and my present troubles.
“NightTown isn’t enough for you.” She caught and held my gaze. “Staying here with me isn’t enough.”
I looked her in the eye for a long moment of silence. “No,” I said at last.
Until we had talked, I had not fully realized where I intended to go or when. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. But then I felt it, an itching need to investigate the causes of Corvinus’s death while the event was still fresh. I wanted to find out who killed him, and why, not only for him but for myself. Emerantha had been right in one respect—if Corvinus had been killed for his research, then the killer probably figured, like Emerantha, that I had knowledge of it too. If someone had set me up deliberately for the vendetta and the trap in Faerie, then my bet would be that the same person would prove to be involved in Corvinus’s murder.
And if that were the case, maybe the murderer was not so much interested in stealing Corvinus’s research as suppressing it. That ugly thought gave me considerable pause: with the number of things the Raven had been investigating, almost anyone could have decided that he had begun to dig in forbidden areas. Knowing the nature of his project might inform me as to the nature of his killer or killers. If I could track my troubles back to the root cause of Corvinus’s death, I had a chance of dealing with my own problems and getting my life back on track. As long as Fetch could legally hunt me for defaulting on a contract, as long as the Whitesnake bounty hung over my head, and as long as unknown forces thought of me as a threat because of what they believed I knew about Corvinus’s research, I was a fugitive in CrossTown. Hell, I would be a fugitive anywhere I traveled along the myriad Ways, if they were motivated enough. I couldn’t dodge all those bullets forever.
I considered my possible courses of action. I could investigate Corvinus’s activities and check out his abode and the workshop there, as well as his study in the caves above DeepTown. I could also track the money the Whitesnakes had posted—fifty golden hours sounded like quite a bit for the ragged lot of cultists I remembered. It also seemed odd that all of it would have been put on my head. They had other sacrificial knives to grind—why not thirty on me and twenty on Anthony Vayne? Even ten golden hours gets a fair amount of attention in the CrossTown market. That focus on me reinforced my suspicion that more lay behind the Whitesnake bounty than simple revenge.
Tracking the money wouldn’t be easy. The Bank of Hours wouldn’t tell me squat if confidentiality were involved, unless I could pay the disclosure price, which I doubted. My best bet there would be getting my hands on a Whitesnake in the know, like one of their priests. I knew where one Whitesnake priest had lived, but I had retired him myself (permanently), so that didn’t help.
I wished I could have found an analogue of Corvinus, or talked to a past self who could tell me what I needed to know, or journeyed to a timeline wherein I could warn him against his impending death. But subjective time is a constant in Cross-Town. In addition, the more we travel the possible Ways, the more the probability waves of our alternate selves collapse into our subjective past and present. I might have been able to find an analogue of Corvinus down some strange Way, but as a powerful user of the Ways, Corvinus would have absorbed all of his closest analogues into his personal probability.
Analogues of initiates of the Ways were so rare as to be virtually nonexistent. If I did find an analogue, the experiences would be divergent enough that any information I obtained would be unreliable. Each subjective past is fixed. Even trying to scry into a place as tangled as Corvinus’s home would be beyond all the experts I knew and trusted. Certainly it was beyond me, though I might have some luck picking up traces once inside. Although, given what Pale had told me about how the killer had left no traces for CrossTerPol to find, I had my doubts.
“You’re going to approach this thing the way you always do, aren’t you?” Eliza sounded amused and a little melancholy.
“And how’s that?” I asked.
“Head on.” She smiled. “You could stay here with me a little longer. I think you’re afraid that if you stayed long enough, you wouldn’t want to leave.”
That had more than a little truth in it, so I kissed her and said nothing. We sat together in silence for a while, listening to the wind in the trees and watching the shadows dance.
To break the mood, I changed the subject. “Who was your uninvited guest at the party?”
She cocked her head, and then laughed. “Emory? My half brother. He managed to get himself turned a few years back, freeing himself of his master.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t think that happened often.”
“It doesn’t. Most masters are more careful than that. Still, it was careless to turn Emory in the first place.”
“He’s dangerous?”
“To himself and everyone else. I don’t expect him to last long.”
I grinned. “And what does a masterless vampire do?”
She chuckled. “Whatever he wants, as long as it doesn’t involve sunbathing.” She gave me a quizzical look. “Do you think he’s involved in your present problems?”
I shook my head. “Just a stray thought. Should I?”
Eliza shrugged. “Not to my knowledge. But then, I don’t always know what he’s up to these days. Word has it he’s hired himself out to nobility. I wouldn’t have expected that. Put it this way: if he finds out that you have a bounty on your head, it wouldn’t surprise me to find him trying for it.”
“He’s not concerned about your reaction?”
“That aspect of it would amuse him.”
“I knew I didn’t like him for a reason.”
Eliza plucked fastidiously at my ragged shirt. “You need to burn these before you go. I can give you new ones. There’s a stream not far from here, for your bath. You need one.”
I gave her an impudent look. “You didn’t seem to mind before.”
She arched an eyebrow delicately. “That was before. And you had the excuse of fatigue.”
Truthfully, I needed a bath. “Lead on.”
We left the remains of the picnic under the broken trees. Eliza led me to a narrow stream running between smooth rocks and down to a clear pool hemmed in by dark, crooked trees whose roots curled snugly under a thick blanket of moss. Long-stemmed roses with midnight petals ringed the pool, nodding gently in time to the unseen rhythm of a gentle breeze only they could feel, every movement wafting a delicate, musky scent into the air. Fresh clothes and thick towels lay folded at the base of one the trees, nestled in the midst of roses.
“You’re nothing if not prepared,” I commented as I stripped.
She laughed. “Teila was happy enough to bring the clothes and towels down.”
The water had the cold, clear bite of purity. I thought about a great many things as we bathed, and when I rose from the water I had considered my course of action. I needed to deal with the Whitesnake bounty. Until I did that, every move I made would provide some joker with the opportunity for making some fast cash. I needed a plan, and I had the beginnings of one smoldering in the back of my mind. But first I needed information, both on the Whitesnakes and on the details surrounding Corvinus’s recent demise. So I needed to hit the crime scene while the evidence was still fresh. I needed to see if Corvinus had left anything for me there. I doubted it. I expected that he would have left any valuable information at the more secure workshop “down by the sea,” but I couldn’t afford to pass this opportunity by.
I picked up the clothing Eliza had prepared for me, and found three small chains nestled in the folds of cloth. The links of the chains had been fashioned alternately out of a bright metal and a dull metal. I held them up. “Iron and silver?”
She nodded gravely. “You never know.”
I fastened the chains around my throat and wrists. They would slow certain NightTown predators with particular vulnerabilities. “Thanks for thinking of me.”
I drew on loose trousers, a long-sleeved and high collared shirt, and low boots. All fit well. Everything had been cut from fine cloth, and fit as if it had been designed for me. All of the clothes quite possibly had, Eliza being the way she was.
I turned my attention back to strategy. All of my planning, of course, ignored Fetch. He motivated me to move, in the final analysis. Even at Eliza’s place, if Jack found me, he would take me. I couldn’t present anyone with a stationary target. I had to stay away from any and all of my places and regular contacts. I needed to shift from the defensive to the offensive.
“It’s dangerous,” Eliza told me quietly. She stood behind me, her hands tracing the line of my spine.
I had almost become accustomed to the way she could read me. “So is staying here. So’s life.”
“And that’s what you love about it.”
“There’s a measure of truth to that. I’m going to keep this thing out of your backyard. I think that my best chance is to keep moving.”
She turned me and carefully smoothed my collar as it lay against my neck, covering the chains at my throat. “Don’t get caught.”
“Not if I can help it.”
With Shaper’s help, I pulled the guise of age back over myself. The wind stalked gently through the trees as I set my feet on the path out of there, my mind open to all the possibility I could reach.