11
Two Fair Maids
“Bard!” Kory came clattering down the stairs behind him before he could think to do anything, even to slam the door in the woman’s face. “Eric, Elizabet wants—”
Eric turned to stop him, but it was too late. Kory jumped the last couple of steps, and skidded to a halt behind him. He stared at the woman from the Labs with his eyes gone big and round with surprise.
Slit-pupiled, green cat-eyes. Situated between pointed ears.
Kory was not wearing his human guise. Of course he wasn’t; he was tired, worried, and among friends on his home ground. He didn’t have to think about keeping up an illusion.
Eric did not need to turn to know that the woman was staring at Kory with the same look of astonishment on her face as Kory was wearing.
Oh shit. As if things weren’t bad enough. Before he could even move, however, she had forced the issue, pushing past him and closing the door. Then she leaned her back against it so that the only way to get her out would be to forcibly pry her off the door, get it open, and then throw her out. No doubt, with her kicking and screaming every step of the way.
He backed up a step. She stared defiantly into his eyes. “I want some answers,” she said firmly, “And I want them now. Who are you, what are you, what did you do back at the Labs, why did you do it, and how? And in God’s name, what were those things you called up?” She moved her gaze slightly to meet Kory’s for a moment. “Your type, I know, or at least I think I do. I grew up on Tolkien. I’ve read my Celtic myths. Provided I’m not currently hallucinating all of this, locked up in a little cell. You’re either an elf, or I’m seriously ready for a jacket with extra-long sleeves. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here, but if I can believe in shadow-monsters that kill people, I can believe in elves, no problem.”
Kory drew himself up to his full height and put on all of his dignity. The loose shirt and jeans he wore somehow became the raiment of a prince, and Eric got the fleeting impression of a coronet encircling his head. “I am Korendil, Champion of Elfhame Sun-Descending, Knight of Elfhame Mist-Hold.” He placed one long hand on Eric’s shoulder. “This is my friend and brother, Bard Eric. If you have aught to challenge him with, you must also challenge me.”
Eric didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or both. Bethy was upstairs falling apart, this crazy woman had tracked him down and wanted to know what he had been doing at the Labs—and now Kory was issuing formal challenges. It was just too much.
He blinked away dizziness. “I—” he began, and his throat closed up. Then his mind went blank.
All three of them stood there staring at each other like a cluster of dummies in a store window, until the sound of someone clearing her throat politely from above them made them all turn. Elizabet stood at the head of the stairs with Kayla perched, a round-eyed gargoyle, at her feet. Both healers were watching all three of them like Jane Goodall and Dianne Fosse examining a trio of strange primates with unexpected behavior patterns.
“Would someone like to tell me what is going on here?” Elizabet asked.
Before Eric could get his mind and mouth to work, or even his body unfrozen, the Lab woman looked up and addressed the healer as the person in charge. “I am Dr. Susan Sheffield,” she said, taking an aggressive stance, feet slightly apart, hands on hips. “I work at Dublin Labs—and last night—”
“All hell broke loose,” Kayla offered brightly. The woman favored the kid with a glare that had even Kayla shrinking back.
“Last night,” the woman repeated tightly, “I watched some kind of shadow thing kill my research assistant and my partner. They told me today that anyone else that didn’t get out when the alarms went off is either dead or crazy.” She half-turned to glare accusingly at Eric. “And he told me it was all his doing.”
She stabbed a finger at Eric, who shrank away from her, wishing he could melt into the wall. Wishing he could undo everything and go back to the night of the party. Back when things were simpler.
Kayla had gone very pale and quiet; Elizabet looked from the woman to Eric and back again, then nodded, as if making up her mind.
“I think we need some tea,” she said, decisively. She descended the stairs like the Queen of England, as Eric repressed the urge to giggle insanely. Instead he followed meekly in her wake, preceded by the Lab woman and trailed by Kory and Kayla.
His mind went blank again for a moment. Somehow he found himself sitting at the kitchen table with the rest, a cup of tea in his hands that he did not remember pouring. He sipped it. Chamomile. Just the thing for nerves. He wanted a drink . . . and he knew he didn’t dare get one. One drink wouldn’t be enough, and how many would it take before the Nightflyers started whispering to him again? And how many more before they started to sound like his best friends? Back when he’d been drinking, he’d thought a lot of rotten people were his best friends . . .
“I think you should know, before you make any more accusations, that two of us were unwilling ‘guests’ in Dublin Labs last night,” Elizabet said, watching Susan Sheffield over the rim of her teacup. The scientist narrowed her eyes, looking skeptical. “There is a third victim of detention asleep upstairs right now, suffering severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. If this were someplace like Iraq or South America, I would have said she’d been tortured.” At the scientist’s look of shock, she added smoothly, “But of course, this is the United States, and nothing like that ever happens here. Does it?”
Susan Sheffield opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it. Elizabet followed up on her advantage. “And of course, since this is the United States, no one kidnaps middle-aged health professionals from conferences on the psychic, ties them up, shoots them full of sodium amytal, and drags them off to a sub-basement at Dublin Labs. Do they?” Elizabet didn’t wait for Dr. Sheffield to answer. She rolled up one of her sleeves with clinical detachment, displaying rope burns around each wrist and a bruise the size of a golf ball on her bicep, a bruise with a needle mark clearly in the center. “He really was awful, too,” she remarked. “I’m surprised that he didn’t break the needle off in my arm. But then, I wasn’t cooperating.”
“How did you—what did you—”
She rolled her sleeve down again. “I told you, I was a health professional; I’m a licensed psychiatric therapist. As it happens, I’ve gotten jabbed with a needle meant for someone else from time to time in the course of my job. I never thought that would turn out to have been such a good thing. Lucky for me, I’ve gotten accidental trank doses so many times that my tolerance is pretty high. Otherwise, when the alarms went off, I might have been one of the ones I had to leave behind in the cells.”
“Others?” Susan said sharply. “Cells? What others? What cells?”
“The cells on the thirteenth floor below the ground,” Kory put in, shaking back his hair. He leaned forward earnestly. “The cells where the evil man put Beth when he took her from us, and where he also put me and tortured me with Cold Iron. I swear to you upon my honor that he did this.” He displayed his own wrists, which up until this moment had been hidden in the long cuffs of his soft silk shirt. Eric gulped and averted his eyes, and beside him he heard Susan Sheffield gasp. As well she might. It looked for all the world as if someone had been working Kory’s wrists and lower arms over with red-hot wires.
Eric’s hands tightened around his cup, as his own wrists burned and throbbed in sympathy. That was what I Saw, he realized suddenly, when I tried to reach him with the Bardic magic. That was what I felt. They were hurting him, and the Cold Iron might have killed him if the pain didn’t turn him crazy.
“Level thirteen?” the scientist asked, licking her lips nervously as Kory covered his wrists again. Her eyes had gone from skeptical to wary. Eric had the feeling that the reference to this thirteenth floor hadn’t taken her entirely by surprise. “But thirteen is a sealed level, it’s the one just above mine. That’s—that’s Warden Blair’s Labs, the Cassandra Project! How did you get in there? Nobody gets in there! I mean, I know he has about four times the number of Lab people than anyone else, but—you aren’t Lab people—”
Both Kory and Elizabet nodded, but it was Elizabet who spoke. “We didn’t ‘get in,’ we were brought in. Our charming host called himself Dr. Blair,” she said calmly, outwardly unmoved by the display of Kory’s burns. “And I would guess that when the alarm went off, there were about a dozen of us who got out of our cells—our locked, monitored cells—and escaped. There were at least as many who didn’t, who were either too broken, too cowed, or too frightened to run. Or, possibly, too crazy.”
“He said that there were fourteen Lab people missing,” the scientist said, as if to herself. Then her gaze sharpened as it fell on Eric. “But what about him and his pet monsters? What’s he got to do with this?”
Eric’s wits finally came back, and he straightened up, looking back at her with all the defiance he had left. “I knew that my friends were locked up in Dublin Labs, lady—high-tech, Fed stuff in there—and everything pointed to the Feds taking them. What was I supposed to do, call the cops and tell them to go arrest some Feds, or maybe write my representative in Congress? Was I supposed to just let them rot in there? Look what they did to Kory! I had to get them out!” He swallowed once, then continued. “So I used the only weapon I could think of. It wasn’t a good choice, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know what they’d do, I didn’t know that they’d manage anything worse than scaring people. I thought—I don’t know what I thought. I know that I didn’t think there’d be anyone innocent in there.” He dropped his eyes, then, to stare at his hands and the cup in them. “I thought everybody in there would have to know what was going on, would have to be bad guys. I don’t know what goes on in a place like that! I’m just a musician.”
The scientist started laughing, a note of hysteria in her voice. “Just a musician. Just a musician! Playing Pied Piper to a bunch of man-killing monsters and you’re just a musician!”
For a moment, Eric thought that Elizabet might slap the woman to bring her out of her hysterics—but when he looked up, the healer just pursed her lips at him and shook her head slightly.
Susan passed from hysterical laughter to soft weeping within a few moments; sobbing into her hands, crying with a peculiarly helpless tone to her voice. Elizabet left her alone for that, too, until she got herself under control, and wiped her eyes with a paper napkin. Then she looked up and when she spoke, her voice was steady.
“I could believe just about anything of Warden Blair before today,” she said steadily. “And now, after this afternoon—I can believe he’d do anything. The man was as cold as a snake, and had about as much moral sense.”
“Do you have any idea what Warden Blair did there?” Elizabet asked urgently. “I have a very traumatized woman upstairs. If I have some idea what might have happened to her, I might be able to help her.”
Susan Sheffield pursed her lips. “I know he had a lot of equipment,” she said, finally. “He was supposed to be running some kind of psych project. That was what rumor said, anyway. But he had all kinds of equipment that he’d scrounged from all over the Labs that no psych project would need. Colonel Steve likes to use mythological names for our projects, names that kind of have something to do with the project itself. Like, mine is ‘Poseidon,’ because it’s got to do with earthquakes and Poseidon was the god of the sea and earthquakes.”
“Poseidon, the earth-shaker,” Elizabet muttered. “But ‘Cassandra’—that was the prophetess of Troy, the one doomed both to speak the truth of what would come and never be believed.” She pondered a moment. “Could it be that he was attempting to collect psychics for some kind of government work? Seeing the future, perhaps?”
The scientist shrugged. “He was popularly thought of as a real nut case; nobody who had ever met him wanted to work on his projects. As I said, I could believe about anything of him. And—” She paused and her face paled. “And some of the people who quit his project had—bad luck. Pretty bizarre bad luck, really. . . . I’d never thought about it before, I guess nobody did, but it was things like the intern kids getting kicked out of their grad programs or being forcibly transferred to other universities. I remember one lad in tears, because they’d told him to either quit or go to Anchorage. And we sure never saw them around the Labs anymore.”
Elizabet snapped her fingers in front of the woman’s eyes, startling her. “You were going to tell me something about the equipment Blair has,” she said firmly.
“Weird stuff,” the scientist said faintly. “Oh, a decompression chamber, for one thing; that had been sitting in the corner of my space since I’d gotten my floor and I was just as glad to see it go upstairs—but what would a psych project need with something like that? And one day one of my grad students came back giggling that the dumpster from his floor was full of boxes from—” she blushed crimson “—from, ah, one of those—ah—adult toy stores. You know—”
“Porn shops,” Elizabet said crisply. The woman flushed again.
“Yes, well, this one is supposed to be really popular with the—ah—‘leatherboys.’ The ones who like to tie each other up. Handcuffs, restraints, and gags, according to my Lab kid.” She rubbed her cheeks, and averted her gaze. “There were lots of boxes. So many that Charlie asked me if Blair was planning on holding a party. A ‘black tie-down party for thirty,’ he said.”
“Hmm.” Elizabet seemed lost in thought, and asked the next question absently. “What did you mean, earlier, when you said that you would believe just about anything of Blair before today?”
Susan’s flush vanished, and her face went dead white. “Today—today when I saw Warden Blair, he wasn’t the same man at all. Oh, outwardly he looked the same, but—the snake that used to be on the thirteenth floor was someone I wouldn’t have trusted without all the cards on my side of the table, but he was still someone I understood. I’ve seen his type before. But today—he’s changed, and I can’t read him at all. I think he would do anything.”
Eric had a horrible, sinking feeling, the feeling as if he almost knew something. And that when he found out what it was, he was going to be really afraid. Not that he wasn’t afraid now, but—
Suddenly, Susan Sheffield seemed to wake up, and she stared at Elizabet as if the healer had just sprouted horns and wings. “What am I doing, talking to you like this? You don’t have clearances, you don’t have any right to know anything about the Labs. I came here to get you to answer my questions, not the other way around!” She shoved her chair back and stood up, angrily. Eric distinctly heard Kayla mutter damn. “I’m getting out of here, and when I do, I’m calling Colonel Steve and letting him know I found you.”
But Kory was between her and the door, instantly. She looked up at him, surprised, probably wondering how he had gotten there so fast.
“We shall not imprison you, my lady,” the elf said gravely, “but we cannot allow you to do that.”
Susan’s response to that was a quick knee to Kory’s groin.
Eric heard something like a muffled clank. Then she bent over double, clutching her knee and moaning.
Kayla giggled. “All that and endurance too,” she said with a grin. Elizabet glared at her, but she kept on grinning.
Kory remained in the doorway, shaking his head sorrowfully. “I am very sorry, my lady,” he said over Kayla’s snickering, “but I have seen those television programs also.”
Elizabet rose, graceful and unhurried, and got the scientist back over to a chair. But instead of placing her hands on Susan’s knee and doing something about the pain as Eric had expected, she sat back in her own chair.
:Why isn’t she helping?: he asked Kory silently, forming the words carefully in his mind. This telepathy thing was still new to him and it didn’t come easily. Nor was it of any use much outside of normal vocal range. A different kind of speech, was all, and if he wanted to talk to someone on the other side of town, he might as well use the telephone; it was a lot more reliable.
:I believe because she has no strength to waste and wishes to save it for Bethany,: Kory replied the same way.
“Gentlemen,” Elizabet said after a moment, while the woman massaged her maltreated knee, “why don’t you go into the other room for a moment. And Kayla, go sit with Beth. I think Susan and I should talk together a little. You can watch the door from there easily enough.”
Kayla started to protest, but a look from Elizabet quelled her. She got up sulkily and left with a look of disgust at being excluded. Eric and Kory followed.
Kayla clattered noisily up the staircase, so noisily that it had to be on purpose. Eric waited until Kayla was up the stairs before saying anything.
“Kory, Elizabet needs to know what happened to Beth, right?” he asked, flinging himself down into a chair. Kory seated himself on the couch, across from him. “Not just what happened to her, but what went on inside her head.”
The elf nodded, slowly, his blond curls looking a lot more wilted than Eric was used to seeing. “I believe so.”
This is taking a lot out of him. Me, too. “And we need some serious reinforcements.” He scratched his head. “Look, I tried to get through to your relatives when you got caught, and I couldn’t reach them. But I was using the phone—you’ve got to have some way of getting to them, you know, elvishly. Right?”
Kory glanced warily at the kitchen door as the voices on the other side of it rose for a moment. “I can contact my cousins, yes,” he replied. “And at nearly any time or place. But—why need we reinforcements? Are we not safe again, and together? Have we not defeated the evil men? Once Bethany is well—”
“Is the guy that kidnapped you dead?” Eric countered. “You just heard that woman say he’s still around. As long as he’s around, we aren’t safe.” He ran his hands through his hair distractedly, trying to think of all the angles. Plotting was not his forte. It should be Beth doing this, not him. “Shit, we aren’t safe now, if he knows where we live. I’m only hoping that he doesn’t, that the reason he took Beth in broad daylight was because he doesn’t know who we really are and where we live. I dunno, he was picking up psychics, maybe he’s got some kind of psychic sonar that zooms in on people like Elizabet and us. Maybe that’s how he found us. I hope so. ’Cause if he knows where we live, we’re in deep kimchee.”
At Kory’s look of bewilderment, he shook his head. “Let me see if I can explain this right. Remember—ah—Die Hard 2?” The elf was an insatiable consumer of action films, good, bad, and terrible, and with his magic, if they didn’t have the cash, it was easy enough for him to sneak into theaters with his Low Court cousins, so it was a safe bet that he had seen the movie and he would recall it.
If the film industry had more fans as devoted as Kory, Hollywood would have nothing to worry about.
“Remember how the bad guys had friends in with the good guys?”
“The special army team; yes, I remember.” Kory frowned. “I think I catch your meaning. While those who are honorable would condemn Warden Blair’s actions, they are prevented from knowing about them by friends of Blair’s who have been corrupted by him.”
“Pretty close,” Eric said, relieved. Fortunately for them all, Kory became less naive about the human world with every day, particularly where human failings were concerned.
Hooray for Hollywood.
“And these same corrupt men have the resources to find us again,” the elf brooded. “This is an ill thing. I believe I must call the others. Arvin above all will know what to do.”
“Good. Excellent. How soon do you think they can be here?”
Kory pondered for a moment. “Bard Eric, would you say this is an emergency?”
He gave a thought to what the elves might consider an “emergency.” His peril and Beth’s—not a chance. They were human, and important only to Kory. But Kory—
“Yeah, I’d say so,” he replied. “Tell Arvin that the human had you captured and bound with Cold Iron—that he’s going to come after you again—and that once he has you it would only be a matter of time before he figured out what you are. That means humans—in the government—would know all about elves. And that would mean that none of you would be safe outside of Underhill.” He smiled a little to himself; Arvin might well be indifferent to the fates of Kory’s pet humans, but he adored living in human society and he’d go mad from boredom in the carefully controlled world of Underhill. That would bring him around soon enough—
“You might tell him that given this set of humans, they might even figure a way for themselves to actually get into Underhill,” he added. “They’re scientists, and once a scientist knows that something is possible, they find ways to do it.”
Put that in your little leprechaun pipe and smoke it, Arvin.
“I shall do that,” Kory replied, a certain grim delight on his face. “I think I can have at least a dozen or two here within the hour, with that to fling at them.”
That was good news. “Okay, you take care of that. I’m going upstairs. By the time they get here, I may have some idea what’s going on with Bethy.” He vaulted up out of his chair and sprinted for the stairs, noting absently as he passed the kitchen door that the murmur of voices sounded less angry and more—anxious.
And maybe Elizabet’s getting through to the scientist lady. I sure hope so. I don’t want to have to wipe her mind clean of what happened at the Labs and anything to do with us.
This Bardic magic stuff was getting messier all the time. Seemed as if every time he used it to fix something, he had to use it again to fix what the fix had messed up, and then fix the problems that the fix to the fix had brought up.
Why couldn’t things be simple, like in one of those awful Role Adventure Escape books? Just find the Magic Talisman and poof, all the crayon box dragons would roll over on their backs . . .
He paused at the door to the bedroom and peeked inside. Beth was asleep, but he doubted it was anything other than magic-induced sleep. Kayla looked up as the door creaked, surveying him warily from her perch in the window.
And just find the Wand of Wizardly Wonder, wave it, and everyone is healed of everything. Including death. He shook his head a little unhappily. I could do with one of those right now. And not just for Bethy.
“Kayla?” he whispered, easing himself into the room. “You’re gonna have to spot for me. Kory’s calling in some kind of elven SWAT team to back us, and I’m going to try to find out what happened to Bethy, since she won’t tell us.”
The kid’s expression sharpened with interest, until she looked like an alert little fox. “What are you gonna do, Bard?”
He grimaced ruefully. “Wish I knew. Oh, I have a plan—I’m gonna try and get inside her head. But once I’m in there, well, I dunno what’s gonna happen. So you’ll have to play it by ear. Sorta put a lifeline on me and haul me out if something goes wrong, okay? You’re better at this than Elizabet is.”
“Jeez, you don’t ask for much, do you?” the kid muttered. Then, louder, “Okay, I’ll do what I can. But—shit, Bard, I don’t know what I’m doing here. So don’t sue me if I mess it up.”
“If we both mess it up, kid, there isn’t gonna be anything to sue.” This was going to be dangerous for Kayla—not so dangerous as it was for him—but she could get hurt and he hoped the healer kid realized it. From the expression on her face, she did and she also had no plans to try and back out.
Kayla gritted her teeth. “I know,” she said grimly.
He settled himself on the bed next to Beth, one hand covering one of hers. What should he use to key on? There weren’t any Celtic songs about mind-reading . . .
Oh, of course. Gordon Lightfoot. Perfect. He closed his eyes, and hummed the first few bars—and Felt the power take hold of him.
“Okay,” he muttered, “let’s get this over with.”
He came up out of his trance with a scream.
And he found himself the center of an audience. Kayla he had expected, and maybe Kory—but the tiny room was full of bodies, human and elven. His eyes went first to Elizabet—and, to his immense relief, he saw a pale-faced, round-eyed Susan Sheffield crowded in beside her. Kory stood on the other side of the scientist, and the rest were jammed in however.
He checked the elves first, and they were equipped for mayhem. Elegant, but definitely no one was going to mess with them. Knives long enough to qualify as swords hung at many sides; the elf he had last seen dressed in pink-punk style was still in pink, but it was a catsuit, and she had a bandolier of throwing knives across her chest. One end of a bo staff peeked over the heads of those on the right side, and were those arrows on the left?
So they’d taken the threat seriously. Good. They’d better. The threat was a serious one. He hadn’t been throwing bull when he’d told that stuff to Kory. Odds were nine-to-one it was true.
“Well?” Elizabet said, as he struggled into a sitting position—not an easy feat on a waterbed.
“Remember what you said about torture?” he asked the healer, who frowned and nodded. “Well, that’s what he did. Somehow he figured out that Bethy’s a claustrophobe; there’s nothing in Beth’s memory of how he did it, but I’m guessing maybe he used her reactions to questions and had a lie-detector on her. Then he locked her in that damn decompression chamber in the dark, and started increasing the pressure.” He snarled as he spoke, and the scientist whitened a little further. “Real clever, too. Torture without leaving marks. Wonder what he’d have done to you, Elizabet?”
Kayla was livid, and holding her anger well; much better than he had expected she would. “That’s probably what I was for, boss,” she said to Elizabet, who nodded. “He was gonna snatch me, and tell you to cooperate or he’d take me apart and not be too careful about putting me back together. I almost wish that son of a bitch would let me get within a few feet of him, guards or no guards . . . ”
“There’s more,” he told them, “but right now, the only thing that’s pertinent is that she’s got the phobia mixed up with my precognitive dream about the Big One. The one we were kinda talking about. It’s pretty clear, and there’s Nightflyers mixed up in that one, too. That gonna give you enough to work on?”
“That should give me enough to break her out,” Elizabet told him. “Once I’ve got her out of this hallucination-cycle she’s in, and talking, the rest will come.”
He heaved a sigh of relief, and rolled to the edge of the bed. Several sets of hands helped him up, and he staggered with fatigue as he got to his feet. Kory caught and held him, and he looked up into the friendly, worried, elven face he knew so well. “I have a nice nervous breakdown coming,” he said conversationally. “I’ve earned it, and I’m by-God going to take it as soon as this mess is over. But right now—we’ve got things to take care of. Is Arvin in here, somewhere?”
“Here, Bard,” said a voice at the back, somewhere near the bo staff.
“Okay, let’s all of us get out of here and let Kayla and Elizabet do their thing. I’ve got something that involves all of the rest of us.” He looked straight at Susan Sheffield. “You, especially.”
“Me?” She looked confused and apprehensive, and probably would have backed away from him if there hadn’t been so many people.
“Yeah, you, and that Home for Deranged Scientists you work at. Let’s move it on out of here.” He nodded at the door, and let the tide of the others carry him down the stairs and to the livingroom.
Once there, the “audience” arranged itself around him in a semicircle; Arvin wordlessly handed him a glass of Gatorade, which he downed with gratitude. His head hurt, he was ready to drop, and he wanted to sleep for a week. He could have used one of Kayla’s jump-starts, but she was busy with something more important.
Christ, I haven’t felt this bad since my last hangover.
And yet, he was calm for the first time in weeks, maybe months, because now he had some answers. He wasn’t crazy, his dream was a warning, not a hallucination. And he wasn’t—entirely—to blame for what the Nightflyers had done. He had been their tool, and there was some blame there; he had allowed himself to be deceived and that was something he was never going to forget. But others had been their tools as well, and one of them was standing awkwardly beside the sofa.
“You said your project had something to do with earthquakes, right?” he said to Susan Sheffield. She nodded uncomfortably. “So what’s it all about? And what’s going on with it right now?”
“I can’t tell you that—” she began. He interrupted her with a downward slash of his hand.
“Damn your clearance crap anyway!” he spat, and she winced away from him. Arvin looked impressed. “All right. I’ll tell you.”
His time in trance hadn’t been spent entirely in Beth’s mind. And it hadn’t been at all under his conscious control. Someone, or something, had guided and impelled his vision. Maybe it had only been his subconscious, which had always been better at putting two and two together than he was. Maybe it had been his conscience, which had lately been pretty good at making him face up to the facts, no matter how unpleasant they were.
Whatever it was, once he’d seen in Bethy’s memory what she had been put through, his trance had taken a different turn without him thinking about it. He had leapt into an omniscient point of reference right over Warden Blair’s shoulder, and fast-forwarded to the Nightflyer invasion.
He knew a lot now. He knew that Warden Blair wasn’t Warden Blair anymore—and hence, the change that Dr. Sheffield had noticed. And he knew what Project Poseidon was.
“You built yourself an earthquake machine down there, didn’t you?” he said to Susan, whose eyes widened with shock. “Not one to read them; one to make them. I don’t suppose you worried much about the implications of that.”
“That’s all I thought about! It’s meant to trigger micro-quakes, to relieve stress along faultlines,” she said defensively. “It’s going to help people, to save lives—”
“Yeah, but your project’s in Warden Blair’s hands, lady,” he countered as she blanched. “And by the way, I wouldn’t go back to my apartment right now if I were you. He told that Colonel Steve of yours to send you a little reception committee after that unscheduled visit you made to the office this afternoon. He got worried, and he wants to make sure he has your services for as long as he needs them.”
Her face went paper-white, then flushed. “You’d better be telling the truth,” she said angrily, “because I have a way of checking that.”
He spread his hands and arched his eyebrows. “Be my guest. Check on it. I’d rather you did that than walk into an enemy ambush.”
“I need the phone.” She changed her challenging gaze to Kory, who moved politely out of the way of the phone on the wall—but stayed within grabbing distance of her in case she tried anything.
She dialed a number, which must have been answered on the first ring. “Hi, Betty, it’s Susan. Listen, I was supposed to have a cleaning crew over this afternoon, are they there yet?” She listened for a moment, and her angry flush paled to white again, though her voice remained steady. “Well, good, Betty, that’s terrific. Yes, they certainly are handsome young men. Yes, they’re bonded, that’s why I let the firm have a key. No, they’ll probably be there a while; they’re cleaning everything. That project’s coming to a head, and the place is a pigpen. Thanks Betty, I just wanted to be sure they’d gotten there. No, thanks, I’ll probably be working late. Bye.”
She hung up, and when she turned to Eric, her hands were shaking. “A nosy, elderly neighbor can be a wonderful thing, sometimes,” she said, with a false little laugh.
“Yeah,” he replied.
She made her way carefully to the sofa, and sat down on it. How much else do I tell her? he wondered, watching her. For all the profound shocks she’d had, she was coping pretty well. Encountering Nightflyers, death, Bardic magic, elves, and betrayal all in forty-eight hours could put quite a strain on the brain . . . But he needed her input.
Okay. He might as well go for the whole thing. “You said that you’d noticed something weird about Blair the last time you saw him?” he asked carefully. “I mean, weirder than usual.”
“The lights were on, but nobody was home,” she said without a second thought. “Or—no, somebody was home, all right, but it wasn’t human—”
She stopped, suddenly, and he saw her putting all the facts together in the way her brow creased and her eyes widened. “One of those things,” she gasped. “One of those horrible shadow things took him over, like in The Exorcist! Didn’t it?”
He nodded, while all of the elves except Kory looked puzzled. Great. Kory didn’t tell them how I sprung him. That’s not going to make them real happy with me, even if it isn’t a direct threat to them. Yet.
“Right,” he said wearily. “And that is what’s in charge of your project. In charge of something that can trigger the Big One, instead of preventing it. And just what do you think it’s going to do with something like that?”
He thought for a moment that she might faint, she grew so white, but she recovered.
“All right,” she said, slowly. “All right. I believe you. For whatever I’m worth, you’ve got me on your side. Now what?”
“Now you sit there for a minute,” he told her, and turned to the others, taking a deep breath.
Okay, kids, it’s story time with Uncle Eric. Got a lot of catching up to do, and a short time to do it in. “When you last saw our heroes, they were recovering from the big party,” he began. “This is what happened when you all left them—”