Winter Tide Page 27

  “Started to teach me magic. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Learning magic.” He eyed me, walked around the edge of the room to get a better view. “Your new mentor’s not human. I wasn’t sure whether she forced you to stay with her, or whether you’d just gotten caught up in something bigger than you could handle. But with what happened to Leroy, we needed power of our own. These guys started asking us questions, and we found out we had some interests in common.”

  “I’m human,” I said, picking the accusation most immediately worth responding to. “Just a subspecies.”

  “Are you?” asked Mary. “It said so in the files, but I didn’t take them seriously.”

  “Amphibious,” said Barlow. “Supposedly. And certainly more loyal to her immortality-granting ocean gods than to any country. What about that one?” He jerked his elbow at Audrey.

  “I’m human,” she said. “Just a subspecies. Will you please shut down this goddamned spell?”

  “Which looks,” came Trumbull’s voice from the doorway, “absurdly unsafe. What by all the gods do you think you’re doing?” Twisting, I could see her and Caleb. Caleb looked ready to charge across the floor, and I made shooing motions. I wanted him to run for Spector, but he didn’t seem inclined.

  “It’s an inventory equation,” said Barlow. “It’s meant to track down and sample any exotic power sources that might be available within a given range.” He turned to shuffle a stack of notes. “The sensitivity appears to be higher than predicted. I do apologize, Miss Marsh—I didn’t intend to detain you a second time. Although perhaps I should have. You seem to have come from very close by. What were you doing, skulking about the administration building after midnight?”

  I gritted my teeth. “Trying to find out whether you were doing something dangerous. Which you were.”

  “Certainly. Dangerous to our enemies.” He narrowed his eyes and shifted his weight; I could tell he would have preferred to come closer. “If you consider yourself an enemy of the United States, I think we’d better talk after I finish the inventory. Unfortunately, the equation is difficult to interrupt before it’s run its course.” He looked up to nod at the others. “Miss Trumbull, Mr. Marsh. I’m afraid we’re somewhat occupied at the moment, but if you want to leave now … well, your unwillingness to answer a few questions will be noted. This will take another hour or two; perhaps you’d prefer to come around the side and join us—I understand you have some background in more traditional esoterica. You might be interested to see what we’ve accomplished here.” And he clearly wanted to see their reaction to it.

  Trumbull, who’d been listening to his suspicions with an expression of increasing disapproval, did not approach. “Are you mad? Your ‘equation’ is a nonspecific summoning and binding, however unorthodox—it’ll drag in one of everything it can reach. There are things that don’t bind as easily as two mixed-race humans.”

  “Really, miss, there’s no need to be hysterical.”

  “She’s a professor,” said Audrey. “And she knows more about esoterica, traditional or otherwise, than you’ll ever—”

  One of the gears—less a gear, up close, and more an amorphous globule edged with numbers—began to pulse brightly. Then another, and then the whole room burst into a haze of actinic light. It ought to have been cacophony, but I heard nothing other than Trumbull’s startled hiss, abruptly cut off. I tried again to move, but the spell bound me fast. Something rushed past, cold as space and carrying silence with it. Memory flared of the thing I’d encountered during our own ritual—now I knew I’d only glimpsed it at a distance. It surged against me and I felt the touch of a nameless need deeper than hunger. I choked on something that was not air.

  My connection with Charlie flared, all fear. But even fear made a spot of warmth, a little space where I could draw sudden, painful breath. I still heard nothing, though I could make out vague shapes moving beyond the light.

  I had another connection in this room, beyond the confluence. My hands were unbound, though moving them brushed the edges of my bubble of warmth and air, and my fingers came back hoared with frost. When I pulled up my sleeve, it was a moment before I felt the fabric against my fingers. I touched the sigil on my arm. Sally. Sally, let me look.

  I doubted my words would get through, but I hoped she’d sense the intention behind them. And it worked: for a moment, I saw through her eyes. Sally pressed her back to the wall, painted concrete rough against her hands, trying to stay as far as possible from the morass of color that overflowed the edge of the diagram. Then there was light, and our connection flickered, dimmed—did not go out, but I felt her paralyzed terror only at a great distance.

  The cold haze began to tighten around me, pressing inward. Caleb and Audrey and Charlie felt far away, and Dawson impossibly distant. I hurled signals into the void: fingertip flutters, tiny patterns of breath. I knew now that no one could answer with aid; I only wanted to be noticed and remembered.

  Iä, Shub-Nigaroth, tell my grandfather …

  And then the light started to shrink—or to pull into itself, retreating and compressing into lightning-bright pinpricks. I forced my lids closed over huge, dry eyes. The light flared painfully even through that protection and then, at last, vanished. I rubbed my eyes, felt my tear ducts loose a little precious fluid to soothe them. I opened them cautiously.

  Illumination bloomed, pale and painless: Audrey’s flashlight. She shone it around, found Trumbull on the floor beside Barlow, scribbling furiously with chalk. Then I had to cover my eyes again, if only for a moment: Caleb had found the wall switch.

  Trumbull threw the chalk to the floor. It shattered, and the suddenly returned sound echoed from the walls. I stumbled as my bonds dissolved.

  “You are abominable creatures,” she said, rising to face Barlow. “Do you think you can play trial and error with this kind of thing? Your own lives and sanity are yours to risk, for whatever they’re worth. But you very nearly wiped out three hundred years of work!”

  Barlow took a step back. “What are you talking about?” He glanced at the diagram, with its strange asymmetries now subtly altered, and frowned.

  “You interfered,” said Peters. “You were deliberately trying to sabotage—”

  “Keep silent,” she snapped, and then smiled as he did. “Well, you’ve burnt out your little amulet, if nothing else. All of you hold a moment.”

  I thought perhaps I ought to intervene—but the urge was not a strong one. Our captors stood dazed as Trumbull looked them over. A part of me watched avidly, delighted to see them at her mercy. And a larger part hoped that she would take advantage—that whatever interest the Yith held in my people’s existence would inform what she did next.

  “Ah,” she said to Jesse. “You raided the library, but they took the excuse to steal what they wanted for themselves. And made better, or worse, use of the materials than you could have hoped to on your own. Somehow you thought their mentorship a route to safety. You are an idiot.” Over her shoulder, to me: “He distrusts you because you wouldn’t mate with him.”

  “Thank you; I had figured that part out myself.” I recalled his cheerful insistence that he’d accepted my refusal, and felt my urge to intervene wane still further.

  Trumbull glanced at Sally, still pressed against the wall, and dismissed her. She passed on to Peters. “An intelligent brute. Terrible combination, all too common.”

  Barlow was next. “Loyalty and curiosity. A rarer combination. A pity that you direct your virtues toward such petty ends—and that you aren’t nearly as intelligent as you want to believe yourself.”

  Then she turned on Mary. “Now you, you’re more interesting. You might have been one of Miss Marsh’s pupils, under better circumstances. Or a researcher in your own right in fifty years, without tailoring your studies to the agendas of imbeciles. A pity: I hate to see intelligence wasted. But we cannot afford you repeating such experiments; Miskatonic must stand for a few years yet.” She cupped Mary’s chin,
locked eyes. For a moment Trumbull’s body sagged, jerked away—then returned to its accustomed posture of confidence. Mary gasped and pulled back. She put her hand to her chin, touching it gingerly.

  Trumbull looked around. “It would be best if you recalled this night well enough to learn more caution. But I see you rewriting your memories already—better then to know only that your ‘equation’ failed spectacularly, and leave us out entirely.” I realized, with mingled regret and relief, that her concern was all for their dangerous experiments; their suspicion of the people of the water, the threat of their politics, hadn’t even registered. And I didn’t dare speak up, lest I disrupt her work.

  One by one, she took their heads in hand and met their eyes. No sign of body switching this time, simply a moment of contact. When she got to Sally, she snorted. “You’ve already effaced the whole thing for yourself. Some minds are truly incapable of correlating their contents.”

  At last she stepped back. “Well. Clean up and go home. Or curl gibbering in a corner; I’m sure it will serve the world just as well.” To the rest of us: “Are you coming? Or do you want to stay here and wait for something else to try and eat you?”

  Audrey glanced at Sally. “But—”

  “She’ll do better if you leave her mind to scab over on its own,” said Trumbull. Audrey looked uncertain, but followed. Caleb and I did likewise. I wanted to be out of that room.

  Trumbull began muttering to herself. By the time we left the building, she was cursing audibly in Enochian. Or so I supposed: not all the expletives were ones I recognized.

  “What did you do to Mary?” Caleb asked, cutting through the stream of profanity.

  “Gave her alexia,” she said. “She’s the smartest of them, and did much of their design, for all Barlow styles her his secretary.”

  “And now she can’t read?” I asked, horrified in spite of myself. If it worked, though …

  “It’s easy enough, on a human brain—though the process does make it more vulnerable to later lesions.” She glared at us. “I swore I wouldn’t put myself in danger, and instead I find myself defending the local archive from outsiders. I’m losing all sense of scale.”

  “We’re glad you stayed to help,” I said. And, thinking that might not be enough: “As you said, they risked destroying three hundred years of work.”

  “And in defending three hundred, I risked millions of years of memories. I will answer for that, you may be sure.”

  Charlie hurried up to us. “Are you all right? I thought I saw—what was that?”

  “Outsider,” said Trumbull.

  “Do you remember what I said about trying to summon gods?” I asked.

  “That it’s a bad idea; other things are likely to answer.”

  “Yes. Apparently no one ever told Barlow. Or Mary, I suppose.” Trumbull’s suggestion that Mary might have made a good student felt strange. I imagined a woman like Audrey, already grown and forced into the box of a powerful man’s expectations, discovering a talent for magical research.

  Dawson came running around the building. She flung her arms around Caleb. “You absolute idiot—what were you doing?”

  “Failing to get any useful evidence,” he said. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be back at Dean Skinner’s place, pretending you don’t know where we are?”

  “I figured you might get in trouble and I ought to pretend from a little closer. But when you got in trouble, I had no idea what it was, or where you were—idiot!”

  He pulled her close, and they walked with arms linked, murmuring insults. Trumbull looked at them, muttered something about mating practices, and stalked ahead.

  “We still don’t know how to get them off the campus,” I said to Charlie and Audrey. “I don’t think we can try something like that again—they’re too eager for evidence of sabotage. And it sounds like they weren’t even the ones who stole the books—they just haven’t turned in the perpetrators.”

  “I’m really mad at Jesse and Sally, but I don’t want to get them in worse trouble.” Audrey shook herself. “My head hurts. Let’s find out if Trumbull keeps aspirin in the house, and then see if sleeping on it helps. Maybe we’ll have a great idea in the morning.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Neko met us, found the aspirin, opined that we illustrated every possible reason to avoid practicing magic, and pro forma invited Audrey to sleep in our room again.

  I woke shivering in the early morning, to find Neko and Audrey sitting on the other bed, talking quietly.

  “Were you having nightmares too?” asked Neko. She patted a free spot amid the sheets, and I struggled free of the dream’s paralysis to join them.

  “Shub-Nigaroth’s laughter,” I said bitterly.

  “What’s that mean?” asked Audrey.

  “It means,” said Neko, “that it’s not practical to fear everything in the universe that’s scary.”

  “Essentially, yes,” I said. “So She probably thinks it’s funny that I now have nightmares about being cold, too.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Neko, and hugged me tightly. I leaned against her, trying to forget the airless chill of my dream.

  “You too?” I asked Audrey.

  “My dreams were different,” she said, turning her head away. Audrey, stripped of her usual manic confidence, seemed a worrisome and vulnerable thing.

  “Different how?” I tugged on the sleeve of her nightgown, and she let herself be drawn back to our mammalian warmth.

  “It was a good dream. Sort of.”

  “Oh, those,” said Neko.

  Audrey flopped back on the bed. “I read too much about the Mad Ones, the other day. I dreamed that we were in that basement, unable to move, listening to Trumbull talk about how dangerous the spell was, and I just—just turned into smoke or energy or something. It was easy. And I floated over and started doing things to Barlow and Peters, to make them stop. It wasn’t like the spells you’ve been teaching us—I only needed to think about it to break them, and I felt so smug that I’d saved everyone. And then I started doing the same thing to Sally—” I held her while she sobbed. Between her gasps I caught the word “monster,” repeated.

  Neko held her too. “No, you’re not, you’re not—Audrey, look at me. Look at me.” At last Audrey did pull back and turn, sniffling. Neko went on. “Only the way we all are. You know those horrible movies, with the Japanese villains all white guys in bad makeup?” Audrey nodded, shakily, and I got the feeling that she’d liked some of those movies better than we had. “I have dreams where they come and get us out of the camps. Or where I’m one. Sometimes you look for strength where you can find it, even if it’s horrible.”

  “But that’s different. The Mad Ones really are down there somewhere, right now, eating slaves and mutilating prisoners.”

  “And men of the air are up here,” I said, “mutilating prisoners and killing millions in wars and trying to summon brain-eating entities for power, and probably eating things I don’t want to think about too. And Trumbull’s people sacrifice kids for immortality. And my people, under the water, preserve every stupid idea humans have had since we first lit fires. We’re all monsters, or related to monsters, one way or another.” I wrapped my arms around my knees, still shivering. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t very reassuring.”

  “No, it kind of was.” She sat up, rubbing her eyes.

  “Salt water?” I asked, and Neko laughed. “What?”

  “You’re predictable, that’s all. Audrey, she wants to wash your tears into a jar so you can give them back to the ocean. It’s actually weirdly comforting, too.”

  Audrey laughed shakily. “Sure, why not. It’s not like anyone else wants them.”

  I got up and padded out to the kitchen. The dining room was dark—thankfully Trumbull wasn’t working late tonight.

  I showed Audrey how to use the salt water. She dipped her fingers, wiped her eyes, then dipped her fingers back into the cup I’d found. I set it aside on the sill.

 
“Trumbull’s asleep,” I said. “I wonder if she’s having a bad night too.”

  “Do Yith dream?” asked Neko.

  “I’ve no idea. I’d expect them to have a fair amount of control over it, if so—but she really was scared.”

  “She wouldn’t have acted so angry if she wasn’t,” said Audrey. “I’m glad she stuck around to save us, even if she was a jerk about it afterward.”

  “So am I,” I said. “I hope she’s human enough right now for sleep to do her some good. Whatever happens next, I suspect we’ll need her help to get through it.” And persuading her to grant that help—if it were possible at all—would probably be my task.

  * * *

  I’d just fallen back asleep at last—or so it felt—when a pounding on the front door shocked me awake. I lay still a long moment, caught between waking and dreaming, before I realized that it was 1949, and this couldn’t be the soldiers who’d demanded entry twenty-one years past. It’s January 27th. The anniversary of my father’s death had passed yesterday, unnoticed in the tumult.

  The knocking paused and started again, and it occurred to me that if Trumbull’s amnesias hadn’t taken, this still might be soldiers. Neko sat up, wide-eyed. We both started throwing on clothes. Audrey rolled over, and I nudged her.

  “Oh god, my head. What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know,” I said grimly.

  We hurried into the hall to see Trumbull in a bathrobe and an extremely irritated expression. She opened the door, and Spector rushed in. Charlie followed more slowly a few yards behind.

  “What on earth is going on?” Spector demanded. He stamped snow off his feet and glared. “Barlow insists that someone sabotaged one of his experiments last night. He’s convinced you did it even though he didn’t see anyone and won’t say how it happened. And he says his secretary is ‘damaged,’ as if she were a piece of equipment. He swears he’ll have me disciplined for recruiting a ‘team of moles,’ and Mr. Day insists he didn’t see anything.”