Ghostlight (25 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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If she could.
 
“Dylan? It's Truth.”
“Truth! Hey, this is great! Where are you?” Dylan was unfeignedly glad to hear from her, and Truth felt a faint twinge of guilt for the fact that she was only calling to beg a favor.
“I'm in a little place called Shadowkill. It's in Dutchess, I came here to see Shadow's Gate, and—”
The practiced phrases came easily to her tongue; the history of the house as she had unearthed it; her belief that it was a center of paranormal energy, the events that had occurred in the house so far.
“—just a little PK and some channeling; a cold spot in the library but I don't think that's where the real action is. There's a trance medium living there, and—”
And she's my sister,
Truth added silently. She went on explaining what she'd learned and what she'd guessed.
“—he's not really interested in strangers showing up
around the place, but he doesn't have too much objection to the monitoring equipment, so I thought—”
She'd come back to the library in Shadowkill to use its phone, and was perched on the narrow, angular bench in its old-fashioned wooden booth. Through the glass door she could see the library information desk, and the rows and rows of books in their turn-of-the-century shelving beyond.
Shadowkill was a nice town, simple and friendly. Then why did she feel so afraid—as if there were something she would soon try to protect it from, and fail?
“What? Dylan, I didn't hear you.” Abruptly conscious that her mind was wandering, Truth was jolted back to the present by the interrogative note in Dylan's tone.
“I said, why not let me drive up this weekend with a truck and a couple of my grad students and set the stuff up and run a few tests. I can take you out to dinner, and—”
“No.” The refusal was so instantaneous that it was rude, and she hastened to amend it. “Julian doesn't want any strangers here.”
There was a pause. “Ah,” Dylan said, and now some of the warmth was gone from his voice. “Julian, is it? The reclusive new master of Shadow's Gate?”
“Honestly, Dylan, you sound like a bad Gothic novel,” Truth snapped. At the moment she didn't remember her wistful fantasies of opportunities lost; she was thoroughly irritated with Dylan and it was difficult to recall that she was trying to get him to do what she wanted.
“It's just that—Look, of course the man is filthy rich and could probably afford to buy the Institute's whole array out of pocket change—”
Dylan laughed. “Not unless his pockets are two point five million dollars deep.”
“Well, they may be,” Truth said, thinking of what she'd seen so far. There was a silence.
“He's doing the Blackburn Work,” Truth blurted out suddenly.
“Does he know who you are?” Dylan asked carefully.
“Yes.”
To the devil, a daughter.
“It's just that I—I have—My sister's here, Dylan, and—”
“I'm coming down there,” Dylan said, cutting her off. “You don't know what you're getting into with these people.”
His matter-of-fact assumption of the right to meddle grated on her sensibilities, but a chill distant part of her was amused—that this innocent should be presuming to protect
her
, all unknowing of what she was.
The moment passed.
“If
you
know, Dylan, then I'm worried about you,” Truth said, fighting for lightness. “And I, of all people, know exactly what ‘these people' are like.”
“A sister. You said a sister,” Dylan said. He sounded flustered.
“Blackburn fathered other children,” Truth said baldly. “One of them is here. That's all.”
There was a fulminating silence on the other end of the line that told Truth that, in Dylan's opinion,
that
was far from
all.
This conversation was not going well at all. Had she always been this clumsy in her handling of other people? Or was it only because Dylan Palmer took the time to try to pierce her chilly armor?
A choice
, her inner intuition whispered.
You have a choice to make here, Daughter of Earth.
“Look,” Truth said, trying to bring the subject back on track. “The important thing right now is to map the extent of the Paranormal Event taking place in Shadow's Gate. Julian's willing to have you bring a team up to the house in November and do anything you want, but I really think we need to start mapping now. I need you.”
It's dangerous here, Dylan, but if I tell you that you won't listen to anything else I say.
Truth broke off, sighing, and rubbed her forehead with her free hand. Her sleepless night made her bones ache with exhaustion, but it wasn't only that. Everything seemed to be tiring these days, as if her weariness formed the invisible walls that constrained her to follow the path appointed for her.
“I need you,” she repeated, “to get me the equipment. The cameras. Some of the monitors. I know what I'm asking, Dylan—”
“No, I don't think you do,” he said quietly, and the conversation died again.
“What do I have to say to make you do what I want?” Truth blurted out in frustration. If this was a sample of the sort of so-called normal life people were always urging on her, she'd stay the way she was, thank you. “I need those monitors. I need to
know.
Before someone gets hurt,” she added in an undertone.
Over the long-distance line she heard Dylan sigh.
“Truth, it's not that—These monitors aren't cheap. Even if I only bring up one of the barometric arrays and a camera … Do you know that film costs one hundred twenty dollars a roll? Which budget line am I supposed to hide those costs in?”
“I'll pay for it myself,” Truth muttered.
“It doesn't work that way. Truth—” She heard him sigh again, and imagined she could feel his breath stir the tendrils of hair coiling against her cheek—and did that image repel or attract her? “What are you
doing
up there?” Dylan asked helplessly.
This time her emotions went spinning out of control, and her self-command shattered like a thrown plate. “What am I
doing
, Dylan? I'm doing what you and everyone else has always badgered me to do. I'm getting involved. I'm being reckless. I'm getting in touch with my feelings. Hell, I'm even getting in touch with my father.” The laugh that followed was mocking and barely controlled. “I'm getting to know my father
better, Dylan—isn't that something you'd think was appropriate?”
She felt the song of power rise up in her; the headiness of knowing that if she only chose to use it she had the ability to wound with a word, to change the course of others' lives, to force them to obey because she had the power to command
“I'm coming up there and I'm bringing you back with me. And if this Julian of yours tries to stop me—” Dylan's voice was edgy, harsh. Truth could feel the tension thrill between them like a tight-drawn whiplash, shocking her back to the world.
“‘This Julian of mine' will rightly point out to you, Dylan Palmer, that you've got no grounds for treating me like a teenaged runaway,” Truth said. She held her trembling voice even and low with an effort; every instinct urged her to shrill at him; if he were here she would
claw.
… “I'm a grown woman. I need that equipment. I thought you'd help me. You won't. That's all.” Her hands were shaking. She took a deep breath.
“I'll help you.” Dylan's voice was so low she had to strain to hear it. “I'll see what I can sign out. Is there a number where you can be reached?”
She'd won, but the victory didn't make her happy. “I'm staying at Shadow's Gate, but the phone service isn't very reliable. I've bought a cell, only it isn't working either, most of the time. You can try them both, though.” She gave him both numbers; he read them back to her.
Truth hesitated; Dylan did not deserve this treatment from her. “I'm sorry I snapped at you, Dyl. I—”
She wavered over telling him about Aunt Caroline's death, then recoiled from the thought of using her aunt's death to buy cheap sympathy. No matter what, she would not do that.
“I've been having some personal problems lately,” she finally said. “And I'm worried about these people. They're
playing occultist in a haunted house and I think they're playing with fire.”
“And with the money you say this Julian's got, they can afford a really expensive box of matches,” Dylan said, finishing her unvoiced thought. “If there's—If there's anything else I can do, Truth, just tell me. Maybe Colin—”
“No outsiders,” Truth said quickly. “Julian …” What could she say that wouldn't rouse Dylan's misgivings again? “Just wait a few weeks, Dylan, okay? After Halloween everything will be all right.” Even to Truth, the sound of her words had a forlorn echo: whistling past the graveyard.
“If you say so,” Dylan said doubtfully. “I'll do what I can.”
“Thank you,” Truth said honestly. She wanted to say something more, but hated the thought of saying something that wasn't true. “When I needed help, I thought of you,” she finally said. The words came with reluctant honesty.
She could hear Dylan's pleasure in his indrawn breath, and had a sudden disturbing insight into the strength of his feelings for her. She'd done nothing to deserve them; that Dylan felt so strongly about her made her feel trapped, almost unworthy.
No, not unworthy. Almost sorrowful, as if to love her was to court destruction.
“Well, just keep thinking of me, okay? And I'll give you a call tomorrow, assuming I can get through,” Dylan answered.
“Sure.” A few minutes later Truth hung up the phone, most of the conversation already fading from her mind, leaving the memory of Dylan's hurt feelings and willingness to help behind them like a psychic sore tooth. Dylan deserved better than to wait for a kind word from
her.
For a moment she let her mind run free to speculate about what it would be like simply to talk with Dylan about inconsequential things, to wander across the Taghkanic campus with no ulterior motive or end in mind. To find out what Dylan Palmer was like—and what she would be like with him.
Then reality intervened like the closing of an iron-bound door. Even assuming Dylan was interested in such a colossal waste of time, why should he be interested in wasting it with her? If he knew what she was—
And what is that, precisely?
But he did know—didn't he? And he hadn't run screaming into the night yet.
Ready to run screaming into the night yet, Truth?
Hereward's voice from the first night she'd come to Shadow's Gate echoed in her memory.
But this time the words weren't funny.
 
Truth dawdled in Shadowkill as long as she could, buying lunch at the Chinese restaurant on Main Street, browsing through all the pricey little boutiques for some accessories to freshen up her wardrobe. If she was going to be staying at Shadow's Gate for an extended period she was damned if she'd do it looking like a poor relation.
At one of her stops Truth found an exquisite chenille shawl in dark blue yarn; silver threads of Lurex woven through it gave it the look of the sky on a starry night, and though she had no idea what she might possibly wear it with she bought it on the spot. A long vest in bright patchwork velvets from the same store joined her purchases, and a pair of green onyx and marcasite-set silver earrings. She was on the street again, having regretfully decided she'd already spent far too much, when she saw the dress.
The store's name was
“innovations,”
and Truth had decided, looking at the chaste gold-lettered sign in the display window's bottom corner, that she'd better not
even look inside. That was before she looked at the dress in the window.
It was on a dressmaker's form of woven wicker, and the sand-washed silk clung to the wicker's weave like poured cream. It was all the possible shades of green, from the blued fire of an emerald's heart to the peridot-yellow of a tiger's eyes. The silk had been marbled; the dye colors laid on with a wavy flame pattern of a book's endpapers.
The cut was simple—a princess line, with a sweetheart neckline piped in green velvet cord—but it was the skirt that truly made the dress special. Even seeing it hanging on the dressform in the window, Truth could see that the handkerchief hem of the skirt had been inset with a dozen gores of opalescent silk-illusion netting, giving the long skirt a fairytale fullness, as if one of Cinderella's ballgowns had wound up in the village of Shadowkill by mistake.
The dress sparkled.
“How much is it—the one in the window?” Truth found herself asking a few moments later. The saleswoman she spoke to was far too wise to answer straight away; she took the dress off the dummy in the window and handed it to Truth first. The fabric slid over Truth's hands like wintery cream, supple and heavy and gleaming in the light.

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