Yarrow (33 page)

There was no conversation amongst the four as they waited. Ben held Cat's hand. Peter sat on the other side of her, staring at the floor. Debbie was in a chair across the room. They all looked up when the door opened and Detective-Sergeant Potter returned.

"Okay," he said. "Forensic's come up with a set of prints that match Kirkby's." He pulled up a chair and sat down in front of Peter, Cat, and Ben. "I just want you to go through how you ended up under the Marquis again."

"We've already told you," Peter said.

"So humor me. Tell me again."

Peter glanced at Ben, then shrugged. "Okay. Ben arrived at my place, told me that Mick had been killed and that Cat was in danger."

"And you thought she was in danger because of this prowler, the one that you"— he indicated Ben— "and this Jennings had a run-in with a couple of nights ago?"

Ben nodded.

"And then?" Potter prompted.

Peter sighed wearily. "We got to her place just in time to see this Kirkby guy pulling away from her place. We saw that her car door was open, her purse on the ground, so—"

"You gave chase. Who'd you think you were? Clint Eastwood? Why didn't you call us then?"

"I… we… I told you before," Peter said. "We just weren't thinking straight."

Potter regarded him for a moment. They were hiding something. He knew it. All four of them. But whatever it was, he couldn't put his finger on it. The Mitchell woman's story corroborated theirs, the prints on the knife were Kirkby's…. It nagged him that he couldn't get it out of them. But this was the fourth time he'd taken them through it, individually and in a group. He couldn't hold them any longer. He didn't have anything on them.

"Okay," he said with a nod. "I guess you can go. Just make sure you get down to the station later today to sign your statements. Nicholas and Waller, third floor. Ask for Detective-Sergeant Potter. Got it?"

"Yeah. Thanks."

"There's going to be an inquest," Potter added. "You'll have to appear at it. Maybe a court appearance. It all depends on the Crown Prosecutor, but I doubt it'll get to court."

"Sure." Peter stood up.

"Your cab's down in the lot," Potter told Ben. "I had one of the patrolmen drive it over for you."

When Ben didn't say anything, Peter nodded his thanks to the detective. "You guys coming?" he asked.

Cat waited for Ben to get up.

"I'm thinking about Becki," Ben said. "Maybe someone should be here when she… you know, comes around."

"The doctor said they'll both be under sedation for most of the day," Potter said. "You might as well go home."

"I guess…"

"Oh, Ben," Cat said. "I'm so sorry about Mick. If it hadn't been for me—"

Ben shook his head. "It wasn't your fault. It's just… just the way things turned out, I guess." His eyes brimmed with tears. The rage that had allowed him to strike down the parasite had long since fled, replaced with a sense of despair that he could be driven to do such a thing. And losing Mick…

Peter put his arm around Ben's shoulders and Cat took his arm on the other side. Cat understood what Ben was going through. The ache of losing Kothen was still fresh inside her.

Across the room, Potter approached Debbie. "You're free to go as well, Miss Mitchell."

Debbie sighed. She looked across the room to where Cat and Peter were comforting Ben. It's funny, she thought. She knew so many people, but after hearing their story, what they'd gone through for each other, she was just realizing how superficial her life had become. Where was the person she could call a friend? A person that could be counted on like these people counted on each other? Where was the person who could count on her?

"If you could just come down to the station later?" Potter was saying to her.

She nodded.

"Do you need a lift home?"

Debbie stood wearily. "Please."

"Anybody else need a ride?" Potter called over to where the others stood.

Peter shook his head. "We'll be okay. Thanks."

"Suit yourself." The door closed quietly behind Debbie and the detective.

They sat in Cat's kitchen, just the three of them now, too tired to move, too tired to sleep, police and hospital far from their thoughts. Dawn was finally streaking the eastern horizon.

"Cat?" Peter said after a while. They'd spoken no more than a few words to each other since leaving the hospital. "What really happened to… to him?"

She looked up, her eyes haunted. "I… trapped him." She tapped her chest. "He's here. Inside me."

Haltingly she tried to tell them what had happened in the Otherworld, watching their faces to gauge their reactions. But the disbelief she'd half expected to see never came. Both Ben and Peter had seen and experienced enough to accept just about anything at this point.

"Jesus," Ben said when she was done.

"I'm scared," she told them. "Scared to sleep, because of what I might dream. Scared he's going to get loose. Scared that he's going to turn me into whatever he was. Scared that some part of me
wants
to like him…."

Ben reached across the table to take her hand. "Nothing's going to turn you into what he was, Cat."

"We can't know that. We don't even know
what
he was. Or how he got to be that way."

Peter shook his head. "Ben's right, Cat. There's no way you're going to become what he was. If you were strong enough to… to trap him like you did, you're strong enough to keep him there."

"Do you really think so?" she asked in a small voice.

"I know so." Peter glanced at Ben. "And if you need any help, we're going to be around— for as long as you can stand us."

He said it lightly, but she knew he meant it. Ben tightened his grip on her hand. For a moment she felt good, thinking that there'd be people to share this awful burden with her, then she realized that it just couldn't be that way. She pulled her hand from Ben's and folded her arms so that neither of them would see how she was trembling.

"It won't work," she said.

"Don't push us away, Cat," Peter said.

"I don't want to!" Her eyes brimmed with tears but she refused to cry. "You just don't understand, neither of you. I'm not me anymore, not… not with this
thing
inside me."

"That doesn't matter to me," Ben said.

Peter nodded. "Or to me."

"Well, it should. I couldn't stand becoming what he was and maybe… maybe finding myself feeding on
your
dreams…."

Ben tried to reach for her hand again, but she backed away in her chair. He started to say something, then paused, looking helplessly at Peter.

Peter found it hard to meet his gaze. He was remembering how Cat had fled from his apartment last night. He didn't want to get into another argument with her. He didn't want to tiptoe around her, but he figured that after all she'd gone through, after the things that had seemed to prove her to be crazy had finally been validated, it wasn't his place to try to force her to do anything.

Ben read something of Peter's thoughts and nodded, almost to himself. "Okay," he said to Cat. "I'm here if you want a friend, but I won't push."

"It's not that I don't care about you…."

"I understand, Cat. Really I do. Look, maybe you should try to get some sleep."

She shook her head. "I can't, Ben. I just can't."

"You're going to have to sleep sooner or later. It's either go to sleep on your own, or keel over from exhaustion."

"We'll stay, if you want," Peter added. "Downstairs. You need something— anything— just call down to us."

"But I can't let you just—"

"No more arguments," Peter said. He gave Ben a quick glance.

Ben blinked, then came around the table and helped her to her feet. This close to her, it was hard not to just gather her in his arms, but he fought the impulse.

"I'll go to the glade," she said as Ben left her at the door to her bedroom. "I can't go back to the hill. I want to know if Tiddy Mun's all right, but I just can't go there yet."

"You do that," Ben said. "Just try to find some peace, Cat. That's what you need. Some distance between what happened tonight and the future. And it'll come."

He stood there and for a moment Cat thought he was going to kiss her, but then he turned and went back down the stairs. She watched him go, torn between wanting to call him back and knowing that she had to be alone. She didn't think she'd be able to sleep, not all wound up as she was and knowing that they were downstairs waiting for her to do just that. But the pillow was so soft against her cheek when she lay down, and she was feeling so drowsy….

The glade was deserted. Slowly she walked under the apple trees, pausing when she was a few feet away from the stone wall of the pool.

"Mynfel?" she called softly.

There was no reply. Morning had stolen into the glade. Sunlight gleamed on the surface of the pool as she drew near it.

"Please," she said. "Come to me this one last time. I have to understand. What's real? Am I a dream, or is it this place?"

Though she needed a voice to answer her, the quiet of the glade soothed her. She closed the remaining distance between herself and the pool and knelt down by the wall. Looking into its water, she knew she had to accept that the riddles would stay unanswered. Her own face looked back at her— without the antlers, without the strangeness in her eyes.

She wasn't sure when the wood's mistress came, but suddenly she looked up and Mynfel was standing across the pool from her.

"This world is real," the antlered woman said. "You and I are the strangers in it, but only one of us is real as you use the word. We are two sides of the same tree, dear heart. I was here because you needed me. But you do not need me anymore."

The horned woman had never spoken before. Her voice was low and throaty. Like one unused to speaking.

"I need you now more than ever," Cat said.

"Yours is now the strength."

"But that thing's inside me. I'm not strong enough."

"You are strong enough. Did Kothen not name you Yarrow? Heal-All?"

"Yes, but—"

"Then heal our world of its hurts, dear heart. Heal yourself of the shadow that worries you from within."

"Did… did I just make you up?"

"I was always your reflection." Mynfel smiled her smile of old. "As you were mine."

Cat looked back at the surface of the pool. Again there were antlers on the image's brow, but Cat couldn't feel their weight.

"Set me free," Mynfel said.

Their gazes met— Cat's searching, Mynfel's warm and full of riddles to which there could never be answers. Slowly Cat lowered her gaze. She leaned over the pool and stirred the reflection with her hand, the white scar on her palm shining through the water.

When she looked up again, Mynfel was gone. But Cat didn't feel alone. She knew she
was
strong now. Not just because she had to be, or because Peter and Ben and Mynfel said she had to be, but because she was.

She felt the thing that had been the parasite stir inside her. Rather than fighting it, she sent down peaceful, soothing thoughts. The shadow withdrew, deep and deeper, fleeing.

Cat stood up and smiled.

Years had been crammed into the past week. So much pain and sorrow. But at last she knew her own peace. Not borrowed from ghosts or the Otherworld, or lately from Peter and Ben. But a peace of her own. And because of it she had something more to offer them than just her need. She could be Peter's friend. And Ben…

She left the glade and headed west through the forest. Shafts of sunlight dropped through the giant oaks, giving the wood its cathedral effect again. The air was invigorating, and she began to run. In no time at all she was out of the forest. She saw Redcap Hill in front of her, the three standing stones stark and gray on its summit, the fairy thorn on its slope. She heard a shout and turned to find Tiddy Mun hobbling toward her, with Toby at his side, supporting him. It was because of them that she'd come.

Tiddy Mun waited for her to drop to her knees and hold open her arms to him, then he hugged her tight with his one good arm. "I missed you," he murmured in her ear, "I was so afraid. I couldn't get home. Whenever I tried to, I couldn't find the way. The darkness was everywhere. But then in the cave of the iron dragons, when you washed the darkness away, suddenly I could see the borders again and step my way home."

"Peter and Ben both told me how brave you were," she said. "You're the bravest gnome that I ever knew."

The little man blushed and hid his face against her shoulder. When she squeezed him, he winced and Cat, held him at arm's length, worry plain on her face.

"You were hurt," she said.

Tiddy Mun nodded. "The iron in… in the metal dragon. It burned me…."

"Oh, Tiddy!"

She turned him around and pulled up his tunic to examine his back. Her face paled. The skin on his back was raw in places, inflamed from the tops of his shoulder blades to the small of his back and all along his right side. She imagined how much it must hurt. The chaffing of cloth against the wound alone…

"The bravest gnome of all," she murmured.

She wanted to help, but didn't know what she could do. She lifted a hand, hesitated. Mynfel's words returned to her.

Yarrow. Heal-All. Heal our world of its hurts.

If only she could.

If she could be like some biblical healer and cure such afflictions by a laying on of her hands….

Her palm throbbed, and she looked down at the white scar. Again she felt the weight on her brow. Perhaps in her own world she'd be helpless, but here, in the Otherworld… If what it took was wanting to, wanting to so bad… caring so much…

She laid her palm gently against the little man's back and felt the hotness of his wound run into her hand as she willed his pain away with all her heart. Before her eyes his skin cleared, the inflammation dying, whitening, healing….

Tiddy Mun let out a long sigh of relief as Cat stepped back. She stared in wonder at her hand, his back, her hand again. The scar on her palm flamed red— a bright slash against her skin— then dulled and was white once more. The throbbing stilled. Her brow was light again, the weight gone, and she understood at last what it was that she had become in the Otherworld.