Black Swan Rising (36 page)

He chuckled. “Snoop Dogg’s twitters really crack me up.” He typed something using two claws and chuckled again. Then he whisked his tail across the screen and growled. “The euro’s bubbling up again. Sell the dollar short. The greed of these currency traders amazes me. It puts a dragon to shame.” He cracked open the iPhone like a clamshell and using two claws like a pair of tweezers delicately extracted its circuit board. He scanned the ceiling above him, blew a stream of fire at a spot until the metal glowed red-hot, and then pressed the circuit board into the molten metal. Looking up, I realized that the whole room was paved with circuit boards among the jewels and coins and melted precious metals, the copper tracings on all those circuit boards creating an intricate filigreed pattern.

“What’s he making?” I hissed at Ignatius.

“A supercomputer,” Ignatius said with a sigh.

“Did you get me any more RAID cards?” Ddraik growled.

“Not yet, sir, but I’ve summonsed a couple of Mac employees for hacking violations and suggested they could pay their fines in terabytes.”

“Heh heh, tell them they’ve been pwned!” Ddraik chuckled. Then he touched the tip of his claw to one of the copper lines
in the circuit board and the whole network lit up. It spanned the breadth of the vaulted ceiling, ran down the columns, and spread across the floor—a pulsing red web. Images and numbers flashed through the air, too fast for me to identify.

“Traditionally dragons hoard gold,” Oberon said. “But since the dawn of the information age Ddraik has been hoarding data.”

“Knowledge is power,” the dragon repeated, “at least most of the time. Every once in a while, like this past autumn, you humans screw up so badly knowledge, and the patterns it reveals, doesn’t work anymore.” He touched his claw tip to the groove again. The network pulsed and flashed even faster, until its information was an intense blue blur. Then it was nothing but blinding white light for a millisecond as if chaos had coalesced into a vision, then it went back to spewing images and numbers, but more weakly now. Almost wanly. Ddraik grinned. “The trend is your friend,” he rumbled. “Until it ends with no warning. But go on,” he said, fixing me with a glowing red eye. “Ask me something.”

“Where’s Dee?” I asked without a moment’s hesitation.

Ddraik reached a claw up into the air and intercepted a stream of bright light. A picture shimmered in the air of John Dee seated in a red chair before a fireplace. It was the same setting I had seen him in beneath the river—and, I realized, the same as the TCM set—down to the silver box on the table beside his chair and the portrait of the sad-looking eighteenth-century lady above the fireplace.

“But this doesn’t tell me where to find him,” I complained.

“Doesn’t it?” Ddraik asked, cocking his huge head at the image. “I only provide the data. What you do with it is up to you.”

I stared at the picture of Dee. Although the fire crackled
behind him, he was motionless—static. “It’s not a live shot, is it? It’s as if he’s posing.”

“I think we can look at it as a sort of ‘away message’ he’s left for us,” Oberon said. “But Ddraik’s right. Knowing Dee, he’s left some clue to his real whereabouts in the image.”

I stared harder at the picture, examining every brick in the fireplace, then moving up to the portrait. The subject regarded me dolefully out of almond-shaped eyes. I felt sure I had met that gaze before, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where. I noticed, though, that a name was engraved on a brass plate affixed to the frame.
MADAME DUFAY
it read. Might her identity provide some clue to Dee’s location? I looked in her eyes again and felt a stirring of recognition just as the image faded from the air.

“Enough!” Ddraik roared. “I don’t give information for free. What have you to offer me?”

“Me?” I looked back to Oberon and Ignatius, but they had backed away farther into the doorway. “I don’t think I know anything that you’d be interested in.”

The dragon stretched his neck until the tip of his nose was level with my face. I nearly gagged at the sharp odor of burnt hair on his breath as he sniffed at me, but I didn’t move. “Mmmm . . . I think you might have one or two very tasty memories. If you would allow me to warm them up a little—”

“Remember, Ddraik, this is a descendant of the Watchtower,” Oberon said. “We need her.”

“If she’s a true descendant of the Watchtower, she’ll be in no danger. What say you, Garet James? Shall we explore the past together?”

“Oberon? Is this . . . safe?”

Ignatius made a sound that might have been a stifled giggle.
After a pause too long for my peace of mind Oberon sighed. “The important thing to remember is that the fire reveals the truth—but not
all
truths.”

“The fire?” I asked, but the only answer I got was the click of the door latch. I turned, but Oberon and Ignatius were gone. I heard the bolts on the other side of the door sliding home, then heard a gasp and felt something tugging me backward. I whirled around to find Ddraik reared up on his hind legs, his head bent under the high, domed ceiling, his cheeks and belly swollen. The force I’d felt pulling me back was the intake of his breath, which he now released on me.

The fire hit me so hard it knocked me back against the door. I opened my mouth to scream, but that only sucked the fire inside me. I felt it burn the cilia on my windpipe and scorch the lining of my lungs, and then it was in my blood, racing through my heart like brush fire through dry grass, then striking out through my veins to the tips of my fingers and toes. The pain was horrendous, but it was only when it reached my brain that I started to scream again. It reached into every synapse and exploded them like firecrackers. Each explosion sparked a memory: I was three, on a swing in the park, my mother’s hand firm on my back as she pushed me up to the treetops; I was six, eating an ice pop on our front stoop; twelve and waking up scared from a nightmare and wanting to call for my mother, but knowing I was too old. Random memories flashed by so quickly I had no time to process them. I was sixteen smoking a cigarette at a bar in the East Village; I was seventeen standing on top of the Empire State Building with Becky; twenty-six and begging Will Hughes to drink my blood. The fire circled briefly there and raced on. I was four, waking up in a warm puddle in my bed; I was eight and I’d broken an expensive Lalique vase
that my father had given my mother for their anniversary and I hid the pieces so she wouldn’t know about it; I was still eight and lying to my mother about what had happened, watching her face go slack with disappointment; it was last night and I was lying in Will Hughes’s arms on Governors Island.
I’m not ashamed of that,
a voice—my own?—called out.

In an unnerving moment of recognition I realized that faint, faraway voice was my
present
self. The fire had cut me off so thoroughly in the past that I needed to strain desperately to hear my present self, like the faintest of crackling radio signals on a stormy winter night. I was desperate not to let go of that voice, but it only came through on occasion. I clung to it the way Melusine had to her dissolving form, with a fear of the oblivion that lay beyond it.

The fire only laughed and plunged onward. I could feel it seeking, scouring my brain for something it wanted. I was fourteen and making out with a boy I didn’t really like; twenty and losing my temper with a checker at the ShopRite; sixteen and sitting in the back of a rented car wishing my mother dead—

The fire circled and pounced.

No!
that faint voice inside my head screamed.
I never wanted my mother dead.
To my relief the fire left the car and flipped back through my memories of my mother—her hand on my back as I swung at the playground, her face when I won an award at school, her expression when I lied about the vase, her face in the rearview mirror watching me sulk in the backseat.

Aaaahhh,
the fire crooned with a satisfied sigh (I heard its thoughts with the same staticky distance as my own thoughts, but I could tell the difference),
back here again. We’re always here, aren’t we?

It was right. I was in the back of the rented car coming back
from Providence, watching the snow fog up the windows, hating my mother . . . and, yes, wishing her dead. I knew I’d do what she wanted in the end or hate myself for not. I loved her too much. I’d never be free as long as she lived.

That’s not the same as wanting her dead!
my present voice called out, barely audible over the slap of the windshield wipers and the hum of the defrost fan.

“This fog is really thick,” my mother said. “I think I’ll pull off at the next exit.”

I didn’t answer. I knew my mother would do the safe thing, the right thing—she always did. She always knew what ought to be done. As long as she lived, I’d do what she wanted rather than see her disappointed.

A red Ford Expedition passed us.

Tell her to pull over now,
my present self screamed, but my sixteen-year-old self only turned up the volume on her Walkman.

When the Expedition slammed into us, I tried desperately to wrench myself out of the memory—to tell myself it
was
a memory—but I was pinned in the hurtling carapace of metal as surely as I was trapped in my sixteen-year-old body; the little bit of extra consciousness that flickered in Ddraik’s cave only made it worse. I knew that the fire would circle this moment until it had burnt a hole in my brain. Already I could feel the conflagration of this memory spreading out, overtaking all other memories, reducing them to ash. What did it matter how much I loved my mother? I had wished her dead and she had died. This was the truth at the core of my being. This is where I’d spend eternity.

“Garet, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

It was my mother calling me from the front seat. My
sixteen-year-old self was answering that she was okay. My twenty-six-year-old self was shouting that
she
wasn’t okay.
Your mother is going to die and you will spend the rest of your life trapped in this moment!
But that voice was drowned out by the screech of the Jaws of Life tearing through the metal. The fireman was pulling me out . . .

And then I was in the backseat of the car watching the snow fog up the windows, wishing my mother dead, turning up my Walkman, watching the red Ford Expedition pass us . . . I watched it all happen again and again, helpless to change a thing no matter how loud I screamed. The fire cackled happily. It had found the perfect fuel to keep it burning for eternity: my guilt.

On the tenth . . . or was it the hundredth? . . . time I stopped screaming and merely listened instead, lulled by the cadences of my mother’s voice as she lied and told me that everything would be okay. “Always trust your instincts,” she told me.

Right, see how well that’s turned out!

“You’re a rare bird . . . unique . . . think for yourself . . .” But I always missed what she said next in the wail of the sirens. It became, amidst all the horror, a small annoyance.
What was she saying?
Would I be doomed to relive this experience for the rest of eternity without catching my mother’s last words?

I started trying to listen
harder,
but that didn’t work. The sirens were too loud. Perhaps she hadn’t really said anything at all.

But then I recalled that my older self had gained a skill or two in the last few days. I knew how to find true north and see pictures in a pool of water . . . and I knew how to listen to thoughts. Could I listen to my mother’s thoughts in a memory?

And if I could, would I like what I heard there?

Then I recalled what Oberon had said: the fire reveals the truth, but not all truths. Unless I learned something new here, my only truth would be that I was a girl who had killed her mother by wishing her dead. Almost anything had to be better than that.

The next time around I focused on trying to read my mother’s thoughts . . . and got nothing. I tried the next time, and still got nothing, but on the third time, right after she said, “The fog is really thick. I think I’ll pull off at the next exit,” I heard, clear as a bell, two words in my mother’s head. John Dee.

John Dee?
My mind stuttered on the words.
What about John Dee?

My mother’s eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror and met mine.
That
hadn’t happened the last time—or the hundred times before.

Garet? Is that you?

I could hear the fire roaring in my brain, trying now to drown out her voice in my head. I had to scream over it.
Yes! Mom, it’s me—ten years later me—there’s going to be an accident—

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the red Expedition pass us. I couldn’t look at it, though. I couldn’t look away from my mother’s eyes in the mirror, which were now filling with tears.

But you survive?
she asked.
You’re okay?

Yes, but you won’t. Mom, you have to stop—

But the Expedition was already ramming into us and we were flipping over, spinning into space. Still, I had changed something this time. If I tried harder next time . . .

“Garet, can you hear me?”
It was my mother’s voice inside my head, not in my memory. “Are you okay?”

“I’m here, Mom,” my sixteen-year-old self answered. “I’m okay, but I can’t move. Are you okay?”

She’s not! She’s not!
I screamed at myself, but it was my mother who answered; in that pause before she spoke now I clearly heard her say inside my mind,
It’s okay, sweetheart, you can’t change the past.