Black Swan Rising (37 page)

“Marguerite,” she said aloud, “always trust your instincts.”
I love you so much, sweetheart, I am so proud of you,
she thought. “You’re a rare bird . . . unique . . . think for yourself . . .”

I heard the sirens blaring, drowning out her next words, but my eyes were on her face in the rearview mirror, and I could see her lips moving and hear the words she spoke aloud echoed in her thoughts.

I know you love me. Don’t be afraid,
my mother told me.

“There’s something else I need to tell you,” my mother shouted aloud.

I wanted to tell you about the Watchtower,
she told me now.
I shouldn’t have kept it from you, but I saw it kill my mother. I thought that if I pretended it didn’t exist, I would be free of it and then you would be free of it. But it came looking for me again
. . .

The Jaws of Life was tearing apart the car now.

That’s why I wanted you to go away to college.

The fireman was pulling me out of the car.

That’s why I was going to go away. Tell your father I was only leaving to protect him and you
. . .
tell him
. . .

My sixteen-year-old self was fighting the fireman, but inside I was calm. I only had to wait for the next loop and I would break into my mother’s head sooner. I would make her pull over. I would stop the accident. I would keep her alive.
You’ll
tell him yourself,
I thought as I was pulled out of the car.
I love you, Mom. I’m going to save you next time.

But instead of going back to the car, I was actually getting farther away from it. I turned and saw the car blow up, the
whoosh
of the explosion eerily echoed by the crackle of the dragon’s flames in my own head. But I could already hear the fire inside me dying down, retreating from my brain, smoldering in my veins. The scene in front of me was fading like an overexposed photograph. I screamed along with my sixteen-year-old self, desperate to stay in the moment. I could go back! I could change this! I fixed my eyes on the flames, willing the dragon’s fire back into my brain, but it was already gone. I could already feel the cold floor of Ddraik’s cave against my skin.

Just before the scene faded completely, though, I noticed a figure standing behind the fire, on the far side of the median among the EMTs who had arrived to help the owner of the Expedition. His shape wavered in the heat waves from the fire giving him the appearance of a mirage. But he wasn’t a mirage. He was there. He had always been there. John Dee stood beside the fire that had killed my mother and stared through the flames directly at me.

I awoke on the floor of Ddraik’s cave screaming, “Send me back! Send me back!” I flung myself at the dragon, pounding my fists against his scaly hide. For answer he wrapped his tail around my back and held me firmly in his grip.

“It took great strength to break free of your worst memory, but it shows even greater strength to be willing to go back. You are truly a descendant of the Watchtower, Margaret James. I am proud to have shared your memories.”

“Then send me back!” I sobbed.

“That I cannot do. Nor would it make any difference. Your mother was right—you cannot change the past. But you did a rare thing—you sent a message back.”

“Did she?” I heard Oberon’s voice from behind me. At some point he and Ignatius had come back into the room.

“Yes, she did. This one’s stronger than you thought,” Ddraik answered, then he said to me, “Your mother died knowing that you survived and grew into a strong woman. No mother could ask for more.” He stroked my face with the surprisingly soft tip of his tail, brushing away my tears. His stroke kindled a flame in the pit of my belly and I realized that Ddraik’s fire
had not left my body. It had retreated deep inside where it smoldered—a hearth fire banked against a long winter’s night—for me to draw on if need be.

I drew on it now, pulling it into the palms of my hands. I pictured Dee as I’d just seen him, standing behind the car fire that had consumed my mother. Of course, I realized, that’s why my mother had thought of Dee when she saw the fog. Dee had sent the fog that pushed the Ford Expedition into our car, killing my mother, and then he had watched me while my mother burned to decide if I was anything to be afraid of. Clearly he’d decided I hadn’t been. I pictured him now
inside
the fire I summoned into my hands. A huge ball of fire sprung from my palms and grew to fill the room. I heard Oberon and Ignatius scurrying backward, but Ddraik only chuckled.

“Yes! Much stronger than you thought!”

I smiled at Ddraik, letting the fireball shrink back to a spark that slipped into my veins. “Thank you,” I said, bowing. Then, turning to Oberon, who was cowering near the door with Ignatius, I said, “Let’s go home. I think I know how to find Dee.”

On the subway ride back Oberon wanted to know what I’d learned that would help us find Dee, but I told him that I had to show him. That was only half-true. Really, I wanted to talk about something else.

“Did you know that Dee killed my mother?”

“What makes you think that?” he asked, glaring at a man whose legs were spread out so wide he was taking up three seats. The man got up and walked to the end of the car.

“I saw him at the site of the accident.”

Oberon shook his head, then patted me reassuringly on the shoulder.

“I was afraid that was where Ddraik would take you. That must have been very painful.” He laid his hand on mine. It felt cool against my overheated skin, soothing. A green glow flowed from his skin to mine. I felt it quenching the fire that still smoldered in my veins.

I took my hand away. I wasn’t ready to have my anger quenched. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“I suspected,” he said. “In the days before your mother’s death she came to me and told me that she thought John Dee was in New York. She told me she was going to send you away to school and then leave the country—that there was something she had to do back in France.”

“Did she say what?”

“No, she didn’t. I’m afraid she didn’t trust me entirely. She resented how the Watchtower had ruled her mother’s life and believed that she had died because of it. She made me promise not to initiate you if anything happened to her. And then she died. I suspected Dee might have been behind the accident, but I found no sign of him in New York afterward. Then I heard through contacts abroad that he’d been spotted in France. Perhaps Dee learned that was where your mother had been headed and he went to find out why.”

We’d reached our stop. I followed Oberon out of the station. When we got up to the street, I was surprised to see that it was nearly dark already. I checked my watch and saw that it was four thirty—sunset at this time of year, but there should have been a lot more light. When I looked up at the sky, I saw
why there wasn’t. A heavy fog obscured the western sky, smothering any last rays of the setting sun.

“We’d better hurry,” Oberon said. “If you saw Dee in your memories, he probably knows you’ve been to see Ddraik. He’s not going to bother going after your friends anymore—he’s going to go straight for you.”

We walked briskly, but at the last street corner on the way to my house we had to slow up because a large crowd had congregated, blocking the pavement. The crowd and thick strands of fog obscured our view at first, but soon we could see that, near the curb, a half dozen police officers had surrounded two well-dressed men who, from their bloodied faces, had been in a fistfight. Police were handcuffing them but the taller man was still screaming expletives at the shorter man. The shorter man’s attaché case lay open on the sidewalk near his feet, the pile of papers in it beginning to be strewn about by the wind. I observed that his face seemed to be streaked with tears as well as blood. I thought of helping the man with his wafting-away paper pile, but as I took a step toward him, the police deepened their ring around them with some new arrivals.

Then Oberon and I started to slip through the crowd, and I overheard a pale, slender woman in a quilted red riding jacket say to her companion, “It’s been the darndest day, Angelique. I also saw a fight like this on the way to my subway station in Queens this morning. Also normal-looking businessmen. And Chris called me at work this afternoon—he’s off today—to tell me there were two separate house fires raging at opposite ends of our block. What a bleak coincidence; there hasn’t been
a fire on the block in ten years! Both have been put out, but still, I’m starting to get the creeps. Is something in the air?”

“Back in the islands we call it voodoo wind,” Angelique answered in a soft but somehow emphatic voice. “It is creepy, but I haven’t run into anything today until now.”

“Discord,” Oberon muttered under his breath. “A sometimes erratic but always most poisonous demon.” He glanced around at the fog, which was starting to break up in the wind, but was still coiling around lampposts and trees with the sinuousness of multiplying snakes. In the east, the sky was graying. “Angelique may not have much longer to wait,” he rumbled, taking my hand briefly as we walked on.

At the town house I told Oberon to stay on the second floor and wait for me while I got something from my studio on the third floor. I found him sitting on the couch, sniffing the empty wineglasses.

“Mandrake root and hellebore,” he said. “The combination increases melancholy and makes the user susceptible to suggestion.”

I sat down next to him and used the remote to turn on the TV and select the movie Jay and Becky had watched. I fast-forwarded to the end where Robert Osborne came on and paused. “There,” I said, pointing at the portrait of Madame Dufay. “I knew I’d seen this woman’s eyes before, but really I’d just seen one of her eyes.” I opened my hand and showed Oberon the lover’s eye brooch.

He jumped up, knocking over the wineglasses on the table. “Where did you get that thing? Cover it up!”

I closed my hand. “I got it at Dee’s shop. Why are you so afraid of it?”

“Dee can see through it.” Oberon moved closer to the TV screen and bent down to look at the portrait. “Yes, you’re probably right about the eye matching the portrait. They’re a pair. An enchantment was placed on both the portrait and the miniature, so that if you look through the eye of the portrait you can see what the lover’s eye looks upon—sort of like a remote camera. In fact, I remember when this particular portrait was painted.”

“You do? Did you know her? She looks so sad.”

“Madame Dufay? Yes, she had good reason to be sad. I knew her in Paris in the days just before the Reign of Terror. Now
there
was a time when the demons of Discord and Despair ran rampant! Madame Dufay was a young woman at the court of Louis the Sixteenth. She fell in love there with a young man of mysterious birth and questionable repute. He commissioned a painter to do her portrait, but she knew that because the king frowned on the romance, he would not be able to display it. So she asked the painter to do a miniature of just her eye, so that her lover could wear it and no one but she would know to whom he was professing his devotion. While the artist was painting the eye, she said to him, ‘If only I could see through this eye, I would always be with my lover.’

“And the painter, who had fallen in love with her, thought to himself, ‘If she could see how her lover conducts himself while away from her, she would see he was unworthy of her.’ So he went to a man in Paris who was rumored to know how to make spells. The magician agreed to give him a magical pigment to use in his paintings to effect the spell, on the agreement
that he would be named the painter’s beneficiary in the event of his death. The painter agreed, completed the portrait and the lover’s eye, and gave the portrait to Madame Dufay and the lover’s eye to her lover. The first night he wore it, though, an attempt was made on his life. Seeing this through the eye, Madame Dufay, who was nearby, ran to his aid and was killed herself. When the painter learned what had happened because of him, he hung himself, and his paintings—including the one which Madame Dufay had yet to pay for—became the property of the magician—”

“Wait, don’t tell me . . . the magician was John Dee.”

Oberon inclined his head. “He must have left the eye in his shop hoping you would pick it up and that he’d be able to spy on you. You must destroy it.” Oberon reached for the brooch in my hand.

“No!” I said, pulling my hand away. He looked at me in surprise. I was surprised myself. Since the ordeal in Ddraik’s cave I’d felt a shift in my relationship with Oberon, but I hadn’t realized until now that I knew something he didn’t . . . or at least I thought I did. “I think the eye wanted to be left behind. I think it—she—wanted me to find her. There’s a link between us. I can feel it.”

Oberon sucked in his breath and narrowed his eyes at me. “Ddraik was right. You
are
stronger than I thought. But still, you don’t have my experience. I agree that there might be a link between you and Madame Dufay, but how is that going to help us find Dee?”

“Like this.” I opened my hand. The eye blinked in the sudden light. Oberon backed away.
Why is he so freaked out by it?
I wondered. Something in the way he had told the story seemed . . .
off
to me. As if he were reciting from a script. But
I didn’t have time to ponder the question right now. Oberon was correct about one thing: Dee could be using the portrait to watch us. I was hoping, though, that the portrait was still hanging over his fireplace.