Shadowlands (24 page)

I remembered what the Rider at the Portal had said. “But humans have been brought here before,” I pointed out. “At least, there are all those old songs and ballads that say so.”

“True,” she agreed. “Both pure-blooded humans and children of mixed blood. But psychics? That’s something we’ve never seen before.”

“Maybe it’s like an allergy,” I said. “Maybe repeated, small exposures would give me an immunity.” I didn’t really need to see the answer in Cassandra’s eyes. I already knew it.

“We don’t know enough—yet—to solve this problem.” Her voice was very gentle. “You have enough Rider blood, and therefore enough
dra’aj
, to sense the Lands, the connection that we all have that allows us to Move, though not enough to Move yourself. It is confusing you rather than helping you.”

“So pure-blooded humans would have no difficulties, since they wouldn’t be able to sense the Lands at all?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

I rubbed at my forehead, feeling the corners of my mouth starting to tremble. My ability, the thing that marked me as part Rider, that might have given me some rights to the Lands, was the very thing that prevented me from staying here. “So what now?”

“Now you will go home, until such a time as we can bring you here without drugs.”

That would be never, I guessed, but she was still speaking.

“But first, I would have you both interviewed by Singers. We must give them all the information we can about the new form of the Hunt, and about the Outsiders.” As if on cue, another Starward rider, dressed in the same colors as Cassandra, appeared in the doorway. “Would you bring Graycloud at Moonrise to Moon, and ask that a Singer be sent here for Valory?”

I waited until Alejandro had kissed me on the forehead and left with the strange Rider before I asked the question I’d been waiting to ask the Dragonborn High Prince.

“
Are
you?”

She smiled, knowing right away what my question meant. “Your mother? Or many times great-grandmother? No. I bore no children
during my time in the Shadowlands.” She smiled when she said this, and I thought she might be planning to have children now. It was strange not to be able to read her. Not unpleasant, just strange. “It will have been some other guided by a Dragon, not I, and if your coloring is true, likely a Sunward Rider. As Alejandro will have told you, there was more traffic between our worlds in the time before the Exile.”

“But you can do what I do?”

To my surprise, she shook her head. “As I said, I see the truth of the physical essence. I see when that essence is not true, and now that I am bound to the Talismans—to Sword and Spear, to Cauldron and Stone—if I see an untruth in the Lands, or in one of the People, I can repair it, Heal it.” She paused, brows drawn down in thought. “I can usually tell when someone is lying to me.” She smiled. “But not always, if they are lying to themselves as well. I cannot see the truth of things apart from the person, as you do.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that did describe what I could do. “Toward the end, when you were touching me, I thought I felt scales—warm, though, not like a snake.”

“That was my Guidebeast you felt.” She tapped her chest. Her
gra’if
mail gloves had fingernails on them, short, thick, and rounded off at the tips of her fingers, as though they were claws. I was already becoming accustomed to the natural look of Riders, so her fingers didn’t seem unnaturally long to me, though her hands were very beautifully shaped. “My Dragon, or rather, the Dragon that is me. It was only through becoming my Guidebeast that I was able to stabilize your condition at all.”

I remembered then that she had lived as a human for a long time. And a doctor, Alejandro had said. But she was still speaking.

“I cannot cure the illness that comes upon you here,” she was saying. “I cannot stay a Dragon for you. My Healing no longer belongs to me alone.”

“You healed Stormwolf,” was what I said aloud.

“He is a Rider,” she said.

“I haven’t told Alejandro,” I admitted. “That Wolf, that he…” I searched her face and saw she understood. “He’s ashamed of it, Wolf, I mean. And now that we know the Hounds can look like Riders, Alejandro would never trust him, no matter what I say.” And that
was the bleak truth of it, I realized. Alejandro would continue to believe what he believed, no matter what the evidence to the contrary.

Cassandra brushed my hair back out of my face, and just for a second I was a child again, in my bed, and my mother was putting the back of her hand on my forehead to test for fever. Even with the
gra’if
on it, Cassandra’s hand was warm and gentle. I wanted to stay in this bed forever.

“I know human addicts, and human addiction. Until I understood what had made the Hunt, I did not believe addiction was possible for the People. But how it functions in Riders?” she shrugged, the gesture looking altogether too human for her, though, like Alejandro, she did it perfectly. “How can I be sure what happens? With human addicts, we could cure the physical cravings, even at times the psychological ones, but we weren’t able always to remove the circumstances that led to the addiction in the first place.”

“You’re afraid this might be true of Wolf as well?” I cleared my throat, swallowed. “You can relax.”

“You have no such concerns? You trust him?”

I nodded, finding my mind ready to drift off on the warm tide of her voice.

“Why?”

“Because I
know
.”

“You see the future?” I shook my head. “Then you have a very hard road in front of you, Valory Martin. I wish I could be of more help.”

You’re not asking me why,
I thought. Why I wanted to help Wolf. And that was good, because I wasn’t sure I knew the answer myself.

We were interrupted at that moment by the Singer, Piper in the Meadow, a Sunward Rider who was guided by a Roc. Cassandra left us, telling me that she would be back when they were ready to Move me, and I should rest as soon as the Singer left me. She gave me more Gravol to take.

“Don’t worry about overdosing,” she said, smiling her quiet smile, “
that
I can cure.”

I told Piper in the Meadow everything I knew about the Outsiders, including everything I could remember of what Nik had said, and what I’d gathered from him the few times I’d touched him. The
Singer hummed while he was speaking to me, but his eyes never left my face, and I knew that he was getting every word. He asked me a couple of questions, thanked me, and left.

I swallowed the tiny pills with the help of the glass of water on the table next to me, tasting the sharpness of the medicine on my tongue washing away under the freshness of the liquid. I had a momentary panic when I thought that maybe I shouldn’t be eating or drinking anything here in case it trapped me. Weren’t there stories about that kind of thing? But surely Alejandro would have warned me, and Cassandra was doing everything she could to get me home.

I lay back in the bed and tried to relax, surprised to find that after a while there were tears trickling down the sides of my face from under my closed eyelids. Somehow the knowledge that I would soon be back in Toronto, in our house in the Beaches, wasn’t very comforting, even though my stomach felt better. With that knowledge came the awareness that this place, the home of at least one of my ancestors, would never be my own.

N
IKOS POLIHRONIDIS RAN whistling up the steps of Elaine’s double-fronted Victorian. Both the design firm and the architects who occupied the main floor were in, so Nik muted his whistling as much as his mood would allow. For the first time in months he was beginning to feel that they might be getting a handle on things, that everything might yet return to normal—or at least what they’d considered normal for the last century or so.

Arlene and Marg were at their desks when he reached the second-floor landing, but he could see that Elaine’s office door was open, so he blew them kisses as he went by. Elaine was dictating into her headset—looked like the Finnegan Brothers were going to settle out of court—and she raised her finger at him. He waited until she finished, and unhooked her earpiece.

“How are you feeling?” he said as he threw himself into the more comfortable of her client chairs.

“I believe the expression is dazed and confused.” Elaine leaned back in her own chair and sighed. “Nikki, I take back every time I
ever felt impatient with you, and every time I got pissed when you took off, leaving me to deal with clients while you ran off to help someone. I had no idea.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head, her eyes glinting. “How long have you…” She rotated her hand in a “keep going” gesture. “Tell me it gets easier.”

“Obviously it does. Look at me. You’ve known me how long?” Nik used his most matter-of-fact tone. Elaine was scared, but an attitude of business as usual would be the thing to steady her. There were still things he needed to tell her—thank god she’d never shown much interest in having children—but he’d save that till later. When she was stronger.

“What happens now?” Elaine’s eyes flicked to the light blinking on her phone until it stopped.

“You have to be careful the first month or so, but Marg and Arlene already know what to look for, so we’ve nothing to worry about.”
Except where I’m going to get you your next shot of
dra’aj. Nik was careful to keep smiling.

“I didn’t say anything to the ladies.” Elaine lifted her head toward the outer office, where their assistants sat.

“Good.” It was one thing for Elaine to know—lots of Outsiders had a normal person they confided at least part of the truth to—but experience had shown them it was better their condition didn’t become general knowledge.

Elaine’s eyes shifted to look over his shoulder and Nik turned around. The smile faded from his face when he saw the short man with the dark blond hair and Slavic features who stood in the doorway, Arlene hovering behind him.

Nik forced himself to look welcoming and got to his feet. “It’s okay, Arlene. This is an old colleague of mine from Kitchener.” Poco helped him out by giving him the handshake, shoulder-hug, kiss-on-both-cheeks greeting of the Mediterranean intimate. “Elaine, I don’t think you’ve ever met—”

“Your cousin from out of town?” Elaine put out her hand and seemed pleased when Poco kissed it.

The small man’s blue eyes twinkled as they shifted from Nik to Elaine and back again. He slapped Nik on the arm with the back of his hand. “Dude.” He turned back to Elaine. “My friends call me
Poco, and now you can do the same.” He looked around at Nik. “Just now I’ve got something I need Nikki for, so if you don’t mind…?”

“We can go to my office.” Nik picked up his cue.

“I hope to see a lot more of you from now on,” Elaine said, as she sat back down and picked up a folder.

“Nuthin’ more likely, darlin’.”

As he led Poco to his own office—a corner office, just like Valory Martin had said—Nik braced himself for the blast he knew was coming. Poco waited until the door was closed behind them.

“Are you out of your mind? What were you thinking?” At least Poco was keeping his voice down.

Nik bit down on the angry retort trying to force its way past his lips. What was he going to say? But this is Elaine? Exceptions should be made for her? He tried to dial down on the emotion. “You don’t tell me what to do, none of you. I don’t answer to any of you. I’m senior—”

“And what? That means you don’t have to follow the rules the rest of us follow? My god, Nikki, you know better than anyone—” the little man squeezed his eyes shut and took a breath before continuing. “These are
your
rules, Nikki. You’re the one who came up with them. Do I have to remind you what happened with the ‘Spanish Influenza’?” Poco made quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

Nik’s temper flared again. No, he didn’t have to be reminded of the last time a group of Outsiders had decided access to
dra’aj
didn’t need to be regulated. Just because spreading around a deadly virus wasn’t directly killing people didn’t make it okay.

“We agreed, Nikki. When we saw how things were going, we agreed no new ones would get fixed.” Poco’s control just made his anger all the more apparent. “I know she’s your friend, I know you went to law school with her, but—dammit—we all have someone.”

He couldn’t. He absolutely could
not
explain why Elaine was different, not just someone he’d known for years, but
family
. Terribly remote, ten generations away—but still his sister’s child to him. No other Outsider of his age had any living relatives—even someone like Poco, who for all his anger really did understand, wouldn’t have let him make an exception for her.

“I’ve spoken to the Rider,” was what he did say.

Poco squeezed his eyes shut, his hands were fists. “And?”

“And he’s going to help us. They. They’re going to help us.”

Poco pumped his fist into the air. “Dude, you should have led with that.”

Nik raised an eyebrow, but refrained from pointing out that Poco hadn’t given him a chance to lead with anything. “I was waiting until I had something concrete in place. We’re still talking over the details.”