The Gates of Sleep (54 page)

He did what another magician would have considered
madness—he rushed Reggie physically, like the rugby player he had been at
university, his momentum carrying him over the desk, knocking the body of the
poor dead girl off the top, and carrying carcass and Reggie both to the ground.
He grabbed for both wrists and got them, pinning the other to the blood-soaked
carpet.

Pain lashed him, the pain of Reggie’s mage-fire
raging over him, burning him physically as the fire ate into his shields.
Reggie still held the sacrificial dagger he had used to sever the girl’s
throat; Andrew screamed in agony, but held to the wrist that held that
dagger—for he knew, with a cold fear of the sort that he had never felt
before, that if Reggie managed to free his hand and use that dagger, it would
kill him no matter how slight the wound.

He built up his shields as the pain and fire burned them
away; he bit back his screams as Reggie rolled under him and tried to throw him
off. And he used tricks learned in the violence of the rugby scrum, bashing his
forehead into Reggie’s nose, smashing it in a welter of blood,
distracting him just long enough for him to try the desperate call he hoped
would be answered. He made a summons of it, calling through the channel that
they had shared, hoping that she had been freed to answer it.

Because if it wasn’t—he and Marina were both
doomed. “Here!”

The voice in his mind was weary, weary—but he felt
Marina’s spectral presence, felt her spirit, tired, battered, but alive
and free of the limbo into which she had been sent! Felt her join her power
with his—

And knew that it wasn’t enough.

Desperately, he reached for the power of Earth—and
found it closed against him, violated by the sacrifice of the servant and more
blood shed over the past months, poisoned by blasphemy in a way that made it
impossible for him to touch. He could use it—but only if he cleansed it.
And he didn’t have time.

With nose smashed aside and bleeding profusely, Reggie
grinned up at him, a savage grin that made him cold all over. And in that
moment, he knew utter despair. “No,
damn it,
NO!” Marina
cried.

Reggie gathered his own power; Andrew felt it gathering
above him—them—like a wave poised to break over them, threatening
to send them both back into the limbo where Madam had cast Marina.

Then—from some unguessed depth of her spirit, Marina
reached for a source of
her
power uncontaminated by the blood and
black magic—reached down into the village, where a wellspring lay doubly
blessed, by Elemental and Christian mage—She should not have been able to
touch it—and reaching so far and so desperately might doom her, burn her
out forever—He couldn’t stop her.

She wouldn’t let him.

“I love you,”
she said,
“And
I’ll be damned before I let him have you!”

The words gave him a last burst of energy past his own
strength in that last instant, and he, too, reached further and deeper than he
ever had in his life—and then, two floods met—evil and good, light
and dark, life and death—

Andrew was caught up in the maelstrom, and was thrown about
like a cork in a hurricane. The power was beyond his control now, or Marina’s,
or indeed
anyone’s.
It was its own creature with its own laws,
supremely indifferent to the wishes of a few puny humans. In the depths of the
storm he thought he sensed others—one, two, a dozen, more—who found
themselves unwitting channels for a power with a will of its own. He lost sight
and sense of Marina, lost sight and sense of Reggie, clung only to his own
identity, desperately, praying, as the competing waves of power battered him
indiscriminately, and finally drove him down into darkness.

And his last thought was that if Marina was not to survive
this confrontation—
he
didn’t want to, either.

The last thing he heard was a dreadful wailing, a howl of
the deepest and most profound despair and defeat—and the sound of demonic
laughter.

Then he lost track of everything, and knew nothing more.

He woke in a bed in his own sanitarium; he knew that
ceiling—it was the one above his bed. He coughed, and suddenly there were
half a dozen faces looking down at him. And among the faces around his bed was
the one he wanted to see most.

“Marina!” The word came out as a croak, from a
throat raw and rasping.

“Alive, thanks to you,” she said, her eyes
dark-circled, her voice heavy with exhaustion, her smile bright and full of an
emotion he hardly dared name. “And
well,
thanks to
my—our—friends. And so are you.” She turned her smile on the
three men, who looked equally exhausted. “Clifton bridged the power-well
of the rectory to the greater power of the other Masters—and got a bit of
a shock!”

“I should say,” Davies admitted, rubbing the
side of his head, as if it still ached. “Never have I seen such an
outpouring of power—not only from the Masters we had telegraphed, not
only from your Undines and the lesser Water creatures, but from the Mermaids
and Tritons, the Hippocampi and other salt-water powers all the way down at the
sea, and from the Air, the Sylphs, the Winds, the Fauns and other Earth
creatures, the Salamanders and Dragons of Fire—things I can’t even
put a name to! They cleansed the earth for you, Andrew! And you reached for
your power and it answered with more than I have ever heard of!”

“And you did exactly what that irascible old
reprobate told you to do,” Sebastian said, as words failed the Reverend
Davies and he shook his head in wonder. “You unwound that curse and
wrapped it around Reginald and tied it back to Madam, and then—” He
shrugged. “Well, we don’t precisely know what happened then. All we
know is that when the brouhaha faded out, when Marina woke up and demanded that
we go rescue you, and Thomas and I went into Oakhurst to find you, you were
sitting on the front stoop looking as if you’d been in a bare-fisted bout
with a champion and come out the worst. Reginald was in Madam’s study,
slumped over the body of the poor wench he’d killed—unconscious,
exactly as the curse made Marina—and Madam was in the same condition in
the next room. The servants were just starting to wake up, so Thomas whisked
you away before they saw you, and I laid into the footman, trying to get him to
wake up. The servants found Reggie and Madam, by the way—” He
grinned sheepishly. “I did take credit for the lad with the finger he’d
chopped off, though. Someone had to, and no one could prove that I wasn’t
the one who’d used that hot poker to save his life. They couldn’t
prove I was any farther into the manor than the kitchen either, which is just
as well for all of us.”

“Police?” he managed.

Clifton Davies nodded. “Called, been, gone. Coroner
too. He says that Reggie and his darling mother poisoned each other—like
they tried to poison you, my dear—” he patted Marina’s hand “—and
before Reggie succumbed, he killed that poor girl—Marina’s maid, a
lady of, hmm, negotiable virtue with a bit of a past. They say that he
slaughtered her in a state of dementia. We suggested that they ought to be seen
to by doctors, specialists. I’m told that they’re going to be moved
to some place in Plymouth, under police guard, in case they might be feigning
their state.”

“And meanwhile, I am living
here—convalescing—until they are far away from my estate,”
Marina said firmly. “I do not intend to set foot there until they are
gone.”
She smiled, charmingly, a smile that made him melt. “Besides, it’s
perfectly proper. My guardians are here, and you’re not only my
physician, you’re my fiance.”

He blinked. Not that he minded, but—when had
that
happened? “Now wait a bit—” he said.

“Are you saying you don’t want to be my fiance?”
she asked, her serene smile wavering not at all.

Of course he wanted to! He couldn’t imagine spending
the rest of his life with anyone else! But she was so young—it wasn’t
fair to her—”No, but—dammit, Marina, you’re only
seventeen!”

“Almost
eighteen,” she interrupted.

“You’ve never been anywhere but Blackbird
Cottage and Oakhurst!” he continued stubbornly. “You’re
wealthy, you’re beautiful, you’ll be pursued by
dozens
of
suitors—”

“—none of whom are worthy to polish your
scalpels,” she said impishly.

“And I don’t want you to miss that!” he
cried, voice cracking, as he gave words to what he was really afraid of. “I
don’t want you to look at me across the room one day, and wish that you
hadn’t gone so fast, that you’d had your London season, that you’d
had a chance to be petted and courted, seen at the opera and Ascot—had
all those things that you should have—”

“Very nicely put, Doctor,” Lady Elizabeth said,
patting his hand complacently. “And she’ll have all those things. A
little thing like an engagement to a country doctor is not going to put off
those hordes of suitors. I intend to see she gets that London season myself.
And when she’s had her fill of it, she’ll come back here, and marry
you, and between all of Madam’s money and her own, I do believe you’ll
be able to turn Briareley into a first-class establishment.”

He blinked as the three women laughed together, exchanging
a glance that excluded all the mere males in the room. “Ah—”
he managed, and dredged up the only thing he hadn’t exactly understood. “Madam’s
money?”

“I’m the only heir—I’ll have all
her property and Reggie’s too in a few months,” Marina
said—with just enough malicious pleasure that he felt a rush of relief to
see that she was human after all. “I doubt that they’ll live longer
than that. I’ll be cleaning up the potteries, of course—which will
mean they won’t be quite so profitable—but there will still be
enough coming in, I believe, to make all of the improvements here that you
could wish.” She made a face. “And in addition to having that
delightful London season, I’m afraid I’m going to have to learn how
to run a business—”

Oh, my love! I won’t let your season be spoiled!
“You’ll have help,” he assured her. “Surely there must
be someone we can trust to guide you through it. Or even take over for you.”

“My man of business, to begin with,” Lady
Elizabeth said airily. “And after that—I think I can find a
business-minded Earth or Water Master to become your manager. Someone who,
needless to say, will be as careful of the land, the water, and the workers as
he is of the pounds and pence.”

“Needless to say,” he repeated, and suddenly
felt as if he was being swept up again in something beyond his control.

But this time, it was something very, very pleasant. And it
was all in the hands of these utterly charming women, one of whom he had loved
almost from the moment she had walked into Briareley to help a little
factory-girl she didn’t even know.

“I think I’d like to sleep now,” he said
meekly. “Unless—”

Then he remembered his duties, and tried to sit up,
frantically. “My patients!” he exclaimed.

“Are fine. They have
my
personal physician,
and
the village doctor to attend their needs. And two Earth Masters, a Water
Master, and a Fire Master.” Lady Elizabeth pushed him down again. “And
if that isn’t enough,
my
physician is bringing in several fine
nurses he can recommend who would very much like to relocate to this lovely
slice of Devon.”

“And
I
am hiring them, so you needn’t
worry where the money is coming from,” Marina concluded. “Now, if
you won’t sleep, I
can’t
sleep. So must I prescribe for
the physician or will you be sensible?”

“I’ll be sensible,” he replied, giving in
with a sigh. “So long as you are, too—”

And he whispered the last two words. “—my love.”

“I will be,” she replied, smiling. “My
love.”

One thing was very certain, he thought, as he drifted into
real slumber. He was never going to get tired of those two delightful words.

Never.

MARINA’S bridal gown was by Worth, and it satisfied
every possible craving that a young woman could have with regard to a frock. It
should have—Worth had had more than two years to create it, and the most
difficult part of the work had been making certain it stayed up to the minute
in mode. Silk satin, netting embroidered with seed pearls, heavy swaths of
Venice lace,
the
fashionable S-shape silhouette, a train just short of
royal in length—no woman could ask for more.

The gardens at Oakhurst, cleansed and scoured of all of the
blood-magic Arachne and Reggie had done there—with every vestige of Cold
Iron removed and hauled off as scrap—and with a section carefully set
aside as a “wild garden” where no gardener was allowed to
trespass—made the perfect setting for a wedding. And it was going to be a
very, very large wedding. Every room at Oakhurst was full, not only with fellow
Masters, but with some of the many friends that Marina had made in her
two
successful London seasons. Most of those were girl friends—a young lady
who was safely engaged to a sober and undesirable young working man was no
rival, and thus safe to become friends with. Besides, it soon proved that
Andrew Pike knew an amazing number of other, quite personable young men, who,
even if they weren’t all precisely what a marriage-minded mama would have
preferred, made very good escorts. And generally were good dancers into the
bargain.

The rooms in all the inns for miles around were full. All
of the stately homes and some of the not-so-stately had guests. There were even
guests at Briareley, in the special, private rooms. This was a wedding
long-anticipated, long in the planning, and long in the consummation.

Andrew had insisted—and had gotten his way—that
they not actually get married until Marina was twenty-one. He wanted not a
shadow of doubt that she was making a free choice among all the possible
suitors. He had almost relented, when his head nurse Eleanor had wed Thomas
Buford—finally meeting the mate she deserved over Andrew’s sickbed.
Thomas had moved his workshop to Briareley when Andrew burst in on the two and
demanded to know just what he was going to do without the best nurse he had.