The Others 03 Vision in Silver (10 page)

Maybe there was a distraction that would help. “Sure we can. It would be good to do that.” Tomorrow he would think about human things again. Now he would spend some time with his own kind—and with his friend.

As he and Meg locked the back door of the Liaison’s Office, Vlad approached them from HGR.

“I closed for the day,” Vlad said. “We’re not open for human customers, and any
terra indigene
who want a book can borrow one from the Market Square Library. And I’ve had enough of—” His mobile phone rang.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Meg asked.

“No.” When it stopped ringing Vlad took the phone out of his pocket and shut it off.

“We’re going up to the Wolfgard Complex,” Simon said.

“I have to report to Grandfather Erebus. Why don’t we ride together?” Vlad looked at Meg. “Simon can shift and ride in the back of the BOW. I’ll drive over to the Chambers and then pick you up when you’re ready to go home.”

“I can drive,” Simon said.

“Not tonight,” Vlad said quietly. he added.

Simon nodded. Vlad was right about him not being able to hold the human form much longer. He couldn’t get a measure of Meg’s fatigue, but she crossed the short distance between the office and the garages as if she’d run a long way through deep snow and every step now was an effort to survive.

Since they’d already locked up the office and bookstore, Simon went into the garage that housed one of the BOWs to strip off his clothes and shift. Vlad obligingly stood where he would block Meg’s view. Not that Simon had any inhibitions about a human seeing him naked or shifting, but he was still careful to avoid Meg seeing him naked. He’d made the shift from Wolf to human once without thinking, and her confusion about seeing him as a naked human had almost broken their friendship.

He shook out his fur and waited for Vlad to set his clothes in the back of the BOW. When he jumped in, he made sure his tail was out of the way before the back door closed. Then Vlad and Meg got in the front seats. After Vlad backed out of the garage and stopped long enough to close the garage door, they headed for the Wolfgard Complex.

The BOWs were electric-powered vehicles that were used in the Courtyard. They had two seats and a cargo area that was just big enough for a grown Wolf if he kept his tail tucked. It wasn’t his fault that Meg’s head—and that newly cropped hair—was so close to his muzzle that he couldn’t help but sniff it.

No stinky smells anymore from whatever she had used to dye her hair. Now the hair smelled of the shampoo made by the
terra indigene
, and it smelled like Meg.

He gave the side of her head a quick lick before she squealed and ducked away from him.

Tasted like Meg. Felt like puppy fuzz.

Too bad he couldn’t hold her down and give her a proper grooming like he used to do with Sam. Could
still
do with Sam.

When they arrived at the Wolfgard Complex, the pups were outside playing some kind of game with the juvenile Wolves.

Vlad barely had time to stop the BOW before Meg scrambled out of the vehicle.

Sam’s happy
arroo
was followed by those of other pups as they all crowded around her.

Simon growled at Vlad. Excited pups could easily forget to be careful with Meg.

He almost smacked his head, too impatient to wait for Vlad to lift the back door fully before he leaped out of the BOW.

Then he stopped and watched Meg and Sam. Strong bond between them. Trust and love.

Was Meg’s little brother at the bottom of a lake? Did she really want to know that kind of truth about the humans who had kept her? Did he?

The rest of the Wolfgard who lived in Lakeside came over to where Meg was hugging all the pups, but especially Sam.

Sam said.

Couldn’t tell the pups what had happened today, especially not Sam, who had seen his mother shot, had been with her as she bled to death. The pup didn’t need to hear about humans killing their young. Instead, Simon howled the Song of Sorrow.

The adult Wolves took up the song. Most of them knew at least some of what had happened. He heard Blair’s voice, and Elliot’s. Then Jane and John and the rest. Then the juveniles and pups. And something else. A voice he’d never heard before.

Meg, kneeling in the grass, one arm around Sam. Meg, howling, adding her voice to the grieving.

When the howling ended, all the pups were pressed around Meg. The pack offering comfort.

Simon watched her as Sam left for a minute and returned with one of the soft ropes, offering the distraction of play. He watched her as she ran around making squeaky noises, pretending to be prey while the pups chased her and the adult Wolves made sure the game didn’t get too rough. He watched as she played tug with Sam.

She had spent most of her life isolated, even when she was surrounded by other humans. Now she was learning as much from the Wolves as she was from the humans about what it meant to have family.

She wasn’t a Wolf. She wasn’t
terra indigene
. Despite that, Meg was becoming one of them.

Thaisday, Maius 10

“Y
ou’ve reached the Borden residence. Leave your name, number, and the purpose of your call.”

Monty hung up without leaving a message. He’d been trying to reach Elayne—or, more to the point, his daughter, Lizzy—since hearing about the abandoned girls and the disposal of
cassandra sangue
babies. Feeling heartsick, he wanted some assurance,
any
kind of assurance, that his own little girl was all right. But there had been no answer.

He turned on the news, half listening as he made a sandwich he had no interest in eating and poured another glass of wine.

“In a day full of bewildering tragedies, the
terra indigene
and police departments all across Thaisia worked together to locate at-risk teenage girls who were wandering alone beside country roads and highways. The girls, left homeless by the sudden closing of several institutions that had cared for troubled teens, were suffering from dehydration and, in some cases, exhibited psychotic behavior when approached by rescue personnel.

“Motivational speaker Nicholas Scratch had this to say about today’s tragic events.”

Monty studied the man now filling the television screen—the man who was currently living with Elayne and Lizzy. Classically handsome with skin that might have been described as swarthy if it didn’t have the gleam of a pampered life. Wavy dark hair that was long enough that it should have looked unkempt if it hadn’t been perfectly styled to defy anything that might leave it mussed. Dark eyes that were filled with fiery sincerity.

Considering what had happened today, it wasn’t surprising that Nicholas Scratch was much in demand. But even if Elayne was attending the news conferences with Scratch, someone should have been home with Lizzy once school let out for the day. Someone should have been answering the phone, especially this late in the evening.

“While humans everywhere applaud the efforts the Others have made today to assist in the search for these troubled children, we also recognize that it is the actions of the
terra indigene
that set these tragic events in motion in the first place,”
Scratch said.
“The destruction of an institution in the Midwest, whose personnel allegedly engaged in questionable practices or forms of abuse, and the subsequent threats against any and all places that care for troubled girls, especially those with an addiction to self-harm, is at the core of today’s tragedies. Would the personnel running these establishments have closed them so precipitously if they hadn’t feared reprisals by creatures that cannot understand the pressure humans live with when under constant threat? Would they have left these girls to fend for themselves if they hadn’t feared that the communities where they lived and worked would be destroyed? Clearly the number of suicide victims found by rescuers should be a sufficient message that these establishments are needed and should be left alone.

“When humans asked what would be done with the rescued girls, the Others said the girls would be taken to safe, undisclosed locations,”
Scratch continued.
“Many of us are wondering tonight if these mentally fragile teenagers will ever be seen again.”

“They won’t be seen again by humans like you,” Monty muttered as he turned off the TV.

He had to admit that Scratch pushed all the right buttons, especially when earlier news reports were about the number of girls, many heavily pregnant, who ran out into the road and were struck by fast-moving vehicles.

It was easy enough to grab the spotlight by reminding everyone that the Others had started this by pressuring humans to reveal the locations of every place holding
cassandra sangue
. But the general population didn’t know that the Others had forced the issue because the girls’ blood was the main ingredient in the street drugs that had sparked violence in many towns across the continent. It was easy to point the finger and express fear for the girls the Others had taken out of reach, but what, if anything, would be said about the babies who had been disposed of by humans? Go ahead and bang the “we’re all humans” drum but don’t even whisper the words “benevolent ownership,” which might make a few people wonder why these girls with their evenly spaced scars had been shut away in the first place.

The phone rang. Monty almost spilled the wine as he grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”

“Lieutenant? It’s MacDonald.”

Had something else happened? Was he being called back to work?
Please, gods, don’t ask me to face anything more tonight.
“What can I do for you, Lawrence?”

“I got a call from Vladimir Sanguinati. He says the Business Association discussed matters, and they agreed that the girls should return to work tomorrow, and the Denbys should come by as planned. Just wanted to let you know.”

“I appreciate the call. Good night, Lawrence. See you tomorrow.”

“Good night, sir.”

Monty ended the call, drank the wine, and almost dumped the uneaten sandwich in the trash can. Then he remembered seeing a new sign on the bus:
WASTE TODAY, GO HUNGR
Y TOMORROW
.

He wrapped the sandwich and put it in the fridge. The bread might be stale tomorrow, but he could warm it in the wave-cooker and have the sandwich for breakfast.

After washing the few dishes sitting in the sink, he headed for bed. But he stopped and stared at the phone. Then he picked up the receiver and called Elayne’s number.

Someone picked up before the answering machine kicked in. Monty waited, but no one spoke.

“Elayne?” he said.

Nothing but heavy breathing on the other end of the line.

“Elayne?” Monty said again.

The person in Elayne’s apartment hung up.

Monty set the receiver back in its cradle and continued to stare at the phone. There was no one he could call in Toland, no fellow officer who would do him the favor of swinging by Elayne’s apartment. He’d been transferred from the Toland police force because he had killed a human to save a Wolf child who had been in human form. He’d been seen as a traitor to his own kind.

It could have been Elayne who answered the phone and decided to screw with him. Wasn’t her typical way of dealing with him, but he wouldn’t put it past her. She had blamed him for her sudden drop in social status and used Lizzy as a way to punish him, refusing to let him talk to his little girl. During one phone call a few weeks ago, she’d informed him that she and Lizzy were
going to Cel-Romano with Scratch for the summer—and might not be coming back to Thaisia at all.

She and Monty hadn’t married. He had no visitation rights beyond what she might allow. In fact, the only thing Elayne did for him when it came to Lizzy was cash the support checks promptly.

“Lizzy,” Monty whispered as he picked up the receiver and dialed Elayne’s number again.

“You’ve reached the Borden residence. Leave your name, number, and the purpose of your call.”

Nothing this time. Not even heavy breathing.

Monty went to bed but didn’t sleep. Captain Burke knew a lot of people. Someone in Toland might be able to tell him something. And Vladimir Sanguinati knew some of the vampires who ruled the Toland Courtyard. He’d rather owe Burke a favor than deal with Vlad, but he’d take whatever help he could get to confirm his little girl was all right.

Firesday, Maius 11

T
he girl dreamed of rain and woke to the sound of something dripping.

Where . . . ?

Not the compound where the white-coated keepers . . . That older girl, Jean, had called them Walking Names. And there was that other girl, the one who didn’t come to lessons anymore. Well, a lot of girls stopped coming to lessons. A lot of girls stopped being allowed to walk outside in the fenced yard. Then one day their places at the table were empty.

But
that
girl. Her disappearance had been different. And, somehow, she was connected with the fight that destroyed the compound and . . .

They had covered the girls’ heads. They had carried the younger girls, but girls her age were led through the corridors, stumbling over things that squished underfoot. And from the ceiling came the
drip-plop
of something falling. Something thick and wet.

Even with her head covered, she saw things. Or maybe she remembered some things she’d seen in visions. Bad things. Wet, red things that terrified her. And people who weren’t people, who had teeth and claws and red eyes.

Then she and the other girls were put into vans or cars and taken away from the compound.

This is a village in the Northwest. You’re going to stay here with us now,
they had said.
They
were humans called Intuits.

What’s your name?
they had asked her.

Cs821,
she’d replied. Her answer made them sad. So sad.

Eight girls had come to this place from the compound. The four unscarred girls were taken to another part of the village. The four girls her age—the ones who had their first set of scars but not too many beyond that—were put together in this single room. A barracks. That was the word for the training image that matched the room.

She wondered who usually lived there and what had happened to them. There were clothes in the lockers and books on the shelves that made up the bottom of the bedside tables.

You’re free now,
the new keepers had told her and the other girls. But the girls had no images of “free,” no reference, no understanding of what was required of them in this place made of wood and glass, this place filled with images and sounds that didn’t belong to the compound that, she’d been told her whole life, was the only safe place for girls like her.

She found the toilets out of desperation a few hours after they had arrived. She found that if she stood at the door of the room and asked loudly for food and water, someone would bring food for her and the other girls.

Would you like to eat in the dining room? Would you like to go outside? Would you like . . . ?

The food tasted different, even when it looked like something she remembered eating. The water tasted different. The air
smelled
different, a wild scent under the smell of unwashed girls.

Too much, too much. All too much. So much too much the other three girls spent most of their time curled up on their beds, and the more their new keepers tried to help, the more things overwhelmed them until they didn’t want to find
anything
in this terrifying place.

The new keepers had locked up the silver razors, but there were several objects in the barracks that were sharp enough to make a cut.

The Walking Names would not have been so careless.

A shiver of pain followed by relief. No one to listen, but they whispered in the dark, craving the euphoria that would get them through the next barrage of images.

Don’t you want a name? Don’t you want to live?

How was she supposed to know if she wanted those things?

Every night they cut themselves and whispered in the dark. Then, one night,
before she began to whisper, the girl saw a glimpse of herself in a vision. So she gritted her teeth and endured the agony of an unspoken prophecy. The pain ate her up inside and she wanted to scream and scream and never stop screaming. But she said nothing—and saw herself with sheets of paper and many colored pencils.

When she was young and learning to make letters and write words, she would draw the images from the day’s lessons. So much joy from such a simple thing.

The Walking Names said she was diluting her ability to see prophecy, and she needed to be broken of this bad habit. They had special gloves made that kept her fingers laced together so she couldn’t hold the pencil. But drawing gave her a different kind of euphoria, and it was so hard to resist making a little sketch whenever she had a pencil.

So the Walking Names withheld the paper and the pencils. They fed her pap that had no flavor, depriving her of the variety of taste and texture in food. When they had stripped her life of every possible bit of pleasure that was available in the compound, they cut her for the first time to show her the only pleasure that girls like her were allowed to have.

They made her afraid to touch a pencil or paper. But that night when she swallowed the words of prophecy, she saw herself drawing. She saw the look on her own face: joy.

She’d almost worked up the courage to ask for a pencil and paper when the other girls arrived. The mommy girls who looked sick and wild, abandoned by their old keepers and found by creatures to be feared above all else.

You’re safe here,
the new keepers, the Intuits, said as they settled the mommy girls in the other four beds.

They meant well, but they weren’t experienced keepers.

The girl sat up, shivering.

The sound of something dripping.

Maybe one of the sinks in the room with the toilets? If she turned the faucet, would the dripping stop?

She got out of bed. Her bed was closest to the door; the toilets were at the other end of the room, past the rest of the beds.

Drip, drip, drip.

All the whispering had stopped.

Drip, drip, drip.

As she passed the next bed, her foot slipped.

A smell in the air. She remembered it from the compound, when her head had been covered as they took her away from the bad thing that had happened there.

She turned and rushed toward the door, patting the wall to find the light switch. The other girls would be angry when she turned on the overhead lights, but she didn’t care. She needed to see.

She squinted as light filled the room. Then she looked at the floor. She looked at the girls in the beds who were past being overwhelmed by images and expectations.

They didn’t want to live,
she thought as she stared.
They chose this instead of trying to live.

Easier to choose this. How much longer could she keep struggling to understand this place, these people? How could she learn what they wanted her to learn? She knew where to find the sharp objects. She could do what the other girls had done and . . .

She remembered the image of herself with the sheets of paper and colored pencils.

The girl pounded on the door and screamed. It wasn’t until she heard people shouting and running toward her that she tried to open the door.

Not locked in. A test? Or a choice?

She flung the door open and fell into the arms of one of the men who had come running in response to her screams.

“I want to live!” she cried.
“I want to live!”

*   *   *

“You’ve reached the Borden residence. Leave your name, number, and the purpose of your call.”

“Elayne, it’s Monty. You’re not going to see another support check unless I talk to Lizzy and have some confirmation that my daughter is all right.”

Monty waited a moment, half expecting Elayne to pick up and start shouting at him for implying that she wasn’t a good mother. Right now, he wasn’t sure she
was
a good mother.

He hung up, then finished getting ready for work.

Radio and TV news reports were full of sound bites from Nicholas Scratch’s
speeches about the teenage girls, already troubled by an unhealthy addiction to cutting, being taken out of human control.

Scratch was careful not to make any mention of the girls being
cassandra sangue
or that most of the cuts on those girls had been made by men selling prophecies for profit. He didn’t have any trouble pointing out that the
terra indigene
’s imprudent actions were the reason behind the fifty percent suicide rate of the girls who had been released from the sheltered, structured life that had been designed for them by caring professionals. But he made no mention of the babies who had been killed to hide the evidence of breeding farms.

It was equally telling that most of the girls who had committed suicide had used a folding razor with a silver handle—the same kind of razor Meg Corbyn used, because each blood prophet had a sharp, shiny razor that was used exclusively on her.

If Elayne wanted to wave the banner for Scratch, that was her choice, but Monty wasn’t going to stand back anymore and let Lizzy be pulled into that mess. Simon Wolfgard had said the
terra indigene
didn’t harm children. While it was probably true that a Wolf wouldn’t harm a child without provocation, Monty didn’t think the Elementals or other kinds of
terra indigene
were always as concerned about who might suffer from their wrath.

Sooner or later, the
terra indigene
would realize that words could be as much of a danger to them as a physical weapon. Sooner or later, Nicholas Scratch, or someone else in the HFL movement, was going to say too much.

He stopped at his apartment door and looked back at the phone. This early in the morning, Elayne should have been home.

“Damn you,” he said softly.

He had intended to go to court to gain some kind of custody that would prevent Elayne from taking Lizzy to another continent. He’d had to put personal needs aside when the pressure of finding the Controller and preventing an assault on all human settlements in the Midwest Region had consumed all his time and energy. A justifiable decision, since the threat to the Midwest had been immediate and the trip to Cel-Romano had been slated for summer, presumably after Scratch had finished his speaking engagements in Thaisia and was returning home.

But now summer was less than a month away. Now Monty needed to do something for himself and his little girl. And by a quirk of fate—or the gods’ benevolence—he’d met Pete Denby, an attorney he could trust to represent him.

Returning to his bedroom, Monty opened the closet and removed the lockbox from the top shelf. Opening the box, he took out a copy of Lizzy’s birth certificate, which listed him as her father, and a copy of the support agreement Elayne had insisted on when he’d been transferred to Lakeside and she’d refused to go with him.

After tucking the papers in the inside pocket of his suit coat, Monty replaced the lockbox and closed the closet door. Then he locked up his apartment and walked to the bus stop, arriving just in time to catch the Whitetail Road bus to work.