Seeker (45 page)

“Yes, unlike that,” he responded quietly, feeling a flash of the dread that always appeared when he thought about that night.

“I’m not hungry, thank you, John.”

In spite of what she said, there was a kind of hunger around Fiona’s eyes. John recognized it from his time as an apprentice. She’d been a wonderful teacher, in charge of languages and math, but by late afternoon, her mind had always been fuzzy.

From a cabinet at one side of the room, he pulled out a crystal decanter and poured a generous helping of brandy into one of his grandfather’s heavy glasses. Without a word, he sat again and slid the glass across the table. Fiona lifted the glass and took a long sip, her eyes not meeting his.

“Even when I was twelve, I felt sorry for you, Fiona—with Briac as a husband,” he told her, hoping she understood that he was sincere. He remembered her very clearly from his early days as an apprentice, her beautiful face and dead eyes. The way she had held herself back whenever Briac was nearby, the softness of her voice that hinted at tears. Quin and Shinobu had always seemed oblivious, but John had understood. He knew what it was to live under a cloud, to have someone near you who cared nothing about your own survival and wished you ill. “Briac treated you like he treated me—we are more alike than you might think.”

“We’re not at all alike, John,” Fiona whispered.

“Don’t say that. I only need a little help. I still believe Quin will understand and help me.”

“Why would she? She’s in no state to help anyone.”

“She’s come back to herself, Fiona. I’ve seen her. Can’t you help me convince her?”

“Do you think kidnapping me was the best way to win us over?” she asked, her voice mocking him.

“I had to take you here so she’ll bring me what’s mine and teach me to use it. She loves you. She’ll bring it to get you back. And then you’ll be free to go.”

“You think the athame is yours,” Fiona said thoughtfully. She drank again from her glass, the cuff and chain weighing heavily on her wrist as she did so. “You’re not the first person to claim that.”

“Don’t talk like Briac, please. You know the athame is mine.”

“That depends how far back you’re willing to look.”

“That athame has belonged to my house for hundreds of years, probably more. You must know that, Fiona.”

“A family becomes a large and twisted tree over hundreds of years, John. Some of its branches reach so far it’s difficult to recognize them. How can you be sure you should have it?” She set the glass down. It was empty.

For some reason, the word “twisted” made him think of his mother, bleeding on the floor of her apartment, her limbs arranged awkwardly around her body. Suddenly he was losing control of his emotions. “Can’t there be a moment when simple justice comes into it?” he asked her, hating the sound of despair in his voice. “When something is done because it’s
right
?” He stopped himself. There was no point in moaning about justice to the woman who had been married to Briac Kincaid. She, like John, already knew that life was not fair—you had to
make
it fair.

He needed a moment to compose himself, so he crossed the room and poured her another helping of brandy. Then he changed the subject. “Why did you choose Hong Kong?”

He handed Fiona the refilled glass, and once more she brought it to her lips.

“We were there while Quin was healing. From the bullet wound. Perhaps you remember that wound?” Her eyes met his for a moment. One of her hands was at her throat, where the faintest traces of a scar were visible.
It was necessary
, he reminded himself about the wound on her neck.
But I went too far that night. Am I going too far now? Is it true what Quin said—am I becoming like Briac?

“I thought we were only passing through Hong Kong,” Fiona continued, “but Quin was very weak for a long time, and when she was better, she wanted to stay.”

John let his eyes drift away from her.

“I imagine you were happy to be away from Briac, no matter where you were—no matter what you found yourself doing.” It had been one consolation to him after that terrible night on the estate—that Fiona had gotten away from Briac. But the informer who’d helped him find Quin on the Bridge had spotted her mother with the yellow scarf of an escort around her neck. That had struck him as a particularly cruel fate.

Fiona’s gaze went back to the window. The Thames was visible now, red and gold in a stray bit of sunlight breaking through clouds toward the horizon.

“I understand why you hated him, John,” she said. “I often hated him as well. He took what we learned as apprentices and twisted it badly. But he was my husband. I tried to be loyal.”

“Why do you use the past tense?” he asked, anger flaring up again at thoughts of Briac. “I still hate him, even more than I used to, if that’s possible. The things he made Quin do …” Then he realized: the last time Fiona had seen her husband was that night on the estate, when Briac was lying wounded in the commons. “You think he’s dead,” he breathed. “You think I killed him.”

Fiona turned sharply toward him, and the look on her face told him he was right. “I didn’t know for sure, but I thought perhaps …”

“I’m sorry, Fiona.” There were no words he could choose to soften the message. “Briac—he isn’t dead. I saw him a few days ago on the estate.”

Fiona set her glass on the table, nearly spilling it as she did. She studied him, the lines of her face growing ugly with a subtle but deep fear.

“Are you— Do you mean to …”

“Am I giving you to him? Is that what you’re wondering? In exchange for the athame?”

Very solemnly, Fiona nodded.

“No. I tried that once, remember? Briac wouldn’t accept anything in trade for the athame, even his beautiful wife.” He said this as gently as he could. “But Briac doesn’t have it. Quin does.”

“He wouldn’t want me now anyway,” she murmured, not hearing anything else he’d said. “I know he wouldn’t.”

John understood then. Fiona was an intelligent and beautiful woman. After leaving the estate, she could have become many things, yet she had chosen to become an escort. She’d chosen a profession that would make her, in Briac’s eyes, untouchable. She had believed he might be dead, yet she’d felt it necessary to protect herself even from the idea of him. By degrading herself, she’d hoped to escape his power, as they all had.

“No,” John agreed, “you are free of him.”

The Young Dread could not take her eyes off her master’s face. He had shaved his beard and cut his hair, and the change was almost unfathomable. Somehow her master, who had, she suspected, been born so long ago that he’d seen the Romans in Britain, now looked like he belonged in this uncomfortable and crowded modern age in which they found themselves.

True, he had put on different clothes. Instead of his monk’s robe, he wore trousers and a sweater, with modern shoes that looked to her quite painful. She herself had been given shoes and also a dress to wear. The shoes were intensely uncomfortable, and the dress hung about her slender frame awkwardly, giving her the appearance of a panther forced into a costume.

But it was more than the shaved face or clothing that made her master different. Something about the way he moved had changed as well. Even his voice was altered. He was speaking to the nurse, and his words nearly matched hers. He was even using the strange medical terms the Young Dread had heard so often when she lay in a hospital room like this one, recovering from the Middle’s knife. He
had been stretched out for hundreds of years and had woken only a few days ago, when Quin had pulled him from
There
and into the estate. Where had her master learned to speak this way?

The Old Dread and the nurse were discussing Briac Kincaid, who lay in the hospital bed, his leg and shoulder stitched and bandaged. The Young followed enough of the conversation to understand that Briac would mend perfectly well, given time. The doctors had even put something into his wounds that would heal them quickly from the inside. This did not please her. His moaning and thrashing had given her hope that the wounds would be fatal.

The Middle was standing in the far corner of the room, his arms folded, his cloak hanging from his shoulders. He’d allowed the cut across his chest to be stitched up, but he had changed nothing about his appearance. He looked rough and wild in the ordered surroundings of the hospital.

Eventually the nurse was done speaking to the Old Dread, and with a few final words to Briac himself, and a nervous glance at the Middle, she left the room.

“You will remain here,” the Old Dread told Briac, his mannerisms transforming him, as he spoke now, back into the master she had always known. Somehow he could switch seamlessly between the ancient and the modern, like an actor pulling on different masks. “We will return for you when it is done. And then you shall have—”

The Old cut himself off. His hand went to the inner pocket of his overcoat, where the athame was hidden.

After a moment, the Young could feel the vibration as well. It was growing stronger. Somewhere in the world, Quin Kincaid was using her athame. The Old Dread’s athame, after the ritual in the cavern, would now shake in unison whenever Quin’s dagger was struck.

The Middle, who’d been as still as a piece of furniture all this time, slid into motion, crossing the room and pushing the door shut.

The Old drew the athame from his coat and held it lightly in his hands. The vibration intensified, until it had filled the room and the door began to shudder. Through the window panels into the hall, which themselves were vibrating, the Young saw medical personnel putting hands to their ears as the tremor reached them.

The Old was holding the stone dagger in front of his body, balanced on his palms. After a minute, the vibration began to fade.

“She has gone
There
,” the Young Dread’s master said.

It was the next vibration, the second one, for which they must wait. That second shaking, as Quin struck her athame and stepped from
There
back into the world, would tell them where on Earth she had emerged.

The Young Dread knew it might be some time before Quin reentered the world. Getting lost
There
was one of the chief hazards of using an athame. Even veteran Seekers could find their minds wandering, then floating, then frozen into absolute stillness if they didn’t carefully maintain their mental focus. Seekers used a time chant to achieve this focus, but even with such aids, athame was a perilous method of travel. Quin was still a novice, and the risk of losing herself as she stepped
between
—for a short while or a long while—was quite real.

It was two hours before the athame came to life again, a duration the Young Dread found impressively brief for a Seeker so inexperienced—Quin’s mental control must be very good.

The Dreads had remained in the hospital room all the while. By then, night was falling. Nurses had come and gone, noticeably frightened by the Middle’s stare. The three Dreads stood with their backs to the door, holding the athame between them as it began to vibrate a second time. The Young, the Old, and the Middle positioned their fingers around the dials.

The second tremor was much, much stronger than the first. It
engulfed the room immediately, and a moment later panicked voices could be heard in the corridor outside. The shuddering of walls was disrupting medical equipment in neighboring rooms. Down the hall, a pane of glass broke.

Within the greater shaking, there were small, intense echoes through the athame’s dials. The Old called out the name of two symbols, indicating that he had felt those vibrate more strongly than the others. The Young called out another two, and the Middle a third set.

The tremor ended, resonating in their ears for a moment longer, then disappearing completely. The Old replaced the athame into the pocket of his overcoat, then picked up a pen and paper from the side table near Briac’s bed. To the Young Dread, he appeared to become a modern man again as he put the pen to the paper and quickly wrote out the six symbols they had spoken aloud.

Her master studied the paper, then held it up for the others to see. Together, the symbols were a set of coordinates—the location into which Quin and her athame had just emerged.

“London,” he said.

“She’s going to John,” Briac responded from the bed. His words were drowsy, but he was pulling himself up to a sitting position.

There was a look in his eyes, a brightness there, that the Young Dread didn’t like. Briac did not simply want his athame back—he was eager for revenge.

Briac turned to the Old Dread and asked, “Do you know about John’s home?”