Jane suddenly made a face, then spat onto the carpet. "Atrocious!" she bellowed. "Dr. Simmons, your Squaw Vine Compound is foul-tasting in the extreme. I have no doubt as to its efficacy, as attested to by yourself. But good God, man. Something must be done about the taste, or it shall prove more of a purgative than a tonic!"
And another memory...
Jane's hands became busy, as if she were putting something in place and holding it there. This time, she was silent and needed prompting to speak.
"What are you doing?" Sandra asked.
"What's it bloody well look like?" Jane snapped in a broad Australian accent. "I'm applying a hot pack to this patient's leg."
Her hands continued working on her invisible patient.
"Why?"
"Listen," she said. "I'm bleedin' tired of yer criticism. You've got it all wrong. You don't want to immobilize the limb of a polio patient. What's needed is a strict regimen of physical therapy and... and ..."
The fire and passion drained visibly from her face.
Sandra had been listening thoughtfully, all this time. At last she asked Jane a direct question, using her elven name. "You're a doctor, aren't you, Mareth'riel?"
Jane looked in Sandra's direction, but her eyes were unfocused, as if she were looking into the distance. And in a way, she was—but that distance was measured in years. Her expression changed.
"I am an alienist, to be precise," she said in a clipped Boston accent. "And quite a celebrated one, I might add. I challenged a number of the barbarous management practices that had preceded our more enlightened age, including the use of Dr. Rush's restraining chair, used in the management of violent lunatics. I found that there was no need to restrain them if—"
This time the memory cut off abruptly. Jane screamed, then fell over on her side. In another instant, she was reliving the same trauma that she'd experienced in the Lone Star scanning lab. Her hands tore at her face, as if trying to pull something from her head. "Not the mask!" she screamed. "Not—" Her words became distorted, as if she was trying to speak with something in her mouth. She held her hands in front of her, as if they were held by containment manacles. Then her entire body went rigid. Her face set in a grimace and her mouth opened wide.
"Dear God," Sandra whispered. She jerked her hands away from Jane's head. The magical energy she'd been sustaining shrank to a point, then exploded into fragments and was gone.
Working quickly, Sandra summoned a healing spell. Her hands caressed Jane's face and neck, washing them with a deep indigo energy. With each stroke, Jane relaxed. At last her face became utterly calm. Her head nodded, and she fell deeply asleep. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding. I could only hope Jane would be all right. I reminded myself that Sandra was the best psych doctor in the country, and that eased my fears a little.
Sandra looked up at me, obviously shaken. "I didn't trigger
that
memory," she said. "It surfaced by itself. And what a horror it was."
"What was she talking about?" I asked. "What's an 'alienist'?"
Sandra touched a gentle finger to Jane's throat, checking her pulse. She counted silently to herself before answering my question. "It's an old term for 'psychiatrist,' one that hasn't been in use since the 19th century. The 'restraining chair' Jane was talking about was used in asylums in the 1800s. I saw a woodcut of one in an old medical text. The patient's wrists were tied to the arms of the chair, and the ankles were held in clamps at the base. A strap across the chest held the patient in place, and a wooden box that clamped tight over the head kept the patient from looking around, and prevented them from hearing anything clearly. A bucket in the seat of the chair enabled the patient to be held in that position for days on end."
I stated the obvious guess: "Jane was confined in something like that, wasn't she? That's where that last memory came from."
Sandra looked thoughtful. "Not in a restraining chair. Jane was a doctor—not a patient—when those things were in use." She gave me a steely look. "Romulus, you and I both know about the 'mask' she was referring to, now don't we?"
I knew, but I didn't want to believe it. It had to have been a mage mask that Jane was remembering. A plastic hood that wrapped tight around the face, with a mouth tube for breathing. Designed to prevent magicians from spellcasting, it had earphones that cranked out an ear-splitting ninety decibels of white noise, preventing the mage from concentrating. If worn for long periods of time, it could drive the wearer mad.
Developed for use in the prison system, the mage mask was a trademark of the nation's top security provider: Lone Star. The only way Jane would have wound up wearing one was if she'd been arrested and incarcerated by the police. By my pack.
No, that wasn't possible. If Jane had been convicted of a crime and served time for it, there should have been a record of her somewhere in the Lone Star database. The scans I'd done had turned up nothing.
Had someone else gotten hold of a mage mask—or built one on their own? The materials weren't hard to come by; it was pretty low-tech, when you got right down to it. A thought occurred to me. Perhaps Jane had been kidnapped, by abductors who realized she was a mage and could harm them with her magic. They'd kept her on ice until...
But even prolonged use of a mage mask didn't explain Jane's memory loss. She didn't show any of the signs of psychosis usually associated with misuse of that device.
And there were even more puzzling things to deal with. I looked at Sandra. "Jane wasn't born in this century, was she?"
Sandra shook her head. "If these are actual memories we triggered, Romulus, Jane's lived quite a long time. Some of her memories seem to go back nearly three centuries, to the 1700s."
"How can that be?" I asked. "How can someone live for centuries?"
"I don't know," Sandra said softly. "Magic? But that would mean that magic was present in threshold levels long before the Awakening."
We both fell silent, contemplating the woman who lay on the cushions between us. Relaxed in sleep, her face looked like that of a young girl. Only the gray in her hair and her woman's body hinted that she was at least middle-aged. Her
true
age was well beyond even that.
Jane was stirring. Her eyelids fluttered, and then, after a moment or two, she sat up and yawned. She looked around Sandra's office, then gave me a tentative smile.
I took that as a good sign.
"Do you remember anything that just happened— any of the memories?" I asked anxiously.
Jane looked at the holo of the forest, obviously puzzled. "Where am I?" she asked. She peered at Sandra and me. "And who ... are you?"
"Interesting," Sandra murmured. "The short-term memories seem to dissipate after Jane has slept."
My heart sank. Fat lot of good that observation did me. I couldn't very well keep Jane awake for days on end.
I sighed. We were back to square one again. I took a deep breath—and introduced myself to Jane all over again.
We couldn't go back to my place to doss down. The elf would have recovered from Jane's spell by now, and that was the first place he'd look for her. But we still had his nuyen. We checked into a hotel in downtown Halifax early that evening, after leaving the hospital. The fact that I insisted on paying cash and that neither Jane nor I had any ID didn't even faze the ork behind the counter. He was used to sailors checking in with their joy-boys and joy-girls, and not wanting to leave behind an electronic record that their spouses could find. He glanced pointedly down at my pajamalike hospital pants as we checked in, and gave me a knowing wink as I asked for a room with two double beds, and for a meal to be sent up. I let him keep the change from a 100-nuyen bill. That ought to be an incentive keep his trap shut if anyone came looking for us.
The room smelled of cigarette smoke, air freshener, and the scents of those who'd slept here before us. But the sheets were clean; I could smell the laundry soap on them. I peered out the window to the street below. I was probably just being paranoid. There was no sign of the elf Galdenistal—who I'd begun to call "golden boy" in my mind, due to his taste in fashion and his untouchable, diplomatic status.
I put the money clip on the table between the two beds. I'd checked: the clip had a hallmark and was indeed gold. It was probably worth more than the thick fold of bills it held. In hindsight, I probably should have taken the elf's gold hair clip, too. But that would be stealing. Taking his money had simply been appropriating assets in the line of duty.
There was a knock on the door. I thumbed the monitor button that was set into the door handle. The plastic door opaqued, then turned transparent, allowing me to look out into the hallway. Light only passed through it in one direction; the human who stood in the corridor with a tray of food was unable to see into our hotel room.
I opened the door and took the tray from the fellow. I could smell his irritation when I didn't tip him, but I wasn't about to hand him a 100-nuyen bill. Instead I thanked him and carried our supper inside. The door returned to its usual solid color.
As we ate our food, Jane sat on one of the beds, yawning between bites. The magical spells she'd cast earlier in the day and her ordeal at the hospital had left her drained. Despite her hunger, she could barely keep her eyes open. But even with dark circles under her eyes, she was beautiful. I could barely resist the urge to stroke her hair.
"You should get some sleep," I told her when she'd finished eating. Then a thought occurred to me: Jane would forget who I was if she slept. I didn't want her wandering away again. But there was an obvious solution to that problem.
I used the hotel room's telecom to print out a message: BEFORE YOU LEAVE, PLEASE WAKE ME UP. I pinned it to the door with a needle from a sewing kit I found in the bathroom.
I smiled at Jane. "That should do it."
She smiled back. "Thanks, Romulus." Then she started stripping off her jeans and vest, getting ready for bed. I caught just a glimpse of smooth skin and soft curves before I remembered that humans—that
elves
, I corrected myself—don't like to be stared at when they're naked.
I made a point of turning my back. I rumpled the sheets and blankets on the other bed into a wad at the center of the bed, then glanced at Jane.
"You don't mind if I change, do you?" I asked. "I always sleep in wolf form."
"I don't mind."
She was safely under the covers, now—all those tempting curves covered by a thick blanket. I dimmed the lights and closed the window blind. Then I let my hospital baggies fall to my ankles, and dropped to my hands and knees on the carpet—which smelled of stale, spilled alcohol—and shifted. I jumped onto the bed and turned around in a circle, pawing at the blankets.
"Romulus?"
I lifted my head and peered at her with rapt attention, my ears forward. My vision is even better than a meta's in low light; I could see that she'd raised herself on one elbow and that the covers had slipped down her body. The locket she wore hung down between her breasts. Her gold-flecked eyes seemed to have a pleading look. Or maybe that was just wishful
thinking on my part.
"Would you sleep beside me?" she asked. "I'd feel safer."
Would I? I bounded onto the other bed. I gave her a quick kiss, stroking her cheek with my tongue. Then I settled in beside her, my back against hers. There was a blanket between us, but I could feel the warmth of her body through it. Her scent, this close, was almost overwhelming. I was thankful that human and meta pheromones don't affect me nearly so much when I'm in a animal form.
I kept a watchful eye on the door. My protective posture seemed to soothe her; after a while Jane's breathing deepened. When I was certain she was sleeping soundly, I lowered my head and drifted off to sleep.
I woke a couple of hours later. It was only eleven o'clock at night, but I was wide awake. I lay in the darkness, watching the numbers change on the telecom's clock and trying to fall back asleep, but it was no use. Ordinarily, I would have assumed that my nocturnal instincts had just gotten the better of me. But I knew what the problem really was. My mind was too full of questions. They wouldn't let me sleep. I had to know more about the mystery woman who lay sleeping so soundly beside me.
I slid out of bed and changed back into human form. I used the telecom to print out a new note:
***
WAIT HERE FOR ME. MY NAME IS ROMULUS.
DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR FOR ANYONE ELSE.
YOU ARE IN DANGER.
***
I pinned it over my previous note. Then I pulled on my pants and jandered out of the hotel.
The police station was a twenty-minute walk away. Dass would be on duty tonight; I figured she'd be willing to run the name Mareth'riel Salvail through the databases for me. I headed straight for her office.
Dass leaped to her feet as soon as she saw me. "Romulus!" she said in a loud whisper. "Get your hoop in here. I want your help with something before Raymond sees you and sends you off to Truro to chase down the latest blackberry cat sighting."
She closed the door of her office behind me. Tonight she was wearing a loose white dress woven with a fabric that caught the light like a prism, creating tiny rainbows in the fabric. She'd painted a band of white across her cheeks, and an intricate mehndi design covered the palms of her hands.