Read The Others 03 Vision in Silver Online
Authors: Anne Bishop
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Dark Fantasy, #Alternative History, #Contemporary
Douglas,
Trip delayed. Concerns at work. Overseas connections erratic due to storms in Atlantik. If possible, will call. Aunties request instruction manual for gifts you sent.
—Shady
Shady,
First part of instruction manual already on its way. Will wait for information about your travel plans.
—Douglas
Firesday, Maius 18
H
earing the radio in the station’s cafeteria—and realizing he heard it because everyone had stopped talking to listen—Monty paused in the doorway.
“‘ . . . we cannot ignore the plight of these girls who, having been expelled from facilities designed for their special needs, are now unable to cope and are at risk because of the Others’ callous behavior toward humans in general and these girls in particular. Therefore, the people of Cel-Romano have opened their homes and their hearts to these girls and will do everything in their power to give the girls the care they need.’
“Nicholas Scratch made that impassioned speech at the Toland port as thirty at-risk teenage girls were escorted onto a passenger ship known as an ocean greyhound. These ships are the fastest oceangoing vessels in existence, and the captain told reporters he is confident his ship will be able to outrun any of the storms that have been responsible for the loss of several merchant ships over the past few days.”
Several men noticed Monty standing in the cafeteria doorway, but only Louis Gresh came over to talk to him.
“I heard an earlier report,” Louis said. “Big to-do with Scratch and Toland’s mayor making speeches. The girls weren’t available for comment, but the reporter described them as walking sedately up the gangplank and waving to everyone once they were on board.”
“I wonder how heavily the girls were sedated in order to cope with that much stimulus,” Monty said quietly. “And I wonder if these girls are more
valuable, or if someone decided to change tactics after smuggling
cassandra sangue
out of Thaisia didn’t work.”
Louis frowned. “Say that again?”
I shouldn’t have said it the first time.
But Louis was on Burke’s short list of people who could be trusted with such secrets. He was on Monty’s list too, since he had worked with Monty and Burke to help the Others find the Controller. “Some girls were smuggled out as cargo. The ship was blown off course in a storm and was lost. No trace of it.”
“That’s the official version?” Louis asked.
Monty nodded. “Arrangements were made to pick up the cargo.” He felt relieved when Louis didn’t ask about the ship’s crew.
“If the Others don’t want any of those girls going to Cel-Romano, what difference will it make having Scratch splash this voyage all over the media?”
“To the
terra indigene
? None whatsoever. But it will give Scratch more ammunition to use in his humans-versus-Others speeches when the water-dwelling
terra indigene
sink the ship.” Monty held up the newspaper folded to a small inside article. “I have something else to talk to the captain about this morning.”
“Monty. Do you really think the Others will sink that ship, knowing those girls are on board?” Louis asked.
“They may try to save the girls, but even if they can’t, that ship won’t reach Cel-Romano. The Sharkgard and an Elemental known as Ocean will make sure of it.”
Monty walked to Burke’s office. Seeing his captain on the phone, he hesitated in the doorway until Burke waved him in.
“You got the bear,” Burke said. He held the phone away from his ear far enough that Monty recognized Felix Scaffoldon’s irate voice but couldn’t make out the words. When the yelling started to wind down, Burke put the phone up to his ear again and said, “What jewels?” He held the phone away from his ear for another minute before responding. “So the bear had a secret compartment where a little girl could stash whatever little girls stash. Be happy you found some bits of colored glass. If the bear had belonged to a boy, you might have found a couple of rocks and a desiccated frog. No . . . No, I’m not trying to wind you up. I’m telling you that we weren’t asked to look for anything inside the bear, so we didn’t look. Why did you expect to find something?” He nodded as he listened. “Oh, really? Do you think the murder was a falling-out among
thieves? I thought the Crowgard had been accused of taking . . . Ah. They might be
fencing
the stolen jewelry. Well, if the thefts are being carried out by humans, the brother would be the most likely accomplice, although the thefts didn’t start until—”
Burke looked at the phone. “Huh. Scaffoldon hung up.” He leaned back in his chair, his smile a lot more fierce than friendly. “Sit down, Lieutenant. Let’s talk about Elayne Borden.”
Monty sat, the newspaper in his lap. “What is there to say?” He thought about the part of the phone conversation he had heard. “Scaffoldon found the substitute jewels?”
“He did. He was quite upset. Now the theory is that Elayne Borden was holding the stolen jewels for the as-yet-unknown thief and tried to abscond with the whole take instead of just her share.”
“If he keeps floating theories, he’ll sound like a fool,” Monty said.
“Well, he can’t exactly come out and say that Toland’s society darlings
gave
their jewelry to Nicholas Scratch in order to help finance the HFL movement but claimed the jewelry was stolen in order to collect the insurance money. But the stones are gone because someone put them in the bear, and the bear ended up in Lakeside with Lizzy, and that means Scratch doesn’t have the fortune he expected.
“And that brings us back to Elayne Borden,” Burke continued. “How does a woman go from being the lover of a disgraced police officer to the lover of a public figure like Nicholas Scratch?”
“I’ve thought about this since I first learned about Elayne’s involvement with Scratch,” Monty replied. “Elayne, or I should say Elayne’s mother, was always fixated on social status, but her family doesn’t have the money or the clout they want to believe they have.”
“But they do have, or had, something that Scratch wanted,” Burke argued. “They provided him with some kind of connection. Otherwise, why would he get involved with Elayne or her family?”
Why would he?
Monty thought. “So someone has decided that if Elayne didn’t have the jewels on her at the train station, then Lizzy has them. Why not assume that they were hidden in the apartment and left there?” Monty paused, then answered his own question. “Because the apartment had been searched even before the police became involved. Whether Elayne was in on acquiring the jewels
or had found them and realized who was involved, she knew too much and she was running. Therefore, she was a liability.”
“Someone knew where the gems were supposed to be, and Scaffoldon was sent to fetch them. It isn’t likely that he thinks Lizzy still has them. If he was going to believe anything, it would be that I found the jewels and kept them.” Burke smiled. “I didn’t, but I could have hidden them in the evidence lockup or in a desk drawer.” The smiled faded. “That being said, I think it would be a good idea for Lizzy to stay in the Courtyard unless she’s with you. Now, what did you want to tell me?”
Churned up about Elayne, and feeling he had forgotten something, Monty set the newspaper on the desk and pointed to an article about a woman being killed in a random attack while out shopping with her family.
“Heather Houghton?” Burke said.
“She worked at Howling Good Reads. Resigned last month after Meg Corbyn . . .” Monty’s throat tightened.
“Ms. Corbyn saw this?”
“Saw something. Meg reads the
Lakeside News
. I don’t know if anyone else in the Courtyard does.”
“You should make Simon Wolfgard aware of this.” Burke sighed. “It’s so seductively easy to think that using the
cassandra sangue
’s pronouncements will make the bad things go away, that we’ll be forewarned about anything and everything and will avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it’s not always true.”
“No, sir. It’s not always true.”
Monty met up with Kowalski in the parking lot. The younger man glanced at the newspaper, then got in the car, saying nothing.
“You saw the article?” Monty asked.
Kowalski nodded. “Heather’s family had been pressuring her to quit her job, had threatened to disown her if she didn’t quit. If she’d still been working at Howling Good Reads, she wouldn’t have been in that store, and she’d still be alive.”
“You don’t know that,” Monty said gently. Since Kowalski was feeling the same kind of pressure from his own family to distance himself from the Others, Monty didn’t offer platitudes. But he wondered exactly what was said before Meg saw that vision.
Firesday, Maius 18
A
t least she had stopped crying.
Simon didn’t mind when Meg cried on him during a movie. Well, he minded but he accepted that this was typical of human females, and she shook off feeling bad once the movie ended. But this was something else, a deeper pain, as if she’d swallowed a splinter of bone that was tearing her up inside.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
He’d lost count of the number of times she had said that since Nathan howled that something was wrong with Meg. “How could it be your fault? You weren’t there. You didn’t hurt Heather.”
“I gave her the wrong advice, told her the wrong thing,” Meg cried. “That’s why she died.”
“She died because a human turned rabid and attacked other humans who were shopping in that store.” Had someone gotten hold of a dose of gone over wolf? Something he would ask Lieutenant Montgomery.
“That day we were all doing research to locate the compound where I’d been kept, Heather was upset because her family was going to disown her if she continued to work at Howling Good Reads. I remember thinking,
What will happen to Heather if she makes the wrong choice?
I must have hit my hand at the same time I was thinking that because I had a vision about Heather. There were magazines scattered around her, covered in blood. I saw a date. Not the current issue.” She frowned. “Not even the current year. But what I saw had to be wrong. I must have mixed up the numbers.”
“Is that all you saw? Magazines scattered around Heather?”
“You sell some magazines at HGR, so I thought . . . There was so much blood, I thought it meant she was going to die in the store if she stayed.”
There hadn’t been many details about how Heather died, but the newspaper article hadn’t mentioned anything about magazines. Something else to ask Montgomery. And whether Meg mixed up a date hardly mattered now.
“Meg?” Simon moved until he was right next to her, then rested his forearms on the sorting table, matching her position. “Would that store have had magazines?”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“That store Heather was in. Would it have magazines?”
“I don’t know.” She had that look in her eyes that meant she was reviewing her training images to see if she could find a match. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Heather was a bunny,” he said gently. “She was nice for a human, and a good worker, but she was afraid of us in a way that Merri Lee and Ruthie aren’t. Vlad and I recognized the signs and knew she wasn’t going to stay much longer, even before the
terra indigene
leaders came here for that meeting. Even before you had that vision.”
“But if she had stayed a little longer . . .”
“She would have been driven out of her pack, and when she left HGR, maybe they wouldn’t have taken her back, and she would have been alone.”
“But alive.”
“Would she?” He touched her hand. “Maybe Heather did avoid the death you saw because she quit when she did. She was with her family, and that’s what she wanted. If they hadn’t gone to that store on that day, or if they had been delayed, or if Heather had decided to stay home and do some chores, she would have been reading about someone else who was killed in that attack. You can’t know about what you don’t see, Meg.”
Meg sighed. “You’re right. I couldn’t know. And I can’t make a cut to see what might happen every time a friend has to make a choice.”
“No, you can’t.” He ran a hand over her head and gave her a light scritch behind one ear. “You feeling better now?”
“A little.” She gave him a wry look. “Better enough that I won’t put another knot in Nathan’s tail.”
concerned
,> Nathan said from the front room.
With a huff of annoyance, Nathan went back to the Wolf bed.
“I’m fine,” Meg said. “I don’t want my friends to get hurt, and it’s hard knowing that what I saw wasn’t enough to save Heather when I was able to save the ponies and Sam. And maybe she did live longer than she would have if she’d continued working at HGR.”
And maybe she died much sooner,
Simon thought.
Firesday, Maius 18
N
ot only had Jackson returned her drawing of the Wolf song; he and Grace framed it and hung it in her room. They brought her more paper and more pencils in different colors. They spent time telling her that this shade of green was grass and that shade was tree that shed its leaves when Autumn walked the land and that shade was pine. They described, as best they could, the shades of water, but they knew water as shallow and sun warmed versus the coolness of a deep pool, not the
color
of the water.
She listened, soaking up what they said and wondering what was outside her room. Jackson and Grace weren’t the only Wolves here. She knew that from the song. But she wasn’t brave enough to ask if she could leave her room.
She thought about her new keepers. They refused to call her
cs821
. Once each day, they asked if she had chosen a name. They didn’t punish her for not choosing. They fed her, cleaned her clothes, made sure she had what she needed to wash herself and use the toilet. And they seemed pleased that she liked to draw.
Jackson and Grace. But as she thought of them, she didn’t see Grace. She saw Jackson and . . .
Taking a clean sheet of paper, the girl began to draw.
* * *
Jackson walked into the scarred girl’s room with a plate of food for the midday meal.
She sat at the head of the bed, her arms wrapped around tucked-up legs, her chin resting on her knees.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, only realizing how sharp he sounded when she winced. He set the plate on the desk and approached the bed, sniffing lightly so that she wouldn’t know he was trying to catch the scent of blood.
No blood, but something was wrong.
“I wanted to draw a picture for you and Grace, but I drew that.” She pointed to the paper at the end of the bed.
Holding it carefully by one corner, he turned it around. Then he sucked in a breath.
“Have you ever seen these places? Seen . . . images?” he asked.
She shook her head.
She’d never seen him in Wolf form, but she’d drawn his head, muzzle raised to the sky, the Rocky Mountains in the background. That filled the top left section of the paper. The bottom-right section was filled with the head of another howling Wolf. Filling the center of the paper was a human dwelling like nothing he would find around his home territory, an Eagle’s view of an island, and the thundering water known as Talulah Falls.
“That other Wolf isn’t Grace,” she said, sounding worried.
“No, it’s my friend Simon. He lives in Lakeside, a place on the eastern shore of Lake Etu.” He studied the girl. Her shaggy hair was a golden brown, and her eyes were green with flecks of gold. If she were a shifter, he’d think she belonged to the Panthergard with her coloring. “You drew this for me?”
She nodded. “It means something.” She looked at the desk, at the drawer where she kept the razor. Then she looked away.
“It means something,” he agreed. “A strong friendship always has meaning.”
She looked surprised, then relieved.
No,
Jackson thought.
I won’t ask you to use the razor.
He picked up the drawing, careful not to smudge it. “Thank you.” Then he saw the drawing under it.
“It confused me, so I didn’t finish the picture.” She hesitated, then added softly, “I used up a lot of my blue pencils.”
“I’ll go down to the Intuit village later today and see if they have more.”
There was power in the drawing she’d made of him and Simon, but this other one disturbed him. A wheat field. He knew it was wheat because she had
drawn stalks with ripe grain in the foreground. But it was underwater. Sharks swam above the wheat field, and in the background, at the edge of the paper, was something that looked like a sunken ship.
He took that drawing too.
“Eat your food,” he said.
“Wheat doesn’t grow underwater. I remember that from the training images.” A glance at the drawer that held the razor.
“You don’t have to cut. You’ve given us answers. It’s up to us to figure out the questions.”
Jackson left the room and closed the door. Then he listened.
Soft footsteps crossing to the desk. A drawer opening.
He counted to ten before the drawer closed again and the chair scraped over the floor. When he was sure she was eating instead of using the razor, he silently stepped away.
Only one telephone in the
terra indigene
settlement. There wasn’t any need for more. The phone, along with the computer, was in the cabin at the edge of the settlement, next to the road that led to the Intuit village. Mail and packages were delivered there as well because there were too few who lived in the settlement who could pass for human.
He looked at the drawing of two Wolves who lived in different parts of Thaisia but were connected by more than friendship.
He would show the drawings to the elders, then leave them with Grace for safekeeping while he walked to the cabin with the phone and placed a call to Simon.