Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02] Read online

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  Proofed by Highroller

  IN THE RIFT

  by

  MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  and

  HOLLY LISLE

  To Matt

  who knows the price of happiness

  Every dream achieved someday demands a reckoning, just as every choice comes at a price. This is life: that nothing worth having can ever come easily, that nothing loved can last forever without care, attention, and sacrifice.

  The last of the search parties had given up looking for her months earlier. When the American woman pedaled her bicycle out of a little-traveled mountain pass in the heart of the Italian Alps, her husband had already received the notice that she was missing and presumed dead, her home town had already mourned, her friends had already paid their last respects. She had lived through a month of days in her absence; the world she'd left behind and finally rejoined had, in that same time, lived through half a year.

  She and her guide rode into the town of Bardonecchia, where they caused a sensation. The guide brought with him a mangled corpse which he had strapped to a makeshift travois attached to the frame of his bicycle. The woman carried in her pocket a book. Neither the corpse nor the book were what they appeared to be.

  The corpse looked like the body of the woman's best friend, also reported missing, but it was in fact a magical construct created to give the woman on the bicycle an alibi, while her real best friend remained behind in Glenraven, serving as the new Watchmistress for that beleaguered magical realm.

  The book appeared to be a common guidebook. The woman knew it had once been the key that permitted her and her friend to enter the realm of Glenraven, but she believed that its magical qualities had died when she left. She kept it with her only because it had sentimental value—it would serve, she thought, as a remembrance of her friend and of the adventure they had experienced in a world of magic and wonder. She knew she would never return to Glenraven and her best friend would never leave, but she knew also that this was the best and happiest outcome either of them could have imagined.

  In the center of a brief storm of publicity—a storm that would have been longer had anyone suspected the truth—the woman returned to America, to the little town of Peters in southeastern North Carolina, where she resumed her life and her marriage, had a child, and was happy. She forgot about the book, but in that she had help from the book.

  Had it actually lost its magical properties, the book would have ceased to exist in any form. But it had not. It was changed, but it remained a powerful, complex artifact.

  Further, it had a desperate mission, but the woman who had served it so well before would not serve again. The book needed to belong to someone else, someone it hadn't found yet.

  It altered its appearance so that outwardly it became a copy of a techno-thriller written by an aging actor who had in the writing proven himself incompetent in two professions. Then the book sat on a shelf in the woman's house for nearly two years, until finally she put it into a large box of full of other books she didn't intend to read and took it to a used bookstore. There she traded it in, never suspecting what she had just done.

  Chapter One

  The dead horse lay across Kate Beacham's pinestraw path, hidden from the road out front by the mooncast shadows of the loblolly pines and the heavy overgrowth of the azaleas, rhododendrons, and camellias. The sharp, hard scent of impending frost and the hotmetal stink of blood clogged the air. Kate leaned against the trunk of a pine and clenched her fists, digging her nails into the palms of her hands, fighting back tears. Her breath plumed out in front of her, frozen by the cold night air, the plumes as ragged as her breathing.

  Someone had cut letters from magazines and pasted them to a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper and had nailed the note to her horse's forehead. From where she was standing, she could read it clearly.

  YOU'RE NEXT

  Her tongue slid along the backs of her teeth, tasting blood, feeling the new wobbliness in the front incisors. Her fingers touched her right cheek, probing at fresh swelling over the bone and beneath the eye, feeling the stickiness of scrapes that were beginning to scab over, setting off sharp needles of pain to counterpoint the dull throbbing in her back and ribs and thighs.

  She looked at her torn shirt, at the dirt and the blood, at the gaps where the buttons had come off in the fight. She looked down further to her bloodied, scraped right knee that glowed in the moonlight through the new hole in her jeans. Further, to her feet. She still wore one Nike Air cross-trainer. The other had come off when she kicked at one of the attackers; he grabbed her foot, she pulled away, the shoe had stayed with him.

  That attack hadn't been random.

  She shivered and stared at the black, unwelcoming windows of the tiny house she'd bought, wondering if she dared to go in long enough to pack. Were they waiting in there for her? Were they standing on the other side of the glass, watching her find her horse? Were they laughing?

  They'd been waiting in the alley. She owned a saddle shop on the corner of Main Street and Tadweiller, a block from the police department and the county courthouse in one direction and right next to the used bookstore that had once been Baldwell's in the other. Like the other shop owners on the block, she parked in the service alley behind her store. She was working late. The saddle business she did in Peters wouldn't keep a mouse in scraps, much less rent a store and buy a house and feed her and her horse. But like a lot of other successful small business owners, she'd learned how to market to specialty buyers. She had a thriving catalog business and her reputation for high-end custom-made English and Western saddles and tack earned her visits from riders all over the United States and Canada. She even had a customer in Australia.

  She'd been doing the finishing touches on a matching western show saddle, bridle, martingale and crupper for a client who barrel-raced: oak leaves and acorns and lots of engraved silver on black leather. It was going to set off the client's dapple-gray half-Arab, half-Quarter-horse; Kate could picture the completed saddle as she worked. She wanted to finish tooling the seat before the leather dried and she'd gotten involved in pebbling between the oak leaves and doing some extra detailing she hadn't actually planned until it started to be beautiful and suddenly it was ten o'clock and Lisa and Paul, her two assistants, had been gone for hours.

  Weary but pleased, she let herself out the back way, locked up, and found her car key while she was still standing on the top step. She noticed only peripherally that the light by her back door was burned out and so was the one at the end of the alley. It didn't seem to matter. She lived in Peters, North Carolina, population ten thousand and a few, and though she and everyone else she knew locked their doors and took precautions, it was more because Interstate 95 ran right by the town than because anyone expected trouble from neighbors. Besides, the full moon lit most of the alley and the sky was full of cold-brightened stars, and everything was as quiet as it should have been.

  Deep shadows swallowed her car, but she hadn't really thought about that. How many hundreds of times had she left work late? Alone?

  How many?

  One too many.

  Three of them had been waiting for her. They wore pantyhose over their heads, and one of them had a roll of duct tape. They grabbed her, the one with the duct tape wrapped it twice around her head, covering her mouth. "You're going to like this," they kept saying. "You're going to like us, witch." She'd fought, kicking and punching and head-butting, trying as hard as she could to hurt the three of them.

  They didn't have weapons with them. No knives. No guns. They'd ev
idently figured they were three big men and she was one average-sized woman, and they hadn't anticipated the amount of fight she would be able to put up in her own defense. They should have. They certainly would the next time. Not all the blood on her shirt was hers. She'd kicked one in the nose when the three of them tried to pick her up to carry her somewhere. That one had dropped her and when her feet hit the ground she'd launched herself head first into the face of the one who had his arms locked under her armpits and around her chest. She'd heard the crunch of bone and he screamed and swore. She wasn't winning, though. For every blow she got in, they hit her with three, and the more she fought, the madder and meaner they became.

  Then, from the shadows where she was fighting for her life, she saw the gray backside of the store at the end of the alley light up. Headlights were coming down the service road from the opposite direction.

  "Shit," one of her attackers said, and his friend said, "Later, witch."

  They ran, and she stepped out into the light of the headlights, hoping for help.

  The car had been a prowl car, and the officer in the black-and-white had put her in his front seat, driven her around while she tried to spot the three men, and finally, when it became clear the three of them had gotten away, had taken her to the emergency room. The ER staff determined that she had a hairline fracture of the right zygomatic arch, which meant—they'd translated when she'd asked—the thugs had broken her right cheekbone, but not badly. She also had numerous abrasions and contusions and a couple of bite marks and a slightly sprained ankle, but she didn't have a head injury or internal bleeding and she wasn't going to die. So she got a prescription for Darvon and a couple of tablets to last her until she could get to a drugstore, and the RN had her swallow one Darvon before she left.

  Then she went to the police station and gave her statement and let a female officer take photographs of her injuries.

  The police were kind, but they weren't very encouraging. She hadn't recognized any of her attackers. She hadn't gotten good descriptions. She hadn't been able to come up with any surefire identifiers—no tattoos or scars. She described three youngish white men, all between five ten and six one, all between a hundred eighty and two hundred twenty pounds. All three were going to be bruised and scratched, and she was sure one would have a broken nose. Maybe, she said, two.

  Worse, she'd lied when they asked her if she knew why anyone might want to hurt her. She wasn't about to admit to the police in a small North Carolina town that she'd been attacked because she was Wiccan—a witch. Freedom of religion might be a constitutionally protected right, but that didn't mean anything in most small Southern towns if the believer belonged to the wrong religion, and Kate knew it. She'd learned the hard way to keep her mouth shut. So what she did know about her attackers—that they were after her because of her religion—the police didn't find out. As a result, they were all very caring but not very helpful.

  A different officer took her back to the alley to pick up her car. He watched her get in it, watched her start the car up and check to make sure it would run. Then she waved to him that she was all right, and she backed out and drove home.

  Parked in the driveway.

  Walked up her walk.

  Found her horse.

  It was three thirty in the morning, and now she knew that they knew where she lived. She didn't know them, but they knew her, had been waiting for her. In spite of what they'd said when they grabbed her, she had wanted to think what happened to her was just the odds, but her last, futile hope of that died. She'd wanted to believe the attack had been random violence that resulted from her carelessness, from her being in the wrong place at the wrong time, from bad luck. She had wanted to believe that any woman walking down those steps would have had the same thing happen to her, because if it were just random, then it would have been over. She could have put it behind her and gone on with her life.

  But this was personal. These men were after her, and they weren't just going to go away.

  She didn't let herself cry. She swallowed the tears and felt them blurring across her eyes. She'd raised Rocky from a colt. She'd trained him herself; had ridden him every day; had let him steal apples and carrots from the pockets of her coats; had talked to him and played with him and brushed him and loved him. He was, she supposed, the child she'd never had and probably never would. They'd killed him to hurt her, and they'd succeeded. Standing there staring at Rocky lying across the pinestraw with his eyes open and dull and cloudy, she hurt worse than she had when the thugs had beaten her.

  But she wouldn't cry. She wouldn't let them make her cry.

  She wouldn't let them make her stupid, either. Carefully, she retraced her steps to her car. She got in, locked her door, and backed out of the pinestraw-covered drive. She drove two miles to the Dairy Mart, used the pay phone to call the sheriff—she lived out in the country, so she was beyond town police jurisdiction—then drove home to await the arrival of help.

  A car with two deputies got there twenty minutes later. Both men got out; the one that carried a camera went straight to the horse while the other came over to talk to her. His name was Merritt. He was genial, thirty pounds overweight, in his early fifties. She told him an abbreviated version of what had happened to her at work, then showed him Rocky and the note. The other deputy had finished with the photos of the horse and was working his way around the house by then, checking windows and doors.

  Merritt said, "Death threat like this is a serious thing. Maybe they're only trying to scare you, but I wouldn't bet the farm on that."

  The other deputy called from the back of the house, "No sign that anyone tried to get in here. Doors and windows are fine."

  She turned to Deputy Merritt. "Would you mind coming in with me and making sure they didn't get in? I know it sounds paranoid, especially when everything looks okay out here—but I just want to be sure."

  "I'll be happy to." He headed up the walk with her. The other deputy moved slowly down the driveway with his head down—looking for evidence, perhaps—got something out of the county car, and returned to Rocky. "Bobby, you getting that note?"

  "I am."

  "Fine. I'm going to take this young lady inside and make sure there aren't any surprises waiting for her. Call back to the station when you're done there, and I'll be out in a minute."

  The other deputy just nodded.

  Kate unlocked the door, but Merritt walked in first. She followed and closed the door behind them.

  The house smelled of cinnamon and apples from the pie she'd baked for herself the day before; and of Old English Red Oil, which she used to keep up the antique walnut dining room furniture she'd acquired piece by unmatched piece from various secondhand stores around the state; and of Murphy's Oil Soap. The house was old and still a little run-down, but she'd recently redone the wood floors with a drum sander and stained them herself, and she kept after them. The homey smells didn't make her feel better. They just made her feel that terrible things could happen in the safest of places.

  The deputy switched on the light.

  The floor in the entryway gleamed. "This is right nice," he said. He peeked through the doorway to his left, into the dining room, and then to the right, into the living room. His hand rested on the butt of his gun. "You wouldn't think from the outside that this place was so pretty inside."

  "I haven't had a chance to repaint outside yet," Kate said. "That's my big goal come spring. I've been working on the inside for the last year. I did most of the inside work myself in the evenings and on weekends." She tried to hide her distress in small talk. It didn't help, though.

  The deputy opened the coat closet to the right of the entryway and said, "No one in there."

  Kate reached in, grabbed the baseball bat she kept leaning against the wall and pulled it out. She worked off her remaining shoe and kicked it into the closet. The deputy eyed the baseball bat and raised an eyebrow. "That's not bad, but for home protection I really do recommend a gun. You're a long way out he
re, and no matter how fast we come, it ain't going to be fast enough if you need help right away."

  "I have a shotgun," Kate said. "And I shoot once a week."

  "What do you have?"

  "Mossberg twenty-gauge pump action. I keep it loaded with slugs."

  "That'll do. What do you shoot?"

  "Clay birds, mostly. Boy down the road will come over and toss them for me when he can. When he can't, I toss them myself."

  "Damn. You hit any when you do the tossing?"

  "Most."

  "Damn."

  They went into the dining room. Moonlight shone off the polished surface of the oval Colonial drop-leaf table and the arms and backs of the chairs, turning them silver. The deputy switched on the light, and the warm dark tones of the wood came alive. "Your chairs don't match," Merritt said.

  "I got them one at a time at yard sales. Got the table the same way. Refinished everything and did the upholstery on the chair seats."

  "You'd be pretty handy to have around," the deputy said, crouching down to look inside the deep storage area beneath the china cabinet. "I can't get my old lady to wash the damn dishes without an argument. If I didn't say anything, she'd just live in shit."

  He walked around the counter that separated the dining room from the kitchen and started opening the cabinets. "Have you seen anything so far that looks out of place?" His flashlight illuminated the dark spaces under the sink, where orderly rows of cleaning supplies sat waiting for use.

  "Not yet," Kate told him.

  "God, if it were, you'd sure know it, wouldn't you? Don't think I ever saw anyone kept a place so neat."

  "I live alone. I'm the only person I have to clean up after."

  "There's that," he said. He checked the pantry, then the little downstairs bathroom and the storage area at the back of that. "We got three young'uns, Sharla and me. Oldest is nineteen now, youngest is thirteen." He turned from the storage area. "Let's take a look in your living room, then go upstairs."