House of the Wolf (Book Three of the Phoenix Legacy) (8 page)

It was 18:20 TST. She was more than an hour late calling Jael. That wasn’t so unusual, but he would worry. Still, she made no move to rise. She couldn’t let him hear her voice now; he’d recognize the aftermath of panic, the tears in it.

Besides, she wasn’t yet ready to admit another day of failure, nor to broach—again—the alternative of approaching Sister Thea with the medallion. That was a decision reached over her beads in the chapel. The time was coming for that last resort.

She unfastened the stiff collar of the habit, her fingers seeking the medallion. Perhaps she’d wait until tomorrow night to bring that up. A doricaine and a good night’s sleep—she could survive one more day.

The medallion was in her hand. She wasn’t even conscious of unclasping the chain; she did it so often in moments of privacy.

The lamb. The pale light glowed lovingly on the fine contours of the tiny figure. A smile touched her lips. She hadn’t really been a close friend of Richard Lamb’s, but he had a gift for making everyone feel close, and he had entered the Phoenix at a crucial time in her life. She’d been a member for two years and was suffering doubts about it. Rich had stilled those doubts even though she had never spoken to him about them. It was simply that she couldn’t doubt any cause Richard Lamb espoused. He was so gently, truly just, he seemed to make anything he was part of unassailably right.

She turned the medallion over and felt a cold weight taking form under her ribs. When she looked at the wolf, she always saw three small pill bottles in her hand.

Cyanase.

Yet Alex believed her when she said she didn’t know what those pills contained. He didn’t for a moment doubt her.

She held his life in her hands then, and she held it now. Would he believe her again, believe she—

Her hand closed on the medallion.

A sound.

Her heart began pounding anew; she didn’t move, hardly breathed, listening past the dull thudding in her breast.

Footsteps. But the Sisters
never
made a second check.

A soft, irregular padding; she began to relax a little. Someone coming out of the novices’ wing. At least she’d be in a position to bargain; neither of them were supposed to be out of their rooms after curfew.

Still, there was something unnerving about the slow, halting approach of those footsteps; the back of her neck prickled. She waited, unblinking eyes fixed on the empty section of hall lighted by the shimmera. She couldn’t have guessed how long she waited, listening to the footsteps falter and stop, proceed hesitantly a while longer, stop again, approach again. She didn’t know what she expected to see, and somehow she wasn’t surprised that it was an apparition.

A faceless woman in a flowing white gown, long raven hair falling about her shoulders, catching silken lights, her left hand against the wall, sliding along it as her halting steps took her forward out of the shadows into the pallid glow of the shimmera. She stopped again, right hand pressed to her body, a sound escaping her, a sighing cry.

The God help me, I’ve gone over the edge. . . .

At first, that was Val’s only coherent thought. But that sound, that muted cry, jarred her back to rationality. It seemed so solidly real, and the woman was moving into the light now; perhaps that robbed her of her ghostly aura.

Her white raiment proved to be nothing more than the shapeless white nightgown issued to every nun at Saint Petra’s, and she was faceless because she was using a face-screen. That was odd, but certainly not supernatural.

The light gave further elucidation. It delineated the swollen curve of her abdomen and explained the faltering step, the cry of pain.

Sister Iris. The pregnant one. She must be in labor.

Val felt a brief return of panic. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for a contingency like childbirth. Still, she stayed calm enough to realize Sister Iris needed help; that was why she was wandering the halls after curfew.

Val rose, forgetting her koyf and veil, but taking the few seconds to fasten the medallion around her neck; she’d have secured that if she were dying.

“Sister Iris, can I help you?”

She seemed to freeze, head turned toward Val, weight pressing on the supporting hand against the wall, and Val chided herself for coming so suddenly out of the shadows to frighten her.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just coming up from the chapel. Please . . .” She put out a hand to her. “Let me help you.”

Sister Iris still didn’t move; her voice was pitched low, as Val’s had been, but it had all the tension of a shout in it.

“Who
are
you?”

Val couldn’t answer. She was too close to shock.

Two things hit her at once. First, the light catching, throwing sparks of color from a ring on the hand against the wall. Sparks of blue and red; sapphire and ruby.

And that voice.

She had listened so long for that voice, she wondered if she wouldn’t have had the same reaction even without the recognition conditioning. With it, those few words exploded like a bomb in her mind.

But it was impossible. Sister Iris was pregnant.

“Oh, no . . .” The words slipped out, and in a flashing moment Val understood the aching, ironic
possibility
that couldn’t be denied because it was so tangibly self-evident. And she understood, but took no comfort in the realization, that Bruno Hawkwood had made the same error.

“
Who are you
?”

She drew back against the wall, hiding her left hand under her sleeve, that sibilant query rife with desperate defiance. Val reached for the clasp of the medallion, hands shaking, keeping her voice down when she wanted to shout aloud.

“Oh, forgive me, my lady, it was just such a—
Wait
!”

Val reached out for her, caught her shoulders, and held on desperately simply to keep her from bolting.

“
My lady
!” The frenzied whisper echoed in the amber silence. “For the God’s sake, look at this! The medallion! I’m from the—oh, damn!” She couldn’t say the word; her conditioning stopped her. “
Alex Ransom
sent me. He told me to tell you it was blessed by a saint, oh,
please
—look at it!”

Her resistance ceased suddenly; she sagged against the wall, dark hair falling forward over her shadow-face as Val pressed the medallion into her small, cold, trembling hand.

Val waited, breath stopped, saw the hand move finally to turn the medallion over.

“
Alexand . .
.”

She was falling. Val managed to ease her down to the floor where she slumped against her, huddled over the medallion, body wracked with muffled weeping. It was like holding a lost child, she seemed so small and frail, and Val felt all her own anxieties and frustrations pale against the lonely terrors echoed in that constrained sobbing.

Six months. Half a Terran year.

What kind of nether hell had it been for her?

But it was over, her hell and Val’s. And Alex’s. Val was weeping, too, although she was hardly aware of it. She was only conscious of a fountain of laughter within her that took the form of tears.

Jael, brother, I’ve found her—I’ve found Adrien Eliseer. . .
.

She had been dozing; “skimming sleep,” Jael called it. Erica Radek shifted in the chair, cramped muscles complaining. It was 19:30 TST. She looked across the bed to the biomonitor screen, realizing she’d been closer to real sleep than dozing.

Alex hadn’t moved; he seldom did. Only regular periods of “exercise” consisting of electrode-induced contraction of the muscles prevented atrophy. What concerned her at the moment was his respiration rate. She had removed the oxymask, another therapeutic measure designed to force his body to keep working for itself. Part of the time, at least.

He was breathing well enough; shallowly, and a little erratically, but she expected that. She rose and stood looking down at him, automatically checking the web of wires and tubes surrounding him, the thermostat of the heat shell, the feel of his forehead under her hand, an instrument she trusted as much as the biomonitor. Just as automatically, she checked the five capped pressyringes on the control panel at the head of the bed. They were always ready for any emergency brought about by a change in his condition.

But there was no change.

At least there seemed to be none at first.

For a long time she stood watching him, her eyes occasionally flicking up to the screen.

It came at irregular intervals. A nearly invisible movement behind his closed eyes. Nightmares, perhaps. She watched the brainwaves. A dream-state pattern, or so it seemed, and she took hope from that; he hadn’t even shown evidence of dreaming for two weeks. Yet the brainwaves displayed a slight peculiarity in contour; there were anomalous elements of waking, high-anxiety states in them.

She took his left hand in hers and heard the ticking of his monitored heartbeat quickening. She watched his chest rising and falling, heard the whispers of breath, felt his hand stir in hers. She considered calling Dr. Eliot, but decided against it, foreseeing nothing she couldn’t deal with, knowing he was presently involved with a serious knife wound.

But the brainwave configuration—it worried her because she didn’t understand it; she didn’t understand what was happening in the dark recesses within his mind to which he had retreated.

She uncovered the pressyringes, not even sure which of them she might need. Not the stimulant, at least. The one nearest her was morphinine. That he would need; as long as he was in a comatose state, he’d been given nothing for pain.

Alex . . . Alex, are you there
?

She didn’t speak the words aloud, afraid to do anything, hesitant even to move. His breathing was becoming labored, the exhalations accompanied by faint moans, the only sounds she’d heard from his lips since that first night. His hand moved in hers, pulling away, and she let it go, watched it move against the sheet as if he were trying to reach out to something or someone. She paced her own breathing carefully, warned by a hint of lightheadedness that she was so intent, she was forgetting to breathe.

He was trying to speak.

Erica watched the tentative motions of his lips fixedly, as if she might read the half-formed words. Perhaps it was only an unconscious contraction of muscles; perhaps she only wanted to believe he was trying to speak. Faint sounds formed with the motions of his lips now. Still, she couldn’t make sense of them.

“Alex? Can you hear me?” She whispered the words, leaning close to him. The ting of his monitored pulse beat faster, a small sound that seemed inside her head; her ears would burst with it soon if—

Adrien.

Finally, Erica recognized the word he was trying to say, and she felt an aching within her, a painfully palpable sensation. If that was what he was waking to, waking in hope of finding . . .

She didn’t speak again. Perhaps he
had
heard her, heard a feminine voice and translated it into Adrien Eliseer’s.

His head moved against the pillow, face contorted; he still tried to speak the name through panting breaths. Erica shifted her attention from him just long enough to reach for the morphinine syringe, and in that brief time he surged up out of the bed, ripping wires and tubes loose, his right arm wrenching against the restraints.

“
Adrien! Adri
——”

The pain stopped him. Erica held him as his body curled spastically, strained cries hissing through his clenched teeth. She forced him back onto the bed, and it took all her strength to keep him still long enough for the morphinine injection.

It began to take effect within thirty seconds. She felt the cramping tension in his muscles loosen and glanced up at the screen. The erratic pulse and respiration rates gradually slowed. Finally, she could let him go, but she didn’t let herself relax. She pulled back the sheet to assess and repair the damage, restoring tubes and electrodes, checking the bandages on his arm, cutting away a section at the elbow soaked with reddish secretions that meant he’d torn some of the unhealed skin grafts. She used an antiseptic spray and made a hasty temporary bandage. By the time she restored a semblance of order and covered him again, he was lying with his eyes closed, his breathing and pulse rate nearly normal.

She couldn’t say the same of her own as she stood at his left side, waiting, wondering whether he would slip away from her back into unconsciousness again.

At length, he opened his eyes.

She wanted to cry his name, to shout a prayer of thanks, to weep, to embrace him. But she only stood silently, watching and hoping.

His pupils were contracted with the morphinine, and she knew he was seeing little more than indistinct lights and shapes. He was trying to focus his eyes, frowning a little, and she was beginning to dread the moment when that vague gaze would find her, dreading that he wouldn’t recognize her. And yet he did. It took some time, and she dared to speak now, sure he wouldn’t mistake her voice for any other.

“Alex, welcome back,” she said softly, and her eyes blurred with tears when he finally smiled weakly, and his hand moved, seeking hers.

“Erica . . .” A slurred whisper of sound caught on a long, trembling sigh. Then she heard the ting of his pulse rate quicken. He was trying to speak, to tell her something, but he couldn’t seem to shape the words.

“Slowly, Alex. Just relax. There’s plenty of time.”

He managed a nod at that, and took a long breath.

“Shh . . . she’s . . . al——” For a moment, frustration got the better of him, then he took another breath and tried again. “She’s . . .
alive
. I saw . . .” A frown, then; he seemed bewildered. “Nn-no. I didn’t
see
. But . . . I
know
shhh . . .”

Erica couldn’t respond. She knew exactly whom he meant with that feminine pronoun, and the affirmation that Adrien Eliseer lived stunned her. She didn’t know how to answer it. But he didn’t seem to expect a response, and when he spoke again, the words seemed to come more easily.

“Pain . . . she was in pain. But she . . . wasn’t . . . afraid. I don’t understand. But I . . . I
know
she’s alive. Erica, she’s
alive. . .
.” He turned his head away, covering his eyes with his left hand; he was weeping, and he didn’t want Erica to see the tears he couldn’t stop.