Stranger (26 page)

She wanted to take it further. But they didn’t. Catullus dressed, and they now carried a basket packed with some sandwiches, walking on a little path, discussing the mysterious place known as Otherworld.

She just wanted to drag him off to a secret, mossy place and there ravish him until he forgot how to add two plus two, let alone perform the complex mathematical equations she knew he was capable of calculating. She also knew that her own body’s demands had to wait when the fate of millions hung in the balance.

They needed to find Merlin in order to communicate with Arthur. Merlin was somewhere within the Otherworld. But how to
get
to the Otherworld … that was a conundrum neither Gemma nor Catullus had yet solved.

They walked now without specific direction, only knowing that they had to keep moving, for definitely this enigmatic place would not seek them out.

“Glastonbury Tor has been called the entrance to the realm of faerie,” Catullus mused. He took the land in long strides, which, through force of will, she
just
managed to match.

“Can’t go back there. It’s too far for our purposes—and the place is probably still crawling with pixies.” She hoped she would never have to encounter one of those little monsters again.

“There must be other ways of entering Otherworld. Hollow hills, or other portals.”

“Maps don’t exactly show such places.”

“Not maps, but …” He glanced around, then, seeing something that she could not, strode off the bridle path. She jogged to follow.

Gemma trailed behind him until he reached a cluster of birch trees. Pushing back the undergrowth, he uncovered a tiny puddle of water, then crouched down beside it. She watched with open curiosity as he plucked from one of his pockets a single brown-and-cream bird feather and held it over the water.

“There has to be some explanation for what you’re doing.”

He shot her a grin so full of boyish exuberance, she thought a brass band would pop out of the bushes to play a rousing tune, celebratory fireworks would pinwheel with color, and any of a dozen foolish but wonderful things to happen. His happiness made
her
happy purely for its own sake.

After the disenchantment of Richard, Gemma had taken lovers, with varying degrees of duration. She expected nothing from them, only distraction and temporary assuaging of her body’s needs. Not a one of them ever made her feel as she did now with Catullus, as though his sorrows cut her deeply, his joy feeding her own. She hadn’t felt that, even with Richard. Now, with Catullus, she did. It was terrifying and wonderful.

“Birds are exceptionally sensitive to magic,” he explained, bracing his forearms on his knees and twirling the feather between his fingertips. “Blades often use them to help identify Sources, since they react strongly to its presence. For years, now, I have been trying to create a device that utilizes this sensitivity in order to locate magic. So we can be more precise instead of, as we sometimes are wont to do, blundering around using a haphazard mixture of scholarship and conjecture.”

He held up the feather. “I keep one of these handy, just waiting for the proper opportunity to use it. The device that I have in mind would work along similar lines as a compass.” With surprising delicacy, given the size of his hands, Catullus set the feather onto the puddle. The feather immediately glided across the water’s surface, coming to rest on the edge to Catullus and Gemma’s left. He picked the feather up and repeated the experiment twice. Both times had the exact same results.

“That’s where we’ll find magic,” said Gemma. She pointed in the direction which the feather moved.

Yet he shook his head. “It’s a negative reaction. The closer a bird comes to magic, the more it becomes agitated.”

“Which means that we go in the opposite direction from where the feather is aiming.”

“You’re a quick study, Miss Murphy.”

“I’ve got a good teacher, Mr. Graves.”

Their gazes held, a wordless communion. They drew closer. Their mouths met in an open, consuming kiss.

Heat washed over and through her, and she clung to him as if by instinct, her body knowing without her conscious understanding that she had to hold tight to him, drink in his kisses, because this, he, nourished her.

The kiss turned hungry as he met her with his own demands, and her breasts grew sensitive, heavy. A slick warmth gathered between her legs with each sweep of his
tongue against her own. She would have pulled him down on top of her, but he broke away with a growl.

“Can’t,” he rasped. “I shouldn’t have … not when we can’t take this to where it needs to go.”

“Insanity’s starting to look mighty appealing.” But she knew he was right. They had important business to undertake. Everything else was, unfortunately, a distraction.

So Catullus marked the opposite direction from which the feather pointed, put the feather back into his coat, and they both rose up on limbs grown clumsy with unfulfilled desire. Gemma wondered if she’d ever before lived in such a state of frustrated need. She thought she wanted him greatly before they’d made love. Now that she knew the pleasure of his body, that desire increased a hundredfold.

When they might have the time and security to give in to that desire … she did not knowyr.

“I keep picturing it,” Gemma said as they wended their way down into a tree-lined vale. “The entrance to the realm of magic.”

“And what do you see in that fertile writer’s imagination of yours?”

“A moss-covered stone arch, the surface of the stone covered in arcane carvings.” She plucked a tall grass and began to chew on it thoughtfully.

“Reasonable assumption.” Catullus wore his thoughtfulness with the comfort of a man who was happiest when thinking, a born scholar. “So, in this conceptualization, does one simply walk under the arch to be transported to Otherworld?”

“Seems too easy. All the fairy tales my granda told me made it seem a bit more complicated than that. It wouldn’t be right to have humans just waltzing in and out of fairyland whenever they feel like it.”

“Get a bit crowded.”

“And drive up the prices of real estate.”

“Or lower them—humans can be awfully annoying.”

“All
of them?” she asked.

“Others are quite … pleasant. And by ‘pleasant,’ I mean one human in particular drives me mad with desire.”

His words heated her, but she felt compelled to note, “You were crazy
before
you met this certain human.”

“She took me from the boundaries of merely being eccentric into being verifiably insane.”

“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “We’ll keep each other company in the sanitarium.”

“Then I will be a happy man in my straitjacket.”

They smiled, and she didn’t realize until that moment that she had been just a little worried. She’d given him her body, and he had come to mean a great deal to her, but the truth was that she hadn’t been quite sure whether or not she and Catullus actually …
liked
one another.

As she and Catullus smiled at one another, walking comfortably side by side, she saw that this most extraordinary man suited her, and she him. She was pretty damned content just to be in his company.

A friend, she realized. He was her friend. They were hard to come by, especially given the choices she’d made over the course of her life. Richard had not been her friend. Nor had the men who’d come after him. And she knew few women, still fewer who liked and respected Gemma and her line of work. Now that she had that which she’d lacked for so long, nothing would be taken for granted.

Chill insight pierced the warmth this understanding brought her. They had nearly been killed that very morning, and the risks that lay ahead were even more hazardous. Everything was tenuous. Everything could be lost. Not just her own life, but his. In the span of several days, he had come to mean so much to her. Losing him terrified her.

He saw her expression darken, and, with his usual quick comprehension, he grasped its cause.

Sobering, he returned to the topic they’d been discussing. Within the riddle of the Otherworld lay the slim possibility of victory over the Heirs. “So, it shan’t be easy to cross into the realm of magic. Perhaps it will require some variety of incantation. Or an offering.”

With her spirits lowered, Gemma shrugged. “We won’t know until we get there. Right now, all of this is conjecture.”

He wouldn’t let her sink, so he said, almost cheerfully, “I happen to
enjoy
conjecture. Just as I like postulation, theory, and speculation. If life was reduced to simply dealing with what we conclusively know, it would be a dull business indeed.”

She nodded her agreement, but felt herself torn between her enjoyment of his company and the real possibility that it wouldn’t, couldn’t, last.

They crested a small rise, and their steps slowed. All speculation on the portal to Otherworld soon ended abruptly and, actually, a bit disappointingly.

“This isn’t what I was expecting,” Gemma said. “Are we sure this is what we’re looking for?”

“No ruins, no arches, nothing but this … this …”

“Old well.”

For that’s what it was. In the shelter of trees and bracken stood an old stone well, nothing more than a low circle of rough stones forming its walls. It had no roof, not even a cranked windlass for raising and lowering a bucket. A rusty metal eyebolt gouged into the top of the wall held the tattered remains of rope. No inscriptions. No fanciful carvings or altars. As far as Gemma could see, this was a perfectly ordinary, entirely uninteresting well that hadn’t seen use in decades.

“There’s an old, old book in the Blades’ library,” he said as they approached the well. “Must have read it a score of times. All about faerie lore.
Blaiklock’s Faerie Miscellany.
In it, I saw that, over and over again, the entrances to the
faerie realm often lie within the circle of toadstools, or within the stones surrounding a well.”

It wasn’t a small well—its diameter roughly five feet across—and the wall that encircled it came to her waist. Weeds poked up through the stones, nodding in the faint breeze.

They peered over the wall, looking down into the shaft of the well. It was very dark.

He picked up a pebble and dropped it down the well. After what felt like a long, long time, a faint splash echoed up the shaft. “It’s not dry.”

Not precisely a comfort. Someone might drown at the bottom of the well, instead of having their neck broken.

“This doesn’t look much like the entryway to the realm of magic,” she said doubtfully. “Maybe the feather misled us.”

“Don’t be too hasty.” He braced his hands on the wall and continued to gaze down into the well, as if answers could be drawn up from its dark waters. “Bodies of water often served as boundaries between the mortal and enchanted worlds.”

“And we just jump into this?” If she had to, she’d do it, but the prospect of leaping into an old well, with no real way to get
out
of the well, didn’t strike her as very appealing.

“Not precisely.” He snapped his fingers. “Remember how we were thinking one might have to make an incantation or something similar to open the portal?” When she nodded, he continued, his voice growing animated as he reasoned out the conundrum, “One thing that remains consistent in faerie legend is the love and importance of music. In the tales that mention toadstools and wells, to get to the land of faerie, you’ve got to sing and dance around the circle. That opens the door.”

“Widdershins,” Gemma said suddenly.

“Pardon?” He blinked at her.

“That’s what my granda said. To get to the other realm,
you had to walk or dance widdershins. Backward, or counterclockwise,” she explained, twirling her finger.

“Against the movement of the sun. Which makes sense, since many legends of faerie involve its existence as a complement or opposite to the mortal world.”

“Contrary little buggers, those faerie folk.”

He straightened, then held out his hands. “Shall we?”

It was her turn to blink. “Now?”

“Might as well get to it.”

Gemma didn’t believe herself to be a coward—she
had
leapt off a moving train, been in battle only that morning, and acquitted herself pretty well, if she did say so, herself. But she wasn’t entirely eager to plunge down into some crumbling, dank well. A deep, dark well. With no way out.

Catullus watched Gemma stare down into the well. Trepidation left its tight mark upon her face, yet, despite the fact that she was frightened, she would do what she must to complete the mission. Courage meant doing something in the midst of fear, and she had courage in abundance.

He wanted to crawl inside her mind. He wanted to learn every part of her, from her earliest memories to the secret joys of her heart and even the most mundane thoughts she might have. Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? Or perhaps she favored some American authors—though he couldn’t think of a single one. Did she prefer raspberry jam or orange marmalade? Everything of hers was wonderful to him, all of her precious.

He couldn’t believe he was waxing rhapsodic over what type of jam a woman preferred, but that’s what he’d come to. Making love with Gemma had been one of the most magnificent experiences of his life, if not
the
most magnificent. She was giving and responsive and passionate and aggressive, and all of this, all of her, enabled him to become more fully himself. He’d never let go with any other lover the way he’d been able to with her.

Touch yourself,
he had said.
Ride me.
And she had. The sight of her on him, finding and giving pleasure, filled him to repletion. Not once had he ever spoken thusly to a woman. He had not trusted any of them enough to allow this kind of exposure.

But he didn’t want to think of anyone else. He allowed the slate of his sexual history to be wiped clean. Everything before had been mere biology, two components fitting into one another until a desired result was achieved. With Gemma, it was not simply carnal, corporeal—although, God knew, that aspect had been wonderful—but something much more profound. This woman knew him, intimately, deeply, as he knew her. She alone allowed him to venture into the unknown, without fear, giving him room to learn not only her, but himself. She was the only woman to see him as more than an intellect, more than a maker of machines. A man of flesh and life.

They had found one another, but perhaps too late. Danger, the prospect of disaster surrounded them. He had so much more to lose, now.

They had to reach Merlin, stop Arthur. And the only way to get to the sorcerer was through a gate to the Otherworld. Down the well.

They stared down into the well’s depths. Somehow, at the bottom, they might find an entrance to Otherworld.

“You’ll need to open the portal,” Catullus said.

“Maybe I can open it from here,” Gemma mused. She closed her eyes, deep concentration knitting her brow together. After some time, she opened her eyes. “I can’t feel anything.”

“Perhaps because nothing yet
exists
down there.” “Can’t open something that isn’t there.” “So we make a door.” Catullus sounded a good deal more confident than he felt. “Call it into being.”

“And we do that, how?”

“Dance counterclockwise around the well, singing.”

He held out his hand, as if asking her to waltz. The irony of the gesture was not lost on him. They would have never met in a ballroom. “Shall we?”

She did not want to jump into the well, yet she put her hand in his easily, comfortably, as if that’s exactly where it belonged. It surely felt that way.

“What should we sing?” she asked.

“How about ‘Au fond du temple saint’?” he suggested.

She stared at him blankly.

“From Bizet’s
Les pêcheurs de perles,”
he explained. “Granted, it’s for a tenor and baritone, but I think your contralto should work.”

Gemma continued to look at him.

“All right. Let’s try ‘Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen,’ from
Die Zauberflöte.”

“I had to review operas,” she said dryly, “not memorize the librettos. Do you know ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’?”

“Not familiar with it.”

“It’s popular in all the music halls.”

“Of which I am not a habitué.”

“How about ‘The Little Brown Jug’?
Everyone
knows that.”

“Except me.”

“Damn it.” She frowned, frustrated by the impediment. “We’re from such different worlds.”

Now that he had found her, Catullus refused to surrender. “Not so different that we cannot learn from one another. Teach me the words to one of your songs.”

Her brows raised. “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

A smile slowly blossomed. “All right.” And then she began to sing. Her voice was, as he’d suspected, a lovely contralto, warm and low, untrained, but clear. So pleased
was he by the sound of her singing, he did not pay full attention to the lyrics, until …

Wait, she couldn’t
actually
be singing about a— “’That’s why we call her Susie, the Seventh Street whore,’” Gemma warbled as the song drew to a close.

“Gemma!” Even to his own ears, he sounded like an outraged vicar.

She blinked at him, a look of pure innocence. “Yes?”

For a moment, he simply looked at her. Such a lovely face, those crystalline blue eyes, the sweet, soft mouth, and, of course, the dainty freckles stippling her nose and across her high cheekbones. No one would ever suspect that such beauty hid a wicked soul.

Surprises could be quite wonderful.

He asked, “Was the second line, ‘She threw her skirts in the air,’ or ‘She threw her drawers in the air’?”

Her mouth quirked. “Skirts.”

“Ah. Very good.” He sang the song back to her, putting extra emphasis on the words
thrust
and
bang.
“Think I’ve got it.”

She tugged on his hand, and he allowed her to pull him close, wherein she promptly, thoroughly kissed him within an inch of his sanity using her delightfully vulgar mouth. “Hearing you say things like
pump
with your gorgeous accent,” she breathed, “makes me want to throw you to the ground and bite your clothes off.”

He couldn’t stifle a groan. She may very well destroy him. And he would be happy in his destruction.

“You’ve only yourself to blame,” he rasped. “Where on earth did you learn such a crude song?”

“Chicago slaughterhouses aren’t hotbeds of propriety.”

He shook his head. “The company you keep.”

“My taste is improving.”

Drawing a deep breath to steady himself, he yet again cursed time and circumstance, because everything within him wanted her again, and again, however he could have her,
and everything outside of him—with the notable exception of Gemma, herself—demanded otherwise.

She understood this. They both drew apart, reluctantly. Then, at his nod, they began to dance counterclockwise around the well, holding hands and singing Gemma’s extraordinarily obscene song. Hopefully, the magical realm enjoyed lewd tunes just as much as the mortal one. He felt mildly ridiculous, capering around a crumbling old well like some confused, depraved Morris dancer, but there was also something rather freeing about singing a dirty song whilst skipping about. Having a beautiful woman holding his hand and doing exactly the same thing made it even more enjoyable.

What would the sober, reserved members of the Graves family think of him, the current Graves scion working with the Blades of the Rose, acting like a complete and absolute madman? He honestly didn’t care.

When the song concluded, they stopped and looked down into the well. It looked just as dark and clammy as before.

“Has anything happened?” Gemma asked. “I don’t know if I can sense a door.”

“Difficult to tell. Let’s give it another go.”

They had just begun the second verse when a gunshot split the air. An overhead branch cracked and tumbled to earth.

Catullus pulled Gemma down to the ground behind the well, shielding her. He had no awareness of even drawing his shotgun, but it was in his hands and ready. Gemma drew her pistol. They both peered over the stone wall encircling the well, and they both swore when they caught sight of four armed men heading toward them, running through the woods. Catullus recognized two of them as Heirs. The others had to be newer recruits. But even in the dusk, there was no mistaking their posture, their appearance and attitude of privilege. The excellent quality of their firearms
purchased from the finest St. James’ gunsmiths. Guns aimed at Catullus and Gemma.

Catullus returned fire, as did Gemma, but the Heirs didn’t stop their advance. Within a minute, or less, the Heirs would be on top of them.

“Two choices,” he gritted over the gunfire. “Stay and fight the Heirs.”

“Who outnumber us,” she said as she reloaded.

He took aim and shot, but the Heirs dodged for cover. “Or hazard leaping into the well.”

“Hoping a door to the Otherworld waits at the bottom.”

He and Gemma shared a glance. And then a nod, followed by a brief, but significant, kiss.

They took hold of each other’s hands. Drew a breath. Then rose up, perched on the edge of the well, and jumped.

Cold, moist air swallowed Gemma. One moment, she crouched on a narrow stone wall, bullets flying around her, Heirs’ shouts cracking like whips, and the next, she and Catullus plunged down into absolute darkness. Her stomach flew up to lodge somewhere in her throat. She held tight to Catullus’s hands, the only sure and solid thing in this pitch-black drop.

She expected them to splash into the water at the bottom. Waited for it. Perhaps the water wouldn’t be very deep, and they’d smash into a pile of broken bones while the Heirs above watched and laughed.

Yet she and Catullus fell. And fell. An endless descent. She glanced up to see the heads of the Heirs peering down into the well, growing smaller, farther away. She barely heard their angry yells.

“How deep
is
this thing?” she cried to Catullus.

He sounded much calmer than she felt. “As long as it needs to be.”

She did not appreciate his cryptic response. Not when
they were falling down and down a bottomless well shaft. If they had created a portal to Otherworld, it kept itself damned scarce.

Then— “I feel it! The door!” A presence below. Not physical. A nexus of energy, quick and bright. Beyond the door, she sensed limitless space, unbound by wall or constraint, free from the confining hold of mortality.

“Perhaps now would be a good time to open it,” Catullus murmured, wind whistling around them.

But it wasn’t like an ordinary door that could simply swing open at a touch. Without a physical object, she did not know exactly
how
to open it. It didn’t help that she was falling, her skirts billowing up around her. Focusing on the opening of an intangible door wasn’t the easiest task on which to concentrate.

If she
didn’t
focus, then either she and Catullus would be falling down this well forever, or they’d hit bottom—eventually—and either be killed or have to find a way to scale a well shaft hundreds of feet deep while being shot at from above.

The door to Otherworld is a mind,
she thought. It works just as someone’s mind worked, not as a material object but as a state of consciousness, of being. She had to access it as she did the thoughts of people. Tap into its essence, and allow herself to unlock its core.

She pictured it, no easy task in the middle of a free fall. Gave it shape and definition, coalescing energy into the shape of an actual door, with wood and hinges and a handle. Upon its handle, she placed her hand. Then, with an indrawn breath, she pushed against the door—not with force, but gently, because Otherworld was not her realm, and one must use caution and respect when venturing into someone else’s home.

Nothing.

Her heart fell with her.

No—she couldn’t fail. Not for herself, and not for Catullus. The door
must
open.

She tried again, with greater command. Waited. And then …

It swung open.

She and Catullus crossed the boundary. It sizzled across her skin, a fiery membrane, and from the darkness of the well, light engulfed her. Dazzling light so brilliant she saw nothing, knew only heat and brightness, both outside her and within, as if she had been flung into a star.

Catullus’s hands were tugged from hers. She reached out for him, scrabbling to keep hold. He disappeared. She tried to call out to him. Her voice dissolved.

All around her was light, and in her ears rang a kind of music she’d never heard before, notes from an instrument unknown to mortals, sung with inhuman voices. This, too, enveloped her. She lost herself in the light and sound, and, without Catullus to anchor her, she spun off into measureless time and place. She fought for consciousness. The brightness became too much, and she surrendered to oblivion.

Voices. A host of voices, hovering around her like a cloud of gnats. Gemma couldn’t tell what language they spoke—nothing she’d ever heard before, though it sounded similar to the Gaelic old Granda sometimes spoke when he grew wistful for the old country. But these voices didn’t have Granda’s rusty pipe sound. No, if anything, they sounded small, silvery, halfway between a child and a flute.

What were they
saying?

She couldn’t understand the words, but she might be able to figure out the intent. She let herself into their minds, an easier task now, and a throng of images assailed her, impossible images of spun-glass castles, beasts of all shapes and sizes, vast revels lit by starlight. Wading
through these visions, she found the gleaming thread of thought, and, the moment she touched it with her own mind, the voices suddenly cleared, becoming comprehensible, even if the words themselves were not.

Where did they come from?
one asked.

Brightworld,
another answered.
Knocked the door down and tumbled in.

They didn’t!

Saw it, myself. Through a waterdoor. Down down.

I like the color of that one’s skin, like darkest walnut.

This one is cream and fire. Bright hair, Brightworld.

I should like a nibble. Bet they taste good. Good and mortal. Fleeting flesh. Tasty tasty.

Gemma’s eyes flew open.

She found herself looking up at a dozen tiny faces, faces that were both childlike and wizened. Large black eyes, canted, black from corner to corner. Wide mouths full of sharp teeth, upturned noses, pointed ears. Skin the hue of river stones.