Candle stopped by her chair and looked her in the eye. “That was our story, wasn’t it, Owl?” she asked quietly. “The boy’s vision was Hawk’s vision.”
She didn’t miss much, this one, Owl thought. “Yes, it was,” she said. “But it happened to the boy and his children, too.”
Candle nodded. “Except that the vision in the story isn’t real, but Hawk’s vision is. I know it is. I have seen it.”
She turned and walked toward her bedroom, not looking back. Owl felt her throat tighten and tears spring to her eyes.
I have seen it.
Candle, who saw what was not entirely clear to the rest of them, had seen this.
Alone in the common room, Owl sat quietly in her wheelchair, staring into space and thinking, and did not move again until the rest of them were in bed and fast asleep.
Chapter FOUR
THE LADY CAME to Logan Tom for the first time in a vision. Even now, he could remember the details as clearly as if the meeting had taken place yesterday. He was alone by then, Michael and the others gone, traveling north toward the Canadian border. He had stopped for the night on the shores of one of a thousand lakes that dotted that region, somewhere deep inside what had once been Wisconsin. The day was gone and night had settled in, and it was one of those rare occasions when the skies were clear and bright and free of clouds and pollution. Stars shone, a distant promise of better times and places, and the moon was full and bright.
He had gotten out of the Lightning and was standing at the edge of the lake, staring off into the moonlit distance, pondering missed chances and lost friends. He was in a place darker than the night in which he stood, and he was frightened that he might not find his way out. He was riddled with misgivings and guilt, wrapped in a fatalistic certainty that his life had come to nothing.
His wounds were healed, but his heart was shattered. The faces of those people he had loved most after Michael—his parents and his brother and sister— were vague images that floated in hazy memories and whispered in ghostly, indecipherable warnings.
You have to do something. You have to find a purpose. You have to take a stand.
He was eighteen years old.
A sudden movement in the darkness to his right caused him to glance down the shoreline. A fisherman stood casting into the waters not twenty yards from where he stood. He watched as the rod came back and whipped forward, the line reeling out from the spool, the filament like silver thread. The fisherman glanced over and nodded companionably. His features were strong and lean in the moonlight, and Logan caught the barest hint of a smile.
“Catching anything?” Logan asked him.
But before the fisherman could reply, there was a noise off to his left, and he wheeled about guardedly. Nothing. The shoreline was still and empty, the woods behind the same.
When he looked back again, the fisherman was gone.
A moment later, he saw a tiny light appear somewhere far out over that water, little more than a soft shimmer at first, brightening slowly to something more definable. The light, diffuse at first, gathered and then began to move, drifting toward the shoreline and him. He stood watching it come, even though he knew he should move away, back toward the AV and safety. He didn’t even bother to shoulder the flechette, letting it hang useless and forgotten from its strap across his back. He couldn’t have said why. His training and his instincts should have made him react quickly and decisively. Self-preservation should have been his only concern.
Yet the light held him spellbound—as if he realized even then that it was the beacon that would provide him with the direction he sought.
When it was no more than a few yards away, bright enough that was squinting against its glare, one hand up to shield his eyes, it began to fade, and when it was gone, the Lady was there.
She was young and beautiful, her skin so pure and clear that it seemed to him, in the white cast of the moonlight, he could see right through her. She was dressed in a diaphanous gown that hung in soft folds about her slender body, white like her skin, her long black hair in stark contrast where it tumbled about her shoulders.
She stood several yards offshore—not in the water but upon it. As if it were solid ground, or she weighed no more than a feather.
“Logan Tom,” she said.
He stared, unable to reply. He did not think he was hallucinating, but he had no other explanation for what he was witnessing.
“Logan Tom, I have need of you,” she said.
She gestured toward the sky, and when she moved her garments rippled like soft shadows and revealed that her perceived translucency was real. She was a ghost—or at least more ghost than human.