In a daze, he’d staggered away, gotten into his car, and driven back to his house. No one was home, and he’d stripped down and showered. He’d thrown his clothes in the washing machine and then passed out for hours. When he woke up, the memory of what had happened sent him shuddering. It was undeniably real. His rancid clothes were still in the machine and there were half-moon cuts in his palms from when his fingers had clenched unbearably, but beyond that, the memory of those moments was burned into his brain. He had to dash to the toilet, where he was violently ill. Then, trembling, he turned on the television.
Braced for coverage of the nightmare, he found absolutely nothing. The big story was that some Shetland pony carrying a fat child had bolted from a local riding school, run into town, and come to a halt in the market square. No mention of any murders. No mention of crystals.
Over the next few days, he’d watched the news, read the papers, and scoured the Internet, but there was never any reference to a horrific double murder, let alone a horrific double murder with unexplainable crystals. His psyche, already splintered by the impossibility of what he’d experienced, was shattered completely by the fact that no one else seemed to have noticed.
Lionel Dover had become a different person. The way in which he understood the world had changed. On the outside, he continued to go to work, to spend time with his friends and family, but inside, his thought processes could no longer be considered human.
Eventually, he’d driven by the house and seen no police tape, no bereaved family members wandering around looking shell-shocked. Several weeks later, a For Sale sign went up, and a few weeks after that, people moved in. They did not appear to be aware that their new home had been formerly occupied by a man and a boy who had been killed inexplicably.
Then it happened again. And again. Each time, the sensations were the same. Each time, he braced himself for the world to explode, for word to get out, for the media to go mad, and each time, it was as if it had never happened. No mention anywhere. He was still going home at the end of the day to his wife and children with no consequences whatsoever. He’d stopped caring about what it meant. He was a man who had a home, a job, and a family and who periodically killed people with crystals and felt no concern about any of it. He was madness in the convincing costume of a regular person.
He experimented, cautiously. He went up to London and found that the ability came when he called it — he could direct it to emerge as he wished. But there were times when it came without being summoned, and then there was no way to stop it. He’d feel the burn in his spine, a sure sign that in a few minutes the crystals would erupt, and so he would have to find a person on whom he could unleash them without anyone seeing.
And then that woman had appeared. That impossible woman. Now he sat on the bench by the river and came up with a thousand explanations for her, each one more ridiculous than the last. She was a witch. She was an angel sent to punish him. She was a government operative. She was a figment of his imagination. She was an alien. She was his conscience.
It was all so absurd, he would have thought it was a hallucination.
Except for one thing. His hands closed around his proof.
*
Much to her surprise, Myfanwy opened her eyes.
Not dead. That’s good.
She was in a four-poster bed with a bag of blood hung up next to her, trickling down into a tube in her arm. The blood looked a little more purple than it should have, but she accepted it. On the far side of the room there was a nurse doing some paperwork at an antique desk. A clock on the wall noted that it was ten o’clock; the light coming through the window indicated that it was morning.
Myfanwy quickly took stock of how she felt and was cautiously pleased. No pain. She could wiggle her toes and fingers and — she reached out with her powers and made the nurse drop her pencil — her mind as well. As an added bonus, she knew exactly who she was.
On the downside, she was not entirely certain where she was. The large window showed a little walled garden that could have been anywhere. Am I in the world’s most baroque sanatorium? How long have I been out? Before she could muster her thoughts to call out to the nurse, the woman walked out of the room. Marvelous. Well, I suppose I can wait, she thought. She shifted and felt a twist of pain in her back. Yes, she decided hastily, I think I’ll just lie still here for a while. Then the door opened and her executive assistant entered briskly, holding a stack of files. She was such a familiar sight in such unfamiliar surroundings that Myfanwy felt a little trembly in the lower lip for a moment.
“Good morning, Rook Thomas,” said Ingrid in a tone that acknowledged no difference from any other morning.
“Good — good morning, Ingrid. Where am I?”
“One of the rooms at Hill Hall. You were at Ascot yesterday.”
“Oh, okay.” She felt a rush of relief. “You didn’t have to come up here. The traffic this morning must have been a bother.”
“I came last night, Rook Thomas. Now, the Rookery has couriered over these reports for you to review and some papers for you to sign.”
“All right,” said Myfanwy, blinking her eyes rapidly. “Oh, what about my car?”
“It’s been delivered back to the Rookery, but I’m afraid that a member of the Reading team had to break in and hot-wire it. They didn’t have your handbag, and no one turned it in at the racecourse. New keys are being cut.”
“Well, that’s irritating.”
“The phones and credit cards have been canceled, of course, and your various ID cards are being reissued.”
“Thank you.” She reached out cautiously, braced for the pain that sparked pointedly in her back and insides, and took the first document. It turned out to be all about her.
The report advised that Rook Myfanwy Thomas had been impaled by a spike of crystal of unknown type that possessed characteristics of quartz and alabandite. The weapon had damaged a couple of major organs, which sent her into shock.
Dr. Marcel Leliefeld and Miss Odette Leliefeld had performed impromptu surgery and repaired the injuries, preempting the death that would normally have occurred from that sort of damage. Examination of the spike did not show any fracturing or chipping.
A photocopy of Dr. Marcel Leliefeld’s notes written in glorious copperplate listed the various compounds that had been applied to her during the surgery. The names meant nothing to Myfanwy, but she assumed the Checquy surgeons had reviewed it and would have declared war if something ghastly had been done. More compounds had been added to the blood that was percolating into her. Dr. Leliefeld noted that, provided she remained in bed for the rest of the day and drank plenty of fluids, she would be able to get up to attend that evening’s dinner, though she would be restricted to one glass of wine during the meal and one cognac afterward. She should be fully recovered by the next day, and there would be no scarring.
Well, I was bloody lucky there, she thought weakly. She knew that she should probably be outraged at the thought of Grafter materials floating about inside her, but she simply couldn’t manage it. For one thing, it would be churlishly ungrateful, and for another, the fact that she was alive and would be able to get up for dinner made it impossible to mind.
There were some distant bangs, and the two women looked sharply at the window.
“Are we under attack?” asked Myfanwy calmly.
“Sir Henry has taken the guests to shoot skeet,” said Ingrid.
“Oh, well, as long as none of the guests get shot,” said Myfanwy. She turned her attention back to the paperwork.
The next report made her gasp. The first page was a photograph of the murderer.
“What? Do we have him?” she asked Ingrid.
“No,” said the EA. “But we know who he is.” Myfanwy nodded disappointedly and turned her attention to the dossier. Lionel John Dover of Northampton. I fucking hate you. Most of the file consisted of standard government information — records from the National Health Service, a précis of his finances, details about his family — but there were also two sketches that Pawn Clements had done of him. The first was his face at rest. It was unmistakably him.