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“It’s an experiment.” Because you’ve got an ulcer and I want to see what happens.

  He did as he was told, clasping her wrist above the strap, then jerking away as if he’d been burned. “What the hell?”

  “I bet your ulcer isn’t bothering you now,” Jeanette said sweetly. Robert shot her a narrow look, not pleased.

  “My headache’s gone, too. It makes sense. Ellie, what do you feel?”

  “Hurt,” the woman moaned, in a tranced, petulant voice. “It hurts. I can’t let it.”

  “First she heals herself. Now she can heal others,” Robert said thoughtfully. His eyes were alight with a dangerous fervor. “We have to test this.” He turned to the waiting guards. “Go find Dr. Ramchandra. Bring him here.”

  * * *

  He could not wake himself up—and worse, he’d lost all control over the dream. Helplessly, Eric’s dream self pushed on through the forest, surrounded by slinking red-eyed shapes out of nightmare and the Chaos Lands. Where he was going—and what would happen when he got there—were questions he found himself unable to answer, and that powerlessness fed a sort of angry fear.

  This isn’t right. I’m dreaming and I know it. Why can’t I wake up?

  At last the unchanging forest of stark bonelike trees began to thin. Eric found himself drifting to a halt at the edge of a clearing. The open space ahead was perfectly round, and the bone trees that circled it gave it the appearance of some sort of temple. The floor of the clearing was carpeted with a silvery moss, as thick and smooth as an expensive carpet, and at one end of the clearing was the first artificial thing Eric had seen in this tulgy wood—the back of an enormous throne, its high back blocking the occupant (if any) from Eric’s sight.

  The strange throne was as black as the trees, and seemed at the same time to be both insubstantial and terribly solid, as if perhaps it were forged from something alive that hadn’t finished growing yet. Eric knew now that this dream was a message, a warning—but of what? And from whom?

  Or was it a trap that had somehow penetrated Guardian House’s defenses instead? The fear he’d begun to feel when he lost control of the dream blossomed into outright panic. As he struggled to wake, the throne began to turn, slowly, so that in moments Eric would be brought face to face with its occupant. Somehow, Eric knew that would be a disaster of an even greater magnitude than his present situation, one that he must avert at all costs.

  With all his strength he called upon the Bardic Gift within him, setting the bright humanity of his music against this ghostly moribund wood of silver and shadows. He built in his mind an image of his own safe bedroom in Guardian House, its walls garlanded with the invisible wards of familiarity and good wishes.

  You have no power over me! I reject you! I dismiss you! Go AWAY!

  It worked.

  Eric struggled upright in his own familiar bed, gasping with relief. Not a trap, not a warning, it had been a particularly vivid nightmare, nothing more after all. He stared around at the walls of the familiar bedroom, imprinting its images on his mind, forcing himself to breathe deeply and slowly, banishing fright. It was still night outside. Despite the fact that he seemed to have spent hours in the dream-wood, he’d probably only been asleep for a few minutes.

  Can’t sleep after that. He flung back the covers and swung his legs out over the side of the bed. His feet sank into the fluffy flokati rug and he wriggled his toes appreciatively. He remembered that sometimes in the old days, Bethie’d had nightmares like this (though nothing, a small voice inside told him, could be quite like this), and when she had, they tended to come in chains that destroyed a whole night’s sleep. Elizabet had always said that the best thing to do was make a clean break with the dreaming state—get up, move around, have a cup of tea, connect with the waking world—before trying to sleep again.

  Tea sounded like a good idea right now. He wondered if Greystone were still in the living room. Maybe the gargoyle would like a cup as well.

  Eric had left the curtains open when he went to bed, hoping that the morning sun would wake him before he slept the day away. As he headed for the kitchen, he glanced casually back that way, wondering if it was raining outside. There was an odd glow shining in; probably the reflection of one of the skyscrapers off the clouds. . . .

  It wasn’t.

  He ran to the window and stared out, unable to believe what he was seeing. New York was gone.

  No, not gone. Worse. Blasted to rubble, the twisted remains of the familiar Upper West Side buildings looking like the Judgment Day aftermath of nuclear war.

  And out of their midst, a glowing tower, impossibly tall, rose in evil triumph over the ruined city. He felt a wrenching shock—

  And then there was brightness, and Eric was struggling against something that wrapped him in inexorable, unbreakable bonds. . . .

  Eric awoke again—this time for real. The sun was high in the sky—that was the light—and he was wrapped tightly in the sweat-soaked bedsheets that had wound around him during his nocturnal struggles.

  A dream. It had all been a dream, the weirdwood forest and his first awakening. Still gasping with the dream-induced panic, Eric struggled free of his bedclothes and ran to the window. All was as it should be. Everything was normal—wintery trees and pale December sky. No devastation. No dark elven tower raised by Unseleighe power to rule over what was left of the New York skyline.

  Unsteady with relief, he staggered back to the bed and sat down heavily, waiting for his heartbeat to slow from its frantic racing. The dream and its aftermath of false waking faded, its insistent nightmare reality becoming less urgent by the moment. He was safe. New York was safe.

  But if Toni and the others saw—felt—anything like my dream, no wonder they’re all out running around trying to round up the unusual suspects.

  But had they? Did the dream—vision, premonition, whatever—have anything to do with whatever was alerting the Guardians? Or was it a message meant for him alone?

  Of course, like Freud says, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

  The joke fell flat, even in his own mind. Whatever it was that had happened to him, Eric couldn’t afford to just shrug it off. In the world of elven magic that he lived in, such things were never just innocent nighttime fantasies ralphed up by the collective unconscious. They were warnings—even if the warning came muddled and coded in symbols he couldn’t decipher just yet.

  He’d have to pass on Dharinel’s warning to one of the Guardians as soon as he could, and do his level best to convince the Guardians this was something really serious. Somehow Eric knew that that wasn’t going to be a lot of fun.

  The trouble was, the employees of Threshold were a generally healthy bunch. All Dr. Ram could come up with to test Ellie on were some mild allergies, a cold, a few strained muscles.

  At Jeanette’s insistence, they’d unstrapped Ellie’s chest and legs and raised the back of the gurney up into a sitting position: Ellie could hardly escape, and her new powers seemed to have no aggressive capabilities. In the face of human pain—or even mild distress—Ellie could do nothing but react, healing the injured party as quickly as possible. She seemed entirely without the capacity of self-preservation, a totally vulnerable creature.

  It’d be funny if it weren’t so flaming annoying. I finally get a lab rat who CAN talk, and she won’t say anything! If Ellie Borden had any insight into the process that had gifted her with these powers, she was doing a good job of keeping it to herself. In fact, the second dose of T-Stroke seemed to have reduced her to little more than an animal . . . an animal who could work miracles.

  Robert was insistent that they find something that could really challenge Ellie, and they lucked out with one of the lab techs—Donaldson had spilled industrial solvent all over his arm the previous week. Fortunately he was at his desk, within easy reach, so Jeanette sent the two guards up to escort him down to the Lab. When Dr. Ram unbandaged his arm down there in the lab, the ulcerated skin was purple and weeping, an ugly sight. If Donaldson hadn’t
been such a Type-A control freak, he’d have been home on medical rest with an injury like that.

  As soon as he’d come through the door Ellie had started to whimper and reach for him. Jeanette was fascinated. The girl reacted to the presence of the sufferers as if someone were jabbing her with a red-hot poker—as if, in fact, she felt their pain more keenly than they did.

  There was a word for that, Jeanette knew. Empathy. But what Ellie had was light-years beyond healing touch. Whatever was wrong, she fixed it. When they brought Donaldson over to her, all Ellie had to do was touch him, not even near the injury, and within seconds the skin on his arm was pink and healed.

  “What’s all this?” The tech looked bewildered, staring from Ellie to the healthy new skin on his arm.

  “Just an experiment in Healing Touch,” Jeanette said quickly. Donaldson was a good soldier. He wouldn’t ask questions. “You’ve been a great help. My department will get in touch with you later about filling out an incident report. It’d be great if you kept this to yourself until then, okay?” With an arm around his shoulders, she urged Donaldson from the lab and back into the arms of the Security who’d walk him back to his own turf. There’d be some gossip, she knew, but it wouldn’t go far. Threshold’s corporate culture didn’t encourage idle gossip about its projects.

  “This is great—great,” Robert muttered, ignoring the byplay with Donaldson completely. “How much more can she do?”

  “Do you want me to shoot someone so you can find out?” Jeanette asked, closing the door behind the tech.

  She saw Robert start to agree, then catch himself. Yes, Robert would like that just fine, but Jeanette suspected it would play hell with employee loyalty.

  Just then she had an idea.

  “Does anybody know where Lawanda is? She ought to be here now. One of you guys,” she said to the hovering Security. “Go get her.”

  Lawanda Dupre was Jeanette’s personal charity case. She had terminal ovarian cancer, and had come to Threshold through one of Robert’s other test programs—Jeanette didn’t know where he’d found her and had never actually cared enough to ask. When the test had run its course, Robert was going to cut her loose, but something about the woman had struck a spark in the wasteland of Jeanette’s soul, and she’d offered to continue running a private test program of her own with Lawanda, strictly under the radar. She was the one who’d come up with the idea of Lawanda working as a cleaning lady in the Black Labs, and Robert had no complaints of the arrangement.

  Neither did Lawanda. Without the morphine, heroin, and methamphetamine cocktail Jeanette provided, she’d be lying somewhere in a welfare bed, dying in agony. With the twice-daily injection, she was still able to work. Robert thought the research might be a way to produce another kind of super-soldier: impervious to pain, oblivious to wounds. Jeanette didn’t really care. Treating Lawanda was one of the few things she did at Threshold that made her actually feel good about herself.

  There was no denying that the drugs Jeanette gave her shortened the woman’s life. But they improved its quality, and let her die with dignity. That was more important, though Jeanette knew the FDA would hardly agree.

  After a short wait, Angel appeared, herding Lawanda before him. The woman moved at a painfully slow shuffle. She was in her early forties, and looked sixty. The injections could mask the symptoms, but all the drugs in the world couldn’t cure the disease.

  Ellie began to moan and keen before Lawanda had even gotten all the way into the room. Interesting. Jeanette knew that the cleaning woman was in very little pain—if any—but Ellie seemed to feel the presence of the cancer itself, not the pain of its victim.

  “Did you want me for something, Dr. Campbell? It isn’t time for my shot yet. You aren’t going to stop those, are you?” Lawanda asked anxiously.

  “No, Lawanda. Of course not. We just want to try something new in addition to the shot. It won’t hurt, I promise you. I just want you to come over here and let Ellie touch you.”

  Lawanda Dupre laughed cynically. “You trying faith healing on me now, Doctuh Campbell?”

  “Maybe.” Jeanette smiled. “Just come over here.”

  Ellie strained against the restraints that still held her to the bed, reaching out toward Lawanda. The older woman approached her cautiously. “Sistah, what are you doing here?”

  “Let me—just let me—please, it hurts so much,” Ellie groaned. Her hand darted out, fastening over Lawanda’s emaciated wrist like a clamp.

  There was a sudden spark where the two women’s flesh met, an ozone-like tang in the air. Lawanda’s face had gone slack, as if in a sudden rush of ecstasy, while Ellie’s was contorted like that of a saint seeing God. Everything but Lawanda had ceased to exist for Ellie. That much was plain. But what did that mean?

  “Something’s happening,” Robert said in a low excited voice.

  “No force, Sherlock,” Jeanette muttered back. Whatever was happening now, it was on a much greater scale than the previous healings. This time, Ellie’s struggle was something Jeanette could almost see—a palpable force conjured into the little room.

  Jeanette tore her gaze from the tableau of the two women and looked at the clock. The long red second hand swept magisterially around the dial. A minute passed. Ninety seconds. Longer than any of the previous healings.

  There was a faint groan from the bed. Ellie fell back, limp, releasing Lawanda’s hand. The cleaning woman staggered away from her, blinking in astonishment. Jeanette could see that Lawanda’s eyes were clear, the yellow tint gone from the corneas. She looked years younger, and even stood straighter.

  “Lord have mercy! I— What did she do, Dr. Campbell?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeanette said slowly. Ellie had healed Lawanda—but how? Cellular degeneration at that level couldn’t be reversed. This wasn’t like the burn—not a case of speeding up what the body had the power to do anyway.

  This was a genuine, bonafide miracle.

  Or to put it another way, Jeanette had just seen magic. Real magic.

  Robert made an impatient gesture, and Angel stepped forward again to usher Lawanda from the room. She went quietly, glancing back a few times at the woman on the bed.

  Ellie still didn’t move. Filled with a sudden awful suspicion, Jeanette moved over to the gurney. Gingerly, she reached out to touch the girl.

  Ellie’s skin was already cold to the touch, and the skin beneath the blue coverall lay slack over withered flesh. There was no pulse.

  “She’s dead.” And oddly, the realization gave Jeanette a faint pang of guilt.

  “Well, hell.” There was only self-centered regret in Robert’s voice.

  4The Manhattan Security Detention Facility

  SEVEN:

  LIGHTNING IN A SIEVE

  Aerune hated the Iron City, hated the World Above, hated the Mortal Kind, even as he planned to bend it and them to his will and his vengeance. His flesh crawled in the presence of the ferrous metal that the humans filled their world with, diminishing his powers considerably and making the use of magic an uncertain thing. But there were some prizes worth any amount of suffering, and the ability to own the Gift of a human Bard was one. Urla had told him that somewhere within this city mortals who lacked the Gift were given it. Now Aerune wanted to see for himself.

  The cloak of silk and shadow that concealed him from mortal eyes also gave him some protection from the iron that clogged the very air, but he could not long remain here without dwindling away to a wraith. Some elven gifts, however, were not hampered by the world the mortals had fashioned for themselves. A darker shadow among the shadows, Aerune sifted through the minds within the building known as Threshold Labs.

  Once he had the power to open his own Nexus, he could spend as much power as he needed to in shaping this city to his ends, conjure serpents and nightmares to feed upon its populace. At the hem of his cloak, even now, a faceless chittering mob of his servitors waited to do his bidding.

  At first he found only deception and fear,
which pleased him, though the first minds he touched held only small malice. But though they knew little, they knew there were secrets to find, and so, patiently, Aerune sifted through their witless babble.

  At last he found what he sought. A mind dark and fragrant with overreaching ambition and sublime cruelty: Robertlintel. Through this mind, Aerune learned of an elixir which could wake the dreaming spark of magic in mortal hearts, raise the Power that Urla had told him of and make mortals into living Nexuses. Aerune learned with approval and delight of Robertlintel’s adventures in discovery—how the elixir had killed or maddened all but two upon whom it was tried, one of whom had died by his own hand, and yet this mortal lordling still persevered. He meant to spread his drug throughout the streets of this city, and harvest for his own any who displayed the Mage-gift.

  But that cannot be. Such useful mortals are mine.

  Drawing upon his power, Aerune summoned all those creatures of his Dark Court who had the power to walk these streets: the gaunts and boggins, the redcaps and phookas, trolls, goblins, Bane-Sidhe, all the dark fellowship of the Unseleighe Court, those creatures twined closer to mortal man than any lover, for Man was their prey.

  “Go,” Aerune said to his followers. “Follow those who go from this place with the Mage-elixir. Find those in whom the Power kindles brightly, and bring them to me, for they are mine. Feast as you will, slay whom you will, so long as you succeed in this one thing.”

  There was a swirling in the air as the infernal host Aerune had gathered about himself vanished to their task. The business of following a handful of men through a city of teeming millions was a simple one to creatures with powers such as they possessed. No one of the human lordling’s minions would escape their hunters, nor would any to whom they gave the elixir be overlooked. Aerune turned his attention back to the curdled minds within the building’s walls.

  Robertlintel’s alchemist now administered her elixir to the last survivor for the second time, and Aerune relished the victim’s despair, as well as the more subtle bouquet of emotions in the mind of the alchemist. The power the elixir had woken was one of healing, and Aerune watched as, ignorant of the necessities of the gifts that had been woken so powerfully into life within her, Ellieborden let herself be sent down into death by the mortal lord and his minion.