The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [53]
Then again, the police weren’t the only ones looking for her.
She kept moving. It had been nearly a year since she had last set foot in this place, since the night she had slain the dead man with the iron heart and had fled into darkness and another world. Yet it was easier than she might have guessed to slip back into her old rhythms. She strode with cool purpose through the halls, keeping her gaze high and distant, as if this were a dominion and she its ruler. More people passed by—nurses, technicians, janitors, medical students—but none of them gave her more than a cursory glance.
And why should they have recognized her? The Keep of Fire had changed her, just as surely as the girl Tira had been changed when she closed her small hands around the Great Stone Krondisar. Certainly Grace was not the same person who had haunted these sterile hallways, healing the wounds of others while she ignored her own.
As if this thought were an invitation, the shadow that dwelled on the edges of her vision rushed to the foreground. Its dark folds surrounded Grace, suffocating her. She stumbled, clutching for a wall she could no longer see as memories oozed forth. Once again she smelled the dusty air of the shed, the sharp reek of blood. Once again she was ten years old.
In the name of God Almighty, what have you done to her, Grace Beckett?
But I was trying to help her. Ellen used the wire on herself, Mrs. Murtaugh. She said she had to get it out—she said Mr. Holiday put something in her.
You are a wicked liar, Grace Beckett. And you are a murderess. Surely the fires of Hell will burn you for what you have done to Ellen Nickel.
No, you don’t—
You must pray, pray on your knees here in her blood, and beg God for repentance.
But I was trying to help her, Mrs. Murtaugh! We have to take her to the hospital. Maybe she’ll be all right. Please, you have to listen to—
No, try none of your spells on me, you Jezebel. I know you have given your soul to Satan. I have heard you utter your chants to him—at night, and in no tongue spoken by good Christians. Now take this wire in your hand. Take it! Use it on yourself as you did upon Ellen Nickel. And pray that you have enough blood in you to win your salvation.…
Crimson light flashed, and pain pierced Grace through to the center, bright, sharp, and—
With a sound like gushing water, the shadow receded. Grace blinked against the fluorescent glare, relieved to see the hallway was empty. At Castle Spardis, Beltan had been dying, his old wound reopened by the Necromancer. In order to use the Touch to sustain the knight while they journeyed to Earth, Grace had had no choice but to accept the shadow attached to the thread of her own life, the shadow that for so many years she had pretended didn’t exist. And now that the door had finally been opened, she could not shut it again.
There was never any logic to the shadow’s coming; it seemed anything could trigger a regression. Some were brief, as this one had been. Others were … not. All of them left her sweating and shaking, feeling as if she had been cut with scissors from a sheet of stiff, white paper. So far she had managed to keep her episodes concealed from Travis; there was enough for him to worry about with Beltan’s condition. However, she wondered how much longer that could last.
She still didn’t remember everything that had happened to her at the Beckett-Strange Home for Children—there was so much, and the shadow was so deep—but it seemed almost every day new details came to her. Just when she thought there couldn’t possibly be more to remember, the shadow was there and she was a child again: five years old, a pale nine, thirteen with flames dancing around her.
She forced her mind to focus on deciphering the hospital’s inscrutable room-numbering scheme. Even when she had worked here it had made no sense. Then she saw the etched plastic plate: CA-423. That was the number Travis had given to her. She pushed through the door and into the room beyond.
Machines