The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [75]
Deirdre tried to comprehend the other’s words. “I don’t understand, Glinda. Please, help me.”
But Glinda wasn’t looking at her anymore. Instead she gazed up at something over Deirdre’s head. A dreaminess stole across her face, like the peace just before sleep.
“She’s so beautiful,” Glinda murmured. “So beautiful, and so pure. If only I could have been more like her.”
Deirdre turned, craning her neck, and finally she understood. Of course—Surrender Dorothy. Where else could she have taken her name?
On a nearby television screen, a scene played out in vivid Technicolor: reds, greens, yellows, and blues all as lush and juicy as they had been the better part of a century ago when first revealed to a drab, black-and-white world. Dorothy Gale stood before a fallen farmhouse surrounded by Munchkins as a bright bubble of light danced toward her, shimmering and expanding until it became a woman clad all in gauzy, glittering white.
Deirdre turned back toward Glinda. “It’s not too late. You can come with me … with us. Whoever it is who wanted you, if they don’t need you anymore, they’ll let you go.”
“You’re wrong, sweetie. They don’t let anything go.”
A calmness filled Glinda’s eyes, and it sickened Deirdre. They couldn’t give up without a fight. She opened her mouth, but Glinda shook her head, and suddenly Deirdre found that words had fled her. She worked her tongue, but she could make no sound.
“Hush, sweetie. It’s all right.” Glinda’s voice was like cool water. “You came for me, and that’s all that matters. Sometimes just by wanting to save someone, you do.”
Deirdre shook her head and felt the warm wetness of tears against her cheeks.
“Here, sweetie.” Glinda pulled a silver ring from a slender finger, then pressed it into Deirdre’s hand. “This came from my mother. I won’t … I won’t be able to give it to my daughter. You keep it instead, so that we live on. At least a little bit.”
No, Deirdre tried to say. I don’t want it. But she closed her hand around the ring. Glinda leaned forward and pressed her purple lips to Deirdre’s, kissing her deeply, lingeringly.
Deirdre’s eyes went wide, for in that moment the murky nightclub around her vanished. Instead, she and Glinda sat on a flat, moss-covered stone in the middle of a misty forest glade where moonbeams stole between silver trees like ghosts. The only music there was the chiming of water tumbling over polished stones. All around her, like bits of gossamer, tiny beings with ugly faces floated on the air with butterfly wings.
Deirdre pulled away from Glinda’s kiss.
“Where—?”
But at that moment the forest vanished, replaced again by the nightclub and the throbbing pulse of electronic music.
Glinda curled up on the couch, drawing her long limbs inward until she was small as a girl. Deirdre began to reach for her, but a stubby hand on her arm stopped her.
“They’re coming,” Arion said. “You have to go.”
She shook her head, beyond words now.
The doorman pulled her arm. “Sticks and stones, come on! If they find you here, they’ll spill your blood. They have no love in their hearts for your kind—if they even have hearts at all.”
Deirdre stumbled to her feet. The doorman pulled her toward the back of the nightclub. Deirdre glanced over her shoulder, but the sofa was empty, save for a single twig bearing two silver-green leaves resting on one cushion.
Arion tugged again, and she stumbled through an opening. The pulsing music ceased with the sound of a shutting door. One by one, the night sounds of London drifted to her ears: laughter, footsteps, the distant wail of a siren. She stood on the edge of an empty lane, beneath the flickering orange haze of a lone streetlamp. At last she turned around, and she was only slightly surprised to see a blank brick wall behind her.
24.
Dr. Rohan Chandra, third-year resident at Denver Memorial Hospital, specialist in cranial neurology, and at thirty-four years old already the author of five scientific papers discussing the cause, consequence, and reversal of long-term