Isabelle turned to her captor. “I told him I wouldn’t do it,” she said. Bitterweed shrugged. It was a familiar body gesture of John’s, but John never put the insolence into it that Rushkin’s creature did.
Oh, John.
“God, he named you well, didn’t he,” she said.
“Rushkin didn’t name me,” Bitterweed replied. “I chose my own name.” Isabelle was intrigued despite herself “Why would you choose to give yourself a name in mockery of someone else’s?”
“Bitterweed is my name.”
“Just that. A surname. No given name.”
“There has to be someone to give you a given name,” Bitterweed said. Isabelle sighed. “You know he doesn’t own you, don’t you? You don’t have to echo his evil.”
Bitterweed smiled. “We’re not evil, Isabelle Copley. We’re no different from anyone else. We just want to survive.”
“But at what cost?”
“Don’t talk to me about cost. Look at you. You’re young and beautiful and why not, considering on how many of us you gorged yourself.”
“I did not set that fire. I would never—”
But Bitterweed wasn’t interested in continuing the conversation any longer. Before she could protest, he shoved her into the room and slammed the door behind her. It took her a moment to catch her balance. She heard a lock engage, then his receding footsteps. Then silence.
She leaned against the table and bowed her head. Nobody knew where she was. Nobody knew Rushkin had returned. Nobody would even think to consider that he would have kidnapped her. She was utterly and entirely on her own—not the way she was on Wren Island, cloistered from the world, but helpless. Even on his deathbed, Rushkin had so easily returned their relationship to how it had been. Even now, he was in control.
After a long moment, she sat down on the chair and stared at the blank canvas set up on the easel.
She didn’t doubt that Rushkin’s creatures would track down the paintings of her existing numena. The two at the Foundation would take no great detective work at all. The creatures would acquire them and Rushkin would feed upon them and she’d still be trapped here. Nothing would be changed except that two more people, whose existence in this world were her responsibility, would be dead.
Unless, she thought, staring at the canvas. Unless ..
She rose abruptly from the chair and strode to the end of the table. Without giving herself the time to change her mind, she started picking up tubes of paint and squeezing their pigment out onto the palette.
She didn’t bother to be careful. She didn’t put on the smock. She didn’t bother to put the tops back onto the tubes, but tossed them onto the table when she was done with them, one after the other. Once she had a half-dozen colors on the palette, she opened the can of turpentine and stuck the brush into its narrow mouth. She mixed a thin wash on the palette as she stood in front of the canvas and tried to clear her mind before she began work on a sketchy underpainting.
She knew she had to work fast. There’d be no time to let the paint dry, no time for finesse or precision. But then she was used to working under adverse conditions. Not lately, not for years. But she hadn’t forgotten. Izzy was long gone from her life, but what Izzy had known, what she’d learned and how she’d made do when money and supplies were scarce and time ran against her—all of that was still inside Isabelle. Her memories were something that no one could take away.
Memories.
Standing in the garden and watching the farmhouse as it was engulfed in flames. Seeing the first frail body stumble out to fall charred at her feet. And then the others. All the others ...
Tears blurred her vision, making it hard to see what she was doing, but she carried on all the same.
“I did not start that fire,” she whispered to the ghostly image taking shape on the canvas. “I did not.”
Vignettes From Bohemia
From the quiet stream
I scooped the moon
Into my hands
To see
Just how it tasted
—Lorenzo Baca, from More Thoughts, Phrases and Lies
I
Newford, June 1975
Although the snow was long gone and there was not a soul in sight, Izzy was still nervous the first time she walked down the lane off Stanton Street that led to Rushkin’s studio in the old coach house. She thought being here would re-awaken memories of the mugging, but the only piece of the past that arose in her mind was a more immediate memory from a few weeks ago when she’d finally gone down to the police station to look at their mug books. She’d dutifully scanned page after page of criminal faces, but none looked familiar. The whole exercise seemed pointless, especially after the detective told her how most such attacks never saw an arrest in the first place, little say were brought to trial.
“It’s especially frustrating in a case of random violence such as your own,” the detective went on.
“Nine out of ten times, the victim knows her assailants. Not necessarily well—it might be the guy who takes your change at the subway, or some neighborhood kid you upset through no fault of your own, but there’s usually a reason for this sort of an attack. Once we know it, we can work our way backwards from the motive. In your case, however, that line of inquiry takes us right up against a dead end. And since you weren’t robbed, we can’t even hope to trace your assailants through stolen goods—a distinctive piece of jewelry, that sort of thing.
“I’m sorry, Miss Copley. I wish I had better news to give you than that. All I can tell you is that we’ll keep the file open. If anything new comes up, you can be sure that we’ll contact you.”
But while her going to the precinct hadn’t made much of an impact on the lives of her attackers, it did have an effect upon her own. Now instead of seeing shadowy, unrecognizable features or, what was worse, Rushkin’s face on the youthful bodies of her attackers, she had a whole new vocabulary of faces to fuel her bad dreams.
Izzy sighed, still hesitating at the mouth of the lane. It could have been worse. At least you woke up from a dream. But knowing that didn’t make the nightmares any easier to endure. She wondered how Rochelle had learned to deal with the aftereffects of her own attack. What kind of dreams did she have?
She sighed again. She’d put off returning here for as long as she could. Having finally made it this far today, she knew she had to follow through.
You’re not dreaming now, she told herself and set off down the lane.
The coach house was overhung with a tangle of vines just coming into their summer growth. Yellow and violet irises ran along the sides of the building in bands of startling color, each pocket of flowers surrounded by an amazing array of ferns and the plants’ long, pointed leaves. She paused for a moment, looking for movement in one of the second-floor windows, but she could see nothing moving. The building had an uninhabited feeling about it—not quite abandoned, but not lived-in either.
As she drew nearer, another memory rose up. This one was more painful. She looked past the coach house to where the lane continued on under a canopy of maple and oak boughs. That was where she’d first seen John—really seen him and his resemblance to The Spirit Is Strong instead of talking to him in the shadows of the library’s steps. She wished he could be there now, but that part of the lane was as empty as the length of it that she’d already walked down.