Chapter 13
She swam upwards through a warm sea. Breathing but frightened, she kicked towards the surface. She was certain that she should be cold and that she would freeze to death if she gave in to the enfolding warmth. At last her hands broke the surface and her eyes popped open.
She sat bolt upright in bed.
Someone had buried her under an enormous pile of comforters and no fewer than three electric blankets. The control boxes clicked against the side of the bed when she sat up. One of them sparked ominously.
Over on the chaise lounge, another pile of blankets emitted a muffled snort. An arm emerged from the blankets and pushed back the top layer to reveal Bob's red curls flattened by sleep into spiky cowlicks. The blankets convulsed as he tried to free himself from the tangle.
A heap of coals glowed softly in the grate. Late morning sun,
stained red by the oak tree outside her window, slanted across the bed and her aching right foot. She drew her knees up to her chest. Rififi meowed with displeasure at the withdrawal of her foot from beneath his shoulder, but declined either to move or to notice her hand outstretched to scratch his neck.
Over on the chaise lounge, Bob went through a series of waking up sounds. He rubbed his eyes with knuckles reddened from contact with Carl's chin and smiled when he saw her sitting up.
"What happened?" she asked.
Leaving a trail of blankets behind him, Bob came to her side. "How are you?" he asked. He arranged the pillows behind her back when she refused to lie down again.
"I'm fine, I think," she said. She wiggled her fingers and toes and checked her arms and hands for signs of frostbite, which she would not have recognized in any case.
"You managed to get hypothermia while fainting next to a huge fire," he told her. He lightly touched her forehead, zapping her with static electricity, and peered into her eyes. "I think we warmed you up enough though."
"No, I mean last night, there was a big fight. That was you who bashed all those guys on the head and melted Marla. How did you get the ring of invisibility? I thought that Alice and Dirk had it."
"I found it under the sugar bowl on the floor. They told me later that they agreed to share it and keep it in the sugar bowl when they weren't using it. They said they meant to tell us."
"What made you think of throwing the water on Marla?" She took his hand and squeezed it with girlish admiration.
"Oh, gee. It was all I could think of. I had to stop her before she could hurt you." His eyes fell and he reddened. "Everyone's seen the Wizard of Oz, and if that woman wasn't a wicked witch, I don't know what is. I didn't really expect her to melt though. Do you think she's dead, or just someplace else?"
Remembering the shadow that had stepped out of the velvet Elvis and swallowed the mist rising from the melting witch, Elizabeth thought the answer was probably that Marla was both dead and someplace else. She looked at Bob, who was looking down and digging his toe into the rug with an air of distress. He still held her hand.
She assured him, "Someplace else. People can't melt into nothing. Besides, you couldn't have known what would happen. And she was going to kill me. I'd be dead if you hadn't stopped her, and who knows what all would have happened then?"
He looked up from the rug and their eyes met. Elizabeth felt her heart begin to pound and her cheeks flushed under the sudden intensity of his gaze. He leaned towards her.
A fit of coughing abruptly seized her. She dropped his hand and covered her mouth.
He immediately reverted to doctor mode. "Are you sure you're all right?" He touched her forehead again, looking for fever. His fingers were warm and his touch was gentle and as light as a moth's wing.
"I'm fine, really." She pulled away and slid back under the covers.
"Are you still cold? I'll get you some tea. Just stay down in the covers there."
Bob passed Penrose in the doorway and shivered himself. "There's a hell of a draft through here. Maybe you should switch to another room," he called back over his shoulder.
Rififi growled when Penrose entered the room, but this time he hunkered down and refused to yield his cozy spot amidst the folds of the comforters.
Penrose carried a medicinally pink pair of ski gloves. He dropped them on her lap.
Understanding, she smiled and pulled them on. Penrose knelt beside the bed and took her gloved hands in his. The bitter cold of his hands slashed through the leather and the insulated lining, but she would not have pulled away for the world.
Penrose was back on full power, as she thought of it. The fading of the last few days had left no mark upon him. If anything, he was doubly intense.
"How did you know what to do?" he asked.
In an echo of Bob not five minutes before, she turned red and looked down at the long, strong fingers entwined with her own. "I read Tam Lin when I was going through the ballads, and I wrote a term paper on it for an English lit class. It was all I could think of when Titania talked about using you to pay the teind." She looked up and into his eyes.
"Ah." He gave her a wry smile. "Lucky for me that my fellow sacrifice was an English major, or I might be riding with the court of the Queen of Faery, or the Devil, even now."
"You knew her," Elizabeth said. "Was she the one who ensorcelled you into the portrait?"
"Not precisely. It was a complicated situation, and a very long time ago," he said in a voice to end that line of inquiry.
Elizabeth decided to pursue it later and went with a reserve question. "Do you know what were they trying to do?"
"Well, that ritual was new to me. They wanted to draw on the power that I use. This house is sited at the crossing of several ley lines; there is a tremendous amount of ley energy (you could call it magic) available.I draw off most of it. Once they got me out of the way, they were going to use your blood to break the third seal and somehow forge that scrawny sister of Trip's into an avatar of Famine. They seemed to think they could tie the Revelation of St. John the Divine to the Theogony of Hesiod, and."
"The what of who?"
"There's a copy in the library. I'll show it to you later. Anyway, I can't help thinking that they were overreaching themselves."
"You don't really believe they could bring on the Apocalypse?" she asked.
"Well, I doubt that they are any more capable of destroying the world than any other group of individuals without access to nuclear weapons, or whatever form of mutually assured destruction is in vogue right now. I am, however, afraid that they might be clearing the way for a considerably more powerful entity, or that they might allow such an entity to work through them."
Now Elizabeth was doubtful. "But what could that possibly be? The Devil or the faeries?"
Penrose turned her gloved hands over and cradled them in his palms. "You studied physics at university, yes? Did your course cover entropy?"
Elizabeth nodded. "Entropy is a measure of disorder, or the lack of available energy to a system," she recited.
Penrose said, "Yes, to be specific: chaos. And if you consider that in non-magical terms, I am a type of standing wave pattern in the ether, you will understand why entropy is one of my larger concerns. I'm a form of organized energy, so disorder is death to me."
"Oh. They said they were the Children of Chaos." Elizabeth's eyes widened. "You think they were serious? That sounded like a made up thing, like the Sisters of Sycorax."
"I thought they were just a group of witches, like your sister's coven, only violent and nasty. Then Miss Shevrell from Faery showed up," he said with bitterness. "Her presence adds a certain verisimilitude to their claims. I doubt they really are chaos in human form (I always thought Alice was) and therefore dangerous to me. It's more likely that they could be a channel for a truly harmful disruption to the ether, and any disruption great enough to destroy me would have grave implications for the rest of you as well."
"Miss Price told us that the spell on you pushed your body into the next world and left your astral body here. If you were put back together again, you'd be safe from Chaos. Don't you want to be released from the spell?" Elizabeth asked, though she knew what his answer would be. On a not quite unconscious level, she was thinking about the ballad, and how Janet got Tam Lin after she saved him. She knew that if Titania turned up and tried to take Penrose again, she would not hesitate to throw her arms around him. It would be nice if he weren't colder than dry ice. She could throw her arms around him even if Titania didn't return. For practice, like. She tried to assemble a logical, mature argument in favor of corporeality, but stopped fumbling for words when she saw the cloud that passed into Penrose's blue eyes.
Releasing her hands, he rose and walked over to a window. He looked out for a moment before turning back to her. Numb-fingered, she pulled off the gloves and blew on her hands to warm them.
He started to speak and then stopped, as if he found the subject even more difficult than she had. "No," he finally said. "That would not be for the best, I don't think, and the breaking of the spell would put everyone involved at considerable risk. This is what I am now, what I've been for centuries. I have no business being a man again, even if I survived being reassembled into one." Sunlight fell across his face, edging his profile in pure gold, and silence fell between them.
Embarrassed at having even broached the subject, Elizabeth could think of nothing else to say. The fact Penrose seemed as uncomfortable as her was cold comfort, so to speak.
The silence began to take on a life of its own. When Elizabeth thought she was about to start screaming, Alice came bounding into the room and the tension retreated in the face of her insensible conversation.
"Have you seen my gloves? It's freezing outside and I've got to have them," she declared. Spying the gloves lying on the counterpane, she picked them up and shook them under Elizabeth's nose. "You're a fine one to complain about me borrowing things without asking first. Anyway, I'm glad you're awake. You missed everything! I can't believe you fainted." Alice plopped down on the end of the bed with a bounce. She ignored Rififi's rumbled warning and launched into a blow by blow account of the fight with Marla's minions.