For now I should rest.
Which I was quite happy to do. The night before had been endless, lying huddled against Raziels blazing body, trying to get comfortable with sticks and rocks and hard earth digging into my soft flesh. Maybe if I slept long enough, this nightmare would be over.
No such luck. When I awoke I was alone, and hungry again. I sat up, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. I was wearing soft clothes, a loose-fitting white dress of some sort, and I remembered the embarrassing battle Id had with the Step-ford wives when they wanted to bathe me. A battle Id lost.
I touched my hair, finding it freshly washed but still that disconcerting length. I hadnt worn my hair that long since Id attended that lousy high school outside of Hartford, after Id been kicked out of my expensive boarding school. Not that that was my fault. It had been the one fundamentalist Christian boarding school in the entire liberal, anarchistic, blaspheming state of Connecticut. Clearly I was going to break out as soon as I could.
Always in trouble, my mother had said in disgust, praying over me loudly. I always got the feeling that she never prayed for me in privatethat her loud exhortations were for my benefit and mine alone. I was a miserable daughter, she told me, always spitting in the face of society, always talking too much and pushing against the status quo. Was that what had got me here? And where the hell was here?
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, feeling dizzy for a moment. There were shoes on the floor, and I slipped my feet into them, then winced, kicking them off again as I rubbed my heel. I had a blister there, left from those miserable shoes
That was flat-out impossible. A blister healed in a few days, but it took months to grow my
hair this long. Months that I couldnt remember. Maybe I hadnt lost huge blocks of time after all. The idea was reassuring, but it held its own kind of freakiness. None of this was making any sense, and I needed it to, quite desperately.
Sarah would tell me the truth if I asked. Unlike the man, she wouldnt just brush off my questions, ignore my doubts. The warmth and truth of Sarah was palpable, soothing. I needed to find her.
I didnt bother searching for a light beside the high bed; I didnt bother with the shoes. The door was ajar, a sliver of light beckoning, and I started toward it, feeling only slightly uneasy. Id seen those movies, read those books. Hell, written those books, where the stupid heroine in her virginal white goes wandering where she shouldnt, and the homicidal maniac appears out of nowhere, complete with a butcher knife or an ax or a fish spike.
I shivered. People got murdered in their beds, too. Staying put wasnt going to get me anywhere.
The outer room was empty. Hours ago this had been filled with women. Now it was abandoned, thank God, leaving me to my own devices, to find my own answers.
I looked down at my flowing white dress. Yup, virgin sacrifice stuff, all right. At least I was a far cry from a virginif they wanted to cut out my heart as an offering to the gods, the gods were going to be mighty pissed. Though in truth, that part was virginal. Id had sex, but my heart had never been touched.
All the women had been similarly dressed, in some variant of flowing white clothes. They all had long hair, loose and natural, and theyd been warm, welcoming. Stepford wives. Had I been abducted into some kind of cult? Next thing I knew wed be singing hymns and drinking Kool-Aid.
I shivered again. The women hadnt looked like mind-sucked idiots. My imagination was running away with me, and no wonder. Somewhere along the way Id fallen down the rabbit hole, and nothing made sense anymore.
The hallway was as deserted as the rooms, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I didnt want to be shepherded back to the bedroom with a bunch of platitudes. On the other, I didnt know where the hell I was going, or whether Freddy Krueger was about to appear.
I looked around me. The interior of the house was interestingit look like an old California lodge from long ago, with bronze art-deco sconces on the wall that made me think of Hollywood in the 1930s. There were overstuffed leather chairs and mission-style tables at various intervals down the long hall, with an ancient Persian runner in the center of the highly buffed floor, and a sudden horrifying suspicion came to me.
Things were bizarre enough alreadyif Id somehow managed to travel through time, back eighty years to the early part of the last century, I would be extremely annoyed. That was the problem with time travelno one ever asked if youd be interested. Just a flash of lightning and you were gone.
I remembered a flash of lightning, on a New York street. The vision was swift and fleeting, and then I was back in this weird old house, looking for serial killers.
No, time travel was out of the question. I simply refused to consider the possibility. It was as absurd as some of the half-remembered fantasies that played in the back of my mind. Wings? A body with fire beneath the skin? A vampire?