Gravelight by Marion Zimmer Bradley Read Free Book Online

her, others who had learned to tame their unwanted gift. It was why she stayed here, among people who hated her, who denied her to her face and thought her mother was a child of hell.
    Please, let there be others like me. Please …
    In a timeless place, awareness hovered just out of reach like a waiting shark. Camilla was here somewhere—but
Camilla was dead. Wycherly Musgrave knew that for sure; he’d visited her grave once and seen the headstone: January 16, 1966-August 14, 1984.
    His nineteenth birthday …
    Night. The air was hot and wet, and adrenaline had combined with the alcohol in his blood to create a surreal state of false consciousness in which logic played no part. It took him several minutes to realize that he was wet, and longer to understand that he was standing in the river shallows, staring back toward the middle of the river in idiot fascination at the submerged headlights of his car.
    This is a dream . The understanding did nothing to assuage the guilt or the fear. He tried to stop, to wake, but it was no good. He always came back to this night—the night that had revealed him to himself for what he was.
    He turned back to the car, and when he touched the door it opened. Camilla’s lifeless, moon-pale body floated serenely from the car, slithering boneless like a white eel through the black glass of the river water, reaching out her white arms to coil about him, dragging him down to share the death he’d forced on her … .
    Wycherly sat up with a strangled shout.
    For a moment he wasn’t sure where he was, then he remembered. The crash—the town—the cabin. Someplace called Morton’s Fork.
    He looked around. He’d slept most of the day away; the light coming in through the window was the pale deceptive illumination of July’s long twilights.
    The room was dominated by a wide brass bed with an ornate marble-topped table beside it; the bed was stripped down to its mattress and box spring, the exposed brand labels bringing a weirdly modem note to a room that in so many other ways resembled a museum piece. There was a window, a cedar wardrobe chest, and a braided rug on the floor. The pressed-glass lamp on the table beside the bed, though covered with dust, was still half-full of lamp oil.
    What the hell? Those kids said this place was deserted.
    No. They’d said it was haunted, and that it didn’t belong to anybody. Wycherly got gingerly to his feet. The pain was a little less, but still no picnic. Never mind: There was codeine in his bag, and considering what part of the country he was in, he could probably get a drink. Besides, Luned had brought beer, hadn’t she? There wasn’t any running water, and he had to drink something.
    Hadn’t he been going to stop? an inner voice gibed. Well, yes, Wycherly temporized , but not all at once. Nobody could expect that.
    He hauled himself off the bed, ignoring the mocking silence inside his head. Every muscle protested. He looked around for something to distract him, and settled on the wardrobe.
    Monumental in the style of an earlier day, it towered over the other contents of the room. Wycherly regarded himself in the greenish, mottled mirror.
    Reflexively, he pushed his hair out of his eyes—wincing as he encountered the bruise—and inspected himself critically.
    He was still wearing his leather jacket; it was spattered with blood, and the shirt beneath it was grimy, torn, and bloody. His eyes were red; bloodshot and pouched, their pale-brown color looked positively inhuman by contrast. His pale skin—the redhead’s curse—showed every scrape and bruise and crust of blood. His hair brushed his shoulders, dirty and uncombed; he was several days late for a shave, and rubbed his chin reflexively, wondering what he was going to do about it. If anything.
    You look just … wonderful, Wycherly told himself. He wondered if there was any place to wash up. A creek?
    He opened the