Blood Spirits by Sherwood Smith Page A

up; he gave me a look, with a hint of the old humor.
    â€œOkay, old news before I even got to them. But how? I’d swear no one could have recognized me after I got off the . . . oh. Right. The train conductors. I’m sorry, Alec. Nat did warn me. But the whole concept of my being ‘a person of interest’ seems totally alien to me. Anyway, I came because . . .” It was difficult to get the words out, because modern life makes it too easy to scorn what we don’t understand. But it was too important not to try. “The other night. On our way to London. I saw a vision of Ruli.”
    He stilled, almost a recoil. It was like I’d hit him. The words Help me froze right there in my mouth. What if he took them as accusation, and hard on that was the betraying thought: What if he was the cause?
    No. Every cell in my body revolted against that notion. No matter how disastrous a marriage it might have been, Alec would not do something so evil as to cause an accident.
    Or so stupid.
    â€œA vision?” he repeated.
    The instinct to avoid that was as overwhelming as the instinct to talk to him, to regain the understanding between us. But where to start?
    I looked around wildly for any subject to break the nightmarish silence stretching out into infinity . “Vision. Hallucination, maybe, caused by jetlag. Do you know now long I have been traveling?” I babbled. “This country is beautiful even in winter. On the ride up I kept wondering if Wordsworth had ever been here—‘Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside—’“
    His smile flickered, and the quote came automatically. “‘As if a voice were in them. . . . ‘ ”
    He stopped himself before the sick sight .
    Urgh. Only I could commit a poetical faux pas! I said quickly, “It figures you’d know ‘Simplon Pass.’ Did you think of it when riding the train up here, when you were a kid?”
    But it was too late. The smile was gone, and I knew without any mysterious visions that we were right back where we’d started, no matter how much either of us would rather have avoided it: Ruli. “Yes,” he said, neutral and polite.
    I said, “I saw Tony in London.”
    I may as well have hit him. He didn’t quite recoil this time, but his chin lifted, and if possible he tensed up even more.
    I blundered determinedly on. “He came over to meet my grandmother, but she was—your dad was—Tony and I were touristing around when he got a phone call, and—something was very wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was.”
    I couldn’t bear to see that painful question in Alec’s tense face, the beautiful, dear face that I had tried not to think about even though I was reading the poetry he loved and practicing his language. And dreaming about him at night.
    â€œKim,” Alec began. “We should probably—”
    There was a polite knock at an inner door, followed by muffled words in Dobreni: “Statthalter, they are all here but the Prime Minister.”
    â€œA moment,” Alec called.
    Noooo! Not with us like this, on opposite sides of the room, and the tension, the questions between us.
    I said quickly, “Alec, before anything else, I wanted to apologize for leaving last summer without talking to you.”
    Our gazes finally met, and personal space made that seven-points-on-the-Richter-scale shift to intimate space. The urge to run to him was almost overpowering. I watched his eyes, his hands, for the green light . . . and he looked down at the papers waiting on the desk, his long eyelashes effective shutters.
    The last time we’d seen each other, I spent the night within the circle of his arms. The chemistry between us was as powerful as ever (and I discovered that I was gripping the edge of the desk) but something was definitely wrong, horribly and painfully out of balance.
    Because his wife just died, and you have her