Icy Clutches

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Chug, chug, chug, chug. Slowly, the train slipped peacefully away into the darkness, the steady beat of the wheels lulling him into a...

Train?

Gideon opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on the floor of the contact station, a few feet from the open door, with a throbbing head and an upset stomach. Rolling his eyes gingerly upward, he could see the narrow black tops of spruce and hemlock trees framed in the doorway against the not-quite-as-black sky. He realized at once that he had been unconscious only a few seconds; the chugging noise was running footsteps on the path back to the lodge. He could still hear them, or rather the sounds of someone mounting the wooden stairs leading to the main building and the boardwalks that led to the rooms.

He knew better than to try to give chase. It was going to be a few minutes before his legs would be able to take him anywhere; before the rest of him would want to go, anywhere. He wiggled his fingers, moved his toes. His nervous system seemed to be working all right. When he became aware of a hot, wet stinging at the left corner of his chin, he touched it with a finger. It was nothing awful; a small, raw scrape coated with a thin ooze of serous fluid and maybe a little blood. That was where he'd been hit, then. Probably with the flashlight. Not over the head, but on the jaw, the way a boxer was knocked out.

That was fortunate; less likelihood of real damage this way. The mobile jaw automatically swiveled away from the force of a blow, diffusing it in a way that the more rigid cranium couldn't. All in all, he was sure he hadn't been seriously hurt. He felt no worse—no better either—than the couple of times he'd been knocked out several lifetimes ago when he was working his way through graduate school by boxing in local fight clubs. The disorientation and nausea were to be expected. And the fact that he couldn't remember the blow that had knocked him out was no cause for concern. That was normal. A transient axial distortion of the brain stem caused by a blow to the chin, which is what a knockout is, almost always resulted in retrograde amnesia that—

'Ah, shut up,” he mumbled half aloud. Christ, what he didn't need now was another lecture from his cerebral cortex. Grunting, he pushed himself up on one elbow and waited, eyes closed, for the queasiness to subside a little. After a minute, he got cautiously to his feet. Everything ached, not just his jaw, but that was hardly a surprise. He switched on the ceiling lights and went to the counter. No surprise there either.

The bones were gone.

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Chapter 23

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'It's 9:00 A.M.,” Julie said in his ear. “Do you really want to get up, or would you rather sleep some more?'

'Up,” Gideon mumbled into the pillow. “If I sleep any more, I won't be able to move at all.'

Softly she stroked the side of his head with the back of her fingers. “How's your jaw?'

Gideon gave the question some thought. “My jaw's okay,” he said finally. “The rest of me feels like hell.'

I know, I know, he told his cerebral cortex. Generalized malaise and stiffness went along with postconcussive trauma reactions. Big deal.

'Nothing to worry about,” he said. “I'm just a little achy.” He opened his eyes. Julie, already dressed, was sitting in an armchair she'd pulled to the side of the bed.

'Coffee's on,” she said. “Want some?'

'Uh-huh. Maybe a couple of aspirin, too.'

While she got them he worked up to a sitting position against the headboard and checked himself over more thoroughly. His shoulder and arm were all right. The scrape on his jaw was not much worse than a razor burn. Only the area on his left side, at the base of his ribs—where he'd bounced off the counter—was truly sore, and that wasn't as bad as it would have been had Julie not made him press some towel-wrapped ice to it when he'd gotten back to the room. He probed it with his fingers, flinching when he pressed too hard. It didn't feel as if anything were broken, but maybe he'd cracked that twelfth rib. Best to have it x-rayed when he got back home. Not that there was anything to do about a cracked twelfth rib anyway, other than wrapping it with one of those awkward canvas belts for a month. He leaned against the headboard, tipping his head back, muttering to himself. God, he was getting just a little old for this.

He made himself get out of bed—otherwise he'd really stiffen up—got into his bathrobe, groaning under his breath, and shuffled carefully to the table and chairs near the window. It was a pearly, northern kind of day, gray but drenched with light. He grasped the arms of a chair and lowered himself slowly into it.

Julie poured the coffee, watching him settle creakily down. “Gideon, does it ever occur to you that for a scholarly type you lead a—well, a rather physical sort of life?'

'Yes, it does. I was just thinking about that myself. I don't know why it is. It's not as if I invite it.'

'Mm,” she said noncommittally, watching him down the aspirin and start on the coffee. “John stopped in about twenty minutes ago. He's been talking to all of them.'

He looked up from the cup. “Has he gotten anywhere? Does he know—'

She shook her head. “No more than he did last night.'

Which wasn't much. The three of them had sat around the room for almost two hours trying to make sense of things. John had briefly considered a late-night search of the Tremaine party's rooms (on a voluntary basis; they had no warrants), but they had agreed there was no point. What would he be looking for? The chance that the person who had taken the hones had brought them back to his or her room was nil. They had probably been tossed into the thick woods, or buried under some brush or in a rotted log, or thrown into the cove itself.

So Gideon had lain back on the bed, holding the ice to his ribs, while John, with an attention to detail that was