middlemen, but if it wasn’t for them, you and I wouldn’t have an audience—or at least not the kind of audience they got us. I don’t want to be a waitress all my life.”
“No, no,” Izzy said. “How many times do I have to tell you? You don’t define yourself by what you have to do to make a living, but by what you want to do. You’re a writer. I’m an artist.”
“I still find it hard to believe that I can actually make a living at writing,” Kathy said.
Izzy knew just what she meant. The only reason Izzy herself had been able to survive as long as she had without a second job was because she’d had the bulk of her art supplies and her studio space provided for by Rushkin, and since she and Kathy still lived here on Waterhouse Street, where the rent on their little apartment remained so cheap, her living costs were minimal. Before this, the money Kathy had made from her writing barely paid for her paper and type-writer ribbons.
“So now that you’ve got this money,” she asked, “are you really going to use it to start the Foundation?”
“Absolutely.”
“It doesn’t seem like it’d be enough.”
Kathy sighed. “I don’t think any amount of money would be enough, but I’ve got to start somewhere and fifty thousand dollars makes for a pretty good jumping off point.”
It was Kathy’s turn to make dinner that night. When she went into the kitchen, Izzy tried to imagine whether she could be as philanthropic if she were to come into that kind of money. There were so many other things one could do with it. Use it as a down payment on a house. Go traveling all around the world.
“I saw one of your new numena today,” Kathy said, poking her head around the kitchen door. “It was mooching around down by the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station. I wonder if some of them have taken to living in Old City.”
Old City was the part of Newford that had been dropped underground during the Great Quake, around the turn of the century. Rather than try to recover the buildings, the survivors had simply built over the ruins. Although Izzy had never been down there herself, she knew people like Jilly who had.
Apparently many of the buildings had survived and were still standing, making for a strange underground city that extended down as deep in places as it did aboveground.
There’d been plans at one time for making a tourist attraction of the underground city, as had been done in Seattle, but the idea was put aside when the city council realized that the necessary restructuring and maintenance simply wouldn’t be cost-efficient. Recently, after many of the growing numbers of homeless people began to squat in the abandoned ruins, city work crews had been sealing up all the entrances to Old City, but there were still anywhere from a half-dozen to twenty others that the street people knew. The best-known entrance was a maintenance door situated two hundred yards or so down the east tracks of the Grasso Street subway station, where Kathy had seen the numena.
“Which one was it?” Izzy asked.
There were so many now. She still had her old coterie of numena friends who dropped by the studio on a regular basis, but the newer ones went their own way and she’d never even met some of them.
Kathy had met even less of them. Most of the numena didn’t like to spend time with people who knew their origin. It made them feel less real, Rosalind had explained to Izzy on one of her visits from the island, where she lived with Cosette and those numena who felt more comfortable out of the city.
“I’m not sure,” Kathy said. “But I think they’re making a home for themselves in Old City. July’s told me that the people squatting down there have been seeing all sorts of strange things.”
As she went back into the kitchen to return to her dinner preparations, Izzy trailed along behind her.
She pulled out one of the chairs from the kitchen table and slouched in it.
“What kinds of strange things?” she wanted to know.
Kathy shrugged. “Hybrids like in your paintings—part human and part something else. So they must be your numena.”
“Well, what did the one you see look like?”
Kathy stopped chopping carrots long enough to close her eyes and call up an image of the numena she’d seen.
“Very feline,” she said, turning to look at Izzy. “Small, but with broad lion-like features and a huge tawny mane of hair. And she had a tail with a tuft at the end of it. I guess she’s from a painting that you haven’t shown me yet, because I didn’t recognize her. I remember thinking at the time that it was kind of odd how you’d mixed elements of a male lion with a young girl.”
“I didn’t,” Izzy said.
“No,” Kathy said. “This lion girl was definitely real and
But Izzy was still shaking her head. “What I mean is, she’s not one of mine.”
“But you’re the only one who makes these creatures,” Kathy said. “You’re forgetting Rushkin.”
Except, Izzy added to herself, he wasn’t supposed to be able to bring them across anymore—at least that was what he’d told her before he’d disappeared. “That’s right,” Kathy said. “He must be back.”
A faint buzzing hummed in Izzy’s ears, making her feel light-headed. Hard on its heels she got an odd sensation that was like, but was not quite, nausea. It started in the pit of her stomach and ascended into her chest, tightening all the muscles as it rose.
“I guess he must be,” she said slowly.
She couldn’t begin to explain the feeling of anxiety that filled her at the realization that her mentor had returned—not to Kathy, not even to herself.
The only mail that ever arrived at the coach-house studio was flyers or junk mail addressed to
“occupant.” Izzy simply threw it all out. But a week after the day that Kathy told her about seeing the lion-girl numena by the Grasso Street subway station, Izzy spied her own name on an envelope just as she was about to toss the morning’s offerings into the wastepaper basket. She tugged it out of the handful of flyers and recognized Rushkin’s handwriting immediately. As she was about to open the envelope, the last few lines from the note he’d sent to her just before he’d disappeared returned to her.
And then she could see what she’d let herself forget. She saw it as clearly as though she’d physically stepped back through the years, to that winter night, the snowstorm in her dream that echoed the storm outside her bedroom, and there was the hooded figure, Rushkin, the bolt from his crossbow piercing the body of her winged cat ...
And then there was John’s voice, playing like a soundtrack to that awful scene:
And then mixed into that already disturbing stew of memories was a disjointed recollection of how she’d been assaulted in the lane outside the studio, the faces of her assailants all wearing Rushkin’s features again, instead of those from the mug books she’d gone through at the precinct.
Her fingers found the tattered bracelet of woven cloth that she still wore on her wrist. She looked around the studio at the paintings of her numena—the ones she hadn’t put up for sale yet, the ones she never would and the new ones that she was still working on. She had the sudden urge to hide them all.
To call Alan and ask him to meet her downstairs with his car so that she could stack the paintings on its backseat and he could ferry them away. Her and the paintings. Out of Rushkin’s sight. Away from the possibility of his discovering that they even existed in the first place. Away to safety. Oh, why had she ever let anyone convince her that he wasn’t dangerous?
She forced herself to calm down and take a few steadying breaths.
Lighten up, she told herself. You don’t even know what the letter says.
But she did and she knew she wasn’t wrong. The lion-girl numena Kathy had seen was a harbinger of what this letter was about to tell her. She could feel Rushkin’s return in the rough texture of the envelope that rubbed
