In the Rift by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Author:Marion Zimmer Bradley [Bradley, Marion Zimmer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Historical, General, Fantasy, Epic, Usernet, C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780671878702
Publisher: Baen
Published: 1998-04-01T07:00:00+00:00

Kate woke up muddled. She felt like she’d been on a ship all night, a ship that constantly rolled forward and back and from side to side—a ship that fought its way through the turbid waters of a restless sea. She rubbed her eyes and tried to clear her head. The room was too dark, and she could see a single slit of brilliant white light coming from entirely the wrong direction through utterly opaque curtains. Ah, she thought, as realization dawned. Hotel

All her life she had hated waking in unfamiliar places. Always those times brought back the memory of waking in her grand’ mother’s house when she was ten, with her grandmother sitting in the kitchen waiting for the phone to ring. Lying in that darkened Florida hotel room, Kate could still smell her grandmother’s coffee percolating on the stove; hear the clock down the hall; see the light through the half-opened door, hear the phone ring, and hear her grandmother pick it up before the first ring had even died away; the soft bubbling of the coffee and the creaks

of the old house and her grandmother’s voice, roughened with fear, asking “How is he?” and the silence that seemed to stretch forever, forever; then the sound of her grandmother crying. Soft sobs, and between the sobs, “I’ll get her up and dressed. No. No. I won’t tell her. I’ll wait until you’re here.”

Her grandmother didn’t need to tell her, though. Kate knew Jackie was dead. Jack, her brother, twenty-one months older than she was, funny and handsome and smart and athletic, who had gone swimming with some of his friends and who had told her she couldn’t come because she was a girl. He and his friends had raced away on their bicycles, laughing, while she stood in the yard, furious at not being included when she could do anything he could do as well as he could do it … and most things … better.

And he had never come back.

All her life, she’d thought, If I had been there, I could have saved him. If I had been with him, he would still be alive. Lying in the Florida hotel room with people who didn’t even belong in her world, she still thought, If I had been there I could have saved him. I would have.

In some ways she would never grow up, never leave behind the ten-year-old sister who thought she should have been the one who died. She still felt the absence of her brother as an aching, hollow pain that nothing and no one could ever take away.

But at that moment, in that place, she put her pain away, as she eventually had to put it away every time it came to her. She got up, showered and dried her hair, and put on enough makeup to cover the last remnants of the bruises on her face. In spite of a yellow-green bruise across her cheek, she almost looked like herself again.

She turned on CNN while Rhiana headed into the bathroom for her shower.

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