“I teleported.” The two words were soft, but perfectly clear.
She shook her head a little. “No.” It wasn’t possible.
He was giving answers she didn’t want to hear, yet she knew he told the truth, the impossible-to-encompass truth. He sat there, calmly waiting for her to take it in. To accept it.
“Okay, then. Teleport us to Florida. Out of the snow, away from Clement Hine.”
“I can’t do that.” He sat back once more. “The more powerful lords can teleport themselves over short distances. Only the most powerful amongst us can transport other people at the same time. There hasn’t been one with that sort of power for centuries, that I can recall.”
Us
. She shivered. Did he include her in that pronoun? “That you
recall
? What are you, some kind of historian?”
“Something like that.”
She pushed her glass away from her. “I can’t just accept this…this fantasy. Not like this. For god’s sake, Rhys, I’m an agent. I move in the world of the
real
. I deal with facts, with harsh realities.”
“This is real. Believe me.”
“Take it on faith?” She grimaced. “I’m atheist. I don’t believe a thing about this business of yours, Rhys. It’s all fairy stories for little kids. In the real world there’s a reason for everything and nothing goes bump in the night unless someone pushes it.”
He smiled. “That sounds like something someone else said once, that you’ve remembered.”
The sadness that seemed to permanently hover nearby these days descended over her like a pall, along with the pain and the fury the memories delivered each time she recalled them. “Yes, someone else did say that once.” Sudden tiredness drained all the resistance in her.
“Someone close.”
Tears pricked at her eyes and she wiped them on her sleeve with an impatient movement. “Let’s change subjects.”
“Your lover.” Rhys frowned. “What happened, Jenna?”
She stared at him, feeling the full force of her fury and helplessness surge anew. “He’s dead, okay? He was on assignment with me and someone screwed up and Kevin died. Now let’s change the goddamn subject.”
It was the first time she had managed to speak the words aloud, in the three months since Kevin had died. Her eyes swam with searing hot tears and the lump in her throat threatened to tear out her oesophagus, so hard and big did it seem. But she managed to ride both tears and hurt out, until she sat looking at the table cloth, her gaze back in focus and the sting in her eyes clearing. Only then did she dare look at Rhys.
He was still sitting.
Still watching her.
But the neutral expression had fled. “Kevin Allen?” he said, with something that sounded like caution in his voice.
This time she made no attempt to support her sagging jaw. “You
knew
him?”
Shock raged through her.
Of all the things Rhys had said and done on this strangest of strange days, this would be the most unexpected of them.
That he had known Kevin seemed the most unlikely of coincidences the world could arrange.
“We worked together a couple of times.” Rhys spoke as if his mind had drifted elsewhere. Then he shook his head and gave a small gusty laugh. “Stars above, now it becomes so clear.” He was speaking to himself, but then he focused upon her again. “Is that why you’re here in Banff, Jenna?”
“Sort of. I don’t know anyone here. There’s nothing familiar.”
His eyes narrowed a little, the ridiculously long lashes lowering. “Running away?”
“I prefer to think of it as detox and rejuvenation.”
His stare would not let her go. “You were injured? When Kevin died, you were injured, too.”
“Yes.”
“You’re mended, then? Physically?”
“The doctors tell me I’m well again, but I get weak. I still don’t feel…
right.”
The confession provided a surprising relief. The lag in her recovery had bothered her, even though she had not spoken of it to any of the doctors assigned to her case. She had dismissed it as the physical manifestation of her grief over Kevin and ignored the small voice of denial inside her.
“It’s not just the altitude here?”
“It’s not the altitude. It’s a weakness. I don’t like it. It makes me feel unsure of myself.” She stopped herself from revealing more, from speaking of the odd things that had been happening lately that made her feel unsettled and adrift. Like the coffee thing.
“Yes, I can see how someone like you would find that disconcerting.
But if you don’t like the unsettling feelings, then why come here, where everything is new and unsettling?”
“I don’t…I can’t stand the idea of waking up at home, Christmas morning. Alone.” She pushed away the wail of self-pity with a mental shove.
“Ah, of course.” He grimaced a little. “I’m sorry, Jenna.”
She shook her head. “We both knew the risks. Accepted them.”
“But it doesn’t take away the pain.”
“The guilt,” she amended, surprising even herself with that revealing word.
Even Rhys veered away from it. “Kevin Allen was a cynic of the first water. He had no time for anything he couldn’t put his finger upon and identify.”
“He was an engineer. A geek.” It seemed disloyal to use those words to describe him that way, but even Kevin had called himself a geek. He had got a perverse delight out of the title. She suspected that at times, Kevin had maintained his ‘show me the evidence’ attitude out of sheer stubbornness and a contrary need to show how insubstantial and pathetic beliefs grounded on faith really were.
“How much of your inability to swallow the truth now is simply you clinging to his attitudes, Jenna?” His tone had softened.
“Truth?”
She pushed the bottle of pills a little, making them tip and roll across the table with a small rattle. “All of what you’ve said is hearsay. Parlour tricks. There’s no evidence.”
“Today wasn’t enough evidence for you?”
She couldn’t hold his gaze. “She dumped the coffee because the Prince she sat with deserved it. Every woman in that shop wanted her to do it.”
“You made her do it, Jenna.”
He didn’t emphasize the words in any way, but she jumped all the same. “No, I didn’t.”
He stood the bottle of pills back up. “That’s why you have this uncontrollable need for omega 3s and sugar right now. You’re not used to it. Your brain needs the restoratives, the energy.”
“No.” She was just tired. It had been a long day so far and she still hadn’t recovered from the accident properly. That’s why she had this need for food and was lightheaded.
“It wasn’t Hine, Jenna. It certainly wasn’t me. We were both surrounded by temporals and therefore under the injunction of Erceldoune’s Precept—but you don’t know the laws yet.”
“What’s a temporal?” The question spilled from her before she reconsidered the wisdom of following Rhys down this conversational path. Her curiosity, her need to know it all, prompted it.
“Human. Not one of us.”
“A muggle?” All her defensive energy suddenly drained, like air from a tire. This time she knew he included her in the “us”.
He grinned. “I wouldn’t have thought, given your cynicism about this, that you’d watch that sort of movie.”
“It’s just fun.” Then she amended herself. “I thought it was just fun.”
“That sort of stuff is just fun. Toads and wands.” He pushed the pills towards her again. “Take them. And you should eat more oil for a while—lots of polyunsaturates and monos. Olive oil. And up your water intake. Three liters a day, for someone your height and weight.”
She looked at the bottle and heard Kevin’s voice in her mind, a voice from the past; “
All that hocus pocus stuff is such bullshit. Only idiots who need to prop up their egos with the idea they have a more important role in life than the one they currently own will swallow it. Anyone with any sort of self-respect can only laugh at it
.”
Oh, how he would have skewered Rhys had he been sitting here listening to this! He would have slivered him into small pieces, all with a polite smile and irrefutable logic.
She looked at Rhys, shaking her head a little. “I can’t.” It was far too much to swallow right now. “I can’t accept this.”
“You can’t accept what you saw with your own eyes? Felt?”
“Kevin—”
“Kevin would have accepted it by now. He worked on a scientific basis. Empirical evidence. You got all the evidence you could ask for today.”
She bowed her head. Rhys was right.
Again she saw the woman in the coffee shop, her eyes widen with surprise as she watched her own hand swing around with the coffee cup in it. It didn’t matter how much she tried to rationalize it, that one image would destroy her every argument. It was evidence. Unsavoury evidence she couldn’t make go away. She had to accept that something had happened in that shop that resided outside her experience to date. Something had made that woman act.
Someone
had influenced her. But how? And why?
Rhys’ explanations made a superficial sense. They fit with her own sense of rightness. But the facts supporting his reasons were the stuff of fantasy. Fairy-tale logic. That was the point where her defenses rose. To go against the ingrained attitudes of a lifetime….
She was saved from having to answer right away by the arrival of their food. She fell on hers, cutting into the salmon straight away. Rhys, too, tackled his plate with gusto. Well, he would need the EFAs, too.
She sheered away from that line of thought and pondered instead the question Rhys had raised. Would Kevin have accepted what he had seen if he had been there tonight? She looked at Rhys. “Did Kevin ever see you do…anything?”
He shook his head. “The law, the precept, prevents us—any of us—from using powers or displaying talents where a temporal will see them or be affected by them. The whole Corpus Temporalty was built around that precept. Temporals must never know, guess or even suspect our world exists.”
She continued eating, mulling it over.
They were drinking coffee before Rhys spoke again. He tapped his spoon against the side of the cup in a thoughtful way, then put it down. “Let me give you a demonstration.”
“Here?”
“Why not?”
“Won’t the brimstone and smoke draw attention?”
He rolled his eyes, then settled back in his chair, his long legs stretched out before him. The silence lengthened.
“And?”
Finally, he spoke. “In the coffee shop, you heard me when I told you to keep walking.”
“Well, yes.” She shrugged.
Yet I didn’t speak
. The words echoed in her mind as if she had heard them, yet Rhys’ lips had not moved.
She swallowed. “Ventriloquism?”
He shook his head, smiling. Then he sighed. “Cognitive dissonance. You have a vested interest in not believing what you saw and heard today, so the details will already be hazy in your memory.”
“Am I really being that stubborn?”
“You’re not the worst case I’ve come across.” He smiled a little. “Let’s try something else. I want you to close your eyes and—have you ever meditated?”
“Me?”
“Well, it helps if you’ve had practice clearing your mind. Close your eyes and think of a dark place—a tunnel, going endlessly back.”