Awakenings (33 page)

In the corner, Krebe was snapping pictures with a disposable Kodak camera. Bellus’s face had a look of total surprise. His head began to slide sideways off his shoulders. Hesz thought that Bellus, with his pleading eyes and questioning lips, should have brought his hands up to hold his head in place. He looked ludicrous with his arms just flailing at his sides while his skull went for a tumble, but of course, the connections had been severed. More shocking, Dorn had killed a full-blood instead of a half-breed. Hesz wiped a bead of blood from his nicked skin. A superficial wound. Kraten broke out in a loud laugh with his remaining strength. Krebe joined in the revelry. The troll had passed out long before the cut.

“Has everyone learned something?” Dorn asked.

“How to block his lordship’s backhanded hook,” Kraten guffawed.

Dorn smiled.

Hesz forced a grin, though he saw no humor in the events. He had become a master at appeasement—fitting in until the opportune time presented itself. Soon enough, he would act. Dorn and his ilk would count days past as their best of times.

Krebe dropped the camera and suddenly stiffened. His eyes blanked out, like he had been turned off.

“It’s about bloody time,” Dorn said.

A moment later, the elegant man shook his head. His posture straightened. He brushed off his clothes. An air of dignity prevailed that hadn’t been there a moment earlier.

“Oulfsan?” Dorn asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“The detective?”

“Delaware, sir. Driving south on Interstate Ninety-five. He’s found the trail.”

CHAPTER 18

DRIVING WITH ONE HEADLIGHT

1

The dates on the headstone matched. It read:
John Doe, called to God early and spared the hardships of life.
Lelani had done most of the digging throughout the night. They broke through an hour before dawn. Cal thought the plain pine box could not hold the body of a prince. Not a rational thought, since no one on this world knew who he was.

Cal MacDonnell, son of James, son of Mavis, son of Edmund, son of Chaucer, son of Edred, son of Henric, son of Sweyn, felt the pressure of his ancestors press against his sternum. They had been protectors of great houses since man left the safety of the caves. What was, or was not, in the casket determined the future of his line.

“Crowbar,” Lelani said.

Cal was worlds away and didn’t hear.

“Cal, crowbar,” Chryslantha said, pointing to the tool by his feet.

He handed the centaur the bar. Seth, Ben, Cat, Chryslantha, Erin, and a shadowy group gathered around the grave. Cat was breast-feeding the baby. She eased him off her tit and handed the boy to Chryslantha.

“Cal needs me now. Would you mind?”

Chryslantha pulled out her breast and let the child resume feeding. “Not at all.”

Lelani pried the lid open. An infant boy, dead for years, lay in the coffin.

“Doesn’t mean it’s him,” Cat said.

“Turn him over,” Cal said. “Take him out of the swaddling.”

Lelani did this, careful not to peel the moldy rotting skin as well. The remnants of a birthmark were on the left shoulder. It was shaped like a phoenix.

“Is that him?” Cat asked. “Is this the boy you’re looking for?”

Cal didn’t know what to say. He had failed his ancestors and cursed his descendants. He looked to Chryslantha feeding his son.

“Bum deal, my love,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t tie my fortunes to yours. I don’t know what I’d have done if my children had been fathered by a loser like you. Better to spare anyone that fate.” The hand she held the baby’s head with twisted until there was a snap. “Ooh,” she cried. “Got to take them off the tap first. These little buggers really clamp down.”

“That’s it for me,” Cat said, throwing her hands up in defeat. “I’m done being an incubator for your useless family, Cal. I wasn’t even your first choice. Just some runner-up after you lost your mind … and for what? A third-rate feudal nobility. I should have married the orthodontist like my mother wanted me to. Well, our kids are dead, the prince is dead, so I’m outta here. Chryslantha says she has a younger brother who’s just my type.”

Cal looked down at the dead prince as everyone moved off in his or her own direction. He was soon alone with the corpse, which was as dead as his own future.

2

Consciousness arrived like a former mistress—familiar and accepted reluctantly. Cal did not open his eyes but sampled the environment through his remaining senses like a blind man. The sheets and the mattress were not his own. The sun outside the window, higher than it usually was when he awoke, did not warm the skin, but a dull red glow radiated against his eyelids. The air smelled cool and damp and tinged with moss. Years of sleeping with a partner made him aware of the void beside him. A rarity, because he was the early riser in their home. He didn’t hear anyone else in the room. Perhaps she had finally left; had enough of
his
mess. Her leaving would be a just dessert.

Eyes open. A vaulted ceiling with wooden beams; a circular chandelier made from deer antlers dropped from the ceiling’s apex and hung on a single chain cutting down the center of the room. A spent blaze smoldered in the stone fireplace under a richly ornate oak mantel. It reminded him of Aandor. A stray thought suggested it was Scotland, a castle on the moors; one of the many bedrooms connected to Ben Reyes’s nexus.
The late Ben Reyes.

He had dreamt about Chryslantha before the nightmare about the grave. A hallucinatory vision of blissful peace and lust that culminated in a dry, sticky residue that coated his crotch. He hadn’t done that since before his first woman, Loraine. Chryslantha had become a fixture in his dreams. He was grateful for the morning solitude. There was no satisfactory explanation he could offer his wife.

Cal considered living out his remaining life in this spot. He tried to lift his arm but it refused. Everything was still connected. The signal from his brain was sent. The arm simply didn’t respond. The effort was akin to triggering the last mechanism of a Rube Goldberg device without setting the preceding steps in motion. A nameless force was at work. An empty space sat heavily on his chest and head and pressed down with a father’s authority. Thoughts whizzed through three at a time. He couldn’t focus. The jumble of images made lucidity difficult—his brain had been coopted by the chaos in his life; overwhelmed by his duty to his kingdom, his lost prince, his family in Aandor, his wife and daughter, the newly created widow Reyes, his responsibilities as a citizen of this world and, ultimately, to himself. All these forces vying for his faithfulness—he could not remain true to all of them by serving any one. Yet in the wings of his mind, like an invisible subprogram, a linear vein of reason watched the anarchy on the main stage. Was it a side effect? His mind had been twisted and prodded like taffy the past twenty-four hours. Consequences were only natural. Expected even.

Time stopped. The pressure in his head squeezed at the recesses of his memory. He shucked it aside, over and over, trying to shut it out, only to have the prodding claw return sharper, longer, with more fervor each round. A drunken barber had shaved his brain and culled his motivation like cream from a bucket. The problem pirouetted before him like an elephant in a tutu. The subprogram in his head yelled at him from under the din, scolding him with the natural authority of an elder.

Get up, get up, get up, get up! You useless sack of shit! Get your ass out of bed this instant! You’re on a mission!

Semiconsciously, Cal knew the culprit yet resisted his own edification. Stress and anguish, much like with the roof jumper who was fired from his job and went home to find his wife in bed with his best friend, conspired to wring the last vestiges of chemical harmony from his worn-out mind.

Cal had attended many department seminars to sharpen his skills in negotiating with the mentally unhinged. Confronting suicides was a daily event for the NYPD. Apparently—and this was only a guess—his levels of neurofactor three (serotonin) were posting a low. His factors one, two, and seven weren’t faring any better. Neurons fired with the efficiency of a gelding stud. He teetered on the precipice of despondency. If Cal could just get a modicum of cooperation from life, the universe, and everything else, things might be okay.
Is this what the “ledge jumpers” thought, too?

Cal decided to roll on his side, an ambitious decision he was quite proud of. He lay on his back waiting for something to happen. The details on the ceiling beams were mesmerizing. The grains ran the length of the wood. Some beams were curved to follow the ceiling to its apex. Did they do that with water, the same way they bent drywall?

Drywall? Aandor has been invaded. Your family’s been hunted, maybe tortured, the kid you took an oath to protect has been lost for thirteen years, Ben was mauled to death … and you’re wondering about how they bend wood? Get up!

He pulled the sheet over his head.

Why was this so difficult? Just before the sleep wore off, for a nanosecond, he was the man he used to be. Then reality seeped in like poison. Couldn’t he hold on to that moment—wrap it around him like a shield? Why couldn’t he stay this mental hemlock? He’d led men through massacres; through battles whose likely outcome was a lacerated death. He was decisive, acute, confident. Why was turning over in bed arduous?
It’s a spell.
Yes, that was it, a spell. Everything would be okay. Lelani would find a remedy. Probably an herbal tea made from yak’s piss and eye of Newt Gingrich.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead,” came a familiar voice.

A grumbled whisper, “Chryslantha?”

The sizzling odor of sausage and maple syrup wafted through the covers. Cal shut his eyes. The bedsheet pulled back, like a magic trick, to reveal him. He peeked to find a Cheshire Cat hovering over him.

“No, it’s not Christmas,” his wife said. “Just thought you might like breakfast in bed.” She pulled the drapes back the rest of the way and flooded the room with light. Cat notched the window open. A cold breeze blew through the room. “Sorry,” she said. “Wanted some fresh air. Didn’t think it’d be arctic. I can get the fire going.”

“What time is it?” he rasped.

“Almost ten. You haven’t slept this late since you did twelve to eights.”

Cal pulled himself up and let Cat prop the pillow behind him. “Thanks,” he said. “What’s with the room service? Something else happen?”

“Can’t a wife spoil her husband once in a while?” She was glad, he realized. Grateful to still have
her
spouse. “We’ve never been to Scotland, you know.”

And technically, they still hadn’t. The only access to the bedroom was through Ben’s bungalow in Puerto Rico. Entry from the castle itself had been sealed with stone and mortar years earlier. To get to the moors they’d have to rappel three hundred feet down from the window and avoid the moat, which doubled as a sewage outlet.

Cat rested the bed tray over Cal’s thighs and lifted the warming covers from the plates.

“Have some?” Cal offered.

“No.”

“Did you eat already?”

“Skipped. Having trouble keeping things down. Probably nerves.”

“Hmm,” Cal said, swallowing java. One thought, a minor one until this moment, rose above the din in his brain. “Was that a pregnancy test box I saw in the bathroom trash at home?”

Cat was silent. She sat on the bed facing away from him with her hands on her lap.

“You coppers never miss a detail.”

“Wouldn’t be very good if we did. Is there something I should know?”

“The test results were ruined in the fight. I don’t know for sure, but it sure feels like…” She didn’t finish. Cal edged up to her and stroked her shoulders. “I didn’t want to add to our problems,” she said. “Not in the middle of all this.”

He kissed her on the nape of her neck. “You’ve always been the solution to my problems,” he said.

Chryslantha marched herself to the forefront of Cal’s brain. For a moment, it was her scent he smelled, her voice he heard. Someone had hooked his navel from the inside and was pulling it back toward his spine. He smiled at his wife. Could Cat see the other woman in his eyes?

“What’s the plan?” she asked him.

“We poke around the neighborhood up here, find a lead on the boy. Then, back to New York. The others from our group might head to the city looking for me.” As an afterthought he added, “The ones who are still alive.”

“And then?”

“Then we find the boy.”

“And then?”

“One thing at a time.”

“Let’s say you’re successful. Do we take the kid from his legal parents? Do we raise him ourselves? Do we move to his town? Buy the house next door to his? Do we bring him to the Bronx?”

“I don’t know. Let’s find him first.”

“Do you have to take him back to Aandor? Or can Lelani do it?”

“Let’s not talk about this right now.”

“If not now, when? What’s the plan? Are we actually making it up on the fly? We got lucky finding Ben and Helen up here.”

Not so lucky for Ben and Helen.

“Who knows when we’ll be able to catch our breath again,” Cat continued.

“I’ll know more later…”

“Have you made a decision about going back?”

“Can’t we drop this, Cat?”

“Drop this?”

Cat stood up from the bed. She rubbed her arms, suddenly chilled, while she made her way to the doorway. Cal had a tinge of guilt. She was so distraught, she was out of character. The woman he married would never drop anything.

Suddenly, Cat stopped and turned to face him. “You’re the guy who had every stage of his career with the NYPD mapped out before he graduated the academy!” she said. “You’re the guy who had the colors of our apartment picked out before we even bought the building!”

Cat circled slowly back around toward Cal, still lying immobile in bed.