From the Ashes (5 page)

Finally he heard something. A creak coming from the living room. It could have been the building settling, water in the pipes, a noise from a different apartment, a figment of his imagination, or any number of a hundred other things, but Michael knew better. He looked around his room, eyes darting from place to place in search of something, anything, to use as a weapon.
Of course,
he thought as his eyes settled on his choice.

It would be a shame to damage the seventeenth-century rapier, the heirloom once wielded by one of his ancestors, the Earl of Arundel, but that was the purpose for which it had been crafted. It had been over two hundred years since it had last been used in a fight, but it had served his forebear well, and he prayed it would do the same for him. Actually, as long as he was praying, he wished that whatever agent of death seemed to be approaching would just disappear without the need for an altercation. But, he knew, there was little hope of that happening.

He slipped from his covers as quietly as he could, and padded barefoot on the threadbare carpet to the sword’s case atop a small bookshelf near his closet door. He unfastened the clasp as quietly as he could, and opened the glass lid. As he hefted it in his hand, he realized how very different fighting would be with this sword – weighted and forged to kill back in the 1600s – compared to the fencing foils he and Jon had learned and practiced with as youths. But then, whoever his unknown assailant might be, his unseen bringer of death, it was unlikely that he would also be coming at him with a sword. A fencing match this would not be. A visceral, high-adrenaline, one-hit-wins brawl seemed more likely to transpire.

Michael crouched behind his still-closed bedroom door and waited. And waited. Not daring to turn on a light to check his watch, and not wanting to give up his position to go check his cell phone clock – which also would have entailed turning on another light – he had no idea how much time had passed since he had first grabbed the sword and begun waiting by the door. Had it been one minute or twenty? Had he just imagined the whole thing? The creak could have been any number of things, and his inscrutable sense of death approaching... could that have simply been the product of an overtaxed mind? Yesterday was a big day in his life, and today stood to possibly become equally big. Could all that have been the cause of his strange feelings tonight? He hadn’t heard anything else since that solitary creak, and the muscles in his legs were growing sore, his feet going numb from crouching.

He stood up, still slowly, and exhaled deeply but quietly. He waited for another minute or three, gripping the sword loosely by his side. Nothing.

How much
more
sleep had he now lost because of his overactive imagination? Sleep he truly could not afford to lose. After he got back from New York, he would have to take a personal day of sleeping until noon, relaxing and unwinding. As exciting and wonderful as all these new developments in his life were right now, he still had to take time for himself to just chill, lest his mind would just shut down when he really needed it.

He had just lifted his right foot to begin walking back to replace the sword in its case when he heard the doorknob to his bedroom, just a foot away from him, begin to turn. He froze. He drew his foot back, and stood at the ready. Instantly his mind flashed through a dozen different possible plans. He could return to bed and pretend to be asleep, hoping to catch the intruder off-guard. He could hide in the closet and either pop out to catch the intruder unawares or simply remain hidden. He could try to go out the fire escape and— no, there wasn’t time for that now. He could try to pad the covers so it looked like he was still in bed, then leap out from the shadows to attack the intruder— no, no time for that either. He could yank the door open and stab the sword into the intruder’s head. Or...

The door began to open toward Michael, who stood by the hinges at the ready. A shadowy torso, several inches shorter than Michael, started to snake into the room. The shadow was halfway through the gap between the door and the jamb when Michael shoved the door with all his might, shouting out a “Yah!” as he slammed into it. The shadow grunted and slumped slightly against the jamb, but seemed to quickly recover its footing.

“What do you want?”
Michael screamed as he slammed into the door a second time, this time catching the shadow in the spine. Michael immediately followed up with a blow from the hilt of the rapier to the intruder’s head. The shadow fell to the ground in the doorway. Michael slammed the door into the shadow once more, this time just using his hand on the doorknob as leverage.
“What do you want?”
he screamed again, his voice turning into a screech on the word “want,” a feral animalism having taken over his being, a primal survival instinct having been triggered in his mind.

The shadow rolled over onto its back, facing the bedroom. A pair of black eyes, blazing with indignation in the spectral light of the room, bored into Michael. Then a third eye, black with a slim silver iris, appeared near the shadow’s chest, pointing right at Michael’s head.

“Solo esto,”
came the shadow’s voice at last.
Only this.

The third eye’s black pupil flashed white. The sharp sound of a report.

And then – nothing but darkness.

Blue Mountains National Park, Australia
Saturday

Hanging from the side of a cliff, four hundred feet off the canyon floor, generally did good things to clear Jon’s mind. This morning, it was working, but not quite as well as he’d hoped.

He found himself half-wishing he’d taken the first part of his vacation in Europe, or maybe somewhere in the Middle or Far East. The wealth of historical sites and archaeological treasures those regions held could have easily distracted Jon from the Michael-Mara issue. Instead, for this first chunk of his seven-week break between Hilary Term and Trinity Term at Oxford, he found himself in Australia. Given, it was a beautiful country, and he was sharing it with friends. But the natural beauty, the company of friends, even the sorority sisters from the previous night – four attractive and convivial friends from UCLA spending their term break in the Blue Mountains – hadn’t managed to cheer him up. His sleep was sporadic at best, and now, as he clung to the rocky edge of the cliff, scaling the mountain with little more than his bare hands and a belay line, his brain was still fixated on the problem.

Jon knew, deep down, that his bond, his relationship with his brother, wasn’t going anywhere. Come hell or high water, they would always be tight. It was impossible to go through what they had together and not be. But that didn’t change the fact that, since he and Mara had started going out, Michael seemed to have much less time for Jon. And the fact that Jon would probably see even less of him after they officially became Mr. and Mrs. Michael James Rickner.

The rock he had just chosen for a foothold turned out to be less solid than he’d thought. The sandstone surrounding it crumbled under his weight, the chunk of rock directly beneath his foot dislodging from its position and plummeting to the canyon floor below. Jon dug into the cliff with both hands, forgetting about the handhold he had been maneuvering toward and simply trying not to follow the fallen rock to the bottom of the gorge. The last cam he’d placed was a dozen meters below; a six-story fall awaited him if he fell, and that was only if the cam held out. He felt the belay line tighten against his harness, but he didn’t want to rely on it. As distracted as he had been, he had serious doubts about how securely he had placed the last few cams into the rock.

“Jon!” Paul shouted from forty meters down the cliff, making his own path up the rock face. Even if he could have helped a precariously dangling Jon without endangering himself, Paul was too far away to lend a hand. All he could do was tighten the belay rope and pray he didn’t have to hold the weight of a six-foot-two, one-hundred-eighty-five-pound free-falling partner.

Twin beads of perspiration snaked down from Jon’s short, sweat-soaked brown hair and into his eyes, forcing him to blink away the painful saline – and the dust his frantic clawing was kicking up. Jon huffed as he scrabbled his left leg along the cliff side, half-looking, half-feeling for a new foothold, all while doing his best not to put too much pressure on his other leg. All he needed was for the purchase his right leg still held to disappear, either from his foot slipping off of it or from accidentally sending the rock down the cliff to join its brother. Which would leave him literally hanging on for dear life, his handholds and a sketchy safety line all that stood between him and a four-hundred foot drop into the gorge.

This was a bad idea.

First rule of any sort of life-risking diversion: don’t do it when you’re overly tired or when you’re mentally or emotionally preoccupied. If it applied to driving, it sure as heck applied to dangling from the side of a mountain. And Jon was three for three.

His left foot finally found the purchase it sought. He just hung on for a few moments, catching his breath and allowing himself to get his wits about him.

“You okay?” Paul called.

“Yeah,” Jon replied with a grunt. “Never better.” He looked up the cliff. About twenty-five feet to the top. He should have waited for Paul to reach him, but he had some rope left, and he really didn’t think it wise to spend any more time than necessary without the safety of solid ground beneath his feet. Then he’d see if he couldn’t find a way down from the top that didn’t involve putting his life in danger. In the meantime though, those twenty-five feet still remained to be climbed.

Jon took a deep breath. Slow and steady wins the race.

He shoved a cam into another crack in the rock face, fastening it as securely as possible. His eyes found the handhold he’d been moving toward when he’d lost his footing. He tested his footholds and both of his current handholds. Sturdy. Safe. Time to move forward. As he moved his hand toward the rock, he heard a familiar tune emanating from his jacket pocket. The
Indiana Jones
theme song. Michael’s ringtone.

He knew he shouldn’t answer it, especially in light of how close he had just come to falling to his death, but he couldn’t help it. He missed his brother, and if he waited until he got to the top of the cliff, there was no guarantee that Michael would still be available to talk. He seemed to be incommunicado a lot these days, and the ten-hour time difference that separated them right now didn’t help. Instinctively, his hand went to his jacket pocket and answered the phone.

“Jon?” came a soft voice as soon as he’d answered. Not Michael. Female. Sounded like Mara, but... different.

“Mara? That you?”

Silence. Labored breathing. Sniffles.

Jon furrowed his brow. “Mara?”

“He’s dead, Jon.”

Jon huffed a nervous, disbelieving laugh. “What? What’re you talking about?”

A deep high-pitched intake of breath from the other end. “Oh God. Michael’s dead, Jon. He’s gone.”

Jon’s head was suddenly filled with helium, light and compressed all at once.

No.

No no no no.

Not possible.

His head rolled back, eyes fixed on the unforgiving blue sky, staring but not seeing. The rising sun, warming his skin until just a few moments earlier, had turned cold and empty. Sobs and undecipherable entreaties continued to emanate from the phone Jon held in his tenuous grasp, but all he could hear was the relentless whisper of the wind, rushing through the canyon as it had all morning, now transformed from an enjoyable bit of atmosphere to an all-consuming wall of noise.

All-consuming. Everything Jon had been worried about regarding himself and his brother now seemed petty, ridiculous. Marriage wouldn’t have changed anything, but this...

Jon just clung there, dazed, as the phone finally slipped from his grasp, tumbling unanswered four-hundred feet into the darkened chasm below.

He had been mistaken, he realized. Most things, “high water” included, wouldn’t have been able to change his bond with Michael. But “hell”
had
come, and it had changed everything.

Washington, D.C.
Sunday

The view out Jon’s window was dismally sunny. The daylight, the fluffy white clouds, and the shimmering waters of the Chesapeake taunted him as the plane began its final approach into Dulles. Crossing nine time zones, the International Date Line, and the equator was generally enough to screw with a person’s faculties, but Jon’s faculties had been screwed up long before he ever set foot on the plane.

Michael. Dead.

He had called Mara back at Los Angeles International Airport, halfway through his trip from Sydney. Told her he was coming to Washington. For the funeral. For Michael. For her. And for Jon himself.

He felt immeasurably guilty about his jealousy now. And for the distance he had put between himself and his brother these past few years. Not that he blamed himself for Michael’s death. Not really, anyway.

The phone call to Mara had raised more questions than answers, and his mind was already full of unanswerable enigmas. But what Mara had told him was particularly suspicious. He prayed it was just emotion on Mara’s part, but he was far from confident that would be the case.

The whole thing just kept getting stranger and stranger. If what she said was the truth... well, Jon didn’t want to think about what that might mean.

He had boarded the plane and found a window seat to hide himself in. Shortly after boarding, his seatmate – a middle-aged German businessman bristling with Teutonic efficiency – had asked Jon if he was okay

“My brother just died,” came Jon’s terse reply. The man muttered an uncomfortable apology and didn’t bother Jon for the remainder of the flight. And now, so many hours and time zones later that Jon had no idea what day or time it was, the plane was at last descending toward Washington, DC. A city renowned for corruption, deceit, and smoke-and-mirrors as a matter of policy. Jon had come in search of answers, of closure, yet he had the unmistakable feeling that things would get far worse before they got better.