by Mason Sabre
“And shit,” Stephen added.
Chapter 35
While Eden cleaned away what was left of the pill and Xander packed away all the things he had tipped out during his rampant search, Helena sat next to Stephen and slipped her hand into his. Stephen stood beside her, and he didn't blame her when her cool mask slipped from her face and revealed the woman, torn and tired, waiting and yearning.
"Keep fighting," he said. He kept his voice low and didn't let it cross between the worlds. He could have spoken if he had thought it would do any good, but he figured it would only make Helena sadder. It would fill her with emotions and knock her off the path to getting him back and freeing them from Lee's grasp.
Soon, he knew. Soon they would see each other again, properly, and he would tell her all the things he needed to say then. He would hold her and kiss her. He would caress every inch, and he would make promises, to her, to the babies, and to Aiden.
Aiden was helping Xander. He picked up the items that had been cast onto the floor and put them on the counter for either Xander or Eden to decide if they needed cleaning again.
“What else did Nick say?” Helena asked. “Does he know how to get back into his body?”
Xander had a tub filled with items that now needed to be sterilised again. “Lee has his soul ball.”
“Soul ball?” It was Eden who asked. Her complexion had turned ash white in the space of a second.
Helena clung to Stephen, gripping his hand tightly in hers. “If there is a soul ball … is he going to die?”
At first, it seemed like Xander didn't understand why she had asked, but then the colour drained from his face. "Oh … no. Wait here." He held his hand up to Helena and then dashed out of the room and toward the lounge before anyone could protest. He came back a moment later with Eden's book and his notes. He took it over to the side of the room and the only free space. With a sweep of his arm, he pushed back the bits that were there and lay the book down. He flipped the pages all the way to the torn one and then went back a page.
The backsplash on that counter had a mirror, and even Stephen was curious as Xander angled the book to put the reflection in the wall. "I came across this by accident. I didn't know what it meant at the time." When he pushed the book all the way to the wall and angled the light, he said, "Look."
They did. The way Xander had the book, an image shone into the reflection, but it was different. Shadows and light distorted what was really there.
Eden took the book. “Is that real? What is it?”
“A carriage,” Xander said. “I didn’t know what it was when I found it. Do you see?”
There was a carriage, an old one. The image was like one of those colour-blind tests with the numbers hidden under bubbles, only this image was buried in the reflection, but it was there. Even Stephen could see it. He bent down between them, out of sight.
“Cats?” Helena asked, tilting her head. “Those are cats?”
“Two of them. I knew there was a link. This has taken me ages.” Xander pulled his papers out from under the book. It was pages of notes, scribbled, drawn … a mess of pencil and pen. “Nick is a Caspian tiger, right?”
Helena nodded. “Freya’s animal to call.”
“Yep, but wrong,” Xander said.
“Nick isn’t a Caspian?” Eden asked.
"Not like they say. There are real Caspian tigers, or there were, and then they went extinct, but there were others, almost magic. They weren't breeds like they had been, but more anomalies of nature. If Nick were a true Caspian, then his parents would be too. I don't know his parents or anything about them, but as far as I know, there are no Caspians left."
“He’s never really spoken to me about his family,” Helena said. “I think his parents are alive, but he didn’t mention anything special about them.”
"Right," he said. "But these kinds, they don't need Caspian parents. It's like …" he paused, trying to think of the words. "Deformities, but not really. Like think when someone has blue eyes, but both parents have brown because the parents carry recessive genes. Nick's parents must have carried this, or one of them. Caspians like this are rare, but they do happen." He pulled Eden's book back and flipped a page to where it talked about cats, but even that was only in the reflection. "See there? This gets missed every time. Caspian tigers are also known as Hyrcanian tigers. These tigers …" he paused to look at both women. Even Aiden had stopped what he was doing, and, at some point, he had huddled himself back against Helena. "So, Da Vinci, right?"
They nodded.
"He wrote about these tigers. There was a Hyrcanian tiger, and she had cubs, and a hunter wanted to steal them, so he did, and in their place, he left mirrors for each cub to fool her, so she would see the reflections and think they were her babies. But she realised what he had done, and she went after him. When the hunter saw her, he gave her back a cub, but she didn't stop. She went back until she got them all and he left on his boat. But he hadn't done it to steal the tigers. He had managed to separate the tigers from their reflections and trap the reflections in the mirror. So Hyrcanian tigers are really two beasts in one."
Helena frowned. “But what does that have to do with Nick?”
"Freya rides a chariot pulled by two cats," Eden said slowly, testing if she understood what Xander was getting at.
Xander nodded. “One cat creates the other.” There were two more pages. Most of them made no sense, but even Stephen saw it now. It was like the entire book was a map for this event. His stomach tightened. He was already ten steps ahead of what Xander was trying to say. “Nick created Lee,” Xander said. “He carved the stripes into him, fed him his blood. Look.” He flipped to the next page. “Together they bring in the new world.”
“Lee and Stephen?” Helena asked.
“Two cats … Freya’s cats.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Lee and Nick? Nick will kill him the moment he lays his hands on him.”
Xander let out an odd barking sound, and Stephen realised it was a sarcastic laugh. “They already did.” He signalled to Stephen’s bed. “Nick created Lee, and then Lee created those children you carry. It’s all been set into motion. I can’t be sure, but …” he grabbed another of his notes. “That soul ball of his, it isn’t actually his soul, it’s his reflection. If we get that back, we can … I don’t know how, but somehow, get him back.”
“But he is unconscious,” Helena said. “How do we get him to wake up?”
Xander set his lips into a firm line and paused, then he reached into his top pocket and pulled out the bottle Lee had given to him. “With this,” he said. He gave it to Helena. “You’re a doctor. You know science and all that shit. Can you break it down? Find out what is in it?”
Eden took it from Helena’s hand. “Where did you get this?”
“It’s what the Humans gave to him. It’s why he is still out of it.” He paused again, and Stephen knew he was thinking how to explain himself. But what could he say? Here is the bottle of the shit I’ve been giving to Stephen to keep him under? No. He said nothing. “Do you think you can do it?”
The bottle was small. It was one of those that would be used for a syringe to be jammed into it. “I can try,” Helena said. “Or Eden.”
“Either way, but we’re on borrowed time. We have to get that ball back.”
Chapter 36
Fire filled the room; it was in the bellies of each resident. It was big and bright, and full of power and Stephen fed off it like a drug addict getting his fix after so long sitting in the shadows with no money and no needle.
“Yes …”
Recognition registered on their faces as each of them, even Aiden, understood what it was Xander was explaining, a twinge twisted in Stephen’s gut. It was all such a puzzle, a fucking jigsaw made of mesh and nets and they understood.
Eden covered her mouth and shook her head. “He really is the one?” she said. “It’s really him?”
“Yes.”
She had
been the believer from the beginning. She'd been the one with faith, and she'd pushed them all with that alone, but the light in her eyes as she said the words … as she genuinely said them. It was Christmas morning in her world and was only going to get better. She choked back a sound that wasn't a sob, but it wasn't laugher either, it was somewhere between the two.
“I don’t believe it. I mean … I believed it, but I … I’ve waited my whole life for this,” she said the last part as a whisper and her gaze went to Stephen. She put her small finger to her mouth and started to bite on the edge of it, and it was the first time Stephen had known her to come undone. Even in her letters, though he couldn’t see her, she never gave him the impression she might fall apart. “How do we get the ball back?”
“Did Nick tell you anything about that?”
“Yes,” said Xander. He closed Eden’s book and shuffled his papers back into a haphazard pile. There was no page in the book or in his notes that would document how to fix a fuck-up once it had occurred. There was no note on what to do when one jumped from a bus and fell out of their body. What were the people who wrote the prophecy doing the day that was predicted?
He tapped his finger against the front of the book as if that might conjure a magical force to give them the answers they needed, but there was no map to get to Lee's office. "The ball is on a shelf in Lee's office, where he keeps all his loose change and stuff." Xander laughed at the latter part, but it wasn't a happy laugh or even a cheery one. It was a laugh-filled with so much emotion and disbelief, like a man who'd just climbed a mountain, only to realise, it was the wrong one, and the one he wanted was further away. "The man doesn't even know what he is holding. He has all that power in a dish on his shelf. Can you imagine?"
Helena could. It was in her face, in her eyes, but then there were so many things she was probably thinking. She was a doctor, and that meant she was logical first and factual. “Maybe not smart, but he isn’t stupid either,” she said in the end.
“An idiot,” Eden added, and she ran both hands around her neck and rested them at the nape and laced her fingers together. She sucked in a breath and slowly let it out again. “How do we even get in there? It isn't like we can just walk up to the door and ask to be let in. He’d kill any one of us, or hold us, or something.”
“Maybe aim for the or something,” Stephen said, unheard from behind them. Anything else wasn’t an option for him. At worst, he’d have it end with Lee being killed, but he wanted that pleasure.
"I can get the ball. I know how." Xander backed away from both women and took himself to the window. It had a view of what would once have been a beautiful garden. It still had the shape of one, and someone had cut away the weeds and the debris. Eden perhaps. It had enough space for Aiden to play there, and there were a couple of toys to show he had. But it was also surrounded by a number of trees and overgrown hedges. They acted as protection, or a delay to make it harder for anyone to get close. The wall at the back joined a shed, and Aiden had decorated the side of it in a mishmash of colour.
“How? I mean …” Eden didn’t go over to Xander. Neither woman moved, but Eden moved in the opposite direction.
“You can’t break into there,” Helena said. “There isn't a chance in hell.”
“I’m not going to break in. I’m going to walk up to the door and ask.”
“You're going to ask? Like what? Lee has something we need, give it us back?”
He tried not to flinch at her tone. “No. I …”
"He isn't going to just invite you in for coffee and cake and say sit in my office. This is Lee Norton; if he realises you have anything to do with Nick and me… he'll …"
“He won’t. He won’t harm me. When I used to work for him, with the fighting rings, I’d go to the building to handover my takings.”
“And people,” Stephen added, but Xander didn’t mention that part. It was as unspoken as the information about his son.
“I can go in there. I can give him some bullshit story. Maybe I can even say I’ve seen Nick and that I have information. It doesn’t matter what I say as long as I get in there. I can do this. I can save Nick.”
Eden had put herself closer to Helena, but closer to the door. She would bolt in a moment. She’d protect herself from the fear. “What if you can’t?” she asked. “What if …”
“Then we try something else. After all this time and all the shit we’ve been through, we aren't giving up. Nick wouldn't want that.”
“Nick wouldn’t want you to die either.”
"Before I met you, met Nick, I worked for Lee. I know him. He was a piece of shit back then, and that was before he had someone to be angry with. He likes these games. He'll not kill me because he is missing a piece of his board. This may be the only chance we get. We can't break in like you said, and even if we did, getting to his office would be impossible."
Eden hugged her arms around herself. "You can't really be thinking of doing this. I … Lee isn't a man you can reason with, not really. He makes you think you can. I have never worked with him or had any personal contact, but I know him well enough to know that everything he does is for him."
“This will be for him,” Xander said. “This will be him thinking he can get Nick back. Right now, that’s all that matters to him. We know that much too.”
“What if you fail and we all end up dead?” asked Helena.
“Then it won’t matter because we are dead,” said Stephen from behind her.
Xander came away from the window and put himself in a position in front of both women. “We won’t fail, and he won’t kill me. Trust me. I know Lee. I know what he is like.”
No. He wouldn’t kill him. He wouldn’t kill him because Lee believed Xander was helping him. He was using Xander, and Xander was aware. “You better not switch sides again.” He couldn’t blame Xander for selling out his friends for the sake of his son, not before, but he could now. If he did it again. “I’m trusting you.” And he was trusting the look in Xander’s eye as he reached for Eden, reached for her and held her hand.
“The worst he will do is tell me to piss off.” He took her hand, held it in his and raised it to his chest. “You believe in Nick. You believe in all of this. Believe in me now. We all have our places in this thing. Helena has the babies, you have the magic … this is mine.”
“But I …”
“It would take more than Lee to kill me.” Before she could say more, he pulled her against him and tucked her head under his chin. He wrapped his arms so damn tight around her. “Trust me.”
Aiden slipped from the side of Helena and wedged himself into the impossible gap between Xander and Eden's hips, but Eden slid an arm down to him and pulled him in. A second later, Helena got from her stool and touched Eden's back. "Xander can do this. He's fae. He’s air fae at that.” She met his gaze as she said it, fierce. Determined. He nodded at her. “We can all do this.”
Helena left the three of them to stand together. She went to Stephen and ran her hand along his leg and all the way up to his chest. “I hope you can really hear me.” She cupped his face. “We’re coming for you.”
Chapter 37
“Can’t sleep?” Eden said as she stepped out into the night. They had agreed that Xander would go to the facility in the morning. It was pointless anyway to go in the evening, even if they were ready for it, Lee would have gone home for the day, wherever that was. But facing the enemy at full capacity was the best choice, they’d all decided. Half-arsed and half-dead was not the way to beat someone like Lee Norton.
Xander stood by the door. He leant against the frame, a bottle of beer in one hand and a whole world of problems in the other. Across the tops of the trees and through the cloudless sky, a dark, thick ball of grey fog formed in the air. It was far enough away, but big enough they could see it. Neither one of them commented on it.
“Not really,” Xander said.
Eden stood near to him, her bottle of beer hanging in her right hand. She pulled the front do
or to the house closed with a soft click. "Thank you," she said after a moment of silence.
He cocked his head to the side. His hair, which needed a good cut now, flopped down. “You’re mad at me?”
“No … I …” She bit on her bottom lip and sucked it into her mouth. “I’m afraid. I …” Brows pinched, she tried to find the words she wanted to say. Xander let her. He remained quiet. They’d been together long enough for him to read her, to understand her. To anyone outside, she was loud and skittish. The kind of girl to tease, but never bother to invoke any real kind of conversation. She did that on purpose, because behind the wild hair, the bright makeup and pig-tails, she had more knowledge than some of the best-educated people he knew. "If this goes wrong, if something happens to you … how will I know? I mean, I …”
He took a swig from his bottle and stepped into her space, and without warning or invite; he put his arm around her back. "Nothing will happen." He paused, then said, "I saw Joey."
“What?” She let go of him with such suddenness. “You saw Joey? When? Your Joey?”
He nodded and pointed at the spot near to the gate where Stephen had thrown him from his body. “He’s with Nick, on the other side.”
Hand hovering, she touched him on his chest. "Is he dead?"
Xander took another swig of his beer, but a longer one this time. He gulped it right down into his body and stepped away from Eden and to the edge of the steps. “I don’t think so. Nick isn’t dead. They’re in this kind of limbo.”
“Oh, Xander.” She put her hand on his back, fingers spread at the centre. “He’s not dead.”
“No.”
Xander's face flushed and his eye shone with tears he'd not let fall. He held onto everything in his chest, twining it into a tight ball, so it didn't come unravelled—so he didn’t become unravelled. “Nick said he will get him out of there. Nick said he’d help.”