The Darkest of Dreams

by Emigh Cannaday

  The phone on the assistant’s desk rang once, and Talvi was summoned into Director Sinclair’s office.

  “I’ve been waiting over half an hour,” he said.

  “You kept me waiting far longer than that,” Cyril replied, and began to tidy up his desk. Talvi raised a curious eyebrow at him.

  “That’s a bit passive-aggressive, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Quite passive-aggressive, however, I trust it got my point across. You had direct orders to report to me ninety minutes ago for your assignment, and you blatantly disregarded them.”

  Talvi couldn’t help rolling his eyes.

  “For the sake of the gods, Cyril, my wife was visiting for the first time since I went to prison,” he insisted. “Cut me a bit of slack, will you?”

  “You and I had an appointment. Annika did not.”

  Talvi’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

  “Perhaps she couldn’t make an appointment because you never returned her calls. She told me that she left at least twenty messages with you asking after me. How is it, then, that I managed to receive none of them? You let me believe that her silence was an indication of her feelings for me, or lack thereof!”

  “So what if I did?” Cyril asked in a callous tone. “You might think that times are changing, but the fact remains that it is forbidden for humans and elves to marry! And let’s not forget how many enemies you’ve made over the years. Did we not both agree in this very room that Annika would be far safer if you kept your distance from one another? Did you not proclaim how her safety and happiness were your highest priority?”

  Talvi tossed his wet hair out of his eyes and gave a reluctant nod.

  “You swore to me that you’d be nothing more than friends with her for the foreseeable future, and then you went back on your word the moment she pranced through the front doors. It’s as though you didn’t even try to resist her!”

  “Well…I did try to resist her,” Talvi admitted while holding back a smile. “That’s the trouble with modern girls…and wood nymphs, for that matter. They’re irresistible.”

  Cyril set his files down on the desk with a loud smack before glaring at the arrogant agent sitting in front of him.

  “I ought to write you up for insubordination,” he warned. “Make sure you send her back home before you leave tomorrow.”

  “I beg your pardon—I’m leaving tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” Cyril answered. “You know bloody well that I’ve had an assignment waiting for you.”

  A pair of blue and green eyes looked at him skeptically.

  “If it was so urgent, why didn’t you send another operative?”

  “The urgency of this task is not nearly as important as the delicate nature of it,” Cyril explained. “That’s why I need you for the job. It’s too sensitive for me to let anyone else handle it.” He pushed the top folder off the stack and over to Talvi’s side of the desk. “Here’s her file.”

  “Her file?” Talvi repeated, glancing at the red stamp reading ‘CONFIDENTIAL.’ “Does that mean the assignment is a woman?”

  “More or less,” Cyril answered as he placed the rest of the files into a drawer. He was too busy locking them up to notice the confused frown on Talvi’s face.

  “I distinctly remember telling you about my views on taking these sorts of jobs now that I’m married.”

  “I doubt you’ll have to sleep with her to get the job done, Marinossian,” came the director’s indifferent reply. “The Department of National Security has identified her as a serious threat. Your orders are to neutralize that threat and confirm the kill.”

  Talvi flipped carefully through the documents one by one, and the more he read, the more his stomach turned.

  “She’s fifteen? Even if she’s human, that can’t possibly be right.”

  Talvi flipped through the file, searching through the papers for a photo, a name, or anything else that would give him a clue who he was dealing with. He found a detailed map of Erelia, the province located northeast of his home in Sivita. A few red marks had been placed in the area north of the Sea of Forneus, indicating where his target had last been seen alive.

  “The information is correct. She’s a human who happens to be fifteen years old.”

  Talvi clenched his jaw more out of frustration than habit.

  “She’s practically a child.”

  “She’s nearly an adult. You forget that some cultures view girls as adults as soon as they’re able to have children.”

  “It doesn’t make it right. There’s a hell of a difference between a fifteen-year-old girl and a twenty-five-year-old woman,” Talvi muttered. “There’s nothing honorable about this job. Nothing honorable at all.” When Cyril didn’t comment, Talvi’s face grew darker. “But then, how important can honor be to the government when we still have prisoners of war mining somnomium up at Bleakmoor?”

  Cyril offered Talvi a cigarette from his gold case. For the first time in his life, Talvi turned him down. A quiet sigh escaped Cyril’s chest as he took one for himself. He placed it in the end of his cigarette holder and lit the end in a calm, collected display of pure nonchalance.

  “I’ve already explained this to you—that’s nothing more than a story that prisoners like to share with one another to pass the time. It’s not based in reality, although I’ll tell you what is painfully real.” He took a long puff and blew it off to one side. “The problem with angry teenagers is that they sometimes grow up to be angry adults,” Cyril said, indifferent as ever. “Denalia is young, irrational, and dangerous. She needs to be dealt with swiftly and accordingly.”

  “She’s a girl.”

  “She’s a loose end…a loose end that you failed to take care of,” Cyril reminded him. “Perhaps the next time you take out a Pazachi cell, you’ll keep that in mind so that these loose ends don’t come back to haunt you. It was her brother Stephan that caused all the trouble for you last year. He turned out not to be a doppelgänger at all, but a druid powerful enough to shapeshift into whatever creature he wanted. The last person he chose was—”

  “My brother,” Talvi said quietly, and stared at the documents in his hands. He shook his head as he realized why so much of the information seemed familiar. It was almost a word-for-word copy of the report he’d brought to Merriweather after that fight in the snowy forests so far north from his home.

  After being released from prison, he’d been briefed on Stephan’s identity, and he knew that Merriweather was busy following up on her own assignment, but he didn’t know about the possibility that Denalia was still alive. That little morsel of information was kept quiet until now.

  “Do take some extra precautions with her,” Cyril continued. “This teenage girl managed to escape three of your friends in the middle of a blizzard, despite being blindfolded and restrained. They assumed she was as good as dead, given the harsh weather, so clearly she’s made of tougher stuff than we realized. Furthermore, she didn’t go to a finishing school like her brother Stephan did, but she probably learnt a lot more black magic by staying with her parents.”

  “Her parents are dead,” Talvi said coolly. “I killed her father. I killed her brother. The survivors have been rehabilitated and are living peaceful lives, as far as I’m aware. Isn’t that good enough?”

  “No, it’s not good enough.” Cyril appeared disgusted at the very idea. “If she managed to get in contact with her brother and convince him to seek revenge against you and your family, what’s to stop her from reuniting with the surviving members of her clan and doing it again? What’s to stop her from inflicting a worse fate upon even more of our society? We know her parents built those man-made portals out of black magic. If she has any knowledge of their creation, she could arrange to have more of them made.”

  “Those portals were made of solid gold, and more gemstones than I’ve seen outside of a jeweler’s workshop,” Talvi thought out loud. “The Pazachi are nomads who live in the forest, so how would this girl ever be capable of mastering
this level of metallurgy?”

  “She doesn’t have to be a master goldsmith to make more of these portals,” Cyril said. “She simply has to convince someone else to do the work. Black magic makes even the best of us do the damnedest things.”

  “Shouldn’t I bring her back alive, then?” Talvi suggested. “Don’t you think it makes more sense to learn what we can about this new technology rather than destroy it?”

  Cyril tapped the end of his cigarette into an ashtray and sat back in his chair. Then he gave his best operative a look that left absolutely no room for misinterpretation.

  “Don’t ask questions, Marinossian. Just get the job done.”

  24

  ‘It’s Complicated’ with Talvi Marinossian

  “Babe? Where are you?” Annika called as she followed Tripp through the door into Merriweather’s apartment. “I brought you some ramen, just in case you didn’t have lunch yet. Holy crap—you would’ve loved this place we went to!” She set down the to-go container and her purse on the kitchen counter and watched Tripp conduct a routine search of every room. It was so second-nature to her that she’d learned months ago to wait for the ‘all clear’ before moving freely through a space. She reached for her bag and pulled out a ruby-tinged lip gloss when she promptly found her heart caught in her throat. Right there on the counter beside her purse were airline tickets to Portland, booked for an early departure the next day. She applied the lip gloss to her rejuvenated smile and dropped it back in her bag, then put away Talvi’s lunch.

  “All clear. Talvi’s in the loo,” Tripp said as he returned to the kitchen. “I’ll give you lovebirds some privacy. And if you need me—”

  “I know, I know. Scream like hell,” Annika winked while she slipped out of her jacket and set it aside. As always, she locked the door behind her bodyguard when he left, then stepped into the bedroom. The bed was neatly made, her travel bag was sitting in one corner, and a few sets of Talvi’s clothes were sitting out on the dresser waiting to be packed. She heard a rustling in the bathroom and quickly found her husband preoccupied with gathering his toiletries, which had been spread out all over the counter that morning.

  “I see that we’re going somewhere tomorrow,” she sang out in a musical tone. “I guess I managed to convince you to come home with me after all?”

  To her surprise, Talvi turned to her without a trace of happiness in his eyes.

  “Yes…about that,” he trailed off, then glanced away before returning his attention to her.

  “I know I’ve told you that I don’t like it when you do these kinds of things without giving me any notice,” she said, stepping closer. She ran a fingertip down the front of his shirt and gave him a sultry smile. “But I don’t mind this time.”

  Talvi lifted her finger away from his chest, then held her hand in his.

  “I received my orders this afternoon,” he began to explain. “The tickets you saw are for you and your security detail. I’m headed in the opposite direction, and I don’t know for how long.”

  Annika blinked up at him in disbelief for a few seconds before pulling her hand out of his. The silence between them was deafening.

  “I told you about this before you flew out to surprise me, remember?” He quickly resumed his packing and tucked his comb and straight razor into his toiletry bag. “I specifically said I’d be leaving in a few days for an undetermined length of time.”

  Annika nodded as she recalled that phone conversation in James’s art gallery. She’d heard Talvi speak those words with perfect clarity, yet they seemed so distant when he was on the phone in London and she was standing in the gallery in Portland.

  “Is this how it’s going to be, then?” she finally asked. “Meeting up in apartments or hotel rooms during the few times a year when we’re not busy?” That lump in her throat had returned, and this time it wasn’t caused by overwhelming happiness.

  “I expect that’s the sum of it,” Talvi answered quietly, and reached for his toothbrush and toothpaste. “I don’t like it any more than you do, love, but even Finn warned me that this would be a problem for us. We both find such fulfillment and purpose in our careers, yet those paths are taking us in opposite directions. They’re not even on the same bloody planet. I love you too much to ask you to give up the one thing that makes you so happy.”

  “There’s more than one thing that makes me happy,” she said with a shaking voice. “Music makes me happy. You make me happy.”

  Talvi gave a half-hearted nod, then added his toothbrush to the bag’s contents.

  “Sometimes, perhaps. Mostly I make you want to tear your hair out,” he said, and gave her mane an affectionate caress. “And we can’t have any of that. If we were together on a daily basis like most married couples are, you’d be bald within six months.”

  “Well…now that you mention it, that does make me wonder about something," she mused. “How long will you be gone? Will you be back before summer?”

  “I can’t rightly say,” he shrugged. “I’ll be done when I’m done.”

  “And then what? Another assignment?”

  “That’s how it works,” Talvi replied. “There might be some time off in between…whether it’s days or weeks I couldn’t tell you. I wouldn’t mind teaching hand-to-hand combat classes again, but Cyril would never allow it as a permanent situation. I’m too overqualified for a job like that, and he’s not as lenient of a supervisor as Merri was. He’ll expect me to fully abide by the oath I swore when I entered this line of work.”

  “Which is?”

  “To always place national security over any personal needs.”

  “You left for personal reasons when you brought Finn home from Paris,” Annika reminded him.

  “And I was sacked for it,” Talvi pointed out, and zipped up his toiletry bag. “Luckily I’ve been given another chance. Being that Cyril has bent over backwards to ensure my safety and prompt release from Bleakmoor, it would be poor form to abandon my post now.”

  Annika let out a heavy sigh and turned to face the mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of herself that no looking glass could fully reveal. Was she ready to play her last hand? Did she have the courage to risk defeat?

  “I don’t care what Cyril says,” she declared with a defiant spark in her eyes. “You need to be back by the middle of June so that we have time to go someplace together…alone. I want to fix everything that went wrong last summer. Anthea said I should keep the third week of June wide open, so that’s when I expect you back.”

  Talvi’s body language completely shifted from downtrodden to dumbfounded.

  “Annika…even if I could get away, you don’t want me anywhere near you during that time of year!”

  “Actually, I do,” she said, crossing her arms. She stared at his reflection in the mirror and drew herself up with as much dignity as she could muster. “I’m sick of everything and everyone else coming between us. There’s got to be a reason why our wedding rings will never come off—it’s like the magic that fused them to our bodies knows something that we don’t. And you might be out of prison, but you’re still trapped by your job. I’m trapped, too.”

  “How are you trapped?” Talvi argued. “You’ve done nothing but travel the world and play songs that you wrote for crowds of people who adore you! If you ask me, I wouldn’t call that being trapped. I’d call that bloody fucking liberating.”

  It took Annika everything she had not to roll her eyes at him.

  “I’m stuck in a totally different kind of prison; the kind where I’m married to you and bonded to your brother. I hate how it makes me feel! The only way for me to get out of it is to make that connection with you instead! It’s not like it’s a radical idea…a husband and wife being bonded to each other. That’s how it’s supposed to be done in your world, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he replied, hanging his head just a bit more than she expected him to.

  “Then why do I feel like you’re totally against the idea?”

  “Suppos
e I get you pregnant?” he said, staring back at her with an uncomfortable expression. “What then? No matter what my prophecy says, neither of us is particularly eager to become parents.”

  “I thought about that,” Annika said with a nod. “When Stephan left me with all those vampires last summer, one of them turned out to be a doctor. He told me about this nifty thing called an IUD that’s good for ten years. He said that some of the more enlightened elven women are using them, and it works the same as it does with people. It’s over ninety-nine percent effective. Talvi—we don’t have to worry about this for an entire decade! And if we’re still not ready in ten years, I’ll just get another one.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?” he asked, and stepped behind her, watching her face react to his words in the mirror. “Nothing’s one-hundred percent foolproof. That’s one of the reasons why you’re safer being away from me than you are by remaining at my side.”

  Annika pressed her lips together to hold back a huge smile.

  “Think about what you just said. Even if I got one of those things and couldn’t get knocked up, do you really want to take the risk of having me around someone else during that time of year? Do you really want to find out if Tripp and Adams can protect me when I go through that again? Tripp’s always telling me to scream like hell if I need him. Do you want me to find out how far he’s willing to go?”

  “No,” Talvi said with a wry grin. “I really do not.”

  “And would you really want to leave me all alone, when all I want is you, every minute of every hour of those three long, insatiable days?” She leaned against his body, pressing her back against his torso. “If you thought this morning was amazing just because I was a little hungry, what do you think that third week in June’s going to be like when all I want is for you to fuck my brains out? Don’t you want to find out what that feels like?” She lifted a suggestive brow at him, fully aware that she’d succeeded in captivating her audience. Now if she could manage to keep him enthralled long enough to convince him of her plan.