by C. E. Murphy
I know, she answered irritably. That doesn't mean I like it. She pushed the backstage doors open, frowned at the hall, and went up to the main lobby. A bored young woman sat behind the ticket booth, her head tilted back as she contemplated the ceiling "Excuse me?"
The girl jerked upright, looking guilty. "Yes? Um, yes, ma'am? What can I do for you?"
Ghean tilted her head at the door. "Three people left just after the lecture began. Did you see them, by any chance?"
"Oh, yeah, I saw them. A black lady and a couple of white dudes. They were arguing about something."
Ghean nodded. "That's them. Did you happen to see which way they went?"
"Nah, they just headed out. The guy with the nose didn't look very happy. Hey, he said something about going to a bar or a coffee shop or something, does that help?"
Ghean's eyebrows quirked and she laughed. "The guy with the nose? Didn’t they all have noses? And yes, it does help, thank you. Was one of them wearing a long coat, kind of like mine?" She moved her hands in her pockets, making the tails of her trench coat swing.
"Two of 'em," the kid said. "Both the guys. Hope you find them. Hey." She squinted at Ghean. "Did you really find Atlantis?"
Ghean paused again, smiling. "I really did."
"How do you know it's really Atlantis?"
Carefree, Ghean grinned. "I was born there." She dropped the girl a wink and crossed the lobby to walk out into the Chicago night. Wind knocked hair into her eyes instantly and she pushed it out of the way, leaving the University grounds. A steady drizzle began as cars pulled away with people leaving the lecture. Whoever it was doesn't want to meet up with us, the patient one said. Perhaps he's young, and doesn't want to risk a battle. Ghean pressed her elbow against the hilt of her sword, hidden beneath her coat.
Maybe, she said, but I don't want a fight, just to talk. I want to see why he left.
It could be dangerous! the frightened voice broke in.
Ghean shrugged. I've had training, even taken a head or two. We'll be fine. Admittedly, she had only taken a very few heads. The Keeper files had proved very useful, and Ghean didn't want to risk her ability to rejoin the society at some point if she needed their knowledge again. The only battles she'd fought had been after making absolutely sure her opponents had no Keepers nearby. Idly, she lifted a hand to touch the pendant of her necklace.
The vault the Lorhen Chronicles were kept in was dusty, not impressive. Ghean scowled at the lower left-hand corner, crouched to peer under the stacks. The shelving was far too deep to just reach back and feel for the crack that would indicate where the safe Lorhen had cut would be. Bringing a mop into the vault would be noticed. Ghean swore softly, and batted at the dust, then sighed and crawled under the shelving. Even with a flashlight, it took several minutes of squirming to find the edges where the stone had been cut. Ghean sneezed. How the hell did he expect me to pull this out? There's no handholds, no grooves. I'm not as strong as he is.
He didn't expect you to at all, the patient one pointed out. He thinks you're dead.
Oh, shut up. Ghean gained a tiny purchase against the stone, pulling back without success. Her fingers slid off the sharp corner, skin tearing.
Trapped! the frightened one screamed. Trapped again! Forever and ever in the darkness again! We should have stayed! Atlantis was safe, we knew Atlantis! Now we're trapped again!
Ghean shuddered violently, biting back a scream as she flung her arms up, hiding her face. Trapped!
We are not trapped. For the first time, the patient voice sounded impatient. Roll backward. We're safe. There are answers to mysteries behind that stone, but we are not behind that stone. We are safe. We won't ever be trapped again. Now try again. We're fine. It subsided into a grumbling silence.
Ghean, trembling, unwound her arms, and tried a second time to pull the stone out. The struggle flew back and forth within her mind, practicality and fear shouting at each other until her own thoughts were all but drowned. When the stone abruptly came free, it shocked both voices into silence, and Ghean dropped her head against the floor in relief.
Gods, you're loud, she muttered, then wiggled backwards to pull the stone further out. It came out smoothly, once there was enough to get a grip on. Ghean brushed dust out of her eyes, studying the stone for a few seconds.
Time had distorted her memories too far to be sure, but she was fairly certain the lump of rock would have been too heavy for her mortal self to move, aeons ago. She had long since lost a sense of what was normal, but she didn’t think a woman her size should have been able to move that stone.
Greater endurance, greater strength, more developed senses, the patient one said. We are more than human. Not as great as a god, but greater than mortal.
Ghean rubbed a dirty hand over her face, picking up her flashlight, and crawled forward into the space left by the stone. I know, but why? Maybe when I've found Atlantis and we've had our revenge I can become a doctor, study what makes us the way we are. The gap went back about three feet, more area than the stone she'd dragged out took, though there was nothing visibly set into the space. She lowered the flashlight, running her fingers over the floor, setting her teeth to ignore the screaming frightened voice. Too familiar, the search for imperfections. Shivering, she almost missed the thin bump in the floor. In a moment, she was able to lever the box out of the floor, and back up with it, flashlight clutched in her other hand.
She shoved the stone back into its resting place as quickly as she could, then sat on the floor of the vault, running her fingers over the Atlantean box. It took several minutes to find the subtle depressions where pressure would open the box, and she held her breath as it quietly clicked open.
An envelope lay at the end of the box, and two delicate velvet bags lay atop it. Ghean picked up the larger, working it open uncertainly, and turning it to spill its contents into her palm.
A silver chain tumbled out, drawing with it a pendant painful in its familiarity. Minyah's pendant, the symbol of their House, was blackened with time, the silver uncleaned in at least a century, but even so Ghean was certain it was her mother's original necklace. She slipped it on, fingers clutching the pendant. Even the voices were silent as she clung to the necklace, trembling with memory.
Eventually she worked open the second bag. A gold ring, etched with the stamp of a lion, fell into her palm, and she smiled. What little had been saved from Atlantis, it seemed, was now hers. She slipped it on over her thumb, where it fit snugly.
Lorhen's handwriting spelled out her name on the outside of the envelope, written in Atlantean as the other note had been. Ghean slowly lifted it, still hardly breathing. It cracked open, and she withdrew the note carefully. A key fell with it, and she caught it quickly, scanning the note.
The key is to a safe-deposit box at the Bank of England, in London. Minyah's Keeper papers are there, detailing the first fifty years of the Keepers. The family name they're under is Lazarus; I couldn't help myself. Someday my sense of humor is going to get me in trouble. There's a bank account associated with the name. I didn't put much money in it, but I made the deposit in 1720. I rather expect it's built up. I imagine I'll use it someday, since I've got the other key to the safe-deposit box, and you've been dead forty-five centuries.
The things we do for old lovers.
Again, there was no signature. It was dated the same year as the note Ghean had found in the book, 1845, only a hundred years earlier. Ghean sat, re-reading the words, and finally let out whispered, "Well. I hope all that money is still there. I'd like to be rich." She tucked the box under her arm, and stood, trying to brush some of the grime off her clothes as she left the vault.
Ghean turned the pendant again, splashing as she made her way down the street. If we were running away to hide, the patient one said, we'd hide somewhere with a bolt-hole.
Our shy friend might not be that clever, she replied, but nodded anyway, lifting a hand to tuck damp hair behind her ear. She crossed the street, examining the occasiona
l open business and evaluating them as likely hideouts for a shy Timeless. Most of them looked too well-kept and wholesome. She continued up the block, glancing up as a street lamp sputtered on and off above her with a faint electric hum, occasionally illuminating a bedraggled bar sign over a door that looked like it hadn't been opened in half a decade. Light crept out around its edges, though, and she put her hand on the doorknob, trying it.
A rush of nausea hit so hard she swayed, yanking her hand off the doorknob as though it had caused the sudden illness. She backed up, staring at the door, then stepped back to look both ways down the street. An alley, obscured by rain and dark, made a shadow in the building walls. Smiling, Ghean tucked the collar of her coat closer and went into the alley to lean against the wall just a few steps away from the bar's back door.
Lorhen broke off his story mid-word, intent assessment drawing his eyebrows down. Cathal's eyebrows rose and he leaned out of the booth, glancing through the dim bar in expectation. Emma groaned. "Another one?"
Lorhen swung out of the booth, pulling a fistful of cash from his pocket and throwing it on the table. "Come on."
"Life with him is never dull," Cathal murmured to Emma as they followed him through a crowd that had grown considerably since they’d arrived.
"Not if you like running away."
Lorhen pushed his way to the back door, using his elbows liberally to clear the path. "A very wise man once said there's no problem so big you can't run away from it, Emma."
"Yeah?" Emma asked. "Who?"
"His name was Trent." Lorhen opened the back door, gesturing Cathal and Emma through before him.
Ghean grinned again as the door swung open. So I was right, she thought, in her mother's often-used phrase. . She pushed away from wall, still smirking, head cocked to the side, to see whom it was she had trapped.
The first person out was the woman, handsome, dark-skinned, and in her fifties, with a military bearing that went beyond the short-cropped black hair that curled tightly against her head: dark eyes scanned the shadows and the street at the alley’s mouth, though she didn’t—perhaps couldn’t—see Ghean in the darkness, any more than she might have seen the blade Ghean carried under her coat. Not that Ghean believed herself to be actually invisible, but there were moments when that the Blending stirred inside her and mortals looked away. Most often it happened in the midst of battle, else there would be dozens of witnesses when Timeless fought in cities, but on occasion it seemed that the power responded to her need to go unnoticed.
Exasperation was settled into the lines of the woman’s face as she stepped away from the door, waiting for her companions. Ghean recognized the next man from her years spent as a Keeper: Cathal Devane, a big Irishman she'd once thought might make a good teacher. Abruptly, the woman came into context: Emma Hickman, almost a renegade amongst the Keepers for her unsanctioned friendship with Devane. He hadn’t seen Ghean yet either, turning to wait on the second man. Ghean stepped farther into the shadows, watching with interest.
Devane looked less exasperated and more amused than Hickman, an expression that sat well on unexpectedly handsome features. He’d looked rougher around the edges in the 1930s photographs the Keepers had had on him, and now that she saw him in the flesh, Ghean discarded the old idea of being his student. He was too pretty to take seriously as a teacher, even if his records proved he was a deadly warrior. She smiled at the thought, and then the third man stepped out.
Her heart gave a violent lurch, pain of the missed beat settling into her stomach as she stared, disbelieving, at the man she had not seen in five thousand years. His black hair was cropped short, now, but the sharp cheekbones and thin, expressive lips were the same. The ticket booth girl's words came back to her: the guy with the nose. Ghean had forgotten how sharp his nose was, how it dominated his features. In the darkness, his deep-set eyes would be black, uncomfortable, and the small light above the bar’s back door made skin she’d last seen ruddy with sun look sallow. Ghean pressed up against the wall, steadying her breathing.
Lorhen turned to close the door with a solid thud, and leaned against it a moment, rubbing long hands over his face. "Let's find our hotel and hole up," the ancient Timeless muttered, loud enough to be heard over the rain. "I have had just a little too much fun tonight. I want a bottle of whiskey and no more surprises."
Cathal clapped him on the shoulder. "And then you'll tell us the rest of the story.” Lorhen dropped his hands to give him a dirty look.
Ghean grinned so hard her teeth hurt from pressing them together. One more surprise, she thought gleefully, stepping out of the shadows. "One more surprise," she repeated, aloud, and flared a grin at the man she was going to kill. "Hello, Lorhen."
14
The rain increased from a drizzle to a more enthusiastic downpour. Lorhen went utterly still, like a rabbit trying to avoid detection by a soaring eagle. After several seconds, water beaded and dripped off the end of his nose. Cathal and Emma stood nearly as motionless, gazing transfixed at Ghean.
They were all tall: even the woman stood eight or nine inches taller than Ghean, and wore heels that added to her height, but for the moment Ghean knew she unquestionably held the power in the equation, commanded it despite her diminutive size. She let them gape a moment longer, aware and pleased that her sharply bobbed straight hair took the rain water well and would still look good, and that with the distant streetlight her coloring would be warm in the rain. It would be best if this had been the very first time Lorhen had laid eyes on her in five millennia, rather than the brief glimpse on stage, but this was nearly perfect. Perfect enough that the violence of her grin felt likely to split her top lip.
When it appeared her very presence had created a stalemate, Ghean, without losing her grin, asked, "Were we going to stand here in the rain all night, or is there a more pleasant place for this little reunion?"
Lorhen flinched as though he'd been bitten. Cathal, casting a glance at his friend, struggled with and lost to a grin, not quite as profound as Ghean's. As he opened his mouth to speak, Lorhen cut him off, snapping, "How can you be alive?"
Ghean's humor fled. "No one's taken my head yet," she said flatly, as deliberately obvious an answer as Lorhen's question had been, without coming anywhere near what he wanted to hear. "Really, Lorhen, aren't you going to introduce me to your friends?" She stepped forward to offer her hand to Cathal. Lorhen took two steps back. Ghean lifted an eyebrow at him, and spoke to Cathal. "I would say he didn't used to be this careless, but I'm not sure it's true. I'm—"
"Ghean." Lorhen came forward again, clearly irritated with himself for the retreat. "I saw the t—"
Ghean cut him off with a quick gesture, tsking. "Don't spoil the punchline," she chided. "I'd guess you've been telling them all about us since you ran out of the auditorium."
"I did not run."
Cathal and Emma both said, "You ran," though Emma said it much more loudly, earning herself a bitter look from Lorhen as Cathal bowed over Ghean's hand. "Cathal Devane. It's a pleasure to meet you…Mary?"
Ghean smiled. "Ghean will do. Unlike my infamous husband here, nobody knows I exist." She glanced at Emma, judging her reaction to the word husband, and nodded. "So he'd gotten that far. I imagined he would have."
"That's 'legendary'," Lorhen muttered. "Not 'infamous'."
"Ghean, then," Cathal replied. "And this is Emma Hickman."
Emma stuck her hand out to shake Ghean's. "Nice to meet you."
"You too, Emma. Interesting company you keep."
"You have no ide—" Emma silenced herself, as it was manifestly obvious that Ghean had an excellent idea of just how interesting her companions were.
Ghean's smile broadened again. "I'm guessing we have no secrets here? You don't know Lorhen under another name?"
Emma gave Lorhen a brief, sour look. "I met him as Logan Adams, but no, I know his story. We go back a ways."
Ghean turned an incredulous, amused glance on Lorhen. "Logan? Really, Lorhen?"
> "Please," Lorhen muttered. "You'd think it was obvious, but nobody in the Keepers pays attention to popular culture. They're all too far stuck in the past. Besides, it actually almost sounds like my name, and that's a nice change."
Emma, half-aloud, said, "Lorhen, Logan," a few times, testing them for similarity, and, after exchanging a glance with Cathal, shrugged it away. "I wouldn't have put it together."
"You weren't supposed to," Lorhen said testily. "Besides, you don't really say my name right. The rh should be almost guttural. Go listen to a Scotsman say it a few times and you'll get the idea. Ghean, how are you alive?"
"Are you really offended enough to find me alive that you'd rather stay out here in the rain than go somewhere dry to discuss it? Maybe you are. Running the moment you laid eyes on me isn't exactly the most charming way to greet your wife, Lorhen."
"I did not run." Lorhen brushed water off his face, scowling. "Fine. Where are you staying, Ghean?"
"I live in an apartment on campus. We could go back there, I suppose. Or do we need to find a church somewhere? I'm guessing Emma's presence isn't going to dissuade you from a fight if you decide you're looking for one."
"Mine will." Cathal's voice dropped an octave, dry with warning. Lorhen shot him a filthy look, but only said, "Do you have any beer?" to Ghean.
"Yes, as a matter of fact."
"That'll do, then." Lorhen hunched his shoulders against the rain and walked down the alley, kicking puddles. Ghean watched him, not moving until he reached the end of the alley. Once there, he turned impatiently to look at her, clearly waiting for directions. Then she followed him up to the street, and took the lead, trying to remain outwardly composed, though she felt an almost unbearable smugness as Lorhen, his shoulders bunched, kept trying to pull ahead, then remembered he didn’t know where he was going and fell back again. A childlike chant ran through her head: I know something you don't know!