“I think you can choose to be whoever you want Charlotte. I don’t believe you have to do any of this if you don’t want to. We could march up to that cockpit right now and ask the pilot to point the plane for London.”
This wasn’t true. “But there are consequences with that choice.”
“There are consequences with every choice.”
“But some consequences would be so bad, it basically takes away your ability to choose. If I did nothing to help Franzen and my mother, I would never be able to live with myself.”
“It doesn’t mean you don’t still have the choice.”
“So I would have the choice to live with the guilt?”
“Basically,” he smiled, I could tell he was trying to lighten the mood. Relieve some of my burden.
I thought carefully about how to word my next question. It was dangerously close to the truth. “And what about love? Given the way they are connected, do you think my mother had a choice with Franzen?”
“I…” he began to speak but stopped. He looked at me very closely. “I was going to say absolutely,” he opened the palm of my hand, ran his thumb over my skin. “Because you’ll remember that, even though she is connected to Franzen in some profound way, that I still don’t understand by the way, she chose to be with and live with Simon.”
“But she was so unhappy with my dad.”
“Yes, but she still had the choice to be unhappy.”
In all my worrying about Hayden and our link, I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t even considered that my own mother, who not only found her twin flame, but wanted to be with him, was still able to make another choice. Even one that had brought her great pain. And choosing Caleb would not be the same for me. It was not the painful decision—it was the easier one. I loved Caleb regardless of being bound, eternally, to Hayden.
I could choose Caleb.
The thought felt like a balloon of hope in my chest. Lifting me out of the fear I had been feeling ever since I had learned the truth.
“Although,” he continued.
“Although what?”
He shook his head and smiled. “I also see what you mean about the consequences being so harsh that you wouldn’t feel like you had a choice.”
“How?”
“I can’t imagine…” he trailed off, his voice lost in an emotion I could see spreading across his face. “I can’t imagine losing you Charlotte. I can’t fathom making a choice that was not you, and so I guess, you’re right, because you are not a choice for me, you are just the girl I have loved and wanted ever since I was seven years old. That fire, when you were in that building—” he broke, and I could see he was swallowing hard, willing himself not to cry. “I wanted to rip the goddamn walls down, and all I could do was stand there. Stand there and watch that building burn. Not knowing what was happening to you. Not knowing if I would ever see you again.”
I reached up and touched his face, “But you did,” I said. “I’m safe, and we’re together.”
“I won’t ever be away from you again. I won’t ever leave your side,” he smiled. “Aaron’s just going to have to deal with that.”
Caleb leaned close and I lifted my face to his. His lips were soft, gentle. What had happened at Mohan’s house didn’t matter and the realization of this washed over me like a wave of relief. A person could control her destiny, with her choice. “Caleb,” my lips moved against his.
“Yes,” he asked between our kisses.
“I love you,” I breathed.
My words had a physical effect, Caleb’s hand trembled on my cheek and his chest collapsed inward. With his eyes closed, he rested his forehead against mine while he took several breaths. “Say it again.”
“I love you,” I whispered. “I love you Caleb.”
When he kissed me again, his lips pressed harder. He took his hand from my face and reached above our heads, searching, never taking his lips from mine, for the button to the overhead light until I heard the soft click and we were cloaked in darkness.
When our mouths opened, a heat rushed through my body that made a soft sigh escape past my lips. For a moment, Caleb pulled away from me. I watched as he reclined his seat in the dark, then lifted the arm rest separating us and shoved it back between the seats. When he reached for me again, he pulled me across the divide and onto his seat.
Behind us, Aaron’s rhythmic snoring paused—we both froze.
Caleb tilted his head to see over the seat to where Aaron was, three rows back and on the opposite side. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Please, don’t wake up, not now. Just let me have this. We sat that way, like creatures not wanting to be caught, until Aaron took a deep inhale that sounded like a old motor starting up. When Caleb brought his head down, his lips stopped next to my ear. “He’s asleep,” he whispered. The feel of his breath on my skin sent shivers down my back.
When he put both his arms around me, I laid down beside him, curled into his embrace, and lifted my mouth up to his. We kissed while our fingers dared to dance across each other’s skin, the inside of my elbow, the line of his jaw. After a long while, his hand ran the length of my body and rested on my thigh that had shifted onto his lap. My hand had found space where his shirt pushed up to expose his waist, my finger, in a single line, trailed dangerously close to the edge of his jeans.
Out the oval window, I could see a faint line of orange light on the horizon. Like a bowl’s edge containing the black night sky. It would be dawn soon. We laid together, limbs entwined, hands holding each other, claiming each other, and watched as the sky’s light lifted into radiant shades of orange and pink.
“Charlotte?”
“Hmm?”
“I meant what I said earlier. I don’t ever want to be away from you again.”
“I know,” my hand slid from his stomach to his waist. I tilted my head up and looked into his eyes, “I don’t want to be away from you either.”
“I won’t is what I mean. When this is all done, when we have all the keys and have returned to the house, and to Franzen and your uncle, I don’t want you to go back to California. Or, if you do…I’m coming with you.”
My head jerked back, “What are you saying? What about college…Cambridge? You’re supposed to start in the fall.”
His eyes slid away from mine and fixed on some point on the ever brightening horizon out the window. “Not if you’re not there with me.”
A nervous laugh escaped me, “I can’t go to Cambridge with you, I haven’t even finished high school yet.” I reached up and turned his face back to mine. “We will be together, even if we’re not always in the exact same place.”
He shook his head slowly, “I don’t think you understand what this last year was like for me. I can’t go through that again Charlotte. I won’t. And if that means not going to Cambridge until you finish high school back in California, then I guess I’ll be applying for a work visa and learning how to wait tables out there.”
He wasn’t kidding. “I won’t let you throw everything you’ve worked for away like that.”
“Then promise you’ll come with me.”
“I can’t just not go home, my father…he’s not going to let me not finish high school and never come home.”
He put his hand on mine and laced our fingers together. His thumb ran across my knuckle and back. I could feel his heart hammering in his chest. “You could finish school in Cambridge. We could…”
My stomach suddenly felt like jelly sliding into my legs. What was he doing?
“Charlotte there has only ever been you. There will only ever be you.”
“Don’t,” I said suddenly. “Don’t do this Caleb. Not now—”
“I want to marry you Charlotte. If you marry me, I’ll go to Cambridge and you can finish school there…with me.”
“Caleb.”
He sighed and closed his eyes, already knowing what I would say.
“I can’t marry you Caleb. Not now. I’m seventeen years old. I’m…not ready to get m
arried.”
He leaned his head back against the seat and stared at the ceiling above us. “I know,” he said and shook his head. “I know,” he lifted his head, defeated, and looked into my eyes. “I just don’t know any other way. Every way I look at it, when this is all finished, one of us is leaving the other.”
I closed my eyes and rested my head in the hollow of his shoulder. “But we will be together, as in you and me, a couple. That’s all that really matters…it’s now us. We’ll work everything else out.”
Caleb stroked my hair and pressed his lips to the top of my head. “You know, with your dad being an author, he could really do that just about anywhere.”
“I’ll see if I can convince him that he needs a new thriller set in Cambridge. Actually, he’d probably go for that.”
“That would be kind of perfect. And convenient.”
“Not to mention I would be able to keep my eye on you around all those college girls. The only reason you think I’m the one is because you’ve been trapped in an all boys school your whole life.”
His hand moved to my chin and lifted my face back to his. His lips, now familiar, pressed softly into mine. “Not even close,” he whispered.
“We still have practically the whole summer,” I said. “If what you think is right, and it only takes us a day or two for the Buddhist key, and then, hopefully, the other ones are collected just as quickly, we could be back at the house in two weeks.”
Caleb smiled and nodded. “And then all we’ll have to worry about is my mother catching you sneaking into my room every night and out every morning.”
The thought made me laugh and when Caleb kissed me again, long and slow, I closed my eyes and imagined us back at Gaersum Aern. Falling asleep next to him, safe in his arms, every night for the rest of the summer. We would spend the next two weeks collecting the keys and then we would go home. Franzen would get better, my mother could come out of hiding, and Caleb and I would be together.
Caleb pulled away from our kiss, kissed my forehead, and held me tight in his arms as we continued towards Shanghai and the third key. For the first time since my mother disappeared when I was twelve, I actually believed everything was going to work out just fine.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Divine Obligation
My palms were sweating. The lectern in front of me was too tall, my head barely showed over its top, the spongy microphone head was nowhere near my mouth. I am a small child playing a grown up game. My eyes stared past the glare of the stage lighting and into the abyss of faces before me. The room was filled to the top with thousands of people.
All of them waiting.
My eyes scanned the wall, instinctively looking for the exit. At the back of the room, high above all the people, there are two sets of doors brightly illuminated by the neon signs hanging above them: Choice and Destiny.
I cleared my throat as my shaking hand reached for the small glass of still water. I took a sip.
What was I speaking about? There were no notes in front of me.
To my left, a long table held a variety of objects. The green puzzle box, a golden crown, my mother’s note, the crucifix and Aum keys along with what looked like four more that I had never seen. There were small scraps of hide with dark inky writing, two books and a set of hand puppets.
I left the lectern and reached for the books, one was a tattered copy of Richard II. I recognized it, it was from my mother’s collection. The other was entitled New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon.
I carried both books back to the lectern and placed them on the top. “There are some,” I began, my voice small in my head but amplified to the room by the microphone above me. “There are some who say, who believe, that Shakespeare and Francis Bacon were the same man. That the name Shakespeare was just a pen name, so to speak. A symbolic pen name created to hide the true author of the Shakespeare work, a man born in a time and under circumstances that prevented him from being able to take credit for his brilliant, and often controversial, masterpieces…Sir Francis Bacon.”
As if by magic, my paper on Richard II materialized on the lectern next to the books.
“The first unacknowledged son of Elizabeth I, a man who rightfully should have been king. A man who gave so much more to our modern world than any king ever did. Sir Francis Bacon, aka Shakespeare.”
I looked out into the crowd, they sat silent, staring.
“It is easy to forget, in our modern times, in our first world luxuries and rights, the struggles and difficulties and limitations of the common man in the early seventeenth century. Francis Bacon realized that any man, everyman, afforded with education and resources, had the opportunity to move closer to their full potential.”
I lifted the copy of Richard II into the air. “To the divine right afforded to the everyman, not just a king or queen. A king or queen who were just as flawed, just as human as every other man, woman, or child on this planet. And that the divine right to rule, should be afforded by the very people who are just as equal in God’s eyes to the one we choose to lead us. Not the one afforded exaltation simply because of the genetic happenstance of birth.”
My hands looked strange before me. Older, more lined. The lectern too, it was now smaller, or rather, I had become larger behind it. My palms, no longer sweaty with nerves, gripped the wooden sides with a confidence I felt but hardly recognized as my own.
I was older now. A grown woman with a commanding presence. Lecturing on a topic well versed.
“If we are thankful to our founding fathers for the rights and privileges afforded to us, us common men, then it behooves us to be aware that their grandfather, their shining light, their genesis, was Sir Francis Bacon…their dream for a better life in a better place, began with Shakespeare. A man who should have been king, but instead, worked to empower all people.”
My eyes rose to the back of the room, to the escape doors. In front of each door there now stood men, both staring past the crowd, both waiting for me. One was my destiny, one was my choice.
“But how you might ask,” I continued. “During an age when the common man was grossly illiterate, buried in mud, and barely able to sustain his short life. How do you empower such a creature on a massive scale?”
I strode to the table, picked up the two puppets and placed one on each hand before holding them up for the crowd to see.
“With entertainment, of course. You give your lectures in the form of a play. You infuse them with drama, humor, intrigue, and most importantly, love. Stories so powerful, so moving, they pack the house. The man capable of this has something more powerful than even the mightiest army commanded by the most cunning of kings. That man holds the heart and mind of everyman, and thus, he has the power to touch them, educate them. He has the power, with nothing more than his words, to influence a nation. Influence an entire world. Francis Bacon, both as himself and as Shakespeare, has wielded more power than any king in any country throughout all of time.”
I slid the puppets off my hands and laid them on the lectern. “And still, we ask how.” I walked slowly to the table and stood before the puzzle box and keys. “How does one man, rightful king or not, act as the conduit for so much brilliance brought to generation after generation of humankind?”
My fingers began solving the puzzle, placing the keys, unlocking the secrets for the whole room to witness with their own eyes.
“He does it with his divine right.”
The crowded room before my eyes pulled away, the puzzle box left my hands, the whole image grew fuzzy, less real.
My eyes opened to a dark, unfamiliar room. It was a dream. Vivid, with colors and sounds, a physical presence I could still feel. Events I remembered clearly, more like a memory than a dream.
I knew what I needed to do.
I sat up, careful that the stiff white sheets and thin comforter didn’t pull off Sophie sleeping beside me. Aaron snored loudly in the bed next to ours while Caleb had unfolded the couch bed and slept diagonally across its too short mat
tress. Since the fire in India, we would all be sleeping in the same room from now on.
My bare feet slid over the edge of the bed to the hard, stiff carpet and I moved soundlessly towards the sliding glass doors concealed behind the heavy drapes. Careful not to disturb the dark room and wake anyone up, I moved behind the musty smelling fabric first, like a child playing hide and seek, before unlocking the metal slide and pushing the heavy glass door open.
The sun was not up and the air felt warm and wet against my skin. I closed the door and stood staring out over the tiled roof of the nearest building, past the lush greenery of the dense, fern like trees, to the view of Mount Emei waiting for us to reach her summit. There we would see the world’s largest statue of Buddha and meet with the next key keeper who would, hopefully, give me the third key along with information about where to go next.
I wanted to hang onto Caleb’s positive beliefs. Wanted to imagine the rest of our travels and key collections going smoothly, easily. But the dream was more than just my mind reaching for random imagery, it was a film of a life not yet lived. Memories that hadn’t happened but would.
It felt like a calling.
I closed my eyes and took a breath. “You get to choose,” I whispered. But that dream felt like a life laid out, and not one I could imagine choosing for myself. A life steeped in Franzen’s work, the puzzle box and, “teaching?” The question whispered out to the sleeping, foreign world around me. “Am I supposed to be a teacher?” Would I choose to be one?
With that possibility before me, my involvement and role as the ascendant, as Mohan called me, became clearer. But also less escapable. Less like doing whatever I wanted once we returned with all the keys. Less like easy summer days passed with Caleb and books on the library couches.
It was easy to see—now. Collecting the keys, unlocking the puzzle box. Learning its secrets, and then, devoting my life’s work to teaching those secrets to the world. That was what I was doing in that dream. An older me. Wiser, more educated, well versed in my lecture. That confidence had coursed through me. The desire to open doors for the people in that room, open them with knowledge.
Midheaven (Ascendant Trilogy Book 2) Page 15