John didn’t know what to say to that.
“The thing is”—the boy, Aleksandr, took up the story—“we’ve done okay. We don’t have a damned bit of experience. All the research material at the Gypsy Travel Agency got blown to hell and gone. We’re totally faking it. But Isabelle has been using Irving’s library to research past Chosen cases, and we’ve been going out there rescuing abandoned babies. And we were pretty proud of ourselves until . . . Gary showed up. At first he seemed okay, just getting his strength back while he observed us. Then he advised us. For sure he tells a good tale about past missions he’s led.”
“I was with him for three years,” John said. “He’s brilliant.”
“And erratic!” Charisma snapped.
“Yeah. That, too,” John acknowledged.
“The guy is crackers—all about treasure and glory; and even when he does lead us out to protect the children, he’s looking for the flashiest way to do it.” Aleksandr took a breath. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m the least of the team and I know it. Mostly I’m just supposed to go to college and be there for computer aid. But I can see when there’s a problem, and that problem is Gary.”
“I don’t like to sound like I’m campaigning for the position, but I can handle Gary, and I will keep you safe.” John accepted a pint from Davidov.
“Why?” Isabelle asked.
Caleb nodded. “Good question.”
Samuel gave her a glance full of pride, then hid his approval in his glass.
“Why what?” John asked.
“Why have you come back? Why now? And why help us when we’re poised on the brink of disaster?” Isabelle hammered home her questions. “You’ve got an ulterior motive. What is it?”
John knew the answer all too well. “Not too long ago, someone told me that if I hold myself responsible for the deaths of my team members—and I do—then I should use my special gifts to destroy the bad guys and make life better for the Abandoned Ones.” The picture of Genny rose in his head. He saw her as she had been that day, standing over him, naked, wet, and glorious, lecturing him, telling him her truths. “She was right. So I’ve come here. I have the skills to help you. I hope you’ll let me.”
The glances went around the table again.
Aaron Eagle spoke first. “We’d like that.”
An understated acceptance, but John was satisfied.
Rosamund spoke up without a hint of self-consciousness. “The most difficult part of the whole situation is that there’s a prophecy hanging out there that applies to this situation, but we know only part of it.”
“A prophecy?” John hated ephemeral stuff like prophecies.
But Rosamund’s eyes shone. Clearly, she loved her prophecy. “When each Chosen finds his or her true love, that is a brick in the wall that defends us against the Others.”
Caleb took Jacqueline’s hand and kissed it. “I always knew it was Jacqueline for me, but after she joined the Chosen and we declared ourselves, I swear, man”—Caleb grinned at John, happier than John could have ever imagined him—“there was this happiness bolt that went through the whole group—”
Charisma gave him a thumbs-up. “It was major cool.”
John didn’t like the way this was heading, but they were so excited, talking over the top of each other, he didn’t want to interrupt their joy-fest.
Aaron was smiling at Rosamund the way a man in love smiles at his woman. “We got the same thrill when I brought Rosamund back to the mansion and we made our commitment to each other. That’s the important part—commitment. Then we know.”
“They’re not just talking about the fact that when the Chosen find their true loves, their marks are expanded.” Rosamund sounded prosaic, but she blushed under Aaron’s steadfast regard. “Aaron’s mark grew and expanded. Jacqueline had an eye on her palm; now she has one on each palm. For Aaron and Jacqueline, their powers have stabilized and grown.”
“That’s important,” Aaron said, “because until I met and loved Rosamund, my powers were erratic, and even fading.”
“Yet still we have a problem. It looks like everybody has to find their true love.” Samuel sounded doleful, a lawyer who didn’t believe in true love and didn’t believe he would find it, anyway.
“Looks like?” John questioned.
“Okay.” Samuel leaned forward and stared John right in the eyes. “Here’s the bad news—we don’t know the whole prophecy.”
John thought about that. “But you know part of the prophecy.”
“We think we do.” Rosamund’s eyes sparkled with pleasure. “Prophecies being what they are, translated from who knows how many languages and vague to start with, it could turn out that what we think we know is contradicted in the second part. I’ve searched every likely source in Irving’s library and mine. I’ve read stone tablets. I’ve studied hieroglyphics.”
“I’ve searched for it, too,” Jacqueline said. “I’ve looked into crystal balls, shaken dice. . . . I’d gaze into the entrails of chickens if I thought that would help.”
“We don’t know what’s brought on these disasters, and we don’t know how to cure them,” Aleksandr said.
John pondered the situation. “So everyone here is looking for their true love?”
“That’s right,” Caleb said. “That’s the one part of the prophecy we know—well, we’re pretty darn sure—is the truth.”
Bleak and cold with despair, John said, “Then, perhaps, you should think twice about taking me as your leader.”
All heads swiveled toward him.
“Genesis Valente was my one true love, but I was a coward.” She had called him a coward, and she was right. “I was afraid to trust her. I refused to make a commitment. Now it’s too late.” He put his hand to his shoulder where the lynx had ripped him apart. “My love died seven months ago in a snowstorm in Kazakhstan.”
John stood outside the door of a nondescript brownstone in the Bronx.
The meeting with the Chosen Ones had gone well. He had told them the truth about meeting Genny, their visit to the rasputye, how he had destroyed their chance for happiness, and her fatal decision to leave when she did. It made sense that they should know the truth and the fact he had whacked their chances of ever having everyone on the team find their true love.They’d taken him on, anyway. They had been that desperate to shuffle Gary aside.
So John had been elected, and he looked forward to starting. Because Genny was right. He needed to use his special gifts to destroy the bad guys and make life better for the Abandoned Ones.
But first—
He rang the doorbell.
First he had to break the news to Kevin Valente that Genny was dead.
Chapter 42
Two Years Later
John stuck his head into Irving’s study. “Have you got a minute?”
Irving looked up from the huge leather-bound medieval-monk-inscribed book he was studying. “John. Of course. Come in.”Irving had grown old in the last year. The man thrived on work, had met head-on every challenge created by the loss of the Gypsy Travel Agency. But finally age had caught up with him, and now he divided his time between his bed and his study, searching compulsively through heavy tomes and ancient scrolls for the prophecy, which they all knew was there somewhere.
Irving removed the reading glasses off his face, not realizing another pair remained on the top of his head. He hefted himself out of his chair and wedged his walker in place. “I’ll fix us some tea. Sugar in yours, right?”
“That’s right.” John could have made tea in half the time. But taking over the task would have made Irving feel twitchy, old, and useless, so John seated himself across at the long library table and waited patiently as Irving made his painstaking way to the cupboard and removed a teapot and two fragile china cups and saucers.
“Where is everybody?” Irving asked. “On a mission?”
“Caleb’s taken Isabelle and Samuel out to handle a problem near the orphanage. Minor stuff.”
“You
keep flinging those two together, don’t you?” Irving smirked.
“Samuel and Isabelle? Yes, but it never takes. They desperately want each other. But Isabelle doesn’t trust Samuel. Samuel doesn’t trust Isabelle.” John sighed. “I want to shake them both.”
“Yes. Time is not so unlimited as they like to think.”
“Speaking of star-crossed lovers, that woman who watches the mansion is still out there on the street corner,” John reported. “She looks cold this morning.”
“Fascinating! I wonder who she is.” Irving pulled the pair of glasses off the top of his head and examined his selection of loose teas.
Like John believed that. “I don’t know, but she keeps your window in sight.”
Irving began the long, laborious process of measuring leaves into the pot. “I’ve met so many people in my life, and I’m afraid my memory is failing . . .”
Conveniently failing. “She’s about sixty-five or seventy, looks like a Gypsy fortune-teller, and someone split her nose right down the middle. Ring any bells?”
Irving pretended to stop and think. “Not right offhand. Does she have any other distinguishing marks?”
“At least once a day, when one of the Chosen sets foot out of your mansion, she sends a message to you via us. Give Irving my regards.” John waited.
Irving pretended to be blithely oblivious.
“Having someone deliver a message into our brains is disconcerting, to say the least.”
“She sounds like a powerful mind-speaker to me. Maybe she’s wiped my memory?”
John snorted. Irving knew who she was, all right. He just didn’t want to tell anyone. “We could bring her in. You two could meet.”
Irving shot John a glance that was the exact opposite of his feeble-old-man act. “Not a good idea.”
“Probably not.” Because something was going on between those two, and it wasn’t a love-fest. “But I do know her name is Dina.”
“Why do you know that?”
“Because the other day, when it was raining, Charisma went out to give her an umbrella and she asked her.”
“Charisma is a foolish girl.”
“Charisma has good instincts.” John let the matter rest there.
Irving’s study was a cavernous room . . . a remarkable room. His massive bed occupied the far end; and while it was carved from some precious wood, and gargoyles hung from each tall post, it was the larger study area that made the unwary retreat into the hall.
When questioned, Irving always said the study was simply a room dedicated to learning, with the library table, his easy chair and ottoman, an illuminated world globe on a tall maple stand, and enough seating for all of the Chosen around the table. But his brown eyes twinkled when he said it, for on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, precious texts and fragile scrolls competed with empty-eyed human skulls. Glass cases displaying antique jewelry and glassworks from the Renaissance jostled for room with a jar of yellowed teeth and half a dozen African masks. And John didn’t even want to know what those odd-shaped human hair toupees had been created to cover.
A small leather pouch tied with a red string sat on the table beside Irving’s open book.
“I haven’t seen that before,” John said. Although it did look familiar.
Irving poured hot water from the electric kettle into the china pot, peered inside, then with shaky fingers placed the lid on top of the pot. “You don’t recall this?”
“No.” But some kind of memory was nagging at John.
Irving prompted him. “That sack came from the Andes, rescued from a collapsing cave in a glacier . . .”
“My God, I’d forgotten!” John leaned across the table and picked it up. “Is that the one we risked our lives for? It doesn’t look like much.”
“In terms of actual value, it’s worth nothing. But Jacqueline said she dreamed about it, so I got it out. She opened it and tried to find out why it was calling her.”
“No luck?”
“She said she could make a connection, but it wouldn’t go through.” Irving got a bag of cookies out of the cupboard and filled a plate. “Don’t tell McKenna I’ve got these. He says they’re bad for me. But if I eat them, what am I going to do, die young?”
John grinned at Irving’s tart observation. “So does Jacqueline think she’ll be able to make this thing”—he jiggled the leather sack—“connect?”
“For all that I’ve been around this soothsaying stuff for so long, I don’t really know how it works. She tried to explain by saying it was like a network signal that isn’t strong enough to pick up a cell call, like on one of those obnoxious TV commercials.”
John stared at the bag, trying to recall where he had seen something else similar. A leather purse tied with a blue string . . . “What’s in there?”
“Bones.”
Now he remembered. The pool. The falls. Making love to Genny . . . twice.
As the memory washed over him, he closed his eyes in pain. Then opened them again, and gazed at the twin of the leather sack she’d brought up from the bottom of the pond. “Human bones? Finger bones?”
Irving stopped his puttering and turned to John, his brown eyes intent. “I had no idea you included prophecy among your talents.”
“Genny found something like this in the rasputye.”
“Well, well. How interesting that you should be in on both finds.” Irving contemplated the pouch in John’s hand. “What happened to your sack?”
“It wasn’t my sack. Since Genny found it, I believed it was meant for her, and she took it when she left. I’m afraid it’s gone forever, probably burned along with her body in the cremation ritual.” John wondered when he would stop speculating, suffering, imagining Genny struggling against snow and wind, and slowly succumbing to an awful ice-covered shroud of death.
Sometimes when he woke at night, the memory of her was so vital, so close, he felt he could touch her. Then he went to the computer and looked through records in countries around the world, seeking her, thinking that if he stumbled on the right combination of circumstances, he would find her. But she was a ghost, always out of reach, and guilt racked him for allowing Brandon to ambush and distract him. She hadn’t deserved to die because he had let his guard down.
“Artifacts of power are never gone forever. They have a will of their own—and if they’re meant to be united, someday, somehow, it will happen.” Irving turned back to his tea. “There are twenty-seven bones in the human hand. That sack contains eight. I wonder how many the other one contains.”
“I don’t know.”
“A good bet would be nineteen.”
“If there are only two sacks.”
“Ah. Very astute. You do think like a military strategist. That’s why you’ve been so successful at leading the team.” Irving got down a lacquered Korean serving tray. “You came to visit at a good time. I was wondering if you’d like my collection of power tools.”
“Power tools?” John’s eyes widened.
“That’s what I call them.” Irving cackled with an old man’s wicked mirth. “They have powers.”
“Got it.” John relaxed, knowing he was going to hear about some cool, eccentric stuff.
“I’ve got a mariner’s telescope that’s reputed to extend your vision beyond the horizon. I’ve got a chunk of amber that supposedly gives the wearer the strength of the early Cretaceous ant trapped inside. That’s no small thing, you know. Ants can carry ten to fifty times their body weight.” Irving carefully placed the teapot, cups, sugar, and spoons on the tray. “If only I could get it to work, maybe I could carry this tray to the table.”
“Would you like some help?” John rose.
“Please. I find I can’t maneuver the walker and carry the tray at the same time—and McKenna shouts at me when he catches me motoring around on my own.”
“I’m with McKenna. Last time you fell, you broke your glasses and almost your nose.” He fetched the tray and laid it at Irving’s place at the table, then sat
and waited while Irving made his slow progress back to his chair.
“I do hate being this wobbly.” Irving went through the ritual of seating himself—using his walker and the arms of the chair to lower himself into the seat, placing the walker within arm’s reach, pushing the chair under the table. When he was situated to his satisfaction, he poured tea and continued his conversation as if life’s interruption had never occurred. “I’ve got more power tools, too, and I suspect in the right hands, some of them might work. A wind machine, reputed to be strong and directional, fits in a coat pocket. Oh! And a crystal phial that is a light in dark places when all other lights go out.”
“How very Tolkien.”
“You don’t think he made all that stuff up, do you?”
“I hadn’t . . . thought . . .” John blinked and decided not to pursue the idea. “I would love to have your power tools. But why don’t you keep them for me until you’re done with them?”
“Ah, dear boy. I’ve let McKenna know who gets what, but McKenna’s no spring chicken, and he might bite it before I do. So I’ve been marking things for when I pass.”
Since Irving’s butler was approaching fifty and in fine shape, John was unworried. Accepting the cup, he plunked in three sugar cubes, stirred vigorously, and didn’t make a face as he sipped.
He hated tea.
But Irving loved it, so John gritted his teeth and swallowed the hot, flowery brew as fast as he could, trying not to taste it.
“Now, what can I do for you?” Irving asked.
John put down his cup into his saucer a little too emphatically, and the delicate china clinked together. He winced—he hated to think what McKenna would say if he chipped an eighteenth-century piece of porcelain—and said, “I’m afraid I may need to test your power tools soon. I’m losing my power.”
Chapter 43
Irving’s eyebrows shot up. “Losing your power, John? Really? Why?”
“I don’t know why. That’s why I came to you. I lift a garage door, and halfway up it slams down again. I try to use a stick on a thief’s skull, and I trip him instead. And did you hear about the junkyard guard dog that chased me up a tree?”Irving nodded and tried to hide his grin in his cup. “Indeed, I did.”
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