The tea kettle had just started whistling, so she hurried into the little galley kitchen, not much bigger than the one on her boat, to fix her tea with two sugars and a splash of cream. She also grabbed a piece of Scottish shortbread before sitting down at her modest, two-person table.
Opening the book, she ran her fingers over the paper, knowing that he’d touched every page. She began reading, and tried to imagine experiencing the story from Brave’s point of view. When she’d finished off the tea and snack, she climbed into bed, cradling the book like it was a museum piece.
It was a science fiction fantasy about a couple who were the only survivors of a crash on a paradise planet. Shortly after they arrived they discovered a fruit orchard with perfect rows. They were suspicious about the orchard’s origin, knowing that it didn’t seem likely that such a thing was random. Still, they had to eat something. So they tried the fruit and found it sweet, juicy and wonderful.
When Lana fell asleep holding the book, she dreamed about a large orchard of ten foot trees that had dark waxy green leaves and ripe succulent pink fruit ready for picking. In her dream the fruit came away from the tree effortlessly and she delighted at the feel of it in her hand. When she bit through the skin, feeling juice squirt and run down her chin, she heard a familiar chuckle and turned to see Brave’s laughing green eyes.
The next morning Lana got dressed, went to breakfast in the dining hall then made her way to Director Tvelgar’s office. She was told that he could see her if she would have a seat and wait for a few minutes. Almost two hours later, his door opened and he motioned her inside.
It was discomfiting for Lana to realize that no alarm had been raised by her absence. She supposed that, although it seemed to her that a great expanse of time had lapsed, she’d only been away for four nights. She was taken on a Friday night so they wouldn’t miss her at work on Saturday or Sunday. Monday they may have thought she was taking a personal day.
Since she was supervised so loosely that she wasn’t even sure who she reported to, she could understand why no one would have attempted to track her down. It did make her wonder at what point, if ever, someone would start a search.
The Director listened intently as she recounted the events, being as clinically objective as possible while omitting everything that had to do with motivations or feelings or personal exchanges.
“I came to you because I wasn’t sure about where to report this.”
“Well,” he smiled reassuringly, “this is as good a place as any to start, but there are a lot of people who are going to have a lot of questions to pose in your debriefing. So I’d get ready if I were you.” As she opened the door of the Director’s office to leave, he said, “What do you suppose was the motivation for taking you in particular? Any speculation?”
She looked down at her hand grasping the doorknob and debated whether or not to tell the truth. In the end, she decided that The Order was entitled to her professional life, but not her personal life. Even if it did fall into the broad category of paranormal event. Without taking her hand off the handle, she looked back.
“No. It’s a mystery.”
Simon simply nodded and said, “Thank you.” She couldn’t tell by his expression if he believed her or not.
And you called Brave a liar for withholding pertinent information.
Director Tvelgar organized a panel of inquiry composed of a range of department heads who would be most concerned with the subject matter.
Lana described everything about her experience in detail from the fact that the demons were a species called Callii to the handsome guest chambers with sunken whirlpool tubs made of polished stone.
Naturally, the idea of demons mimicking invisibility quickly became the chief priority for inquiry. It seemed that everyone on the panel was unnerved by the idea that they might be observed by an elemental species without being aware of it. Not to mention that The Order’s security system had not registered the presence of any untagged entity in the building.
Tagging was the system The Order used it to track personnel and be sure the organization’s integrity was not breached. It was a sophisticated state-of-the-art means of identifying a person by their unique pattern of dna plus heat radiation, aka aura. It had been developed by Thelonius Monq and quickly adopted by every Order installation in the world. The fact that demons could come and go undetected was disturbing.
Lana didn’t amend that assumption to include humans whose abilities were temporarily modified by the injection of demon blood. At times she felt guilty about that because she knew that was a breakthrough insight that could be crucial to operations. She was aware that The Order had in its employ a half demon who could travel between dimensions at will. She was also aware that The Order believed that interdimensional shifting while human was a death sentence. Clearly the demons, and Brave, had found a way around that.
For a time it seemed that her new job would be answering the same questions again and again. There was no question in her mind that the line between her professional obligation and her personal privacy was blurred. Still she continued to insist that she didn’t know why she’d been singled out to be taken and returned unharmed.
Lana knew that it was standard procedure to include psychics in debriefings and inquiries to insure that she was both sane and telling the truth. One of them had given her a look that said she knew Lana was withholding information. Apparently the psychic, who was either better than the others or had a connection with Lana, had decided that girls are entitled to keep personal details to themselves.
After a week of being questioned, Lana was sent back to her cataloguing job and things returned to normal. Or at least as normal as things can be when a person literally sails into an alternate dimension, learns that such things as vampire, werewolves, and banshees are real and is then kidnapped by demons and taken to yet another dimension so that a lost human can court her.
Now and then she had a flash memory of something funny Brave had said or a hint of the way her body would respond with a rush from just an accidental brush of his hand. Sometimes she thought she felt his breath near her face. Sometimes she thought she heard his voice.
I know it felt great to have you grab onto me and hang on for dear life.
Now and then she even had the sensation that she wasn’t alone when she’d stayed late in the library to keep from going back to her room. Sometimes she thought she felt a presence in her room at night and she would ask out loud.
“Brave? Are you here?” Or, “Brave? Is that you?”
There was never a reply, exactly what she’d insisted upon. Exactly what she’d insisted that she wanted.
If he was there, he never revealed himself. One thing about demons, they always abide by the terms of the deals they make. She supposed that went for humans raised by demons as well.
At night Lana continued to reread the paperback books on her personal library shelf. Each book brought her closer to understanding his reasoning and how he had reached his conclusions about what she wanted.
There was a paranormal romance in which a pair of would-be lovers traversed a quicksand bog by slowly and carefully walking single file on the abstract pattern of narrow bars of solid ground.
In another book a couple was chased through a forest by a sorcerer who had a pack of wolves at his command.
One book in particular involved a couple who had been imprisoned together without knowing why. During the process of attempting escape they fell in love.
She noted that, in each of the books, the adventure into which the couple was thrust served to bring them closer together and help them recognize the true love that they seemed predestined to express.
It was during one of the debriefing inquiries that she realized how ludicrous it was to be chased on foot by beings who can go anywhere they want with a thought. She came to the conclusion that the demons either respected Brave enormously or bore him great affection to be willing to go to so much trouble to help him win the “female”
who… “captured his love”.
As the days came and went, Lana felt underutilized by The Order. She became restless and was overcome by that feeling of having taken the wrong turn from her true path, the one she was supposed to be on.
What happened to having an aptitude for adventure?
She stopped in her tracks as soon as she’d finished that thought. It wasn’t just the evidence of her choice of reading material. She did have a longing for adventure. Brave had given her exactly that and, as time back in Edinburgh had gone by, she found herself smiling as she thought about that experience. Stomping on Peregrination’s equipment. Hearing a horribly ugly black thing squeak when she stepped on it. Seeing the confused look on the straithgard’s face when she screamed. Watching loke juice run down the front of Brave’s body.
One night, after dinner and small talk with people who might be called acquaintances at best, she grabbed her coat to go out for a walk. Heading east on Princes Street she began taking stock of her life, the one that was going to be new and improved when she sold everything and left Dallas.
It hadn’t just been the city that she’d left behind. It was an entire life history. She had voluntarily driven away from family, friends, and all the cozy familiarity of the place that was home, for better or worse, for a crazy gambit to live on a houseboat in Boston harbor. On reflection, as adventures go, it was pretty tame in comparison to the outlandish experiences she’d been racking up lately.
If things had followed a somewhat predictable course, she probably would have eventually had her fill of exotic Yankee vistas and headed home to the Lone Star state to pick up where she’d left off. She might have eventually found a guy who was more like Brave than Stuart. The sort of guy who would do anything for her, even stage crazy outrageous adventures just to please and entertain her.
At that moment she would have given just about anything to send Dizzy a text to meet for a drink. Right away. There was no question that Dizzy would help put the whole mess in perspective.
Why would a person be nuts enough to give up a friend like Desdemona?
Lana had started to form friendships with Myrna and Josep, but she left the dimension before seeing where that would take her. She started giggling to herself as she walked along, not really caring how that might look to strangers.
Maybe she was on the verge of losing a hold on that or any other verifiable reality.
Friends like Desdemona were hard to find.
Family like hers? Well, there was no possibility of finding a substitute.
Career? What Cal had said about meaningful work replayed in her head. When he’d first introduced the concept of work that was satisfying down to the soles of the feet, she had scoffed and perhaps even ridiculed him for being naïve.
That was before the results of the aptitude test set off bells, whistles and bright spotlights. When she’d first heard that she was well suited to be an adventurer…
Adventuress?
She smiled to herself when she replayed Brave’s voice saying, “It felt great, didn’t it? Your heart was pounding, the adrenaline was rushing.”
For the first time, she was completely truthful with herself. Yes. Yes, it did.
One thing was certain. Transferring catalogued archives to computer in a sublevel basement was not her idea of meaningful work. Even managing the people who manage the portfolios of rich people had been more meaningful than that.
For the first time since she’d left Dallas, Lana felt like her life had definitely taken a turn for the worse. In the beginning, the transition of moving cross country to a place where she knew no one, and learning to live within the tiny confines of a boat when she’d always had Texas size spaces around her, had been enough to hold her attention and keep her mind occupied.
She hadn’t yet had a chance to get used to those changes before she’d been sucked into another dimension without even knowing that others existed. Black Swan had taken over her life and her choices, but things had been such a whirlwind of confusion and emotion that she hadn’t had time to sort out how she felt about that. It had been all she could do to keep treading water, so to speak.
Right at that moment, however, it all seemed to converge as a perfect storm of loneliness. She pulled the lapels of her tan trench coat a little closer to her throat and looked toward the south, to the buildings lined up on High Street. She wondered if the view of the Royal Mile was identical in her dimension of origin. She couldn’t say for sure because she’d never been to Edinburgh.
What she could say for sure was that it was time to make some changes. She just had to decide what they should be and how to go about it.
She was lost in those thoughts when she happened to look up and see Cal smiling as he emerged from the Balmoral Hotel with his arm around a tall blonde. The woman was chic enough and polished enough to be hired as the focal point for a Cartier ad.
Lana stepped out of the way of pedestrians, over to the edge of the sidewalk next to the closest building, and watched. She realized that she hadn’t seen Cal since she’d returned from the experience she privately called her “time in Demon World”. It didn’t escape her notice that she hadn’t given any thought to not seeing Cal. None at all. Not up until that moment.
While Cal and the woman with him waited for the doorman to call a taxi forward, Cal leaned over and said something in her ear. She laughed. It was clear from their body language that they were lovers.
Lana did a quick assessment of her feelings about that and found that, no, it didn’t bother her in the least. Cal had never hinted that they were exclusive. Far from it, they’d had one sort-of date that hadn’t gone well and one kiss that was good, but not earth shattering.
Lana turned to walk back toward Charlotte Square before she was seen. She didn’t want to make him feel awkward, but stopped suddenly when she realized that making Cal feel awkward was exactly what she wanted. She had, after all, promised payback and she’d learned from her three cousins that no matter the time or the distance, you don’t just forget about payback. Payback is sacred.
Calling up every trick she’d absorbed in high school drama, she rearranged her features into the look of a tempest, ran up behind Cal and jumped in front of the couple in an aggressive, angry-woman-scorned sort of move.
Cal’s expression was shocked as he looked into the face of an irate Lana.
“Lana, what the…?”
“Oh, yes, what indeed?” she spat. “You’ve left me and the babies without enough to pay the fuel bill and gone off to play bang the blonde at the fancy fucking Balmoral Hotel. Easy enough to see where the money goes.”
Lana looked the other woman up and down with disdain, while the date looked around as if she would die from the embarrassment of being associated with such a scene on the street.
“Cal?” the girlfriend asked uncertainly.
“So here you are,” Lana forged ahead, giving the performance of her life, “with a peroxide slut!”
That was apparently more than enough for Ms. Cartier. She turned and walked off leaving Lana smiling ear to ear at Cal like a cat with feathers on its chin.
He shook his head and nodded at her with eyes twinkling. “Well done. Props and all that as you Americans say. Remind me never to play you again.” He glanced over his shoulder in the direction the blonde had gone. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve a catastrophe to avert.”
She laughed as he ran after the leggy descendant of Vikings, calling her name, which was either Judith, or Cal was developing a lisp. She lingered until she saw Cal overtake his date and catch her by the elbow. Lana had no doubt that Cal would offer a plausible explanation that Judith would choose to believe because that would be preferable to giving him up.
There were no residual feelings that Cal might have been the one that got away.
No. Cal was a very nice guy, but… if she was being brutally honest with herself, the only “but” she could think of was that he wasn’t Brave. Compatibility was there on every scoring poin
t, but there just wasn’t that raw spark – the one that set every nerve ending at attention and awaiting orders, that heart pounding, breath quickening, stomach fluttering, thigh clenching extra something that maybe only came once in a lifetime. If that.
As she watched Cal and his friend get into a cab further up the street that he hailed himself, and drive away, she experienced a moment of crystal clarity.
How horrible was it, actually, to be pursued by someone who wanted her so much that he was willing to stage the most elaborate fantasy in history to impress and please her?
As the last of the light was disappearing, she turned back toward Headquarters. The growing gloom was okay with her. She didn’t want to be seen by people on the street who were hurrying to trains that would take them home to dinner with family. Or the people who were joking with friends on their way to a nearby pub for a pint.
What Lana wanted was what everyone wanted, to be someone who had someplace to be with someone who needed them more than anything.
What came to mind as she hurried along was the picture of seeing Brave’s face for the first time. There was no way to explain her reaction except to say that it was a feeling of… home. He may have been her someone who needed her more than anything. If that was the truth, she needed to retrace her steps before he became the one who got away.
For the first time since Stuart had said, “I can’t. I just can’t,” and left her standing shell-shocked in a four-thousand-dollar dress, she had a destination. She knew exactly what she wanted. All she had to do was find that ring and hope that it worked the way the demon said it would.
CHAPTER 6
Put the ring on and say his name.
Prince of Demons 1-3, Box Set Page 18