“Strategy? If people are meant to be together, you don’t need a strategy. All you need is a way to put them in the same place at the same time until the chemistry kicks in and bakes the cake.”
Monq was nodding. “I know that. The problem is keeping them in the same place at the same time. First, Glen has concluded that he’s never going to be happy and has settled into that role with all its accoutrements and satellites. Second, regarding Elora Rose, it’s hard to pin down someone who can walk through walls, cross dimensions, vanish in an instant, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”
“Hmmm.”
Elora got up to restart the tea kettle then picked up her phone and dialed Litha.
“Hello?”
“What are you doing?”
“Playing twenty questions with you?”
“No. Really.”
“I’m reading an ancient esoteric Sumerian text on demon young.”
“Of all the things I imagined you might say, that wasn’t one of them.”
“What did you want me to say?”
“I wanted you to say, ‘Nothing. What’s up?’”
“Got it. Ask me again.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not doing anything. What’s up?”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“Elora.”
“Monq is here with something very interesting to discuss. Can you run over here?”
“Now?”
“Now.”
Litha appeared in the kitchen next to the stove with her phone still held to her ear. “Yes.”
Elora looked at her. “I will never get used to that if we are friends for a thousand years.”
“That could happen. I don’t know how long I’ll live, but it might be long enough to figure out how to extend your life.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be right to extend my life because I’m your friend and not offer the same thing to everybody. And if you offered it to everybody we’d have the rats in a bottle problem and populate the world beyond tolerance within a few years.”
“There are lots of other dimensions with no population at all.”
“That may be, but exponential is exponential.”
“When I suggested that I might want you to live forever I’d temporarily forgotten how irritating you can be.” She looked at Elora’s stomach. “My gods. You are bigger than when I saw you this morning.”
Elora chuckled. “Monq is here.”
Litha looked behind her. “Hello.”
“You want tea?” Elora asked.
“Yes. Whatever you’re having.”
“Monq has a really intriguing idea.”
“I’m getting a strong intuitive feeling that I should leave now without asking what it is.” Litha looked at Monq with unmasked suspicion.
“Before you go, you should know it’s about Rosie,” said Monq.
“So you do know her name!” Elora accused.
“Of course I know her name. She’s a phenomenon. How could I not know her name?”
Elora stared blankly. “Sometimes I think you’re the biggest mystery in the whole of The Order and that’s going some.”
Litha took a chair at the table. “Where’s Helm?”
“Playing Dungeons and Demons. Monq, tell her what you have in mind.”
“Very well. Did you know that Sir Catch is on assignment with the tracker who’s filling in for you?”
Litha pulled back as if she was examining Monq, then directed her attention toward Elora when she said, “No. I didn’t.” She sounded concerned.
“Well, truthfully, it’s not widely known,” he said. “In fact, neither of you are supposed to know. Technically.”
Litha managed to look even more suspicious. “Then why are we sitting here listening to this, Dr. Monq?”
“You know the two of them have a romantic history?”
“Of course I know that.”
“Well, then, the answer to your question is simple. I think the happiness of two young people is more important than Order protocol. Don’t you?”
Litha glanced at Elora when she put a steaming cup in front of her.
“What are you thinking?” asked Litha.
“They’re chasing an AWOL knight on a lost-cause mission of love. All the way to Paris.”
“Oh.” Litha took a sip of tea feeling sorry for the poor bugger, whoever he was, who was in the agonizing midst of unrequited love. She’d been there herself and wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
“We were thinking…”
“We?”
“Mrs. Hawking and I.”
Litha smirked at Elora. “Oh. You and Mrs. Hawking.” Elora rolled her eyes. “But I’m guessing that wouldn’t be you, Mrs. Hawking, and the Jefferson Unit Sovereign.”
Monq readjusted his seat in the chair. “I don’t think he should be bothered.”
Litha laughed out loud. “Hmmm. I can see that.”
“We,” he motioned between himself and Elora, “were thinking that, if Glen and Rosie found themselves together in the City of Lights for long enough they might find their way back toward one another.”
Litha looked at Elora. “How did you get roped into this?”
She rolled a shoulder. “I love Rosie. I love Glen. It didn’t take much persuading.”
Litha stared into her tea cup for a long time. When she looked up, her eyes went back and forth between the two cohorts. “You’re not planning any interference beyond that? Making sure they’re in the same place together for a while?”
Monq held his hands up. “Just that. Then we back away and let love do its thing.”
“What is it that you want from me?”
“Well, background for starters,” Monq said. “What happened?”
Litha sighed then did a little bobble head thing. “They were dating.” She looked away and smiled nostalgically. “It seemed like Rosie was in love with Glen before she was born. The first word she ever said was Glen.
“Before she could even walk she would try to pitch herself out of my arms, in Glen’s direction. Sometimes I was afraid she was going to fall. Although I shouldn’t have been. Now I know that she had the ability to stop herself from falling.” Monq glanced quizzically at Elora, but didn’t stop Litha mid-speech. “Glen would always get there in time to catch her. He’d take her in his arms. The two of them would laugh and she’d pat his cheek with her chubby little hands and squeal his name. It was cute as…”
Litha looked up and became embarrassed when she realized she was waxing maternal. She cleared her throat and continued in a more clinical tone.
“He babysat a lot when Storm was lost. I was gone so much searching. You know?” She looked up for confirmation and maybe absolution. Monq and Elora both nodded sympathetically. “And, gods, she grew up overnight. At least physically. I turned around twice and she was pubescent. That’s when she began to be petulant about Glen.”
“In what way?”
Litha sighed. “Glen was… how do I say this? Highly sought after by girls and equally receptive to their attentions. He didn’t try to hide that from Rosie, at all, because he didn’t see her as anything but the kid he was babysitting. Perhaps even as a little sister. She, on the other hand, believed she was in love. His dating was becoming more and more of a problem for her, while he didn’t get why she was acting crazy.
“When we,” she made a motion between Elora and herself, “decided that perhaps Rosie was old enough to date, we practically had to ritualize giving Glen permission to take her out.”
“That’s right.” Elora chuckled. “We had a private candlelight dinner for four.”
Litha nodded. “It worked. They were together, and by all appearances happy, right up until Glen was being inducted into knighthood.”
“What happened then?”
“Rosie told him she didn’t want him to accept commission as a knight. Naturally he told her that was ridiculous. She ended
up giving him an ultimatum. She gave him four days to choose her over the job.” Litha sighed. “It’s not that it was just childish. It was also the worst case of self-sabotage I could imagine. When Storm found out what she’d done he blew a gasket. It was her first experience with having her dad be angry with her. Between not understanding Glen’s need to accept the knighthood he’d spent half his life working toward and her father, well, you could say it was a perfect storm. And I don’t mean that to be funny. There was nothing funny about it.
“She gave Glen a deadline and said that, if he didn’t call to say he was choosing her over Black Swan, she’d disappear. Bottom line. He didn’t call, at least not by the deadline. And she disappeared.”
“You didn’t know where she was?” Monq asked.
“My friend knew where she was and I knew that I could reach her if there was an emergency. But for whatever reason, she’d decided to go off on her own and I thought it was best to let her make her own choices. Sometimes we learn the most from our failures. Good parents get out of the way and allow their kids fall down so that they can learn to pick themselves up and keep going. At least that’s what I think.”
“So you hadn’t seen her again in all this time?” Monq asked.
“No. I did. A few months after she’d left, she’d had a really bad experience where she’d been staying and came home distraught. Storm and I listened and reassured her that we would always be there for whatever support she needed from us and that she’d always be loved no matter what. Then she was gone again and I didn’t see her until a couple of weeks ago.
“Half the reason why I took a leave of absence was to give her a purpose close to home so I could reconnect with her. So I wouldn’t have to go for years between visits.”
Elora nodded reassuringly.
Monq said, “What about Glen?”
“Glen had been close to our whole family. He’d practically worshipped Storm, and Storm thought the world of Glen. For the first year Glen called twice a month to find out if we’d heard anything from Rosie and if there was a way he could reach her. The next year the time between calls began to grow. For a while it was once a month, then once a quarter until he stopped calling.
“After he stopped calling, he also stopped returning Storm’s phone calls, which I have to tell you, didn’t sit well with my husband. Although he would never say so, I think it hurt his feelings. When Glen was transferred back here, he never reached out to us. That was hard. There was a time when he came to dinner every Tuesday night. Like family. We loved him.”
She held up her cup. “How about another?”
“Sure,” Elora said as she rose to pour another cup.
“That’s all there was to it,” Litha said. “If Rosie had been more mature and not put Glen in the outlandish position of choosing her or The Order, I would bet my last dollar that they’d still be together.” She looked at Monq. “You believe in soul mates?”
He pursed his lips. “I don’t know about that. I believe that, at any given time, there are multiple people in the world with whom any one of us could find love and happiness, but I also think that of those options, there is one that is the best match possible.”
“For somebody trying to conjure a love match, that’s just about the least romantic thing I’ve ever heard,” Elora said.
Monq shrugged. “These two personalities settled on each other early and then missed out on the follow through. Now that I’ve heard the details of their history from a reputable source, I’m even more convinced that Sir Catch, at least, would greatly benefit from finding his way to forgiving Rosie.”
“What is it that the two of you have in mind?”
“They believe their mission is to find Sir Falcon and bring him back. If he is actually headed to Paris to find Jean Etienne, and by extension, Genevieve Bonheur, we could ask Jean Etienne to apprehend and subdue Falcon. We could even have people transport him back here. But if Glen and Rosie believed he was still at large, they would continue looking. Subterfuge in the name of love isn’t subterfuge. It’s caring.”
Litha exchanged a look with Elora.
“So the big question is this.” Monq looked at Litha. “Would it be possible to create a decoy for Falcon that would fool a tracker? Something that would cause her to believe he was there? In Paris? Something that someone could move around from place to place?”
“Something that would lead them on a chase, you mean.” Litha considered that for a moment. “It would be four-layered and tricky, because, not only would I need to create something that would suffice as his proxy, I would also have to mask his actual presence, essentially make him undetectable magickally. That and we’d also be depending on things of a mundane nature that are beyond my control.”
“A cloak of invisibility,” came a small voice from just outside the door.
“Helm!” Elora said. “Were you eavesdropping?”
Helm appeared at the doorway. “I was coming to the kitchen to get juice.”
“How much did you hear?” Elora asked.
Helm’s blue eyes twinkled in an eerily familiar way. “Some.”
“Come here.”
Helm crossed the room, stood by his mother, and put his hand on her gigantic abdomen. “How are the babies?” he whispered, trying to endear himself to his mother.
Elora couldn’t help but giggle. “The babies are fine, but you, young elf, are in trouble.”
“Why?”
“Do you know what confidential means?”
“No.”
“It means that you can’t tell other people what you know.”
He looked around the table. “Like a secret.”
“Exactly like that.”
“So you want me to keep my mouth shut.” He shrugged. “Okay. Can I have juice?”
Elora stared at Helm for a couple of beats. “You are your father’s child.”
Helm’s eyes cut to hers sharply. “Is that a bad thing?”
She laughed. “No. It’s the best thing in the universe.”
He grinned as she pulled him in for a big hug. He got his juice out of the refrigerator then, on his way past Litha said, “If you can make a cloak of invisibility, I’d like to have one for my birthday.”
Litha raised an eyebrow. “Better come up with something else because that’s never going to happen.”
“Aw,” he said, mocking disappointment. He smiled when he looked back at his mother.
“Go,” she said, “and no more listening in.” When Elora was sure Helm was in D & D zone, she sat down and said to Litha, “So. Can you do it? A cloak of invisibility?”
Litha treated her co-conspirators to one of her rare demon-like smiles. “Close enough.”
Elora looked impressed. “I’m so glad I’m on your good side.”
Litha nodded. “I have to admit, it is the best place to be.”
Monq broke in. “You said four-layered. What are the other two pieces?”
“We need cooperation of both Jean Etienne and my father.”
“Go on,” said Monq.
“I need to get my dad to remove Falcon from this dimension so that Rosie’s tracking crystal will lock onto the poppet. That’s a big if because he’s unpredictable. If he agrees, the last thing would be to get Jean Etienne to move the poppet around Paris to give them something to chase after. When they arrive at our destination of choice, Jean Etienne will douse the energy of the poppet by covering it with the, um,” she dropped her voice to a whisper, “cloak of invisibility.”
Elora said, “This plan is nothing if not elaborate. What can go wrong?”
Monq said, “Let me count the ways.”
“I actually think that’s a good idea,” Elora responded. “Number one?”
“Jean Etienne could say no,” Litha offered.
“He’s French. Aren’t they all about romance? Especially if he’s feeling romantic toward Mme. Bonheur?” Monq asked.
“Hmmm. Comme ci comme ça,” Litha said.
“So you thin
k he might say no?” Elora asked. “Monq, you know him best.”
“It’s really impossible to predict. He’s a virtually immortal vampire, not a man.”
“Okay. Moving on. Number Two?”
“Deliverance could say no,” said Litha.
Elora waved her hand in dismissal. “He never says no to you, Daddy’s girl. Number Three?”
“The couple might experience stress over not finding Falcon, which could cause either Glen or Rosie to be out of sorts and repel the desired result. Judging from what I’ve seen, right now they’re already behaving like flint and steel.” Litha and Elora waited for him to clarify that. “If they get too close together, sparks fly, fire starts, etcetera, etcetera. The last time that happened in my office, I had to replace the carpet. Again.”
“Glen and Rosie ruined your carpet?”
Monq realized he was getting off topic so he waved his hand in the air as if to clear that question from the air. “Never mind. We have more important things to cover.”
“Such as?” Litha asked.
“How to keep the Sovereign satisfied that progress is being made on Falcon’s return, while keeping him from pulling the plug on our mission.”
“I can fix that one,” Elora said.
“How?” Litha and Monq both asked in unison.
Elora smiled. “Secret weapon.”
“Don’t be coy,” Litha said. “Spit it out.”
“Farnsworth.” Elora nodded. “She can get stick-up-his-ass to do anything.”
“She can?” Monq seemed bowled over by the idea of that.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sounds risky. Letting Farthing in on this could knock the legs out from under the entire operation. He might just say no.”
Elora pondered that while her fingers made clockwise circular patterns on her rounded tummy as if she was soothing the twins . “I see what you’re saying, but I have faith that Farnsworth can lead him to reason.”
“Then we’d be in trouble,” said Monq, “because there’s really nothing reasonable about what we’re proposing. It’s quite mad and could get the lot of us in hot water with The Order, not to mention the young people who are being played like pieces in a game.”
Knights of Black Swan, Books 7-9 (Knights of Black Swan Box Set Book 3) Page 76