Samantha Sommersby - [Forbidden 03]

by The Revolution (old ver. ) (lit)

  Chapter Seventeen

  Although the look of other rooms in the house had changed over the years, the dining room still looked the same. There weren’t any windows or overhead lights. We’d always had dinner by candlelight. The edges of the room were lined with tall candelabrum filled with long white tapers. The walls were covered in rich red damask, the same red damask that covered the seats of the dining room chairs.

  The china had been in the family for ages, so had the stemware, although my father had purchased that himself in London, may years ago. I think what I liked best about the room growing up was the mural that covered the ceiling. The painting of the sky at sunrise meant that the opulent room was set almost constantly ablaze with vibrant hues of gold, orange, and red.

  There was a second painting in the room. It hung on the wall behind where my father sat. It had been there for as long as I could remember, one of six versions of the Madonna painted by Munch. I knew that my father had acquired it long before I was born and that it was something that he treasured. But I didn’t understand the significance of it. Not until now.

  “The Munch,” I said, thinking out loud. “I didn’t realize until now…”

  Father glanced back over his shoulder. “What?”

  “It’s Rita,” I said. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “We attended his exhibit at the Unter den Linden in Berlin. I found his work to be positively gripping, revolutionary really. All of his emotions were right there on the canvas. It was so…raw. We lived in Berlin for almost two years. I was studying German. Rita would sit for Edvard in the afternoons. That one,” my father said, lifting his glass towards the painting, “was the last in the series. It was a gift and I’ve always treasured it.”

  Dad sighed and took another sip of his port.

  ~

  “So, Alex, do me a favor and explain to my father how it is you’ve managed to maintain your virginity all these years. It seems he just doesn’t believe it’s possible for a girl to do these days.”

  That was Lily. We’d just finished desert and her question made my father spew the port that he’d been relishing across the table. Alex looked mortified. Chase sat back, amused. Clearly he didn’t believe that Alex was a virgin and he couldn’t wait to see how this was all going to play out.

  “Lily,” scolded Mother as she stood up and began to blot at the wine on the table. “Alex is our guest, you’ve made your father choke, and…”

  My mother glanced up at Alex, a questioning look on her face. Alex avoided her gaze.

  “The spell,” whispered my mother under her breath.

  “What spell?” asked Lily. She pounced on that like a dog chasing after a bone.

  Alex set her fork down slowly, cleared her throat, then in a painfully small voice while staring down at her plate she said, “It’s a protection spell. I…um…can’t…”

  “You can’t have sex?” gasped Lily. Then she quickly turned to my father and pointing her finger at him added, “And don’t you get any ideas. That’s absolutely diabolical! Dell, you’ve got to do something!”

  “I don’t think that it was an intended consequence, Lily,” my father said. Turning back to Alex he continued, “Luna meant well. She was trying to give your father some…hope, to assure him that you would be kept safe from harm.”

  Mom launched into doctor mode. “Alex, are you sure that you can’t have sex? Have you tried? There are—”

  “Mom,” I said, shaking my head and holding up my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Alex. “It’s just that I want to help if I can. There are many medical—”

  “Trust me,” I interrupted. “It’s not an issue of libido or lubrication or whatever else you’re about to propose. It’s magic.”

  “And you’re going to fix it, right?” asked Lily.

  I looked over at Alex, took her hand in mine, smiled and then nodded. “Yes. Somehow I’m going to fix it.”

  Lily leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, something she hadn’t done in years. “You know,” she said, “sometimes you’re not completely horrid.”

  While everybody else at the table was busy laughing, my sister leaned closer to me and whispered, “Someday I hope I find a guy as great as you.”

  It was one of those moments that you just wish that you could bottle. The focus of the conversation shifted. I’m not even sure to what, probably the stock market, or current events. I found myself looking around the long mahogany table at these people that I’d shared so many dinners with: Chase, Lily, my parents. But tonight Alex was there. And she seemed to fit…just right.

  “What?” asked Chase, his voice cutting through the momentary silence. He was holding his hand to his ear as he pushed away from the table. “Message, sir,” he said to my father. “Stage 1, they’ve found the location of the target and are standing by.”

  “Video?” asked Dad.

  “Streaming now,” replied Chase, and he was off. My father and I followed quickly at his heels.

  “Where is the target now?” asked my father as we scrambled down the stairs then ran down the hallway and into my dad’s office.

  “New York. He just checked into the Waldorf,” replied Chase.

  There was a private bath inside my father’s office, which was far more than a bath. It was the entrance to the command center that we all called The Vault, an elaborate set of secure offices designed by one of the best penetration experts in the business, the infamous Stanley Houghton.

  “Damn you guys move fast,” panted Alex as she rounded the corner to join us in the bathroom. “What are we all doing in the bathroom?”

  “Byron Renfield,” said my father as he stared into the mirror. “Zebra, tango, bravo, six, four, zero, x-ray.”

  The far wall slid open, revealing a long, dark hallway with another door at the end, a door with no window and no doorknob. It was always manned and before we’d even made it halfway down the hall it had opened for us.

  “What is this place?” asked Alex, trying to keep up.

  “What’s the situation?” I asked, holding my hand up to momentarily silence Alex.

  “We have his room surrounded. Hotel security cleared the perimeter. A bellboy brought his luggage up moments ago. He’s alone, we’re ready to go in on your mark,” said a disembodied voice.

  “Let’s get this on screen one,” demanded my father.

  Almost instantly the large screen began to fill with images from various vantage points. By my count it appeared as if there were a dozen men and women involved in the operation.

  “Who’s the target?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity.

  “Malcolm,” said my father with a quiet determination. “On my mark. One, two, go.”

  With incredible synchronization rounds were shot through ceilings, floors and walls. Seconds later our operatives, masks in place, had entered the room. Through the dense fog I could make out the outline of a body lying prone on the floor.

  “Fuck!” said one voice.

  “Shit!” chimed in another.

  A string of colorful expletives followed and as the fog cleared I understood why. It was the bellboy.

  “Who confirmed the bellboy left?” I asked.

  “Me, sir, George, we have it on tape. We’re pulling it up for you now.”

  “Sending to screen 2,” said Pixel, a human that had been stationed here at The Vault on and off for my entire life.

  “Hey Pixel,” I said, walking over to him.

  “Good to see you, Dell,” he said.

  Up on the screen was an outside shot of the hotel room. The bellboy wheeling in a luggage cart, the door closing, a minute or so later the bellboy exiting.

  “A glamour?” asked my father.

  “Probably,” I replied. “I can’t tell on film. There’d be traces of magic in the room though. Any of you able to sense anything?”

  “Our intelligence didn’t say anything about the target having magical powers. We aren’t prepared for
that scenario,” said the guy who’d identified himself earlier as George.

  “You sure that Malcolm can’t perform magic?” I asked.

  “Positive,” replied Dad with a definitive nod.

  “Then I’d guess that the guy that you’ve been following isn’t Malcolm. He or she was a decoy,” I suggested.

  “Damn it!” cursed my father. “Reinitiate the search,” he ordered. “And this time, when we think we’ve found him, we continue to look… We don’t stop until we have the target captured and confirmed by me. Is that understood?”

  I’ve known all my life that my father was powerful. I’d even had a taste of it now and then. But those times were nothing like now. His power crawled over my skin; the air was thick with it. The heart rates around me began to speed up; even the other Immortals were sweating. A series of affirmations sounded about the room but I don’t think my father even heard them. Blinded by rage, he’d already walked out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You all right?” I asked my father. He was standing in the living room in front of the large picture window, a brandy in his hand. My father was partial to fires and he’d started one in the fireplace.

  “No,” he replied, his jaw clenched so tight that there was a visible tic.

  I walked over to the bar. “Mind if I join you in a brandy?” I asked while I poured.

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to be good company.”

  “Right,” I replied. “If I was looking for good company I’d be upstairs with Alex.”

  My father smiled, then looked down into his glass. “She’s lovely.”

  “Yes, she is,” I agreed.

  “And?”

  “And, what?” I sat down. “Wait, are you asking if my intentions are honorable?”

  “I suppose that I am,” he agreed, sitting down in the chair across from me. “I don’t want to see Alex hurt.”

  “Come on, Dad. You’ve got to know I would never intentionally hurt—”

  My father interrupted me. “You’re not a cruel man, Dell. I know you wouldn’t do anything intentionally to hurt anyone, but you’re playing with fire here. You know it.”

  I leaned forward and swirled my glass, watching as the amber liquid circled the perimeter, sloshing up against the sides.

  “Do you love her?” he asked pointedly.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you told her that?”

  I looked up at him. “Yes,” I admitted.

  He pursed his lips together into a tight line, which conveyed his disappointment.

  “You don’t approve,” I observed.

  My father sighed as he stood back up and began to pace. His pacing was never a good sign.

  “It’s just that you’re so young. Maybe too young to be making such a big commitment.”

  “Who said anything about a big commitment?” I asked. “We’re not talking about picking curtains out together.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I shrugged. “Not seeing other people…for now.”

  “For now? I don’t get it, why even make such a meaningless—”

  “It’s not meaningless, Dad.”

  “So, basically Alex has committed to only fuck you…until she wants to fuck someone else?”

  Okay, so when he put it like that, it sounded pretty meaningless.

  “Is that what you want?” he asked.

  In all honestly, just the idea of Alex with someone else was making me seethe with jealously.

  “No. It’s not what I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  Good question.

  “I want to be confident that I’m doing the right thing, confident like you and Mom were,” I told him.

  My father looked surprised. “What on earth makes you think that your mother and I were confident?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Dell, you’re mother showed up here and in the space of twenty-four hours she’d managed to turn my world upside down. I’d never felt so off balance in my life. It was almost as if I were riding the crest of a wave, as if I were being led, swept up, by a force of nature that was older and more powerful than anything I’d experienced before.”

  “The power of the Chosen?”

  My father shook his head. “The power of love. It was terrifying, yet at the same time there was an underlying…”

  “What?”

  “Rightness about it.”

  I nodded. “When it’s right, I’ll know it.”

  Dad shook his head. He swallowed down the remainder of his drink, set the empty glass on the table, then stood up and stretched. “Randell, you’re a smart kid and I’m proud of you…”

  I sensed a but coming on.

  “…but I’m not talking about knowing it was right here,” he said, tapping on the top of my head. “I’m talking about feeling it here.”

  My father stood there in front of me, his hand over his heart.

  “Good night, Son,” he said. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of my head, something that he hadn’t done in ages, maybe even since I was a boy. “I love you.”

  “Love you, too, Dad.” I told him. “Go ahead and turn out the lights.”

  He did.

  Then I propped my feet up on the coffee table and sat there in the dark, staring into the flames of the fire and listening to wave upon wave roll in and crash upon the shore.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Thick fog swirled around my feet and was swallowed up by the darkness. The night was damp and cold. The ground was wet. There were puddles scattered about. I was running. Not running from something, running towards something. My focus was singular. There was nothing, nothing but the sound of the slap of my shoes against the pavement and the light up ahead. The light…so that I’ll never lose my way.

  Show us the way home.

  I jerked awake with a start, dropping the spell book that I’d fallen asleep reading onto the floor.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” whispered Alex. “I got worried when I woke up and you still weren’t in bed; it will be morning soon.” She was squatting next to my chair, her hand resting on my knee. She was wearing the same dark green silk nightshirt that she’d worn on assignment; only it looked almost black in the dim light. The fire had died down considerably, the glow from the remaining embers casting her face in shadows. I stood up and walked over to the fireplace; retrieving the poker I stirred up the embers.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “For what?”

  I turned back towards Alex. She was sitting in the chair, the book that I’d dropped now in her lap.

  “Worrying you, I guess.”

  She nibbled nervously on her lower lip, a gesture I always thought of as sexy. “Are we okay?”

  “Of course.” I replaced the poker. “Tomorrow’s going to be a big day. I should at least get a couple hours of rest. Let’s go upstairs and—”

  Alex started to open the book.

  “Alka,” I commanded, reaching out with my right hand. The book sailed through the air and I grabbed hold of it.

  Alex jumped to her feet. “Whoa!” she exclaimed. Then her eyes narrowed. “What’s in the book?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Alex placed her hands on her hips and stared me down. “I don’t like secrets. This…us…it’s not going to work if we start keeping things from one another.”

  “I’m not keeping things from you.” I sighed and raked my hand through my hair as I walked towards the staircase. “It’s just a book of spells. It was given to me a long time ago. I thought I’d remembered seeing something in it that might help us break the protection spell.”

  Alex paused as she reached the bottom step. “Well, let’s have a look then!”

  I shook my head and held the book out of reach. “It’s not an option.”

  “Why not?”

  “We have to find another way.”

  “Why? Does it require the sacrifice of a blonde virgin? I saw that on an X-files
episode once.”

  “You don’t understand. This is serious stuff, Alex. It’s old, powerful magic.”