Dangerously Divine

by Deborah Blake

  “So now this guy is some kind of superhero?” The sneer was joined by a traditional teenaged eye roll. “What, does he have a costume and, like, turn invisible? I don’t think so.”

  The third girl shrugged, getting up out of her seat and heading toward the door. “I don’t know, Shannon. Maybe the guy can turn invisible or fly or something. Maybe he’s just sneaky as hell, like some kind of ninja. But this isn’t the first time it has happened, and no one has ever seen whoever is doing it. Maybe it is some kind of superhero. God knows we could use one around here.”

  Shannon made a rude noise. “Maybe he got turned radioactive by eating this food. I’ll let you know if I wake up in the morning and I can suddenly do calculus or something.”

  “Shit, that would be a superpower, wouldn’t it?” Kelli said, and they walked out laughing, letting in a gust of frigid air as the door banged loosely behind them.

  Sun allowed himself a small smile once they were gone. Superheroes. Apparently, the girls still had access to a television or comic books wherever they were staying. Or maybe they were simply telling themselves tall tales to keep away the darkness, as children had always done, throughout the centuries. Either way, he chalked it up to the age and found it amusing, and a little bit sad. He wished there were such a hero to rescue these lost young ones. But such fancies never matched the grim reality of the world, and the pierced girl had been right—no one cared about them. Not enough to fight their battles for them, anyway.

  It was too bad, but it wasn’t his problem, thankfully.

  He told himself that again, a little louder, as he was walking back to the monastery a short time later.

  It was only about five miles, an easy walk for someone like him, and he liked the fresh air, even with the cold that nipped at his ears and fingertips. The streets were poorly lit in this part of town, and the snow was piled up against the sides of buildings that had seen better days, causing odd reflections where black ice formed on the streets and sidewalks.

  He almost convinced himself that what he saw was an illusion of glare and shadow, and not a furtive figure crossing the rooftops above him, leaping easily from building to building where they leaned swaybacked together as if huddled close for warmth. There was no reason for someone to be up there. Clearly, the girls’ story had simply sparked his own imagination.

  Except that his brothers had teased him for centuries for his lack of one, and there was no reason for an illusion to send a small avalanche of snow slithering down the side of a crooked, rusting fire escape in the wake of its passage.

  For a moment, the old Gregori stirred, deep within, and he was tempted to climb the cold iron stairs and follow—to join in the adventure, whatever it was. But then he heard the sound of church bells in the distance, and he remembered that he wasn’t that person anymore, and that his life no longer held adventures, especially those that had nothing to do with him. Prayer and meditation awaited him, and that was enough. It would have to be.

  • • •

  CIERA hid a yawn behind one hand and clicked through to another page in the document she was trying to study. She couldn’t take too many more late nights without the risk of someone finding her slumped over her desk, snoring in direct opposition to the library’s policy on maintaining a quiet space.

  Not that her time last night had been wasted, exactly. She’d followed her mysterious new acquaintance, not quite willing to believe it had been a coincidence that he’d shown up twice in one day when she’d never seen him before.

  But his story checked out. He’d walked (what kind of crazy person walks five miles in the Minnesota winter after dark?) all the way to the buildings that housed the Buddhist monastery, and she’d seen him greet the monk on duty at the door and go inside. Of course, then she’d had to walk back into town, although fortunately she’d been able to catch a bus part of the way. At least the return journey had been on ground level, instead of mostly taking place on the tops of often grimy and snow-covered buildings. The last couple of miles to the monastery, she’d skulked a few blocks behind him when she ran out of conveniently close-together roofs, but she was pretty sure he’d had no idea she was there.

  Was it possible that Victor had somehow found her after all this time, and still cared enough to have someone watching her? That had been her fear, of course, although in the light of day it seemed less likely. What really wasn’t likely was that Victor had gone to the trouble of planting someone in a monastery just so she would be lulled into a false sense of security. The Victor she had known wasn’t that subtle.

  Besides, it had been years since she’d gotten away from him, and she’d completely reinvented herself in that time. Even her name was different. She looked much the same—that damned distinctive mishmash of multiracial disharmony she’d inherited from parents who’d been drawn together by their differences and then torn apart by the same thing—but her drab attire, glasses, and bun were the next best thing to a disguise when you worked in a library.

  So she was pretty sure that unlike her, Gregori Sun was exactly what he said he was: a man studying to be a monk, volunteering at a soup kitchen as part of his discipline, and incidentally pursuing some odd but undoubtedly harmless research at the Wilson.

  Too bad about the monk part though. Not that she was interested. She’d figured out that men were more trouble than they were worth before she’d hit twenty. But that was one seriously good-looking guy, who oozed a kind of sensual serenity that would make a girl’s toes curl. If you liked that kind of thing. It seemed a pity to lock him up behind celibate walls forever. Still, she was hardly in a position to criticize.

  “Good morning,” a melodious voice said, making Ciera’s hand twitch on the mouse and paging her forward to some unknown place in the document. Dammit, he’d done it again.

  “Good morning, Mr. Sun,” she said, removing her fingers from the treacherous mouse. “I have a printout here for you somewhere. A list of books that might contain information that you’d find helpful, although I have to confess, most of them are more of a hope than a certainty.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his black eyes twinkling as if he’d somehow discerned her thoughts as he’d been sneaking up on her across the usually reliably squeaky tile floor. “And please, call me Gregori. Where I come from, people are not so formal. No one has ever called me Mr. Sun; it makes me feel rather like an astronomical body made manifest.”

  An undignified snort somehow escaped down her nose, and she barely restrained herself from making some comment about sun gods and the glory of his presence. She had no idea what it was about this man that prompted these kinds of thoughts, but she’d be damned if she would actually say them out loud.

  “And where is it you come from?” she asked instead, giving in to curiosity. “Is that a Russian accent I detect?”

  One shoulder rose and fell briefly under the smooth surface of his black turtleneck. “Those were my origins, a very long time ago. I have traveled widely since then, and there has been no one place I have called home.”

  “Well, I guess you can call the monastery that now,” Ciera said.

  Dark eyes blinked, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him before now. “Hmm. I suppose that would be true.” He shook himself, as if coming back from a journey that had taken him a long way away. “It seems an unlikely place for such a title. Still, one can rarely predict where one will end up.”

  Ciera looked around herself at the orderly rows of books and the well-dressed students wandering among them. “No kidding.” She handed over a couple of printouts and some handwritten directions to some of the harder-to-find locations. “Here you go, Mr., um, Gregori. I hope you find something helpful in all this mess.”

  He gave one of his charming half bows. “I suspect I already have,” he said, with the hint of a smile that lit up his somber countenance, and walked away.

  Ciera watched him go. A monk. She still thought
it was a waste—and probably just as well, at least for her peace of mind.

  • • •

  GREGORI pondered the enigma that was the lovely Miss Evans, almost knocking over an equally preoccupied young law student with his nose deep in a book on torts as their paths crossed. Apologizing absently and getting a mumbled “Sorry, dude” in return, he made his way to the first section marked on the scribbled map she’d handed him.

  He’d noticed his shadow the night before, of course. First that elusive maybe-something on the roofs up above, and then a more distinct definitely-someone following him the last mile or two down winding streets toward the less urbanized section of city that contained the Shira-in Shashin Monastery. At first he’d supposed that some deluded thief had chosen a poor—in more ways than one—target. But when his unauthorized escort had made no move except to walk him to his door, Gregori had remembered Ciera’s unexpected alarm and her odd question: Did he send you? And thought, maybe one of her friends at the shelter, some teen foolhardy enough to jump from rooftop to rooftop, had followed him to make sure that there was nothing to fear.

  If so, he hoped that whoever it was had reported back in the negative. That Ciera was afraid of something, that much was clear. The couple of times he had approached her desk with his usual silent tread, her seemingly placid exterior had been shaken by a barely visible tremor, like the rumblings of an earthquake from far along a fault line that made an otherwise sturdy house shiver on its supports. He made a mental note to make more noise in future encounters. Whatever she feared would come upon her unexpectedly, he did not wish it to be him.

  The attractive librarian clearly had her secrets. Well, so did he, for that matter. He wasn’t sure whose were darker. Not that it mattered. In another time and place, he might have allowed curiosity—or, admit it, the strange attraction that drew him to this woman who hid behind spectacles whose glass was an illusion of necessity—to pull him into her story. But he no longer had time for such distractions, and must instead focus his attention on pulling at the threads of his own misspun tale, hoping beyond hope to follow them to the one who had started the spinning.

  For hours, he forced himself to adhere to the paper in his hands, pulling out book after book and leafing through their musty pages, only to fall short each time, the information he sought proving elusive as an eel in the shallows of a shade-dappled river. A tidbit of fact here, but for the wrong place and time. A snippet of history there, with another name and face owning its treasures. In the end, it was fatigue that came to his aid, a kind of unexpected accidental genie, let out of a bottle he hadn’t known to seek.

  He had reached his hand out to grasp the next book on Ciera’s less-helpful-than-hoped-for list, when in his clumsiness, he’d knocked it off its shelf instead. As he leaned down to pick it up, his fingers hesitated, hovering over a small brownish tome along the way, an odd prickling sensation pulling at the very edge of his senses like a gnat that hovered just out of eyesight.

  Feeling ever-so-slightly foolish, Gregori pulled his hand back, closed his eyes, and put it out, palm open, to float over the shelf until he felt that tugging impression again. His lids slid open to reveal the tips of his fingers a scant half inch away from the brown leather binding of the book he’d first noticed.

  Its title wasn’t encouraging—Scholarly Musings on Long-Lost Ancient Wisdom—and the introduction revealed it to be the diary of a gentleman of leisure from the early 1800s, who apparently had nothing better to do than travel to obscure locales in search of what he referred to as “the fanciful and often whimsical superstitions of uncivilized Natives.”

  But a closer examination of the book turned up a mention of a wise woman who was supposed to reside in the far reaches of Canada, who was said to be capable of remarkable feats of near-miraculous healing. The author bemoaned the fact that he had never been able to track down this legendary figure, despite the fact that many of the people he interviewed from the area swore that she existed. Her name, he noted in his journal, was Iduyan.

  Gregori’s fingers trembled imperceptibly as he slid the book back into place with a reverence unwarranted by its purported scholarly value. It was the first time he had seen his mother’s name in print in over five hundred years. There was nothing helpful in the diary other than this passing mention, but that alone was enough to confirm that there was a purpose to his search, and for this gift he would gladly have forgiven the author for any other failings.

  He double-checked the paper Ciera had given him just to be certain, but his first impression had been correct—the book he’d just gone through was nowhere on the list. So how had he found it? Reluctantly, he resolved to repeat the experiment, almost afraid of what he would discover.

  Closing his eyes again, he stood in front of the shelf unit and ran his hands up and down, a small way out from the spines of the books. Nothing happened. He checked quickly to make sure there was no one else in sight to see his foolishness, and then began to walk from one end of the stacks he was in to the other, arms out, fingers reaching, mind as open as he could make it.

  Finally, a sort of humming buzz at the edge of his consciousness and a prickling heat in the fingertips of his right hand made him stop and open his eyes again. This time, his palm rested just in front of a thin pamphlet, the thesis of some long-forgotten professor. This one was entitled Lost Cities of Myth and Legend: Atlantis, Shambala, and Shangri-la. Gregori looked at his hand and shrugged.

  It would appear that he had developed another odd gift, possibly a side effect of the huge dose of the Water of Life and Death that had saved his life. Possibly some strange delayed inheritance from his mother like Mikhail had received, and which was part of why he sought her. Either way, it was considerably more helpful than the strangely haunting and vivid dreams he’d been having, or even the scattered incidences of what seemed like precognition. Did this new talent make him uneasy? He could confess to himself that yes, it did. But Gregori Sun was nothing if not a pragmatist; he would use any tool he had to accomplish his task.

  He closed his eyes and began again.

  CHAPTER 4

  IN an area of Manitoba so remote that no one had stumbled on it accidentally in over a hundred years, Batbayar was mixing a batch of medicinal herbs when he felt something odd. Odd was nothing out of the ordinary for him, all things considered, but this was a different kind of oddness, as though one of the forgotten gods had plucked at a thread in the fabric of the universe, causing it to vibrate over a long distance.

  Batbayar had a special awareness—and immense but cautious respect—for the great weaving that contained all life, large and small. Most others might have ignored such a tiny shift, but he knew better. Even a little thing could bring about large changes under the right circumstances. He would not have lived for over four hundred years if not for the innate truth of this fact.

  He put the herbs down carefully, making sure to note how far along in the process he had gotten so he could resume his work upon his return. The isolated community in which he lived sometimes traded their carefully crafted remedies for the few items from the outside world that they could not make for themselves. It would not do to produce a salve of less than their usual high quality, since it was that very quality that brought such high prices so that the need for such interactions could be kept to a bare minimum.

  It was distasteful enough to have to leave the enclave on occasion. No point in doing it more often than was absolutely necessary. Each time risked their isolation, not to mention contamination from the ideas of the strange reality that existed outside of their secret home. Thus it was that only he, the most trusted of the community elders, was permitted to venture out when the need became unavoidable.

  Once the herbs were tucked under a clean cloth, Batbayar left the small wooden hut and trekked out into the forest that lay on its doorstep. He followed a barely visible path to a sacred pool, fed by water from an underground spring that had been ble
ssed and sanctified by years of purposeful spiritual use.

  Settling himself on his heels, he squatted by the pond’s edge and breathed deep, calming and centering himself until his heartbeat slowed almost to nothing, its rhythm matching the gentle soughing of the wind through the trees, the croaking conversation of the frogs, the drip, drip, drip of last night’s rain off the leaves.

  Only then did he look down. In the mirror glass of the still waters, he saw not a reflection but instead the face of a man he did not recognize, whose features were similar enough to his own that they could have been distant kin. Batbayar’s breath hissed through his teeth, almost ruining the focus of the vision, and he fought to regain the measured tempo he needed to continue.

  He did not recognize the visage he gazed upon, but there was only one person it could belong to—Gregori Sun, the singular child of Iduyan, the gifted shamaness whose guidance and wisdom had created the impossible group of people among whom Batbayar had spent most of his life. He had never met Gregori, since Batbayar had not joined Iduyan’s tiny enclave, hidden in those days deep in the Mongolian desert, until after long after Iduyan’s son had attained manhood and left to become a Rider.

  As far as Batbayar knew, Iduyan had not seen Gregori in centuries, but they had all spent many hundreds of years listening to stories of Iduyan’s wonderful, perfect, heroic son. Batbayar had never understood why his otherwise unemotional leader was still so attached to this child she never saw, but she had always made a point of following Gregori’s adventures through their few contacts to the outside world.

  Over the last hundred years or so, Iduyan had withdrawn even further into meditation and healing, giving over the job of handling those contacts to Batbayar, her most trusted disciple. Which was how Batbayar had been able to keep the news from her when their link to the Otherworld, a tree sprite named Willowbark, told him of Gregori’s torture and the loss of his immortality at the hands of the evil Brenna.