Two Worlds of Provenance
Angelina J. Steffort
MK
Two Worlds
of Provenance
Two Worlds Book 1
First published 2019
Copyright © by Angelina J. Steffort 2019
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Ebook: ASIN B07TPFN9CN
Print: ISBN 978-3-9504418-9-5
MK
www.ajsteffort.com
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Acknowledgments
First of all to my wonderful readers, who keep asking for more, whose enthusiasm for my writing is the fuel when I am struggling to keep my eyes open late at night. Thank you for all your loving support. You are the best!
To the girl with the wonderful name.
To Dawn and Carolyn for patiently cleaning up my written mess.
To Steffi and Norma-Jean for real-time-reading my words. You are a tireless source of incredible feedback, and I can’t say enough how much I value your feedback and opinion.
To the beautiful city of Vienna for being an oasis in my life.
To Joanna for being a wonderful critique partner. Thank you for your trust and support!
To Barbara, who has walked the path before me and keeps lending a hand so I won't fall over the same obstacles as she did, who has become a true friend and an inspiration. You rock! To many more Jours Fixe to follow! There is always a cup of coffee waiting for you!
To my family. Thank you for putting up with me when I go through my creative tantrums! I couldn’t have done it without you! I love you!
Contents
Maray
Jemin
Maray
Jemin
Maray
Jemin
Maray
Corey
Maray
Jemin
Maray
Jemin
Maray
Corey
Maray
Jemin
Maray
Jemin
Maray
Jemin
Maray
Jemin
Maray
About the Author
Also by Angelina J. Steffort
Maray
“You want me to kill myself for my birthday?” She stared down incredulously at the colorful package on her knees, hands shaking as she reached out for the dagger.
“Not at all.” Her father shook his head with a smile and watched her extract the metal from the box—she had never seen anything like it: ornate silver and black inscriptions. “It’s a family heirloom.”
“We don’t have family heirlooms,” Maray objected. The Johnsons, she knew, were a family of little history.
“Not on my side,” Gerwin Johnson agreed. “Your mother’s side has a lot of history.”
Maray dropped the dagger back into the box as if she had burned herself and looked up to study her father’s face. “But we hate Mom,” she said cynically and put the box on the table—too cynically for a sixteen-year-old.
Gerwin never talked about her mother much, and if he did, they weren’t very good things.
“We don’t hate her,” Gerwin corrected. “We don’t agree with all the choices she made… We meaning I don’t agree with all her choices.”
His face seemed older, the way it always did when he spoke about her, his brown eyes too dark to read anything from them.
“She abandoned us,” Maray said, not sad like she had been when Laura had left them five years ago, but with a sense of acceptance. “Do you think she is happy?”
“I dearly hope so.” Gerwin looked like he meant it.
Maray gazed out the ceiling-high window. The new apartment was a modern interior set in an old building structure; probably from before eighteen-something, just like almost everything in this city. Her view was of a pale yellow building. It was set on a hill, watching the surroundings with its arched entrances and windows. It looked like part of a palace, yet not like a place people would have lived in.
“Where do you think she is now?” she asked, not really expecting to get an answer. “Still Texas?”
Her father leaned forward and patted her arm. “Your mother was never one to stay in one place for too long.” He got to his feet and crossed the room to get to the slate-grey kitchen and pick up two plates from the granite counter. “This world was never one for her.”
He appeared between the columns separating the kitchen from the dining area and placed the plates he held in his hands onto the table. “Cake?”
With reluctance, Maray guided her fingers away from the dagger, taking plate and fork instead. They ate in silence, both of them studying the weapon between them.
“So, Mom’s—” Maray prompted, and Gerwin nodded almost the second she spoke. “Was it her father’s? Her mother’s?” She didn’t think of them as grandparents. Never having met them did its part in feeling a bit detached.
“It was Rhia’s.” His voice allowed for the same affectionate tone that someone would use to address a stone.
“We don’t like Rhia—” that was her grandmother’s name, “—either,” Maray remembered and shoved a fork-full of Sacher cake into her mouth, grimacing at the explosion of chocolate couverture and apricot. What was it with Austrians and their obsession with apricot-jelly?
“We—” her father creased his eyebrows, scolding her for including him in her generalization of negative emotions towards her mother’s side of the family, “—have nothing against Rhia,” he clarified.
“At least nothing that would work,” Maray muttered between two gulps of water. What Laura had told her about Rhia mostly fortified her belief that there was hardly anything to like.
“Can you stop that?” Gerwin hissed, losing his usually so well exercised patience.
Maray sat back in her chair, not at all embarrassed about her behavior. Her mother, Laura, had left them. She had disappeared in the middle of the night after a call from Rhia, kissing Maray goodbye with the promise to be back soon. That had been five years ago this day: her sixteenth birthday. And every year, it wasn’t the anniversary of her birth; it was the anniversary of the day her mother had bolted from the family, never to be seen again. The times she had heard of her ever since, she could count on one hand. A phone call or two in the first weeks, then a letter after a month, and a postcard after a year—from Texas. No one knew what had brought her there.
Her father had processed the breakup surprisingly well—if she ignored the angry comments he sometimes made when single-fatherhood became too much of a hassle. Gerwin was a diplomat, and his patience and principles were almost as sacred to him as his love of their little family. Little—meaning Maray and him. It spoke volumes that he sometimes couldn’t help himself when Maray’s mother came up in a conversation. He had done everything for his daughter those past years, and now that he had finally taken a step back into his career, accepting the position as an ambassador in Vienna, Austria, she felt it was finally time for Maray to do something for him—even if it was a little thing like biting back a snide comment.
“I am sorry, Dad,” she said, putting on a brighter face. The annual rage at her
mother would have to wait until a little later. “So, what’s with the family-heirloom?” she quizzed, hoping to erase the lines on her father’s forehead, and lifted the dagger out of the box, this time examining all of it.
“That’s a story for another day,” he said and smoothed his dress shirt as he got to his feet. “I need to head out, or I will miss the opening speech.” He kissed her on the forehead and grabbed his tie and jacket on the way to the door. Before he opened it, he stopped and turned around. “Happy Birthday, Maray.”
“Thanks, Dad.” She waved with her free hand. “Show them they hired the right man for the job.”
Gerwin gave her a half-smile and left to his first official appearance as an ambassador for... What was it again? Now that she thought about it, she realized that her father had never actually shared. She had asked many times and always gotten an answer that had seemed satisfying at that time. But had he ever truly named it clearly? “Ambassador,” he had said, “They need someone over there in Europe to take care of some cultural disputes.”
Maray had never asked what type of conflicts. Not that she didn’t want to know. Only, her father was such a secretive man when it came to his job. He couldn’t talk about it much. His employer—some big corporation in IT—didn’t want him to. And it had to be fast. They needed someone like yesterday, and so they had taken this step to move to Vienna more or less overnight. Now that she was thinking about it in detail, it didn’t make full sense why an IT business would need their own ambassador.
The dagger in her hand weighed heavy, and she imagined that this wasn’t a weapon for fighting. It looked more like a ritual dagger. She turned it over one last time before she put it back in the box and grabbed the dishes. It took only a couple of minutes for her to clean up the kitchen. It used to be her mother who would do it, but ever since she’d left, Maray had taken on most of the kitchen duties while her father took care of laundry. It was a silent agreement that helped them avoid bringing up the topic of Laura.
With everything back in its place, Maray had an entire afternoon and evening to pass by. Her friend—one friend—in the States was probably just starting her day, and she didn’t want to disturb her. So she stepped into her shoes, grabbed a jacket, and danced down the historical staircase.
Living in Vienna was like living in a museum. Only here, every architectural masterpiece of the past was still inhabited. As she made her way down to the nearby castle—a relic of the Austrian monarchy—she passed ornate facades painted in subdued colors. It was the first day of November, and still the city was packed with tourists. They had their coats up to their noses, protecting themselves from the merciless wind as they rushed from the metro stop to the grand yellow building across the street.
Maray had laughed when her father had told her they’d have a castle in their back garden. Well, it wasn’t the back garden but close enough: a seven minute walk.
“Where is entrance?” A woman asked in a heavy Chinese accent. She knew that accent from D.C.
With a smile, she pointed toward where the rest of the crowd was headed and watched the woman walk away toward a sign saying ‘Ticket Office’. Maray felt less and less like following the tourist masses like a sheep. Instead, she turned right after the massive iron gate, passed the gift-shop, and followed a gravel path into a park that unraveled behind the castle, ready to leave the multi-language-babble behind her and explore.
Maray glanced up at the perfect arch of gnarly wood, a long tunnel twice her height or more, framed by bushes that looked as if they had been cut back, year after year, for over a century. There were no tourists here, just her and the dusty gravel.
Curious, she set a foot in and marveled at the fairytale feel of the archway. It must be beautiful in summer, she thought and strolled further into the long tunnel of drab wood. The wind played with what few leaves were clinging to the branches, and the sky above was a deep purplish blue, the shade she knew from home when a thunderstorm was brewing. Here, it seemed to be the normal color of the sky for the season.
Maray kicked a stone ahead of her as she made her way further in and watched it roll into the frame of dead leaves along the shrub.
When the stone hit the side of the path, noise caught her attention: metal on metal, an angry sound accompanied by labored breathing, and a scream.
Alarmed, Maray stepped aside, heart thumping in her throat, and stumbled into the sharp, trimmed branches.
As the noise approached, she could see the outline of two young men in the fog that suddenly spread ahead of her, fighting, swords held overhead. She shrank back into the bush, tearing her jacket in the process. Swords? She hadn’t seen a sword since her last visit to the museum in D.C. The two sword-fighters hadn’t been there a second ago; she could swear it.
The clatter of metal piqued, and a ripping sound, followed by a thud, ended the noise.
Maray peeked through the branches, hoping to get a better view of what was going on. Adrenaline rushed through her system, making her fidget.
There, in the fading fog, laid one of the two boys, flat on the ground, face down, motionless. She stepped forward, careful not to draw attention, but the second boy had disappeared. She glanced around, double-checking. The park seemed as dead and empty as it had a couple of minutes ago—except for the still figure before her feet.
From the way he was laying, it was difficult to tell if he was alive or dead. Maray ignored her impulse to bolt and crouched beside the boy. His clothes were like nothing she had ever seen. They reminded her of things she had seen at a medieval fair mixed with high-tech materials. She forced herself to stop staring, focusing on the slow rise and fall of his back. He was breathing.
“Can you hear me?” She touched his shoulder with a hesitant finger, careful not to push on the gashing wound across his upper arm. He didn’t respond.
A shock of caramel hair hid his face. She brushed it aside with her hand, revealing a cheek smeared in dust and blood. She shrank back, glancing over her shoulder. What had the other boy done to him?
“Hello?” Maray tried again, hoping the boy would react. She needed to call an ambulance. The wound on his arm didn’t look good, and there was a cut across his cheek that seemed like it might be down to the bone. “My name is Maray Johnson,” she said in a clear voice like she had learned in first aid. “I am here. I am getting help. If you can hear me and can’t speak, give me a sign.”
The boy remained still.
Maray pulled her phone from her jacket and tried to remember what 9-1-1 was in Austria… 1-3-3? 1-4-4?
Before she could decide which one it was, the boy twitched, then he gurgled and coughed, thin lines of spit and blood running down his chin.
“Are you awake?” Maray had dropped the phone the second he moved and was now hovering over him, one hand sliding under his head to help him get the liquid out of his mouth. “Can you hear me?” she repeated.
He couldn’t be much older than her—seventeen, maybe eighteen—but it was hard to tell through the layer of grime.
One second he leaned into her hand, the next his eyes tore open, and he jumped up into a kneeling position, holding a short sword up to her throat. He panted, trembling under the effect of the cut on his arm.
A pair of wide, bright eyes glared at her, locking her in place as much as the pointed metal under her chin.
“Who are you?” He coughed more blood.
If she hadn’t been petrified by his sudden attack, she would have noticed the figure behind her. But she didn’t. All she saw were those eyes, cold and defensive, and the agitation in the boy’s words.
Maray’s heart threatened to escape her ribcage as it hammered in her chest from fear. She could have asked the same question: Who was he?
Take a breath, she told herself. What options do you have?
The stranger’s hand was trembling, making the sword come dangerously close to her throat. Even if he was weakened by the wound, there was nothing much she could physically do to fight off the stranger
. One inch, and she’d be dead.
Speak to him, she remembered, stall.
“You are badly wounded,” she acknowledged in a voice that resembled calm even though she felt more like screaming.
She glanced down at his chest. His shirt—looking like a cross-breed of chainmail and cotton—was slashed open from collar to sternum, leaving a cleft of flesh. It wasn’t bleeding even though the fabric was blood-soaked.
The stranger cringed as if he was just realizing that she was right. For a fraction of a second, he peered down before his eyes snapped back up to fix on Maray.
“This is nothing,” he commented with a twitch of his lips.
Nothing? If that was nothing, she didn’t want to know what something was.
“I’ve had worse before breakfast.”
The trembling in his arm faded as he spoke, and when she allowed her eyes to check his wound, she noticed the bleeding had stopped.
It was just in that moment that the figure behind her moved. She caught a glimpse of something furry from the corner of her eye before the stranger in front of her launched himself in the air with a push of his legs. Not even having a second to wonder how he’d done it, she squinted, readying herself for the impact, and was surprised as the blow didn’t come from the front but from the back.
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