“I certainly hope not. The etheric storms have worsened since we set off that artifact last night, but we should be able to find someone willing to travel to, ah, where are we going?”
“England. Cardif, I think. Then, southern France.”
“That’s two destinations. We’re looking for three artifacts.”
“France holds two.”
“Blue-light special. I like that. I fixed the armor last night. Hung it in the closet. You should change. Meet me in the lab when you’re done.”
“There has to be someone willing to travel. Come on, Doris. Cut me a break here.” Jack paced with the cell phone, while Raine toured his lab, wide-eyed. If they couldn’t get a guide to find a route to England through the storms, they’d need to go by plane, and that would take them way more time than he sensed they had. “Look, I’m not a tourist. I know the risks. I’ll triple the normal fee. I need someone. Right fucking now.”
“Ease up on the language, Jack. I’ll see what I can do.” She hung up and Jack snapped the cell shut.
Raine hovered by the hidden safe, the same safe holding the original artifact. With a pile of Carmot to use, and a break in the chink of the chains binding his magic, duplicating the scarab had been deceptively easy. He had yet to crash, and when he did, he suspected it would take him under for a good, long time. For now, he was well-sustained, and pleased with what he’d managed to accomplish in a relatively small space of time.
The real deal, the original fist-sized scarab, sat in his safe, buried in a sack filled with the remaining Carmot. The element acted as a decent shield, so Jack saw no reason to change what had worked for centuries. But the fake was out in the lab, on the slab, so to speak, with thinned-out Carmot mixed in with Cinnabar, and the leftover shards of the canopic jar. Still, Raine was drawn to that one area. He bet she didn’t know why. He even experienced a strong pang of guilt about the deception. But after last night, witnessing the power, there was no way he was handing these over to Kerr. No fucking way. He wasn’t even sure he should give them to Ramon. The only thing that gave him a warm fuzzy was destroying them himself. At least, then, he’d be certain they were out of play. “See something you like?”
She turned and hit him with a dizzying smile. His gut tightened, and his dick stirred with hope. “Looks like a cross between Dr. Jeckyl’s lab and the local ER.”
“No reason to avoid the modern conveniences.”
Her grey eyes were lit with energy, her movements filled with purpose. Here was a woman on a mission. His gut tightened further. The thought of her being a knight, beyond his reach, saddened him way more than it should. Being weak this way, vulnerable to a woman’s charm, was rare for him. Not bad. But not good either. The cell rang, preventing him from having yet another puzzle to solve. He glanced at the number and answered. “Tell me something I want to hear, Doris.”
“The storms are bad, Jack. Worst in centuries. But there’s one guide willing to take the risk. I’ll send him over. Should be there in ten minutes. You should know…he’s rogue.”
Great. Fucking great. Old-fashioned travel wouldn’t cut it right now. He needed the mist routes to make this mission happen. Could his luck get any worse? “Who is it?”
“Manny.”
“Manny Chan?”
“Is there another Manny working for me?”
No, there wasn’t another Manny. Proof that as bad as it was, things could always get worse. He hated crossing the Atlantic in a land vehicle, but Manny was insistent on using his hog to take him anywhere he needed to get in the realms, despite the inherent risks. And rogues, Were without clans and often with prices on their heads, always made fine targets for bounty hunters. Tack on his predilection for mind-altering substances, and you had a fine recipe for disaster. Even on the best of days. Using a guide like him brought more trouble Jack didn’t need. But right now, he was out of options. “We’ll be waiting at the front gate.”
He cut the call. “It’s a go. Our guide likes risks, and dares.”
“Should that make me feel better?”
“Nope. He also likes peyote. Kind of eats it the way other people eat M&Ms.”
“Oh.” Her hand fluttered to her pretty neck, fingering the hematite beads. Beads he didn’t think he needed any longer. Not with heaping piles of Carmot floating around. Sure, it had been what screwed Dr. Jekyll, but Jack had always been a master mixologist, and Jekyll, a hack. As long as he limited the use to a few pinches, he should be okay.
Raine smiled thinly. “If things get bad, I can sometimes make sense of the gyrocompass and temporal astrolabe readings.”
This was new information. “Your uncle know that?”
“No. I dated a guide for a while when I was stationed in Madrid. Apparently, some half-breeds can read the same shifts as the Were. Not as well. I can’t make sense of the harmonic moonstone, but I can work the others halfway decent.”
Jack was impressed. And instantly wary. How much else could she do that she didn’t share? “You let that out in the wrong company, deal or not, they’ll never take you in the Order. They hate half-breeds, but they really hate Were.”
“Noted.” She released the beads and looked around with nervous, darting glances. She appeared as if she was taking everything in, trying to make some sense of it all. “Did you really mean what you said last night about teaching me magic, or was it pillow talk?”
The change of topic caught him off-guard. “I meant it, providing you don’t go into the Order. You take the chains of fealty, there’s no way I can help you. They’ll bind you up, and hopefully, they won’t cook your brain in the process.”
A sobering thought.
“What if they don’t turn me off? What if I don’t let them? If I keep the magic flowing, will you teach me how to use it?”
Well. There was ballsy for you. One of the many things about Raine he loved. “There’s no way you can take the vows and keep your magic.”
“Never say never.”
The audacity in her words fired him up. Gods, he wanted her. By his side. Not pledged to some arcane, dusty order, giving over all that energy and love to some unattainable ideal. “They’d need to rewrite every rule book. Even then, it would be a long shot.”
“Would you, Jack? If I got that book rewritten?”
If it would keep him with her a moment longer, hell yes. “Sure. But not for free.”
The smile faded. “What would you want?”
“You, Raine. With me a while longer.”
Surprise flared in her silvery eyes. “Why?”
Why, indeed. He should shut up. Right now. But his damn mouth kept on flapping. “I want to explore what’s between us, without the mission hanging over us. Without the magic binding us in purpose.”
She blinked hard, but remained silent. And damn him, he forged on. “Don’t you wonder where all this chemistry could lead?”
“It’s just sex, Jack. And adrenaline. The mission.”
Ouch. Direct hit. To his ego. And fuck. His heart, too. “Whatever you think it is, I think it could be more.”
“If I take my vows, I can’t have attachments. You know the rules.”
“Unwritten ones. Hugh raised you, yet knights are not supposed to have families. They take lovers, too.”
“Not long-term.”
Fear laced her voice. He was touching the hot buttons again. Good. Let her take a hit or two. She had to wonder, like him, where it could go. Something so hot, so good, so right, it had to lead to more.
“We’ll go week by week. One week we’re lovers, next week, teacher and student.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I can’t disagree with that. I’ll teach you everything, Raine. But you have to give me something in exchange.”
“You’re crazy, Jack. When this is all over, if we’re both still alive, you’ll see.”
Maybe she was right. Standing here, exposing himself to each painful shot was more than crazy, more than stupid. Maybe it was just sex a
nd adrenaline. But he doubted that. Highly.
He glanced at the clock, breaking the tension that had sprouted between them. “Let’s table this discussion. Our ride will be here any minute.”
“I need to grab something from the bedroom.” She looked like she wanted to say more, but Jack wasn’t in the mood to hear any of it, unless it was her admitting what he knew she had to feel. He couldn’t be alone in this, it didn’t add up. But if he was alone, then it would suck worse than anything else had sucked in his life so far. And he had some seriously sucky shit in his days.
He stalked out of the lab into the study. For once, let the Gods be on my side, he thought, as he tossed on his frock coat.
“Once for me,” he said aloud to the empty room. Silence met his words. He threw himself down in his favorite chair, but it did little to alleviate the strange ache her distance and denial had produced. If he’d known they’d click, connect, combust, he might have asked for different payment. Might have said the hell with revenge, give me the girl and the happily-ever-after instead.
She returned to the room, hair pinned back, dressed for battle, and looking for a fight.
She was a once-in-a-lifetime, and she’d be out of his life in the blink of time’s eye. Yeah, he thought, getting to his feet. If I’d have known, I’d have definitely asked for the girl instead.
“Do you think I’m immortal?” she asked hesitantly.
“I think you’re incredible.” The notion of her getting a paper cut made him want to vomit. “But immortal? What the Wardens give out is an illusion, Raine. It’s conditional. All kinds of things can still end your life. True immortality is the province of the Gods, and really, even they can be killed.”
“What happens if a dead God comes back to life?”
Holy shit. She was way too close to some hidden truths. He wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. And, he was thinking maybe that was a good thing. “Dead Gods can’t rise, from what I know. Myth talks about them rising at the end of times and all of that, but we’ve faced the end of times over and over again. I’ve yet to see a dead God, shade or otherwise, climb out of the underworld and do the Macarena.”
“What would happen if a dead God was alive in another dimension and tried to cross into ours?”
Jack’s blood turned to ice. “Where’d you get that idea from?”
“I’m only running the possibilities. Like I’d do with any other analysis project.”
Talk about outside-of-the-box thinking. “Under normal circumstances you can’t cross dimensions. You’d need to open a portal. No one has that kind of power, not even the Gods.”
At the front door, Raine stopped. “The Atlanteans had that power. All those portals the Gods use, the Atlanteans constructed many of them. The history I read has hints of them moving between dimensions. What if they did too much back and forth between contained dimensions? We blame the Gods for nearly destroying our dimension and erasing Atlantis. What if the Atlanteans were the ones who brought about their own destruction and risked our timeline?”
It wasn’t the first time Jack had heard the notion. He gave her words some thought. “If basic magic theory and simple physics holds true, bringing energy or matter from one dimension into another would completely throw off the natural order.”
“What if Osirus is alive in another dimension, and someone wants to bring him into ours?” There was an urgency in her eyes, excitement in the movement of her slender hands. “The artifacts might be a way to do that. Create a portal or whatever.”
Stunned, Jack didn’t know what to say. She was a genius in her ability to follow the random threads. She didn’t even realize what she was doing. Of course, he was sure she wasn’t totally correct. Someone crossing dimensions would destroy both. It was certain suicide. Power-mad freaks usually wanted to retain power, and absolute destruction negated that. “Maybe your first line of inquiry was right. What if someone wants to open a portal to the realm of the dead and bring Osirus back like that?”
“But you said dead Gods can’t be brought back.”
“I know, but a lot of things happen beyond my ken. And yours. Life’s weird like that. Things that shouldn’t happen, or can’t happen, do happen.” Way too often these days, in his opinion.
“I want to meditate later, with you. See what we can turn up.”
Oh shit. Great. “Sounds like a plan.” He glanced into the courtyard, and thanked the feckless Gods. Manny was on the other side of the wrought-iron gates, lounging on his psychedelic purple Harley, chewing a plug of tobacco. “Our ride’s here. We’ll follow him in my vehicle. With luck, we’ll be back by nightfall.”
Chapter Fifteen
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Jack rumbled next to her.
“So do I.”
Fire trucks. Police cars. Two ambulances. And a crowd of onlookers, all clustered around the warehouse she’d seen in her vision. Orange flames licked high into the night sky.
He turned to the guide. “Manny, get us an open door to our next target.”
“Ain’t no safe tunnels open nowhere.”
Raine’s spirits sank even lower. They’d arrived too late. The vision was no good to her. Who knew what France would hold. If they could even get there.
“I pay you to guide.” Jack’s words were clipped. “I don’t pay you to sit on your ass smoking cowboy killers. Capice?”
Manny hit the recalibration switch on the navigation panel of the Harley. “Make-a-miracle-Manny, that’s what they call me.”
“I don’t understand.” Raine cursed her failure under her breath. “It was so clear in my head. Why didn’t I see the fire?”
“You were picking up the vibe from the artifact we found, merging it with what you’d already absorbed from Orpheus and that information. So you found the location. You weren’t working on prediction of events.” He studied her with an unreadable expression. “Predicting the future is more like working the odds of probability, using the mystical side of your energy. Go too deep into that, it’s hard to pull back out again.”
Raine shivered in the chill English night air. She wanted less than nothing to do with that crazy state of madness induced by too much mystical probing.
“You picking up anything?”
She shook her head. “Should I?”
“You know anything about this place?”
“Never heard of it.”
Behind them, Manny cursed in Mandarin. “I got one. This is going to be close. Pedal to the metal, Jack. Don’t let up for nothing.”
* * *
In a basement dive bar in a dangerous part of Prague, a man’s cell phone rang.
“Vargr here. Go ahead.”
“End game’s in play.”
The line went dead.
Vargr closed his cell and finished his pilsner. Then he opened his laptop, and fired up the tunnel-tracking program. Everything east of the Atlantic was closed up with the titanic storms railing through the ether. He tapped a few keys, started one of his custom algorithms. There’d be breaks, tunnels opening and closing, and he’d find what he needed. He always did.
He flagged down the skinny waitress with the pierced eyebrow, and ordered another pilsner. It would be a long night. A longer day ahead. Then, it would either be over at last and he’d be free, or, it would be over on a cosmic scale and being free wouldn’t matter anymore.
* * *
Manny wasn’t kidding about a tight travel schedule. The tunnel of mist began collapsing on their tail as it spit them back out into the more solid realm, right in front of the second target.
“Good. Someone’s home.” Jack backed the SUV up beside Manny’s hog. “Make sure you take extra clips.”
He left the SUV engine running. Outside, the target, a small villa, sat upon a slight hill, about one minute’s walk ahead of them. Lights were on in the ground floor. No gates barred entrance to the drive. “What’s the plan?”
“We go just like a vampire, knock and ask for entry.” He took out a sp
ritz bottle full of a high-powered soporific. “We don’t have time to play nice, or figure out how to deactivate their security system.”
Raine’s anxiety level hitched up a notch.
Jack shook the bottle. “Get us an escape tunnel ready, Manny. I have a feeling this is going to be tight.”
“To where?”
“Anywhere. Find it, open it and keep the motor running. We can reroute once we get there.”
At the doorstep of the well-kept dwelling, Jack pounded on the door. A young man in expensively tailored clothes opened the door. Before he could speak, Jack sprayed him while he pushed inside. Raine followed, kicking the door shut.
A woman’s voice, calling out in French, echoed from down the hall.
“Stay here,” Jack whispered.
He disappeared down the hall, then reappeared seconds later. “Hostiles neutralized. I think the jars are below.”
This time, Jack knew the location, and led them straight to it: a secret door built into the basement wall that accessed a suite of rooms packed full of all kinds of arcana and antiques. He grabbed Raine’s hand for a total of three seconds, working so fast with her energy that she barely registered his presence in her consciousness. The door blew in off the hinges from the force of magical release.
The jars sat on a colonial-style side table, beside a handful of quartz crystals, and a brass frog.
“We could have sneaked in through a window.”
He shoved the second jar into the rucksack and tied it shut. “No time.”
His body went still. The tips of his ears twitched.
Then she picked it up: the unnatural echo of wind, the cry of the mist, signifying an incoming tunnel.
“They’re here,” she said, not even sure who they were.
“At least we’ll know who we’re dealing with. Maybe you were right about using the window.”
ImmortalIllusions: The Eternity Covenant Book2 Page 25