by Jasmine Walt
When we reached the end of the short line to order, Marcus released my hand and I was momentarily filled with an unexpected feeling of loss. The arm he draped over my shoulders to pull me snug against his side drove the feeling away, replacing it with astonishment . . . and a pleasant, tingly flutter in my abdomen. What is going on with me? I hadn’t been so intensely aware of a man in . . . ever. I felt bespelled, like there was some irresistible force drawing me to Marcus, which would have been thrilling if it weren’t for the fact that he was my boss. Off-limits! I reminded myself, again.
Marcus leaned down, bringing his lips a hair’s breadth from my ear. “Really, Lex, I think you can do better . . . you could at least pretend to be enjoying yourself.”
As he pulled his taunting mouth away, I snapped my own mouth shut and turned my face to him. Though I wasn’t short—just over five foot eight—I still had to tilt my chin up, accounting for our notable height difference. Narrowing my eyes, I glared. His chiseled jaw clenched, making his bone structure more contoured than usual. From inches away, the effect was breathtaking, and my glare faded. So did the mischief lighting his eyes, replaced by something more serious.
Since I’d met Marcus, I’d been embarrassingly unsuccessful at hiding my attraction, but I was starting to wonder if we were walking down a two-way street. Maybe I wasn’t alone on the road. My turn, I thought vindictively. We moved forward in the line.
Holding his eyes, I slowly licked my lips, wondering if he could smell the vanilla of my lip balm. As I’d hoped, Marcus took notice. His eyes left mine, lingering on my mouth. When they lifted again, they were on fire with desire.
I rose onto my tiptoes, bringing my face slowly closer to his. I was aching to follow through with the movement, to press my lips against his, but I altered my trajectory at the last minute, aiming for his ear instead. “You’d better have a good explanation for this charade, Marcus. I can’t wait to hear it,” I purred.
As I dropped my heels back down to the ground, my understanding of Marcus Bahur was confused even further. He was grinning in sheer delight, displaying teeth so straight and white they could have been featured in a toothpaste ad. I’d seen him smile before, but not like that. For once, it reached his eyes.
“Oh Lex, you do surprise me often, and in the most pleasant ways. Of course I’ll give you exactly what you want . . . in private,” he said, louder and rougher than necessary. If I hadn’t known exactly what I’d said, I would’ve guessed we’d just agreed on some especially naughty, potentially illegal sexual act. I could only stare at him.
We moved forward again, approaching the counter and its confounded little barista. Cassandra stood opposite us, pressing her lips together so hard they drained of color. She looked like she was either about to throw up, or scream.
“Hello again, Cassandra. I hope you’re well,” Marcus said to the girl-woman. While he spoke, his arm dropped from my shoulders to wrap possessively around my waist.
I smiled up at him, pretending to be enamored. Well, pretending to pretend.
“Hi, Professor!” Cassandra chirped. She refused to look at me, let alone acknowledge my presence.
“What would you like, my darling?” Marcus asked me, tightening his arm around my waist.
To really be your darling. “Oh, just a latte and a turkey and cheddar sandwich.” As an afterthought, I added, “And a raspberry scone.” A well-fed Nejerette is a happy Nejerette, I justified to myself.
“And I’ll have my usual lunch. To go, please,” Marcus said, handing Cassandra his card. His usual lunch turned out to be twice as large as mine, but I figured it took a lot of fuel to maintain such a tall, well-honed physique.
Once we had our food and coffees and were out of sight of the café, Marcus let me go. He continued walking for several steps before noticing I’d stopped.
Pausing, he tossed over his shoulder, “Is there a problem, Lex?” He resumed his slow jaunt.
I caught up to him, careful not to spill my latte, and fell in step beside him. “Yes, Marcus, there’s a problem. What the hell was that?” Up until the moment he released my hand, I’d thought—just maybe—he and I could overcome the professor-student, boss-underling dilemma. I’d thought he might want to, but then he let go and I realized it had all been wishful thinking. I felt used and embarrassed and far angrier than I probably should have.
“I suppose I could ask you the same thing.”
“Oh, please! You told me to pretend . . . to play along.” I was having a hard time keeping my voice at a normal volume. “You owe me an explanation.”
He slowed his step and shot me a sidelong glance. “I’m a creature of habit. I dislike having to change my behavior patterns.”
“What’s that have to do with us pretending to be . . . ?” I raised my eyebrows and waved my hand in front of me, unable to come up with an appropriate label for our pretense.
“Lovers?” Marcus provided.
I groaned. “God, it sounds so much worse out loud than it did in my head.”
“Would it be so unpleasant?” Marcus asked, a chill in his voice.
A laugh of sheer disbelief escaped from my mouth. “Um . . . getting kicked out of my program would be unpleasant. The university has rules against professors and students being together . . . rules with consequences.”
“Do you always follow the rules?” he asked, but the chill was gone.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” I said, and it was the truth. I’d never snuck out of my parents’ house in high school, I hadn’t drunk alcohol until I was twenty-one, and I followed traffic laws as best I could.
Marcus sighed, and to my shock, told me the reason for the scene back at the café. “I’m accustomed to getting my lunch at the Burke Café. Cassandra was becoming a little . . . obsessive. I could no longer sit alone for a quiet break—she’d fill every possible second with mindless chatter. It was getting tiring. I needed to dissuade her,” he explained.
“You couldn’t just go somewhere else?”
“Like I said, I’m a creature of habit.”
I laughed despite my waning exasperation. “You know, Marcus, sometimes change can be a good thing.”
“Sometimes. Rarely. Tell me about meeting your grandfather,” he said conversationally, like we hadn’t just been teetering on a thin, not-okay-to-cross professional boundary.
Carefully, I strung words together into relatively normal sentences. I could hardly say, “He looked like he was thirty, but he’s really a little over two thousand years old, and we visited the echo of his childhood home in Herculaneum before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.” Instead, I said, “It was . . . interesting. I’d thought he was dead, so I was more than a little surprised to see him. But after I got over the shock, it was nice. I learned a lot about my family history.” Like, that we’re not all human.
“And did you get along well, you and your newfound grandfather?” Marcus asked, sounding genuinely curious.
I smiled to myself. “Yeah, we really did.”
We’d arrived back at Denny Hall and were about to enter through the inconspicuous west door when Marcus stepped ahead of me, blocking the entrance. “Have dinner with me tonight.”
“Has anyone ever told you that your transitions are a bit rough?” I asked after overcoming my surprise.
He shrugged. “Have dinner with me tonight.”
“Marcus . . . we already talked about this, remember? The rules . . . ?”
“Inconsequential.” His eyes burned with such intensity that I had to look away.
“Marcus, I—” If I pass this up, I’m the biggest idiot ever born. “I can’t.”
With a heavy sigh, he turned toward the door.
I grabbed his arm. “Wait. I meant, I can’t tonight. I already have plans,” I explained. “I’m meeting up with Alexa—my grandpa again.”
Marcus’s arm tensed under my hand, and he said, “Tomorrow night, then. Say yes, Lex.”
“Why Marcus,” I gasped dramatically. “If I didn
’t know any better, I’d think you were begging!”
He smiled roguishly, sensing victory. “Trust me. It won’t happen again.”
“We’ll see,” I bantered, and his smile widened. “But, fine . . . yes, I’ll have dinner with you tomorrow night.” How am I going to wait until then?
With success secured, Marcus finally allowed me into the building.
The afternoon passed quickly, filled with numerous flirtatious glances between Marcus and me. By the time I left, I’d helped Dominic narrow the list of field school applicants down to the forty we would contact and interview in the coming weeks. I spent the short, lonely walk back to my apartment reading my neglected text messages. While in The Pit, my phone had buzzed at least a half-dozen times, and I hadn’t been surprised when I’d seen the name on the call log. Cara. And after each unanswered call, she’d sent a text message.
Hey lady . . . haven’t heard from you for a while. Just checking in.
Everything OK? Can you text me back, please?
Annie and I wanted to do dinner with you soon. Tomorrow night? Let me know.
Are you mad at me or something?
You know, it’s really not that hard to text someone back.
Okay, I’m officially freaking out. Text me. Or call me. Or stop by.
Are you dead or something? This is getting really old. CALL ME!
Unwilling to face the hour-long interrogation that would undoubtedly result from a phone call, I sent my relentless friend a text: Sorry Cara. I’m fine. Just been busy with my mom and the excavation prep. Let’s definitely do dinner soon. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear, but the words would at least decrease her calling frequency for the night.
When I reached my apartment, Alexander was already waiting in the hallway outside the door. We’d planned to meet up at six o’clock, and I was a few minutes late.
“Sorry! I got held up on campus. Have you been waiting long?” I asked, letting him into my little home.
He smiled kindly. “Not a problem. I brought dinner,” he announced, setting a huge bag of Chinese take-out on the kitchen table.
“Alexander, you’re a genius! You just might be the best grandpa ever!” I exclaimed as I retrieved plates and silverware. “What would you like to drink? Beer? Wine?”
“Water is fine. It’s unwise to venture into the At while inebriated. When we do, our subconscious starts to take over and it becomes too easy to end up seeing something unintentionally. There are some things you can’t unsee, no matter how hard you try,” he explained, giving me my first important lesson.
“Okey-dokey, water it is,” I said, setting two full glasses on the table. Dinner passed pleasantly, both of us downing generous portions of fried rice, sweet and sour prawns, beef with broccoli, and egg rolls. We swapped stories, me telling Alexander about how I came to love archaeology, and Alexander telling me about his childhood in Herculaneum and his modern life as an explorer of sorts. He’d been traveling around the world, never stopping in one place for more than a year, since he’d left Grandma Suse almost twenty-five years ago. It was nice to learn more about him.
“So, what’s on the agenda for tonight? More shocking family revelations? History lessons?” I asked, finally dropping my fork onto my plate with a clink. I was blissfully stuffed.
“Hmm . . . I thought I might answer some of your questions,” Alexander said. “If you’re anything like me, which I suspect you are, you have hundreds buzzing around in your head.”
I straightened, excited by the prospect. Where to start? “Is there a limit to how far we can see into the future or past?”
Alexander tensed one side of his mouth. “Well, other than the pesky solstice issue, which prevents anyone from seeing into the At beyond the twenty-first of June, it completely depends on the individual’s strength. Only a few years after I manifested, I could see thousands of years behind and several years ahead. The weakest Nejeret I’ve ever known could only see a few hundred years into the past. Seeing the future has always been the more difficult and rare talent—that’s what we call our unique gifts—and those with that talent are called seers.”
“I can do it,” I said. “I mean, I did it once, but it was only a few days in the future and it definitely wasn’t on purpose.”
He nodded, apparently expecting no less from a granddaughter of his.
“How many of us are there?” I asked.
Alexander frowned. “I don’t know, exactly. Our governing body, the Council of Seven, isn’t as well-organized as it once was. The Council used to keep records on all our people, but they haven’t been very successful in tracking the births or deaths in a few of the familial lines for at least five hundred years. There could be any number of thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.”
“What changed?” I asked, thinking that a people who could literally take a peek into the past shouldn’t have too hard of a time with a species-wide census.
“There was a disagreement,” Alexander explained. “Half of the members of the Council believed we should force the prophecy and bring the savior, the Meswett, into existence.” He said “prophecy” like it was a particularly foul obscenity. “The other half believed we should avoid the cursed thing at all costs. After a while, reconciliation was impossible and the Council split.”
“Were you on the Council?” I asked, suddenly curious about my grandpa’s standing among our people, and through him, my standing.
Shaking his head, Alexander said, “The seven seats on the Council are reserved for the patriarchs of the seven strongest familial lines. There’s Heru and Set, though Set disappeared more than a thousand years before I was born, so there are really only six members.”
“Did Set die?” At the edge of my mind, I realized that Heru, the man Alexander had set up as my watchdog, was on the Council of Seven . . . which was crazy. It was like learning the President of the United States had been my bodyguard for who-knew-how-long.
My grandpa shook his head again. “There’s also Moshe, Sid, Dedwen, and Shangdi.”
I whistled. “Assuming Moshe and Sid are who I think they are”—Moses and Siddhartha, central figures in two of the world’s largest modern religions—“that’s quite a list of mythical people. Not so good at keeping a low profile, are we?” I asked sardonically.
Alexander laughed. “A fault of our species.”
“That was only six, by the way,” I informed him.
“Ivan, my father, is the leader of the Council, though they haven’t officially met for some time.”
I was momentarily stunned—my great-grandpa was the leader of our people. With a dry chuckle, I said, “So I really wasn’t far off with the whole ‘more shocking family revelations’ thing?”
“You seem to be adjusting well to the phenomenon.”
I shrugged. “Adapt, or die.” I wondered if I was exhibiting some other, hard-to-pinpoint characteristic of our kind—extreme adaptability. It would make sense, considering that our regenerative abilities allowed us to live for thousands of years while the world went through endless changes. Live for thousands of years . . . me . . . unbelievable.
I plucked another question out of the miasma. “So, besides some of us being stronger than others, some of us being able to see into the future, and some of us being able to smell in the echoes, are there any other differences between Nejerets?”
“Yes, many.” Alexander took a deep breath before diving in. “Some of us are ‘tied down,’ meaning we have to be physically in the place of the echo we’re viewing, and some aren’t. For example, if you were tied down and you wanted to see something that happened last year here in this apartment, you’d have to enter the At from this apartment.” He paused for a moment. “Some Nejerets can follow an object through the At, viewing all that has or might happen in its presence. Some can do the same in relation to a specific individual. That is called ‘finding.’ Some can track another Nejeret’s projected self, their ba, through the At, following them from echo to echo.” Again, he pau
sed. “Some can manipulate the At itself, forever changing what other Nejerets see when viewing a particular echo, or creating false echoes—things that never actually happened. Manipulating is a very dangerous talent—permanently altering the At is forbidden, though on rare occasions we’re allowed to create temporary false echoes for training purposes. Related, but not completely forbidden, some can cloak their At-selves or even entire portions of the At containing their past and potential futures. That is how Set disappeared; he’s created a series of blank spots in the At.”
I considered Set and the idea of cloaking in the At. I was fairly certain I’d seen a “cloaked” person in the At before—the man who’d saved me from Mike. With sudden excitement, I wondered if the long-lost Set was my mysterious savior, but my excitement soured almost instantly. The ancient Egyptian god, Set, was often called “Seth” by modern people . . . and “Seth” had been the name attached to the sender of a pretty damning text message on Mike’s phone. Use the lip balm to make her compliant, then complete the mission. Was Mike’s Seth the vanished member of the Council of Seven? Did Mike know about Nejerets . . . about me? It seemed like too much of a coincidence.
“That’s all I can think of right now,” Alexander said, interrupting my wild conjecturing. “I suppose we should write this down in a handbook—it would make training quite a bit easier.”
“It’s okay,” I replied, my head spinning both from the influx of information and my improbable deductions. I didn’t know if I could handle anything else at the moment, but I was a staunch believer in the whole “knowledge is power” bit, so I asked another question. “Hmm . . . so if someone alters the At, does it change what actually happened? Like, will the history books suddenly say something different?”
“No. Since we don’t actually travel through time, we only view what has been or what could be, only the moment’s reflection in the At, its echo, is changed,” he said decisively. “Besides, humans would be unaware of the change in the At—only Nejerets would be able to see it, so history would remain the same.”