by Kiel Nichols
“Very funny,” Gideon said, his grin contrasting the sarcastic words.
“Actually, it’s true. Those new to the Waterfire were treated somewhat like ticking time bombs. They often accidentally hurt people or destroyed property. Once the warrior matured and got a better handle on the power, it became a huge asset. Unfortunately, you don’t have much time to get control. You are in the thick of the battle already.”
Gideon felt the familiar weight of responsibility rest on his shoulders. He just hoped that this time he wouldn’t screw it up.
“The changes in your powers may work to our advantage though, Raina. Being able to predict the weather is less important than being able to see your enemy. The biggest problem we have right now is that neither of you are able to control your powers yet. In addition to that, we have to find the other keepers, avoid Adder’s assassins, and figure out the ritual that the prophecy speaks of.” There was a long moment of silence while everyone absorbed the enormity of the task in front of them.
Raina was the one to break the silence. “Sounds like fun. Where do we start?”
* * * *
They started at the Twenty-Third Precinct bull pen. Although anxious to get started, none of them wanted to complicate matters by missing an appointment with the police.
They arrived at the precinct fifteen minutes before Wijinicki told them to arrive. It was a full half hour before he was able to get to them.
He led them into a lounge area. The walls were puke green, the brown leather couch had seen better days, and there was a vague smell of old coffee and unwashed body. Gideon couldn’t believe how much he missed it.
He liked being out on his own. His agency helped to soothe the rough edges from leaving the force, but he couldn’t deny that he missed the atmosphere of the station. The clean and calm environment of his office just wasn’t the same.
“Sorry to make you wait,” Wijinicki said as he gestured to a seat. “It’s been a madhouse in here all morning.”
They had decided Raina would be less likely to say or do something that would give away the real strangeness of the situation if Raina couldn’t see, so Gideon felt like he had to describe the room to her in his mind.
After he did so, she said, You miss it. It wasn’t a question.
Yeah.
He felt her mental hug.
“OK,” said Wijinicki as he opened a file, “we need to go over everything one more time.” Then he began asking questions.
After running through the events again, Wijinicki began asking her more personal questions. Raina would have been offended if she hadn’t had to answer those questions once before—right after her home was broken into and her roommate killed.
“Look,” she said after an hour of questions like “Do you do drugs?” and “Do you owe anyone money?” “I understand why you have to ask these questions, but my answers are going to be the same as they were after Michelle was killed. I have absolutely no idea why anyone would try to hurt me. I’m just a student. I work with ancient languages and classical studies. I’m not even in an interesting field like international business or finance. I wish with all my heart that I had an answer to this, but I don’t.”
It’s OK, baby. We expected these kinds of questions, Gideon tried to reassure her.
I know, but I’m getting tired of them. There’s so much for us to do right now.
“Look, Ms. Kallan, I know this is invasive and kind of insulting, but I’m trying to understand if you were the target, or just a victim of very bad luck.” Gideon knew that Wijinicki’s tone was more respectful than it would have been if he hadn’t been there.
“I understand that,” she said, “but I don’t know what to tell you.”
“What about your work at the university? Is there any way you could have seen something you weren’t supposed to? Maybe someone could have thought you saw something you weren’t supposed to?”
“If I saw something I wasn’t supposed to, I can’t imagine what it is. I specialize in mythology and mythological figures, although my language skills aren’t too bad either. We don’t even usually get to see actual scrolls or artifacts, only copies. I know we haven’t had anything like that in the department since I was an undergraduate there.”
“That sounds like a dead end,” he said.
“Excuse the pun,” she joked weakly.
Gideon chuckled. Wijinicki just looked confused.
Just then a uniformed officer came in and gave Wijinicki a note. He read it over and turned to Gideon. “I’m sorry to have called you down here for this. It looks like you were just an unlucky victim, again. A group of terrorists are taking credit for the hit. I guess one of the students killed was the kid of someone in the State Department. Looks like he might have been the target all along.”
But he couldn’t have been, Raina said to Gideon. They said they were looking for me.
I don’t know what’s going on, Gideon said. Unless Kristano is helping us out again.
Just then another voice intruded. I’m not, Kristano said. Must be Adder.
Well, I’m going to just try to look at this as being a good thing, Raina thought.
Gideon wasn’t so sure.
* * * *
“It’s taken care of, sir. Local police is looking at Hamish for the shooting.” Agent Jensen very carefully covered up Robinson’s mistakes. He didn’t want another man’s error to create an issue for him.
Director Cascaval didn’t even turn around. “Good. What are your plans to kill Kallan?”
“I’m thinking a little C-4 in her house should take care of Raina Kallan. If she gets away from that, she’ll have no place to go, and it’ll just be a matter of hunting her down.”
Adder just snorted. With Kristano around, Jensen was doomed to fail. That was fine with him. It’d give him a good reason to punish Jensen and keep him a little firmer under his thumb.
“Excellent plan. Proceed.”
After Jensen left the office, Adder looked at the trappings of his success. He couldn’t wait until he could wield his power more openly. The fear and rage he would create would feed him tremendous power. Power enough to stop Kristano for good.
* * * *
Raina and Gideon were hunched over the kitchen table looking at the ornate scroll that Kristano had brought over, along with photocopies and other translations. The academic side of Raina was thrilled to be working on translating an ancient scroll. She was also awed at the condition of it.
“How old did you say this was?” Raina began to unroll it using two pencil erasers.
“I don’t remember exactly. It was brought over in about 2240 BC by your calendar. It was originally written on a tablet in an early form of Phoenician. I was able to translate it myself into Latin around 700 BC.” Kristano began tapping his closed fist onto the counter. “I would have kept translating it myself, but for some reason, after I translated it to Latin, I was no longer able to understand it. I’ve always been able to read and write, but the words on the page look like gibberish to me.”
“I don’t understand why the gods would do that to you. They left you at the mercy of whoever translated it next,” Gideon said as he kept his eyes on the scroll in front of Raina.
“I don’t know why they did it, but I never wanted to be caught unaware, so I had the scroll translated every time there was a new language developed.”
“This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” Raina said, struggling to hold the scroll open with the ends of two pencils. “The paper appears to be papyrus, but I’ve never seen one in such pristine condition. I don’t think anyone would believe it was thousands of years old.”
“It was given to me when I was made a guardian.” Kristano watched Raina handle it with the care an ancient artifact usually required. “You can’t hurt it, you know.”
Gideon looked up at Kristano for a moment, and Raina hissed.
“Sorry,” he said, hunched his shoulders and looked back down at the scroll so that Raina could see it
through him.
“When I say you can’t hurt it, I’m not kidding.” Kristano picked the scroll up and tried to crumble it into a ball. Raina screeched. When he straightened it out again, it looked like no one had ever touched it. “It doesn’t even burn.”
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” Raina said.
“But he made his point,” Gideon reminded her. “Here, let me hold it open, and you can look at it.”
Although the idea of someone touching a piece of parchment that old with his hands horrified her, she knew she was being unreasonable. She had also known, in theory, how old Kristano was and what he must have seen, but he seemed so up to date that she wasn’t in awe of him. She was in awe of the scroll.
Raina pulled out the copy of the modern translation and read it through. It wasn’t incredibly long, and it didn’t make a tremendous amount of sense. Then she looked at the original. “The dialect here is very old. I don’t think your translator was very good. It’s going to take me some time to wade through this, but the first line looks almost completely wrong on the translation.”
“I wonder if the gods knew that when the prophecy became real, we’d have an expert in ancient languages around to translate the text,” Gideon thought out loud. “Maybe the others you had working on this weren’t allowed to translate it accurately.”
“If that’s the case, I wasted a lot of time and money. I had it translated into many languages. Each translation says basically the same thing.” Kristano finally stopped his restless pacing and sat at the table with the others. His massive form looked odd in the small wooden chair.
“This first line was translated as ‘There are four elements, earth, air, water, and fire. They begin to live together.’ But that’s not correct. It actually starts ‘It will begin where earth, air, water, and fire meet.’”
“What does that mean?” Gideon asked.
Kristano answered, “It’s talking about the location where the ritual will need to be performed. ‘Where earth, air, water, and fire meet’ must mean here in Seattle.”
Gideon looked up at him. Even though that broke her line of sight, she didn’t complain. She would have wanted to look at him, too.
“What do you mean?” Gideon asked.
“Think about it. Earth and air are easy. Anywhere you go you are caught between earth and air. We are just south of Seattle, more or less at the base of an active volcano, Mount Rainier. We’re also only five minutes from the ocean. Wedged, if you will, between earth, air, water, and fire.”
“My God, you’re right,” Raina said. “But volcanoes are almost always along the ocean. Isn’t the Pacific Rim dotted with them?”
“So maybe there are a lot of places that we can do it. Maybe there’s more in that scroll thingy that narrows it down to Seattle,” Gideon said.
“Scroll thingy?” Raina laughed. “Is that the technical term?”
“Ha, ha, chuck it up,” he said back. Raina leaned in for a kiss.
“I guess that’s my cue to be on my way. Why don’t you keep the scroll. I can’t translate it anyhow.”
Raina looked back down at the scroll. The second line was going to take some work. “Sounds good. I’m anxious to be working on this, so it’ll be nice to have it here.”
With a wink and a wave Kristano disappeared.
Raina swung her leg over Gideon at the table and sat straddling him on the chair. “Are you going to stay tonight?” Raina asked.
Gideon ran his hands up and down her back. “That’s the plan. Sound OK to you?”
Raina initiated a long kiss. “Sounds great. I’ll be a lot less nervous if you stay close.” She shimmied closer. “Real close. Even the guest room is too far away.”
“I can handle that,” Gideon said, holding her hips in place so that he could grind against her.
Raina gasped and climbed off him and reached for his hand. Before they could head upstairs, the phone rang.
“It’s Bryce.”
Gideon stiffened. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I better answer it.” Raina walked toward the phone, feeling the weight of responsibility on her shoulders. “Hello.”
“Hi, Raina, it’s Bryce. How are you, sweetheart?”
Raina hated when he called her that. It made her feel like he was trying to imply a relationship that wasn’t there. “I’m fine. Actually, a little tired. I’m going to head up to bed.”
“Are you alone?”
“Gideon’s doing some work in the other room. He’s been crashing here so that I’m not alone. The last few days have been really scary.” Raina didn’t have to fake the quiver in her voice.
“Do you want me to come over and stay with you?” Bryce asked. His voice was filled with suspicion.
“If you do, one of you will have to sleep on the couch. I only have one guest room.”
“No need for one of us to be uncomfortable.” Bryce sounded relieved at her answer. “I have early classes anyhow. I’m going to be coming by tomorrow to visit, though.”
“When you do, could you bring my copy of Maltby’s A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies?” Raina tried to remember if he had any of her other Latin translation texts.
“I’ll bring it. Why? I thought you were working on Clytemnestra in Greek?”
“Actually, I picked up some side work. I’m translating a reproduction of an ancient Latin text.” If he came by when she was working on it, she didn’t want him to think she’d handle an ancient scroll with such disregard for its condition.
“How are you managing that?”
Bryce’s question snapped her back. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t see it, right?”
Raina was at a loss for a moment. She didn’t want him to know that she could see the scroll through Gideon’s eyes. Yet at the same time, she couldn’t think of any other explanations. Raina faked a laugh. “Actually, I can feel the symbols, and I’m tagging whoever is around me to help with the research. I’m doing it as a favor for a friend so it doesn’t matter how long it takes.”
“I thought it was a side job?”
Damn, she thought. That’s why I don’t lie. She felt Gideon’s hand on her shoulder in support.
“It’s kind of both. When I get it done, I’ll get the translation byline and a small stipend, but there’s no way he could afford a full translation fee.”
“Oh, who is it?”
Raina had had enough. “I met him in a chat room for ancient languages. I’ve never met him before in person. Listen, I’m wiped. Can we talk about this more tomorrow?”
“Sure, Raina. Get some rest.” Bryce sounded so loving and concerned that Raina felt like a heel. “Can I talk to Gideon for a minute?”
“Sure, let me go get him. He’s in the other room.”
“Sounds good. Goodnight, Raina.” Bryce sounded even more cheerful at the idea that Gideon wasn’t in the same room.
“Goodnight.”
Raina put the phone down. He’s asking a million questions. I hate lying to him.
Me, too. Why don’t you head up. I’ll be there in a minute.
Raina nodded and turned to go. She heard Gideon behind him, “Yo, bro. What’s up?”
* * * *
By the time Gideon climbed the stairs to join Raina in the bedroom, he felt guiltier than ever. He was lying to his brother. Lying about the prophecy and all it entailed was no big deal. He was protecting Bryce by not keeping him in the loop. Lying about Raina was another kettle of fish.
At the top of the stairs, Gideon veered into the bathroom to get ready for bed. He brushed his teeth and shaved before stripping down to his boxers. He came into the bedroom to find Raina already in bed. He wasn’t sure if she still wanted him to join her. “Would you rather I sleep in the guest room?” He wasn’t about to push himself on her.
Raina threw back the covers, revealing her nakedness. “What do you think?”
Gideon looked at all the peach beauty before him. “Thank God,” he said before shucking his
boxers and climbing in with her. As soon as he gathered his smooth body to him, he shuddered. He had gone instantly hard at the sight of her in the bed. Although it didn’t seem possible, he went even harder when he held her close.
Raina rubbed herself against him like a cat and tilted her head up for a kiss. Unable to resist, Gideon cupped her breasts tenderly and plucked at her nipple. She groaned into his mouth.
Obviously feeling more secure with his body, she ran her hand down his body. When she reached the part of him that was scarred, he couldn’t really feel her hand anymore. The skin had been deadened. He was about to move her hand when she moved it herself, straight down his middle until she grasped his cock gently. “I didn’t get the chance to touch you,” she said.
Gideon rolled onto his back to give her full access to his body. “Have at it,” he said.
Raina ran her hand gently on him then reached down to cup his balls. Gideon groaned. Raina moved her hand back to his shaft and started stroking him, like she had in the kitchen the day before.
“Am I doing this right?” she asked. Gideon looked down and saw her lip caught between her teeth.
“You are definitely doing that right.” Gideon put his hand over hers and tightened her grip while she pumped.
“You like it tighter,” Raina said. Gideon knew she wasn’t trying to be provocative, but the comment was sexy enough to make him groan. He flopped his arms back up in the classic “surrender” pose.
“You can’t do that for too much longer or I’m going to come, and I want to be buried inside you,” he nearly grunted.
If his eyes hadn’t been closed, he would have been more prepared for what happened next. Raina was leaning up and touching him. Without warning, he felt himself engulfed in the warm, wet heat of her mouth. His shout startled her enough to pull back.
“I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
Before she could continue, Gideon interrupted her, “Oh, God. Don’t stop now. You just surprised me. Don’t stop.”
Instead of sliding him inside her mouth again, she licked him like an ice cream cone, running her tongue along the thick vein and burying her nose in his balls. When she engulfed him again, it was all he could do not to come.