by Lorna Tedder
“I knew one of you would come. But I’d hoped it wouldn’t be you.” The old man shakily rose to his feet and dusted himself off. It seemed an odd thing for him Lorna Tedder
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to do. His clothes were torn in places and hung loosely on him as if he’d lost several shirt sizes rather quickly.
His eyes were wild, his beard unkempt and his hair drooped long on his shoulders. He looked for all the world like Gandalf the Wizard with an attitude.
I ignored his vote of confidence in me. “Who are you?”
“Just an old man who crossed the son of Max Adriano and lost.”
“How long have you been down here?” He seemed in remarkably good health, especially for a man who was certainly well into his eighties, maybe more. But the air and walls around us seemed to pulsate with energy. My ears rang.
“You feel it, too, don’t you? It’s the ley lines. They can keep you healthy or they can kill you as quickly as any volcano or earthquake. Just as easy to feel as the earth’s magnetic fields. As easy to feel as gravity. The whole Adriano homestead is built atop one of the most powerful geopathic stress fields on the planet.”
“Why are you here?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if he was crazy. The odds were in favor of it.
“They put me down here to punish me.” He waved an arm at the colored pieces outlined on the floor. “For helping the daughters of their enemies. For helping you. ”
Had I heard him correctly? “I…I don’t know you.
I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“Oh, but I’ve seen you.” His aged eyes seemed to come to life. “You have the manuscript, don’t you?”
I nodded. How could he have known?
“We should destroy it.”
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What was with all the bibliophobes bent on destroying valuable old books? He sounded like Simon.
“I’m not destroying anything.”
He sighed. “Might be for the best if you did. Simon will use it as a key to solve his problem, he will. Yes, burn it. Burn it before he reads it. You could save countless lives.” He nodded emphatically. “You weren’t supposed to be here, but I’m glad now that you came for us.”
“Us who? I don’t see anyone else here but you and me. And I didn’t know until a few seconds ago that you were here.”
He waved a hand in disgust. “Doesn’t matter if you came for me or not. As long as you came for them.”
“Them who?” Yes, definitely crazy as a loon.
“Them!” He flung his arm wildly toward the tiles on the floor.
Poor guy. All this time trapped inside the vault, half starving and completely mad. How could Simon and Caleb do this to an old man?
I strode back to the fire hose and tugged it to test its strength. “Look, I’ll get you out of this hole, but that’s about all I can do. I don’t know if I can get you out of the room above, let alone out of the Adriano compound.”
“Oh, I can get us out of the vault. And out of the compound. I can take us all the way out to the parking lot at the security gate if you want. You drove, didn’t you? You always drive.” Before I could ask how he knew, he plowed ahead. “There’s a hidden exit or two that I know about.” He sniffed indignantly at the Lorna Tedder
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trapdoor above us. “I could get out of this hellhole by myself, too, but I can’t jump quite as high as I used to.”
I almost smiled at him. He didn’t seem to realize that somewhere along life’s journey his body had betrayed him with the growing inability to do less than the day before. I suddenly felt a kinship with him that I didn’t want to think about. One day, in at least another four decades, I’d be his age and just as unwilling to admit that I wasn’t as strong as I once was. If I lived that long.
“You can get us out to the parking lot? Seriously?”
I tried to study his eyes for signs of truth, but he wouldn’t stand still. “Okay, if you’ll put your arms around my neck and hold on, I think I can pull us both out of here.”
“You can’t leave without them.”
I pretended not to hear. We had to hurry. “Or I could tie the hose around your waist and pull you up, but I think it would be easier to—”
“Aubrey!” he shouted in a stage whisper.
I let the fire hose drop from my grasp. “What did you call me?” What the hell was happening that, out of the blue, everyone knew my name after I’d kept it a secret for decades?
“Aubergine de Lune.” The old man’s voice dropped to a focused whisper. “Also known as Dr. Ginny Moon, aka Lauren Hartford, professor of medieval literature.”
I stared at him. “You know who I am?”
“More than you do. You think you know who you are.
You’ve spent a lifetime getting to know yourself, flaws and talents and all, and yet you’ve not even scratched 98
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the surface of who you are or what you’re capable of.
How can you? You spend your life in the past.”
It’s where the ones I love reside, I wanted to say.
He gritted his teeth as he leaned forward. “Aubrey, Lauren, Ginny…it doesn’t matter how many incarna-tions you have if you refuse to reclaim the life that was stolen from you.”
Stumbling backward, I leaned against the wall, still staring at him. “You know who I am,” was all I could say. I still couldn’t believe it.
“Yes, I know. And unfortunately for you, so does Simon. He doesn’t know everything, but he knows enough that you’ll never be free of him unless you take back your life. Maybe not the life you planned when you were a girl, but if you’re not willing to live your own life, then you’re already dead.”
“I can’t live my own life,” I said, grating out the words. “I’m a prisoner. In a gilded Adriano cage, yes, but a prisoner.”
“Prisoner? Child, only you are forcing you to wear that crown.” The old man lifted his hands dramatically as if to ask God to strike him down. “Nobody’s keeping you in chains but you.”
“Look, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any choice but to work for the Adrianos.
Now that he knows my name—” Now that he knows my name, my daughter might be in danger.
“Who cares about your name? He knows your identity. ”
I started to tell him I didn’t understand, but the old man took my hand and tugged me toward the tiles laid Lorna Tedder
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out on the floor. It was some sort of mosaic, life-size, with at least one person outlined, but most of the tiles were missing.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Depends on your point of view. It’s history. It’s treasure. But in the wrong hands, it’s a weapon.”
Chapter 6
I picked up one of the tiles and rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. My ears rang, almost hurt. The texture was smooth but with a strange push-back, like two magnets pushing away from the same polarity. I’d seen tiles like this before. My friend Catrina had tiles like this. But that wasn’t all. I’d owned tiles like this…a long time ago.
“They’re some type of fired paste,” I offered. “Maybe fourth century?”
“Very good. Gemstones of particular qualities. Sea-shells. Iron from meteorites. Atlantean dolphin stone—
or larimar—like from the Dominican Republic. Lava rock, like from Vesuvius.”
I nodded. “Elemental properties. Earth energies.” Just Lorna Tedder
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as historical texts told of ancient priests and priestesses who wore precious stones in their breastplates because of the power and representative qualities of the stones.
Then I had a darker thought. “Maybe they’re explosive?”
“Not exactly. They’re radiological electromagnetic energy fields. The ley lines activate them, make them sing with purpose. Some people can hear them or feel them as a tingling in their extremities. Some see auras over the tiles. Some
people see visions around them or hear sounds that resemble voices. It’s the way the energy stimulates the human brain, and each person is different. Most people sense nothing at all. I’ve been putting the mosaic together to see how much of the complete picture the boys have.”
“And how much do they have?”
“All but the best protected of the legacy collections of tiles. Your identity is tied to your legacy. See that corner? The wisps of hair and stars? The empty space below? The Adrianos knew the identity of the woman who inherited those tiles from her mother’s mother. Her name was Nanette. A beautiful girl from Poland who trusted the wrong man.” His eyes grew misty. “She died protecting those tiles.” His puckered mouth twisted to one side. “Simon’s father, Max Adriano. He killed her.
With his own hands. But he never recovered those tiles.”
I said nothing. Obviously this Nanette had meant something to him. I guessed I wasn’t the only one with a penchant for living in the past. I wanted to hear about the tiles, but time was ticking away. We needed to get moving before Simon came back and left me down a 102
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hole permanently with a raving lunatic who felt as vin-dictive toward Max Adriano as I did toward Caleb.
“And that corner there, with the elbow and bit of cloak. That legacy was easier to take, from what I’m told. She was a farmer’s daughter, widowed with five daughters of her own. Killed in 1802. Brigid. From Ireland’s County Clare. They killed her daughters, too, except for one who escaped and was never found, but none of them ever knew their birthright. Her descendants are still out there somewhere, but they have no idea of the legacy they lost. The same with this one over here that was taken in 1719—”
“Look,” I said, hurrying him along, “Simon will be back to check on me. If we’re leaving, we need to get out of here before he shows up. Now come on, old man. Let’s go.”
“Myrddin. You can call me Myrddin.” The Celtic name for Merlin of Arthurian legend. Obviously not his real name and a surprising pseudonym for an Italian, but a fitting alter ego.
I touched his elbow. “All right, Myrddin. Let’s go.”
“You lost your legacy, too, didn’t you, Aubrey? Tell me about your tiles.”
I stared at him. How did he know? “There’s nothing to tell.”
My mother had inherited the strange tiles from her mother with the understanding that they must always be passed on and protected by a daughter. A story went with the legacy, one that I would have been told on my eighteenth birthday when my family felt I was old Lorna Tedder
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enough to grasp the gravity of our history, something more than just my grandmother’s fairy tales. When my own mother died unexpectedly and I was only seventeen and a student at Oxford, the tiles had been hidden away in my flat beneath the false bottom of a locked trunk, along with my mother’s jewelry and my father’s journals. I didn’t think much about them in those days.
I was still reeling from Ma Ma’s death. Later, after Matthew rescued me from a near assassination, I never went back to my flat. My life had depended on it, he’d said. Trust me, he’d said. A friend had retrieved the trunk for me several months later, but it had been smashed and the tiles taken. My father’s journals and my mother’s jewelry had not been touched.
“Aubrey, are these yours?”
The old man knelt on the stone floor and turned over seven tiles of varying shapes and sizes, then placed them one by one in their proper place in the mosaic. All I could do was nod as the tiles took shape as a baby’s face and small, chubby body. A cherub-faced lap-child beamed back at me from the floor as it almost had years ago. I’d seen the tiles before, minus the small ones with blue stone eyes in a pinkish setting. Maybe that’s why I’d never liked the tiles—the eyeless baby had given me chills. But now, seeing the child’s body and face, seeing it whole, seeing those larimar-stone eyes drew me in.
Larimar, reputed to be a stone used for healing, to the point of dredging up pain to be released.
A whimper escaped from my throat. Memories from all those years ago flooded back. The fresh sense of grief 104
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from my mother’s death. The difficulty fitting in at the university. Strange and loud men following me, invading the seminar taught in London. The terror of a masked gunman promising to kill me if I moved.
Matthew. Matthew rescuing me, Matthew loving me, Matthew disappearing forever. And years later, me telling my aunt in a discreet phone call to tell Lilah I was dead, that it was best that way. All those painful turning points flashed through me with the heat of lightning, both illuminating and burning.
I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them. I didn’t have time for sentiment. Not now. If ever. “Yes!” I blurted out. “They’re mine. The tiles are mine.”
Myrddin nodded as if he’d won. “The tiles weren’t the only baby you lost, were they?”
I held my breath. You can poke at a wound only so long before it bleeds again. Especially if it never healed.
The old man studied me carefully. “You weren’t pregnant when you left the country, were you? You’d lost the baby. That’s what Simon was told.” He squinted.
“Or did you?”
“H-how do you know these things?”
“Simon and I were on speaking terms then. I knew everything.” He jabbed a finger at my stomach. “Was that what Matthew was protecting? His own little legacy with you?”
I shook my head and backed away—straight into the wall. He didn’t know about Lilah. Not Max, not Simon and certainly not Caleb. I’d kept her hidden as Matthew had made me promise to do. Myrddin seemed to know Lorna Tedder
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everything about me except when it came to Lilah. And if Simon and the Adrianos knew as much about me as I feared, how soon before they learned about Lilah? I hadn’t seen my baby in years, but perhaps that’s what had kept her safe. She was the only real legacy I believed in.
“Myrddin, we need to go. We need—”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Apparently there’s a lot I don’t know. But there’s no time.” Simon would be back soon. He’d said two hours, but Simon had a habit of showing up unexpectedly and changing timelines to suit himself—and throw others off-kilter.
“You don’t know about Matthew. The boy-soldier who saved your life and seduced you.”
“He didn’t seduce me,” I fired back without thinking.
I had been the one to seduce him. He’d been all about honor and integrity, but I’d slipped into his bed and rubbed my body against his until he’d relented. I’d been barely eighteen, and he’d been a little older and sweet, and I’d been so lost and so hurt and so scared.
“You still don’t know what happened to him.”
My jaw worked but nothing came out. Finally I said,
“He never showed at our rendezvous point. He vanished from the face of the earth. He…” I hung my head. I wanted to believe that Matthew was still out there, but my Matthew certainly would have found his way back to me by now. “No, I don’t know what happened to him.”
Myrddin’s mouth snatched to one side in an awkward smile. “Still love the boy, don’t you? Isn’t that odd how the ones you lose end up perfectly preserved by time?
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If you’d had a full life with him, you may have discovered his flaws. And he certainly would have found yours.
He might have been just another notch on your lipstick case if your passions had been allowed to play out—”
“Stop it.”
“Or you might have married and divorced bitterly a dozen years later when he left you for a younger woman. Maybe that would have been better for you, child. At least you might have resurrected yourself after that kind of tragedy.”
“Stop!”
“Or maybe it would have been a lasting love. With its rifts and joys, yes, but lasting. In any case, you can never know what future might have been waitin
g for you so you choose instead to honor him by burying yourself with his memory. Is that why you’ve never settled down with another man? You’ve had plenty of opportunities.”
I said nothing. I felt sick. I didn’t want to hear the truth and yet I did, just as it’s impossible to look away from a tragic accident when you drive past on the freeway and you want not to look but the flashing lights and sirens and sheer force of life and death around you pulls your attention to the thing you most hate to see. If Matthew was dead, I didn’t want to know. And yet I had to know once and for all the thing that I felt deep and cold in my bones.
“They traced the tiles to your grandmother,” Myrddin said, and I was relieved that he was changing the subject. “There was a family crest drawn in the margin of an old book that Max had lost as a young man. He Lorna Tedder
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used it to find women like you. Aubrey?” He leaned closer. “That book was the artifact Simon sent you to get. So that he could find the women his father missed.
And you brought it back to him, didn’t you?”
After a few seconds, I remembered to close my mouth. The family crests in the margins. The notes.
They were a treasure map to his victims’ genealogy. I’d just delivered and authenticated a murder plan.
“But by the time he found your family, your grandmother had already died of a fever. Max and Simon had nothing to do with that.”
“How reassuring,” I growled, anger and grief rising in my cheeks. “Come on, old man. Let’s get out of here.”
Myrddin tossed aside a piece of embroidery and selected one of the thinner tapestries and rolled it out on the floor beside the tiles. Quickly he began stacking the tiles in the center of the tapestry.
“What are you doing?” I sniffed twice and wiped discreetly at my eyes. I didn’t have time for emotion right now, not if I was going to survive the night.
“We’re taking these with us.”
“What if we break them?”
“It’s more important that Simon doesn’t have them, even if they’re dust. As long as he has them, your life will be full of storms.”