Madonna Key 03 - Dark Revelations

by Lorna Tedder

  I listened to every word. I had the feeling he didn’t divulge his inner world very often.

  “I was working a security detail for Josh. He and Pauline had had a big argument and she told him not to come home. He spent the night at my house to cool off.

  The Adrianos are routinely targets for kidnapping and assassinations. An assassin—he’s dead now—went after Josh and thought my home…my family’s home…was one of Josh’s getaways. Caleb’s usually the one with getaways, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that my home—and everyone in it—was blown to nothingness in an explosion. Josh and I weren’t even there.”

  “Oh, Eric.” I tried to hug him, but he pushed me aside. “Eric, I’m sorry.”

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  “Sorry won’t bring them back. Nothing will. For a long time, I didn’t care if I lived or died. I had nothing left. Myrddin was the one who got through to me. That’s when I started working for him. And my life started to mean something again. I can’t change the way Simon is. Or Caleb. Josh, I don’t know. Maybe there’s hope for him. But maybe with the next generation. I decided I couldn’t change the past but I could change the future.

  I could have a positive impact on that child. I’m hoping for something better with Benny, that maybe I can have an influence on him.”

  My throat ached. I could watch my daughter from afar. Eric couldn’t. I’d spent all my years mourning a life that had been promised to me but never happened.

  My lover was gone. My daughter was lost to me. But at least she was still alive. As long as she was alive…as long as I was alive…

  “As long as I’m alive, there’s hope,” I murmured.

  “Aubrey? I don’t want you just to be alive. I want you to live.”

  Chapter 12

  I woke with a start, and it took a few seconds for me to realize where I was. I lifted my cheek from Eric’s bare chest. The hair on my temple was damp from the heat.

  I blinked up at him. He was still asleep.

  Somehow I must have fallen asleep, too. That in itself was unusual. The last time I’d awakened in the arms of a lover, I’d been eighteen and that man had been Matthew.

  But Eric wasn’t my lover.

  No, waking with Matthew was not the last time I’d awakened in the arms of a lover but the last time I’d awakened in the arms of a man. Any man. I’d never let anyone get that close to me again.

  Until now. Since Matthew, I’d never allowed a physical surrender to become an emotional one. My Lorna Tedder

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  bond with Eric had never made it over the threshold of the sexual. This was different. Somewhere in the night, I’d been lulled into an emotional surrender. Or maybe I was so weary that I didn’t care anymore. I’d been battling for much too long, not just the Adrianos and the rest of the world but my own heart, as well.

  Eric slept. His face was peaceful, and I found myself jealous. He’d dealt with his losses far better than I had, turned them into something positive and honorable, into a reason to live. He’d found a way to transcend the Adriano madness, both by helping the women they were trying to destroy and by protecting and nurturing their future leader.

  One day, Benedict Adriano might become the good man the rest of the planet thought the Adrianos were.

  Nothing could have shocked Eric Cabordes out of his complacency or changed the path of his life except for a drastic plunge into tragedy. Had his wife and daughters lived, he would never have gotten so close to the throne of the Adrianos. Myrddin most likely would have died in the vault. Benny would have fallen to his death from the towers in a dangerous game of hide-and-seek with his uncle Caleb. The Adrianos would have tracked me and recaptured me already. Simon would have had the incunable, a ready-made directory to the families of others of “my kind” who had for centuries been his sworn enemies.

  Yet, in spite of Eric’s resignation to destiny and all he’d done to change the world, I was certain that, given a choice between his heroics and a normal, ordinary life as a husband and father, he would not have embraced 210

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  this future but would instead have embraced those he loved. How could anyone human willingly give up everything they loved for this kind of life?

  I gently lifted off Eric. My skin was still damp in the valley between my breasts and down between my legs where our heat had merged, if not our bodies. I was careful not to wake him. The storm still raged outside.

  I retraced my steps to the bathroom, freshened myself, then tugged on yesterday’s clothes with the exception of the boots. Then I checked on Benny. He was still asleep. He hadn’t moved. The kitten, however, had shifted from under his chin to the nape of his neck.

  Next to Benny’s bed, I lowered myself to the floor, taking great care to keep my right leg as straight as possible. After all the activity and pressure on my knee the day before, it was sorer than usual and dispropor-tionately swollen. I cringed at the crackling sound it made every time I bent it. I rubbed a slow circle around it with my palm. Whether it was the warmth of my skin or the pressure of my touch that made it feel better, I wasn’t sure.

  The tiles under Benny’s bed rang louder than before in my ears. I could barely hear anything for the sound of them, even the wind and rain outside. I shook my head, but nothing stopped it. The ringing was overpow-ering. I felt a little sick to my stomach.

  What exactly were those stones made of? Krypton-ite?

  Their presence was overwhelming. They felt the way I imagined an anxiety attack might feel. Heart palpita-Lorna Tedder

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  tions. Edginess. Nervousness. An overwhelming sense of doom. The strong sense that I was about to jump out of my skin. I couldn’t stand being so close. The only time I’d ever felt this way before was the last week of that six-week workshop that had ended in me being smack-dab in the middle of a museum heist without meaning to be.

  I retrieved the briefcase containing the manuscript from next to the tiles and then ambled back to Eric’s room so I wouldn’t have to listen to the constant drone.

  I situated myself on the floor in the corner of the room by a table lamp, my back against the wall so I could see all the entrances around me. I opened the stereolithographic case exactly as Simon had shown me.

  With trembling fingers, I extracted the incunable.

  No doubt, it had touched many lives since the 1430s, mine among them. I turned the pages gingerly and began to translate the tiny script, vaguely aware of the passing hours.

  Jeanne has worn a ring, according to the manuscript.

  A special ring. One passed down to her from her mother.

  One of two rings, each resembling a blue eye on a pink face. Isabelle, the twin, had put hers away and had never worn it because she’d become ill on every occasion she’d held the ring.

  Jeanne had worn hers, though. Throughout her trial and tribulations, she’d worn her ring, up until near the end of her life. While away in battle, she’d looked at it often because it reminded her of her parents, particularly of her mother, with whom she must have been close. An Adriano 212

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  who had been part of her inquisition had take the ring from her, leaving her with a bloody knuckle. After that, the voices and visions—the ones she’d heard and seen since she’d first worn the ring on her twelfth birthday, those voices and visions of the Archangel Micha-El—had vanished, and she’d thought she’d been forsaken.

  Two eyes, I thought. Two blue eyes.

  Leaving the manuscript wrapped and carefully set aside, I scrambled back into Benny’s room. My knee clicked as I crouched on the floor by his bed and pulled back the tapestry. I fumbled through the tiles, hands trembling, until I located two of the tiniest tiles, each one a small blue eye against a background of pink rock.

  They were square and no bigger than my thumbnail. The perfect fit for a ring.

  I pulled out several other tiles, ones I remembered from my own childhood…the baby’s fa
ce…and pressed the tiny blue eyes into a perfect fit. My breath came out in ragged gasps. The missing bits of my heritage were falling together now, faster than I could absorb them.

  Joan of Arc and her sister had been two of my kind.

  The sister must’ve been my ancestor. My grandmother had said we were descended from the womb of Joan of Arc, but now I understood. Not the womb inside Jeanne but the womb that had held her and her twin sister.

  Isabelle had never worn her ring because it had made her ill, just as these tiles made me ill. And if old Max Adriano had read this manuscript and known that, then he would have known how to pick me out of a crowd of other Joan of Arc scholars. All he had to do Lorna Tedder

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  was narrow down the number of potential candidates for Aubergine de Lune through our interests and expertise in medieval literature and then lure us to Europe. From there, all he had to do was get close enough to each candidate—or have someone else do his dirty work—with the tiles in his pocket and watch for a reaction.

  I’d had the same reaction to the blue-eyed tiles as Isabelle had. They’d affected Jeanne differently. Not just visions, but visions and sound that she’d interpreted as St. Catherine, St. Margaret and Archangel Micha-El telling her to go forth and crown a king and save her people. They’d hidden the remainder of the tiles, the child’s face and body, burying them at the church along with a sword that Jeanne would later carry into battle.

  According to the incunable, generations of priestesses of the Great Mother had preceded the twins.

  Jeanne had interpreted the Great Mother as Mother Mary when she’d been told of her legacy on her twelfth birthday. She must have found the stories of warrior priestesses inspiring. Perhaps that’s why she was so quick to go into battle for God when such a mission was usually reserved for grown men, not feisty teen girls.

  Such priestesses and warrior women had existed from the very beginning of oral history, according to Isabelle’s scribbling. Many had come from other races, other cultures, with even one mention of the priestess Dageniam and the Nolalaln priestesses of a country beyond the wide sea, a land Plato had referenced in his writings, a place Isabelle knew only as Atlantis. There 214

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  had always been—and maybe there always would be—

  women dedicated to mothering the entire human race.

  I placed the two small tiles in my left palm and stared at them. My ears rang fiercely, and my eyes, so close to the created stone ones, twitched and blurred. My stomach flip-flopped. I closed my palm over the tiles, but it did nothing to lessen the effect. My skin seemed to crawl with electricity, energy, some of which felt sexual but only in that life-force sort of way that per-petuates our species. Whatever this radiological electromagnetic energy was all about, the way it affected me and apparently some of my ancestors was through the auditory nerve and, to some degree, visually. Not to the extent of seeing archangels, fortunately.

  The blue of the stone seemed both ice-cold and burning in my hand, yet I could not put it down. I pressed it hard against my chest and held it there. It didn’t hurt exactly. It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t pleasure, either. But it was intense…so intense…I could barely breathe!

  I held it over my heart. I couldn’t move my hand. I knew a lot about stones, about their reputed physical and metaphysical properties. Characteristics of stones in the breastplates of ancient priestesses were recorded in many languages. Fascinating lore, but I was more of the scientific sort myself. What New Agers like Scarlet felt as “vibes” were really more likely to be geological frequencies or geopathic stress, similar to the upsetting pitch of elemental energies Eric had told me about earlier in the day when he had explained radiological electromagnetic energy fields. Even the woo-woo factor Lorna Tedder

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  could be explained by science, just as refracted sunlight on atmospheric particles made the moon appear to have turned to blood in ancient times.

  The blue stone with its waves of light and dark blue, almost like swells of the ocean or waves of clouds, was larimar, what some called the Dolphin Stone or the Atlantean Stone. Geologists and jewelers who aren’t familiar with the legends refer to it as blue pectolite.

  Some texts say it comes from Atlantis, but the one place it’s been found naturally in modern times is the Dominican Republic, where it’s formed by an unusual combination of hot gases, crystallized minerals, volcanic heat and the sea. All four elements merged in one stone. Was that why it was supposedly so powerful? It was revered as a healing stone, one that, when touched, would sear like ice. And upon feeling that strange sensation, the re-cipient would know that the stone was actually healing rather than harming.

  The pinkish-colored stone around it with tiny flecks of gray was most likely kunzite. The stone had been discovered in the early 1900s in California, but it had been found more recently in Afghanistan, Madagascar and Brazil. This stone was a bit pinker than the violet-hued kunzite I’d seen in museums and private collections. It, too, was said to be a healing stone, one that was particularly good for creating an active mind and yet releasing any worry. It was said to give its wearer a sense of serenity and peace of mind in the midst of trouble. Certainly that would have been handy for Joan of Arc on the battlefield.

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  The icy burning in my hand and chest faded. I pulled back my hand and opened my palm to look at the tiles.

  My ears still rang, but not as badly. It’s said that the sensation of burning stops when the healing is done, but I had never believed it. I didn’t feel any different, except that the ringing in my ears had all but stopped.

  I could hear again. Benny’s soft breathing. The kitten’s purring. I could hear—I could hear!

  The storm. The storm had stopped.

  Chapter 13

  My senses lit up and magnified exponentially. Everything around me was alive. The wooden chest with a lamp on top, the Madonna trivet beside it, the wall, the air itself.

  Everything was alive and connected. And I felt it all!

  I pulled back the curtain in the corner of Benny’s window. Nothing outside but darkness. No lights anywhere, but this room faced away from the monastery’s entrance, so the lack of lights outside meant nothing.

  Pocketing the room key, I tiptoed out into the corridor. When I was certain I was alone, I closed the door behind me. Holding my breath, letting it escape just a little at a time, I crept the length of the corridor and back to the reception area. The monastery was so quiet now that I could almost hear it holding its breath, 218

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  too. The only sound was the slight thud of my bare feet on the stone.

  Nothing moved. Nothing. Nothing but me.

  The reception area was dark, but I knew something was wrong. I’m not psychic, but I’ve been in the business long enough to have a sixth sense about these things, and something about all that electromagnetic energy sizzling on my skin amplified every sense. My eyes adjusted to the light in the room. I could see the austere sofas in the sitting room and the desk where the innkeeper’s son had urged me to enjoy my “husband”

  rather than keep him awake any longer with my nervous pacing. He’d left the emergency halogen lantern there.

  I made a mental note of it.

  I glanced above the fireplace at the wall of weapons.

  None of them would hold up against a gun. Their presence reiterated how each successive era of military technology had rendered the previous generation’s state-of-the-art weapons useless. The broadsword would be too heavy, I decided quickly. Almost as heavy as Benny. Even though I could wield the blade in a pinch, I still had the disadvantage of an opponent who might be twice my size. I really didn’t know what was out there. Or who. Or how many.

  I skulked back to the window and peered out as discreetly as possible. Everything outside was still, uncannily still. Security lights outside blinked off, one by one by one.

  They were here. My
senses screamed it. They’d found us. Could I make it back to the room in time to alert Eric?

  Or was it better to dispatch them myself and buy Eric some time to hide the artifacts and escape with Benny?

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  A light in the corridor blinked off, and I was left in total darkness. Night-vision goggles. That’s what they were using. They were trying to put me at the disadvantage of being in the dark while they could see me in a sickly, shimmering green. I’d initially experimented with NVGs when I’d first become affiliated with the Adrianos, back when I was still being trained to be the drone of one of their acquisition specialists, before I even knew who the Adrianos were.

  Yeah. Back when I’d thought they were so nice to give me work and a new life. What a gullible fool I’d been!

  The memory came back like a bolt of lightning. The electromagnetic energy from the tiles had a way of mag-nifying not just my senses but my memory, as well.

  Without wanting to be, I was suddenly back there again, ten years ago, the third turning point in my life.

  I’d been set up, caught red-handed with a museum artifact in my hand that I didn’t know was an artifact.

  I’d been so naive, so willing to help a stranger who’d asked me to hold his backpack while he chased down his runaway toddler outside a museum. Then I’d been in trouble, deep trouble, and the police officials who’d tried to arrest me hadn’t believed me. They’d told me I’d rot in jail for the rest of my life. They’d found drugs in the backpack, too. They’d asked too many questions about whether I had any children or a husband, and their insistence had raised my fears, all the way back to Matthew telling me I wasn’t safe and that the police could be bought. I’d refused to give them my name or my passport. One of the men struck me across the cheek.

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  I’d known then that the situation would not get better and I’d decided then to run.

  I shook off the memory and pressed my back against the wall of the reception area as I listened for footfalls.