Searching for the Kingdom Key

by TylerRose.

  “Why can’t we just use Olympus? It’s still there. Vesuvius isn’t going to be going off again anytime soon. That was an accident in the first place,” Krotos said.

  “The humans are too nosy,” Thor replied, caught up on the conversation. “There are too many people around Vesuvius for us to take up residence again. And I’m not about to move back to the Norselands. The cold was miserable and I hate fish.”

  “Yes, because it’s about what you want,” Carius shot at him.

  “I’m the one expected to take her all the way to final evolution. That gives me a say in the matter,” Thor shot back.

  “Enough,” Odin said, halting the discord with that single word.

  “The proper space for her seclusion isn’t ready yet. She’s not created it,” Morpheus put in matter-of-factly. “The Immaculate has to create her own place of chrysalis. You know that.”

  “This is going to be much more difficult than any of us thought it was going to be,” Carius said. “If she’s proving this difficult this early on, we’re in for quite the war of wills. Maybe we should let Earnol have her. Let him be the bad guy that has to deal with the brunt of her temper and be her enemy instead of us. That would give her a focus for her anger, a focus away from us. We would still be her friends and lovers when she finally comes to us of her own accord.”

  “We may have to,” Odin conceded. “I’ll think on it. Meanwhile, you all go about your lives. I’ll call if there are any developments.”

  He said his goodbyes and went to the office to get some work done…and made a very long distance phone call to a space station to introduce himself and propose a truce.

  “I will expect you at the usual time tomorrow,” he said when he called Tyler Tuesday evening.

  “I’ll be there.”

  And she was. He took her directly to bed.

  “Did last weekend frighten you?” he asked during their first rest.

  “No. I knew you weren’t going to hurt me. It was just a lot of fucking and I got very sore. Is that what I can expect anytime I get laid the night before I’m to be with you?”

  “Yes.”

  She grinned. “Oh goodie! I like the idea of being bad and getting fucked by four men for it whenever I want it. Ya’ll need to learn how to share more closely so I can get a good, long double-penetration going. It’s been too long.”

  He laughed aloud. She really was a hard nut, even at this young age. With a sharp spank to her ass, he sent her to dress for their day out.

  In the morning, she woke with another of those headaches. Pain so bad she was over the toilet with dry heaves for several minutes and was in tears for hours before it finally passed. Drained, exhausted and weak, she curled up in the bedroom he’d given her. She didn’t move for half the day. She kept the room dark lest the pain return through sensitivity to light. He worried more than he wanted to admit.

  “You may as well stay over now,” he said when he came to check on her and found her better and wanting to eat. “There’s no sense in you going all the way back to the apartment just to come back here in the morning.”

  Stay she did, with no further headaches, and went home Sunday night. Tuesday she had another. Then again on Thursday.

  “Why don’t you go see my friend at the sleep study clinic,” he suggested, and had an appointment made for her.

  She went to the place. She tolerated the dozens of sensors placed all over her head and body. She couldn’t sleep for more than a few minutes at a time, however, and there was no indication of a headache coming on.

  “We’ll need further studies to come to any conclusions,” the doctor said, and sent her on her way with another appointment the following week.

  Soon as she was gone, he called Odin.

  “You were right. She’s getting very close. It’s August now. I’d say by the end of the year. No later.”

  “Thank you, Helios. You know she won’t keep that appointment next week.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s fine. You won’t learn anything more anyway.”

  Helios took off the white coat he’d stolen from a locker and teleported back to the planet Sistair in Gamma Quadrant, to the Doyen Confederacy.

  Tyler showed up for lunch as expected and everything was fine. They enjoyed their day as usual. She had a restless night, however, with vivid, intense dream visions so real she may as well have been awake.

  Colors and swirls of faces and voices. Several voices morphing as colors and shapes into several faces. She saw Alen in the chaos. They were walking on the beach and another man talked to him after she left. Then explosions and half the United States of America was in ruins, a man flying around on a silver-blue bolt of lightning that came from his hands.

  More faces, men she did not know. Some from other worlds. She was on those other worlds. An old Chinese face and she was a child learning to fight. Nails telling her to come home to him. Jerome and the electricity that sparked between them whenever they touched. Over and over, jolting her harder and harder until she felt it in the air around her.

  She jerked awake in the dark with the name Julian blurting out of her mouth.

  “Who is Julian?” he asked when she was fully conscious.

  “I don’t know any Julian,” she said, and lay back on the pillow.

  Heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, she couldn’t sleep anytime soon. She got up to take a drive through the hills and back to clear her head and he let her think he was still asleep.

  “Where’d you go?” he asked when she spooned backwards into him around four in the morning.

  “I came back here, so…nowhere.”

  “I’m going on a business trip day after tomorrow and I can’t take you. So you’ll have all of next week to yourself. I’ll call when I’m back.”

  “Why can’t you take me?” she asked.

  “Because I’m staying in Japan at the house of the man I’m negotiating with. He would love you immensely, but his wife would not approve of our arrangement.”

  “I don’t know why. Isn’t Geisha still a thing?”

  “Yes, but you are nowhere near being a Geisha, love. That takes years of study and practice in a great many things. You study nothing.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “It takes dedication to the craft. Geisha means artist, not dance partner and bed warmer.”

  She got up and reached for her clothes.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To warm my own bed, if I mean so little that you can so easily throw insults at me,” she replied, pulling on her pants.

  “How is it an insult, Tyler? You said yourself you’re tired of study,” he chuckled.

  “And you laugh at me at the same time. Fine. Fuck off, asshole.”

  She walked out with her shoes dangling from her fingers, still pulling her shirt down her waist. Thomas didn’t follow her, knowing her anger would send her much farther toward the ultimate goal than his appeasement would. She was in her car, heading down the driveway and he watched her from his window.

  Head swimming with that same chaos from her dream visions, she drove down the hill. Finding herself on a familiar street, she turned and ended up at the Immaculate Heart of Mary church. The doors were not locked. Lights were dim but lit the interior enough for her to not bump into anything on her way to the candle niche.

  She put three twenties into the donation box and set about lighting every single candle, starting at the top left corner and going down. Then going up the next row and then down. Fast as she could at first, breathing too unevenly. As she reached the first third row, her breaths slowed and evened out. A calm began to settle into her body and the colors and chaos faded.

  The niche became warm, dozens of tiny flames creating a heat that reached through her skin to warm her soul. The chaos began to quiet, as if the glow of the candles was creating a force field around her to keep it out.

  She continued until every candle was lit. Fifteen rows of fifteen candles, she leaned on the edge and breathed in the
warm air, breathing in the good energy and exhaling the bad. Exhausted, she lowered to her knees and rest her forehead on her arms on the bar before the angled panel of flames.

  She felt him walk across the width of the church, felt him arrive at the opening of the niche. Not Reverend Peter, but he knew Reverend Peter. She could feel that he knew she was aware of him. He sat on the end of that bench outside the niche, sitting sideways so that he could see her and at the same time he prevented anyone else from going inside. If there’d been anyone else in the church.

  “I don’t need anything,” she said.

  “I’m here for when you do,” he replied in a tone of voice she’d been hearing in her dream visions. “There will be a moment when you will very desperately need my help.”

  She let it go, a hand waving over the top of a candle to more directly feel the heat of the flame. Her skin became hot, but she did not know the sensation of burning.

  Julian watched without watching as she played with her longtime friend, fire. She had fire in her soul. He could feel that easily enough. Eventually she would be fire itself, but not yet. Her first progression would be lesser abilities of telepathy and a more complete remote viewing. Maybe a few other smaller things. He was prepared, this first contact to familiarize her with him and get her to be comfortable with his presence. Nothing more.

  Now that Odin had finally realized he wasn’t qualified for this part of the job, Julian could take his proper place. Each of them had to play their own role. Trying to take someone else’s job would be disastrous.

  With a sudden gasping sob, her energies spiked. Her hands went to her head to grip tight as the pain thrust forth.

  “This isn’t normal,” she said.

  “Not for anyone else,” he agreed. “For you, it is precisely on time.”

  “Why?”

  “That is the difficult part, isn’t it? Knowing how much I should answer and what I should let you discover for yourself.”

  “Tell me, dammit,” she snarled in a tone that made him smile.

  “You have always had a level of telepathic ability, haven’t you? You see the spirits around you sometimes. You hear them and they hear you. You sometimes know when things are going to happen. You always know who is calling on the phone. You knew when your mother’s husband was home. When he was in a violent mood. And you knew when it was safe to go in.”

  “How do you know about that?” she asked, turning on her knees to look over her shoulder.

  “I’ve been watching you for a long time, Tyler, waiting for my moment to make myself known. You’re not the only one who has gone through this. There have been four others before you, of your generation. You’ve met one of them. Alen was making contact to find out how close you were getting to your first Widening.”

  “Widening? What’s that mean?” she asked, sitting on her bottom against the wall near the candles.

  “Widening the Breach is what we call it. Widening the space between what you were and what you will become. Most only do it once. As you’re discovering, it’s a painful process. I am sorry for that but there’s nothing to be done but let it happen.”

  “I don’t want it to happen. Make it stop.”

  “I don’t blame you. I would if I could, but I cannot until it’s in full roar. My job is to help you when you get to that point, to bring you back from that brink. I am your Adjutant.”

  “Adjutant?”

  “Basically, it means helper. Everyone who goes through this has a specific person to help when the process is at its most dangerous,” he told her. “I have helped numerous others. Now it’s time for me to be around to help you.”

  She was silent, turning it all over in her head. “There’s no such thing as telepaths.”

  “Human telepaths are indeed very rare. But you’re not human, Tyler. Not fully human. You’re 75% Sistarian.”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Sistair is a planet in Gamma quadrant. A very long time ago, a group of colonists came here to Earth. They ended up breeding with the humans. Most of the people who have telepathic abilities have some amount of Sistarian DNA.”

  She was on her feet, walking out of the niche.

  “You’re full of shit.”

  He let her go. She wasn’t ready to believe the truth, wasn’t ready to go into her first evolution. Headaches there would be, with increasing telepathic awareness; but the Widening itself was a ways off yet. With a wave of his hand, he extinguished all the candles and teleported back to the space station.

  Earnol was waiting for him with a drink. “Well?”

  Julian sat in the chair in the living room of his father’s apartment, oddly drained by the brief meeting.

  “Not yet. Weeks away, still. She’s smart, and very distrustful and hostile. Defensive mechanisms piled on defensive mechanisms and they will prevent her opening her mind. We shall have to wait her out.”

  “They didn’t ruin her, did they? Clumsy clods that they are.”

  “No, Father.”

  “You will bring her along as quickly as can be managed without damaging her; but she must not know the truth of her existence. Not ever. If she realizes her purpose, the galaxy as we know it will cease to exist.”

  “It might not be that dire,” Julian said.

  “It will be. I can see it. Millions of people will die on the spot. Maybe billions. She must not evolve beyond this first Widening. She cannot be on Earth after the end of the current year either. You have to convince her to come off planet so I can get her out of the way. We must prevent her meeting again with the man the Tao call Tiberius.”

  “That’s not necessary, Father.”

  “It absolutely is. If you do anything other than what I tell you to tell her, I’ll send you to the other side of the galaxy and let her burn herself out.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you,” Julian accused. “Is that what this is going to come down to? Those who want her to fulfill her ultimate potential and those who don’t?”

  “It’s always been that, Julian. The might of the Dautan versus the total insubordination of the Tao. Our two factions have been opposed on the issue of the Immaculate since the Tao first decided to go to Earth and make ready for her coming and the government of Sistair forbade them. That’s why they hide from us. They don’t recognize the foolishness and the damage that will be done. They never have.”

  “The Dautan is you. Only you now that everyone else who was alive then has died. It was you, and the Council you ruled, against your father and everyone else who knows she must fulfill her purpose.”

  “There are other people and other things you don’t know about. You were brought here from Sistair to see her through her first Widening. I am charging you with making sure it’s her only Widening. Do it or I will be forced to act in ways not normally seen as fatherly. You can see yourself out.”

  He went into his bedroom to retire for the night.

  Julian put the drink down, having not sipped from the glass. Glaring at the closed door, he found himself in need of solace, and returned to the Doyen Confederacy to sit in the garden. A few minutes enjoying the peace and his friend and mentor Vaughn appeared next to the bench.

  “Your trip was brief,” Vaughn said.

  Julian said nothing, glowering at the fountain. Tyler found her relief in fire. He found his in water.

  “And deeply troubling,” Vaughn continued. “AASTT business?”

  “My father’s business. He wants me to break the Confederacy’s creed and prevent a minor Doyen from becoming the Eminent I know she is to be. And possibly…”

  He stopped.

  “I already know about the Immaculate, Julian. Your father has told us to stay away from Earth entirely, to not offer assistance to any telepaths coming from it. I think he wants her dead.”

  “Probably. But even he cannot do that without risking himself and his position. He is going to put her out of the way and wants me to stall out her development after her first Widening. How can I do that
without endangering my position here? The role of Adjutant and the relationship with an emerging Doyen is sacred.”

  “Sacred to us. Not to everyone,” Vaughn sighed, playing his part. “You can appear to do what he wants by delaying action. Her first Widening is fast approaching?”

  “Very fast. She can be counted in weeks at this point. She absolutely detests being manipulated. Everything has to be completely upfront or completely hush hush. Gods forgive and help us if she finds out all the scheming going on around her. She’s very perceptive, far too jaded for an eighteen year old girl. She’s already full of anger.”

  “Then you be her friend. Let her be who she is and try never to have harsh words with her or for her. Earnol will have plenty of both, I’m sure.”

  “Oh yes. This one is not going to be a lamb like the other Earth telepaths,” Julian chuckled. “She will not be led. He won’t listen to me, of course.”

  “Of course. If there’s one thing your father is consistent about, it’s being the biggest bully in the room. Her second Widening will not happen for a long time. Centuries. You can appease your father by telling him you’ll stall her out when it’s actually happening. He knows very well you cannot do anything before then, however much he grumbles. It might be five hundred years before you actually have to do anything. He might die of old age before she has her second Widening. You are still young enough. Ride it out. You can afford to bide your time. He’s the old one with everything to lose. Let’s wait and see what happens.”

  “I can do that,” Julian agreed.

  “Since I’m Chancellor of the Doyen Confederacy, you’re doing it with my own personal approval. We’re working together on a private cause to help someone who has very dangerous enemies. We will do so quietly and speak to no one about her. No one else needs to know we’re working together on this or what ‘this’ is. Neither of us will know who the other has employed to help, so there will be no trail to follow.”

  “Agreed. My father would hit the roof. He’s already threatening me to ensure my cooperation.”