It was rush hour in London, but then … it’s always a bit of rush here, isn’t it?
My burrito was meaty deliciousness, a feast for a starving girl. Carson had given me the money for the meal, and in return, I was going to pick up something for both him and Heidi. But on my way back.
Because for now … I cherished the silence, the sweet enjoyment of victory—glory, really—in a crowd of all my admirers.
Yeah, it was pretty quiet up there alone, but hey, I liked it. Fame doesn’t come in a day, after all.
“Why aren’t you celebrating with your new friends?” The voice was playful, and cool, and with a hint of sweetness.
I turned to find the man who’d passed me in the underground just before I’d met Carson. He was smiling, his jaw the very definition of a lantern, blond hair swept back nicely. There was no denying he was fit, as the girls at school used to say, and I tried to keep my jaw from unhinging downward to land in my burrito.
“You,” I said, gawping. “You warned me about those Order of Apdau fellows, didn’t you? I didn’t even catch it at the time.”
“I tried,” he said, sidling over. “You were … thinking about other things, I’m sure.” He nodded at my belt, where Decidian’s Spear hung. “Your newly acquired toy. Glories yet to come.” He grinned wide. “Or that have come, now. I heard you landed the Chalice. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” I said, a little more guarded that I might have been otherwise. This mystery man had come out of nowhere, after all. “And you are?”
He stepped over and extended a hand, gingerly. “Clayton Price, at your service.”
I regarded him with the care I might give a snake about to bite. A very handsome snake. Gorgeous, almost. “And why are you following me about, Clayton Price?”
He got a very shy look on his face just then. “Just trying to offer a little bit of help. Warn you about the Order before they came your way, that sort of thing.”
I stared at him. “You could have done a better job of it. I wasn’t exactly left with the impression I was about to be chased by crazy men with knives from the little you said, now, was I?”
He almost laughed. “I’ll try to do better in the future.”
I started to say something else, but stopped myself, catching the inference there. “The future? Does that mean—what, I’m going to hear from you again?”
He bowed, blond locks swishing forward as he did so, making a slow retreat toward the stairs again. “If you keep this up, Mira Brand? I can pretty well guarantee it.”
And then he was gone.
34
Back in my hideaway just off the Strand, Carson and I sat together in one of the side rooms, filled out with plush chairs and beautifully stained surfaces. An endless stretch of maps adorned the walls, looking like no place I had ever seen, all hand-painted in black against deep crimson.
One bulb illuminated us from the ceiling. Somehow, without instruction, it seemed to detect the late hour; it was much softer than the ones in the library when Carson and I first stepped in here. Like candlelight, almost.
Reclined in an overstuffed chair, I admired the Chalice Gloria. Its jeweled surface winked back at me.
“All of that, for this,” I mused in a whisper.
From the chair opposite, Carson asked, “Was it worth it?”
I chose my words carefully.
“I wanted to show my parents that …” I paused, changed tack. “My dad did well in this work, obviously—I mean, you’ve heard people saying …”
“Your famous name.”
I nodded. “But really it’s my—my older brother.” Anger flashed across me, a dark flush of it. Not at him—but at them.
“He’s the heir,” I spat, “and I’m the spare. That’s how it always was. The chosen one. Nothing he ever did was wrong, and nothing I ever did was right.”
Carson asked, “What’s his name?”
“Emmanuel.” And now, like when Carson started his panicked babbling, and much the same as when Borrick’s irritation and self-pity was unbottled, I couldn’t stop myself. “The day he finished sixth form, he was off, with my dad’s blessing. Started making a name for himself in months—another famous Brand.” The words were venomous, sarcastic. “But then when I came close, when I wanted to follow him, they said, ‘Mira, you can’t follow your brother. You’re meant to go to university, see? You’re not supposed to be a Seeker!’”
I shook my head. The words still stung. So did the looks on their faces, falsely kind, like they were talking to a girl steeped in fantastical delusions that needed to be broken.
“It’s all I ever wanted though. To be a Seeker. Ever since I was a kid. And they never—not once—supported me, told me that I could do it, that they believed in me. Not once.” This last, a whisper. “Everything for him … nothing for me.
“But now …”
I raised the Chalice Gloria.
The jewels embedded in its surface glinted.
“You showed them,” said Carson.
Had I?
“I guess,” I admitted, to myself more than him. I scrutinized it. “I mean, it’s a good find. Solid. And when word gets around …”
When I didn’t go on, Carson prompted, “But?”
“But it’s only a start,” I said. “It’ll get attention—a lot of it, you know? But … I don’t just retire after this; I don’t go home and toss this at them and say, ‘There you go, Mum and Dad. You said I couldn’t, and now look what I did.’ Being a Seeker—it’s a life, not a moment. A career. And you don’t build a career out of one success.”
“You could,” Carson said earnestly. “Harper Lee did, with To Kill a Mockingbird.”
I tamped down a smile. “Fair point. But that’s not what I want. I want to be known for more than one thing. More than this.”
“You want to beat your brother.”
“No,” I said, too hastily. After a hesitation, I corrected: “Okay, yes, I do—but not just that. I want my parents to say that they were wrong. I want them to tell me that I’m right. That I can do this.”
“Seems to me like you proved it.”
I stared into my ruby-red reflection, bounced back from one of the Chalice’s gemstones.
Had I? I was so sure of it … but now, with the Chalice Gloria in hand, I was certain I was wrong. I hadn’t proved it—not yet. I felt more like I’d just started—taken the very first step.
“You asked if it was worth it,” I said at last. “And … I think so. But I was prepared to lose it, too—to rescue you. And if I had …” I glanced past the Chalice, at him, met eyes I wanted to look away from. “… well, that would have been worth it too.”
The ghost of a smile crested his lips, tugged up on one side.
“Thank you.”
I nodded and let my eyes drop back to my prize—and away from Carson. Not for the first time tonight, I remembered that he was leaving soon. For all my fighting, up to even just this afternoon, I was acutely aware that suddenly, I didn’t want him to go. Didn’t want this little hideout to go back to being dead quiet save for the times when I got bored and lonely and started singing or talking to myself.
It came back to me; him talking on the platform with Feruiduin’s Cutlass. About his parents being dead.
“Do you have any siblings?” I asked.
“Huh? Oh, err. No.”
“Grandparents?”
“Nope.”
“Aunts? Uncles?”
Carson shook his head. The smile came back. This time, it was sad.
“Just me, now.”
He was alone. And my heart ached for him.
I leaned forward. “So where are you going to—”
But then Heidi stepped in from the main chamber, and I cut myself off. This wasn’t a “moment” per se, but it was close enough to something Heidi didn’t seem to like. I figured I’d spare her—for now.
She seemed to have realized she’d interrupted something, because she looked somewhat awkward. A
little like Carson yesterday, outside Piccadilly Circus.
“So, the Order of Apdau, then …” she said at last, to fill the quiet. “What do you think they showed up for?”
I eased back in my seat, frowned, shook my head. Except for the tiny slice of information Lady Angelica had given me, I still was in the dark, both as to who they were and why they were after me.
“No clue,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter—at least, for now.”
“You think they’re still out there?” Carson asked.
“Sunk in the hurricane, I hope,” I said. I doubted it, though. They’d gone through worse trying to get to me.
I pushed them out of my thoughts. Today had been a success. I saved my friend—my friend, that was right—and hadn’t needed to give up on my dreams of claiming the Chalice Gloria either.
Speaking of:
“I was thinking,” I said to Heidi, rising to meet her. My hand delved for my back pocket. “You, uh, seemed pretty good with this thing.”
I extended the speaker—Feruiduin’s Cutlass—to her.
She frowned at it, eyebrow raised. “You’re just giving it to me?”
“I only really needed it to get this.” I lifted the Chalice. “Plus, I have a spear now. And like I said: you were pretty good with it. Figured you might want to keep it on you, you know? Just in case, or whatever.”
“Um. Okay. Uh. Wow.” She took it, looking it over, a little boggled. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Thank you for helping.”
There was an awkward quiet for a moment.
Then, very slowly, Heidi reached into her pocket. She drew out a piece of paper, folded and ancient, leathery and beaten through years of weathering. I peered at it, wondering for a brief moment if it was something I’d left in the jeans before she’d borrowed them? No, couldn’t be. This was something Heidi had moved there herself.
“I have this, um, this one treasure,” she said slowly, unfolding it carefully, “that I’ve been after for a while.” She placed it on the circular table the chairs were arranged around. “But I can’t …” She took a deep breath. “I can’t do it alone.”
I lifted an eyebrow.
Carson bowed forward in his seat. His lips moved, sounding out a name that I knew meant absolutely nothing to him.
I expected him to ask what it was.
Instead, he looked up, eyes bright and alert, not at all the look of a man who’d not slept since the night before last, and said, “So when do we start?”
We looked at each other, all three of us.
Us.
A team.
We were going to keep going.
“Well,” Heidi began, and we shuffled in close—to hear where the next adventure would take us.
Epilogue
Mira and Carson fell asleep almost immediately, their breathing regulated and heavy.
Heidi, completely awake, listened for them to sink just a little deeper …
Carson let out a soft snore and shifted in his sleep.
That was it.
She rose.
Tiptoeing silently from her room and into the library, she slunk beneath the dim glow of the lights overhead to the wall with the scrap of paper on which “LONDON” was written. Then, glancing behind her to check Mira and Carson had not woken, she slipped her bracelet down her wrist so she could squeeze the talisman there in her fingers, and cut open a gateway.
For a moment, she admired its widening edges. It was not like Mira’s; hers had a slightly shaky quality, as though drawn by a hand that she could not steady, making the brilliant white glow shimmer. Neither was it like the gateway Carson had opened, ragged and torn and almost half-formed, without any in-between space. Hers was thin and controlled, a perfect gateway from a steady soul who knew exactly what she wanted to accomplish.
Then it was wide enough to step through, and she went.
If London was ever truly deserted, Heidi did not know when that would be. But this was close enough: the street held only a couple of stragglers, couples mostly, making their way to someplace or another.
She would blend in perfectly.
She slunk along the Strand, then past the Duchess Theatre on Catherine Street. It split in a crossroads just past it, Tavistock Street forking left and right.
She crossed over.
Talisman in hand, she checked around to see if anyone was near—no one, at least for the moment—and then cut open a new gateway at the corner. No compass, like Mira’s—but then, she knew where this gateway led. She’d followed it plenty of times before.
Before stepping through, she clasped the Bluetooth speaker tight.
A city loomed on the other side, also clad in velvet night. The architecture looked as though London had bled through: Victorian-style buildings with grand spires reared, all elaborate brickwork and magnificent. But they were just a little off from London, as though seen through a fractured lens: they stuck out in obtuse angles, entire wings out of alignment and without a support in sight.
The green glow leaking from the streetlights, orbs mounted on zigzagging steel rods, further reminded her that she had stepped away from London.
Factories, wedge-shaped or rectangular or a whole unnameable series of spastic jags, were nestled between the brick buildings. Dark, reflective metal without windows, they belched smoke into a night sky that was lit by only a handful of stars, and the moon: full and much larger than the one Heidi knew from home, but far more pallid and sickly.
Like the street she had just left behind, these ones were empty.
Heidi set off. The speaker had transformed into Feruiduin’s Cutlass automatically on transitioning, and she squeezed its grip.
Two blocks later, and an alley loomed. A familiar one.
She ducked in.
Halfway down, where the alien glow from the streets could not press any farther, something skittered past her.
She tensed, spinning, cutlass drawn. Breath caught in her throat.
The alley’s mouth was empty. Just a rat … or the dog-like things that passed for them here, anyway.
“Good evening.”
Heidi turned.
A figure emerged from the darkest end of the alley. If not for the voice, it could be anyone, it was so dark.
“I hope I didn’t startle you,” the figure said.
Heidi lowered the cutlass. “I thought maybe I’d missed you.”
“You’re late.” Without waiting for Heidi’s excuse, the shadow launched right in: “Does she know why the Order of Apdau are after her?”
Heidi fired back, “Do you?”
“No.” Barely visible, Heidi caught the subtle shift of shadows: the figure shaking their head. “The Order has always been thorny, with their vague holy mission to stop Seekers. But never like this. Not across such distance. And certainly not to our world. Attack, strike, harass, yes—but they never follow a person to Earth and darken their doorstep. Very peculiar indeed.”
“Do you think they’ll come back?” Heidi asked.
“Hard to say.” A pause, and the figure moved on. “You will continue to keep an eye on Mira Brand.” It was not a question but a statement, a rehash of the facts as they stood. “In exchange, I will grant you what you want most, Ms. Luo. Are those terms acceptable?”
Heidi swallowed, throat dry. In opposition, her palm had started to sweat on the cutlass’s grip, and she rearranged her fingers around it.
“Yes. I’ll watch her for you.”
“Good.” The figure straightened to full height. “Inform me if anything changes, or if the Order appears again. I expect they will.”
There it was. Confirmation.
“I also expect,” the shadow continued, “she isn’t going to give up and go home either, is she?”
“I wouldn’t count on it. She’s already—we’re already,” Heidi corrected quickly, “planning our next job.”
The silhouette tilted its head. A faint shaft of light managed to press far enough to illuminate a faint smile on
lips edged by lines.
“Keep her close.”
“As you will it.” Heidi nodded, the perfect submission of a soul who knew where her true allegiance lay. “As you will it.”
Mira Brand Will Return in
The Tide of Ages
The Mira Brand Adventures, Book 2
Available Now!
Author’s Note
And so begins a new saga—new heroine, new world, new places, new adventures. You may be forgiven if you’ve never heard of me before—Robert J. Crane, I’m the author here, pleased to make your acquaintance—but I’ve been at this a while. This is my forty … uh … somethingth book, (you kind of lose count after a while, rather like birthdays—especially, when, like me, you’ve written more books than you’ve actually had birthdays), and so this is not my first rodeo. If this is your first adventure in one of my worlds, I hope you’ve enjoyed it and want to go on. In the pages that follow, you’ll find a listing of my other books, including some upcoming volumes. Book 2 of this series is available now, as is book 3, and further ones are currently in the works. If you run out of those … well, I can certainly offer you some other options to keep you busy until the next Mira adventure …
To wrap things up, let me say thanks for reading! If you want to know immediately when future books become available, take sixty seconds and sign up for my NEW RELEASE EMAIL ALERTS by CLICKING HERE. I don’t sell your information and I only send out emails when I have a new book out. The reason you should sign up for this is because I don’t always set release dates, and even if you’re following me on Facebook (robertJcrane (Author)) or Twitter (@robertJcrane), it’s easy to miss my book announcements because … well, because social media is an imprecise thing.
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The World Beneath (The Mira Brand Adventures Book 1) Page 21