by Jenny Allen
They both rushed out of the car when they got to the apartment building. Lilith started pulling suitcases and bags out of the back and Chance looked at her in confusion. She caught the look and pulled open the spare tire hatch. “I’m getting the tin. Why don’t you see if Ida is still awake? Hopefully she can buzz us in.”
“Actually, I think one of these keys might open the front door for us.” Chance grabbed his duffel and her suitcase before jogging over to the front door. Lilith was reaching under the tire, her fingers just barely grazing the tin when her phone rang. It made her jump and she scratched her arm on the side of the well. She cursed and pushed her hand in, fingers closing around the tin. She pulled it out and grabbed her phone. She clicked answer and held it up before she even thought to check the number.
“Yeah?” She twisted her arm to look at the rough scratch down the back of it. Damnit. Couldn’t she go at least one day without drawing blood?
“I cannot believe you hung up on me and turned off your phone.” Gregor’s voice was more than angry. Furious was more like it.
“Dad, I can’t deal with this right now. I’m not leaving. I just had to examine what was left of Miriah’s body, and your brother is still out there somewhere. So don’t waste your breath telling me to come home. You sent me here.” As soon as the verbal flood left her mouth she silently cursed herself. So much for talking in code to avoid being overheard with damaging information.
“Miriah?” The anger was completely gone in a second. “Tell me about the body?”
“I don’t think I should tell you over a cell phone, and I don’t have the time right now.” She was jogging up the front steps after repacking and locking up the car.
“Make the time.” There was the iron firm voice again.
Lilith sighed as she knocked on the door. “Someone used her face for a punching bag. The bones were fractured all over her face. Of course those were the old wounds. Everything else was very precise, methodical and superficial. Eye lids and nose were surgically removed. Thousands of burns, cuts and other wounds covered the entire body. They fed her blood to keep her alive. It even looked like they washed her hair after she died.” A shiver ran up her spine and she felt cold inside just reciting her findings.
Chance jogged down the last of the stairs and pushed the door open for her. She smiled at him and silently mouthed Gregor’s name. Chance nodded solemnly and walked next to her up the stairs.
“Dear god. He must be alive.” Gregor breathed the words so soft that she almost thought she’d imagined it. “Lilith, listen to me.” His voice was quiet and purposeful, but with none of the anger and command it had earlier. “This is a million times more serious than I thought when I sent you.”
“You think?” Lilith interrupted him. “You sent me here to find your brother not examine my cousin’s brutalized body. You know something about what’s going on. You knew something before I left. I was too blind to truly believe it. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t know the severity.” The words made her sick to her stomach, but Gregor knew something and she had to push him. They were running out of time, Duncan was running out of time.
“Lilith, I had suspicions that Duncan uncovered something, but I never dreamed that if he was still alive, he would actually show his face there. You and Chance need to leave, right now. I cannot stress this enough. If he has Duncan, he is already lost and you cannot save him.” His words were almost identical to Duncan’s in the letter he’d sent her. There was pure terror in his voice. She couldn’t remember Gregor ever being scared of anything. He was always strong and fearless. But right now, at this moment, there were tears in his voice.
Lilith stopped outside of Miriah’s apartment like her whole body was frozen. The world was spinning around her and she couldn’t move. “Who?” She breathed the word.
“Even if I could tell you over the phone, it wouldn’t help you. He won’t be using the name I know. He’s an untraceable ghost, completely outside the system. All you need to know is that he is a vicious man that has been inflicting horrors upon my family for over seven hundred years. Please, Lilith, please just get on a plane right now!” Her father was actually begging. Blood was pounding in her ears so loud she couldn’t hear the rest of his plea.
“Malachi wasn’t safe in New York. Leaving is not going to solve anything. We need to end this, Gregor. I can’t leave.” She wished she felt as brave as she sounded. If she hadn’t been terrified after finding Miriah, she was well and truly terrified now. She hung up the phone and stared at it with tears stinging her eyes.
Chance moved in front of her and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her. His hands lightly gripped her shoulders and she could feel his eyes studying her face. “Lily, what’s wrong?”
She looked up at him and just wanted the two of them to disappear, but she knew she was right. “Gregor is scared. He begged me to fly out of here right now.”
“Maybe we should.” For some reason it was the last thing she expected to hear from him. When Lilith opened her mouth to protest, Chance cut her off. “Hear me out. Whoever is behind this got to you that first night and almost killed you. He had no problem getting to Miriah. We have backup in New York. I can keep you safe there.” His hands tightened on her shoulders and his voice was starting to sound as desperate as Gregor’s.
“It’s not the answer, Chance. It sure as hell didn’t save Malachi.” She breathed deep and shook her head. “No. Gregor thinks it’s some phantom of his past. We need to end it.”
“Lily, you said yourself that the wounds on Miriah and Malachi didn’t match. We don’t even know if Malachi was attacked by the same person. In fact, it would be impossible. There is not enough time between his death and the attack on you for someone to make it here from New York. It could have been anyone.”
“Anyone? That happened to dump his body in the same place that we met Gregor to discuss coming here?” She arched an eyebrow and by the look on Chance’s face, she knew he didn’t think it was a coincidence either. “Maybe he’s working with other people, but it’s connected. The patterns were similar, far too similar to be a coincidence.”
“Okay, point, but no one knew Malachi was in New York. For all intents and purposes he was on his own. We wouldn’t be. You have friends in the police force, there’s Alvarez, Gregor, and the handful of bodyguards on Gregor’s payroll. We would have protection there.”
“And what if the purpose of leaving Miriah there like that was to push us to do exactly that? Gregor’s past is connected to this thing somehow. What if he’s trying to find Gregor and we lead him right to him? Hiding won’t solve the problem, Chance. Whoever is behind this, one person or a dozen, they knew enough to drop Malachi’s body there. They can find us in New York.”
His shoulders fell forward and he leaned his forehead against hers. His breath tickled across her lips and the cold flooding her body started to thaw. “I’m only one man, Lily.” The tender whisper made her heart ache. “I can’t lose you. If anything happens to you…”
Lilith cradled his face between her hands and pulled him back enough to look purposefully into his eyes. “If anything happens, it won’t be through any fault of yours.” A thought occurred to her. “This is why Gregor sent you, isn’t it? Because he knew how you felt about me.”
Chance stared into her eyes and a slow smile crept across his lips. “To answer your question, yes, that is precisely why Gregor sent me. He knew that I’d die before I let anything happen to you. I’d fight with every last fiber of my body to keep you alive. You definitely are your father’s daughter, diplomatic, fearless and inspirational.” There was a shine in his sad eyes that made her feel ashamed. She didn’t deserve that look. She was a mess not some legendary pillar of strength and beauty.
Lilith snorted a laugh in surprise as her hands fell away from his face. She pushed past him, into the apartment, too frazzled to keep looking him in the eye. She couldn’t see that trusting look in his eyes. She made her decision
to stay here which could very well be signing her own death warrant, and now she realized she’d signed his too. He would never leave her here.
“Are you serious? I’m terrified all the time. I’ve been jumping at shadows since we landed in Tennessee. Some people say that acting in spite of fear is courage. Others say acting in spite of fear, which is there for a damn good reason, is stupidity. I tend to agree with the second one, but something has to be done.”
Chance closed the apartment door and pulled her around to face him. His expression was all rugged determination which somehow surprised her. “You are stronger than you give yourself credit.” His eyes stared into hers as if he was willing her to truly believe it. Before she could react, he tugged her close and wrapped his arms around her, resting his chin on the top of her head. She slipped her arms around his waist and just drank in the warmth of the moment. It chased away all the horrors of the past couple days and left her pleasantly tired.
“Let’s take a look through the magic box that holds all the answers.” She very reluctantly pulled back, her chin tilted up to smile at him. A few strands of his chestnut colored hair hung out of place and without even thinking, she slipped her fingers through his hair, straightening it. A smile pulled at his lips and his head moved subtly toward her fingers. God his hair was soft as silk. A shiver ran down her spine and for once it wasn’t from terror or some nameless feeling of dread.
Lilith stepped back a little too quickly on shaky legs. She was worn out, emotionally, physically and psychologically. She had to focus if she was going to accomplish anything. She turned away before she could steal a look at his face. “We should look at the tin before I fall asleep.” Her voice was a little shaky and uncertain, but there were no objections from the peanut gallery. With a stifled yawn, she made her way to the dining room table and fell into the chair.
“You know, once Miriah is found, the first place they’ll come is here.” His voice was remarkably calm, but also rather flat and emotionless. Business as usual.
Lilith nodded slowly as she rubbed her temples.
“We have a cooler of blood in the car.”
Her head snapped up. “Dammit.” She heaved a heavy sigh and sank back in the chair. “We can’t bring it in here. We have paperwork for it, but it still won’t look good if they manage to get the authority to search the car.”
Chance took a chair across from her and leaned his elbows on the table. “Neither of us have the energy to drive all the way back to Madisonville tonight. We can’t help anyone if we die in a car accident.”
“Not to mention that they might check his place too. Especially if they find out he’s been missing.” Lilith popped open the tin while she aired her thoughts. She grabbed one of the small satchels and pulled it open. A glass vial of blood sat in her hand. She held it up to the light, but didn’t see any sign of coagulation.
Blood separates over time unless something is added to prevent it. That only happens when you are preserving blood, like they do in cold cases so that the DNA is still viable for later testing. An idea came to her. Of course she had no idea how long it’d been in this tin, unrefrigerated, soothe sample may not be exactly viable. On the other hand, Duncan knew how to preserve blood. He was a brilliant man. If he was keeping it so carefully hidden, there was a reason, a purpose.
“The Lab.” Chance looked up at her with a frown. “Duncan has a private medical lab here in Knoxville. Its ownership is shuffled through a dozen different dummy corporations. The police won’t find it, especially not with Miriah as a starting point. We can drop the blood there for safe storage and have them analyze this.”
“Well let’s see what miracle this box has in it, then we can drop in on the lab. Do you think it’s still open?” He glanced at his watch and winced. She did the same thing when she checked her phone.
“Wow. It’s a quarter after midnight.” She glared at the phone for not magically making time go in reverse and rubbed her face. “All I want to do is sleep.”
“Me too, but I’ll feel better when we don’t have incriminating evidence in a cooler in the car.” His tone was too flat for his usual humorous remarks. “There’s no way that lab will be open.” He looked and sounded completely exhausted.
“And we have more incriminating evidence than just the blood cooler. I have alcohol swabs from Miriah’s office, our bloody gloves. Damn I should have thought about all that.” She sighed heavily. “My brain just doesn’t want to work. However, the lab should be open. Duncan did most of the research at that lab, with help of course, but still. Duncan is at least as old as Gregor. He can’t deal with sunlight, so he would only be able to work at night. It’s more likely to be open now than at noon.
“Brilliant.” His smile warmed her to her toes and she shied away from that look of admiration again. “We should see if there is anything in that tin that will tell us about the vial. I’m guessing it would be helpful to know just what to look for with the tests, right?”
It was Lilith’s turn to smile but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him right now. She stared down at the vial in her hands and somehow knew it was the answer to a million questions. “You really would make a good detective. And yes, you’re right.” She set down the vial gingerly on the little cloth bag and returned her attention to the other contents of the tin. There were several miniature portraits that she didn’t really recognize, so she laid them out on the table. There were also a few pages of parchment and a couple newer scraps of paper. She started with the oldest one, but when she flipped it over it was completely blank.
“Maybe it’s like the others you found?”
“Perhaps. Of course if there aren’t any lemons or maybe limes then we won’t be able to read it.”
Chance hopped out of his chair and jogged off to the kitchen. The next several pages were more diary style entries, living history. Lilith was glancing over them when Chance walked back into the dining room. “No such luck.” He shrugged and sank back down into the chair. “So what do you have there?”
“It looks like more journal pages, but much older, ancient in fact. It’s a little hard to make out. I’m not really fluent in old English. There are a couple words I recognize from random bits of history I’ve read. It mentions something about athelings, noblemen, and unfrith, or a break of peace. Gregor’s name is here as well as Duncan’s and another name, Ashcroft Orrick. I would have to take this to either Gregor, Duncan, or an expert on Old English to translate it.”
“What about these portraits?” Chance picked up one and stared intently at it.
Lilith looked over the rest of them. “Well this one looks like Gregor, and these two might be sons of his. I don’t recognize the brunette woman or these men.” Chance was still staring at the one in his hand.
“Didn’t Duncan’s journal say something about you resembling one of Gregor’s daughters from back then?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was tentative, waiting for him to get to the point.
“Well. This is what you’d look like if you ever dyed your hair blonde.” He turned the little portrait and it was almost like staring into a mirror 15 years ago. It made her skin crawl and she visibly shivered. The girl in the portrait smiled with an innocence that seemed so alien to her now. A definite melancholy fell across her shoulders, weighing her down. She needed to shake this off. Lilith closed her eyes for a moment, trying to find her balance. The whole world was changing around her and she felt left behind. She wanted one selfish moment to mourn the loss of everything she’d been so certain of.
Chance seemed to sense that she just needed a moment and stayed silent. Finally, Lilith opened her eyes and refocused on the rest of the tin’s contents. She flipped over the sneering portrait of a middle aged man and it actually had lettering on the back declaring that this was Ashcroft. All the others were blank. The little coat of arms was interesting, but nothing she recognized. When she had time to deal with computer research, she’d look it up. The other wrapped items were little pewter trinket
s that she didn’t really understand. They just looked like little figurines of people, crude and rough. In the very bottom, a little key rattled around. It looked like a deposit box key, but any unique markings had been filed off. Yet another dead end.
She stared at the Old English pages in pure and utter frustration. The story of Mary was right here. Right in front of her and she couldn’t read it. “Dammit!” She slammed her hands down on the table and rocked back in the chair. “Let’s just get to the lab with this vial and the cooler. I’m tired of feeling totally useless. Hopefully the blood can tell me something. For now let’s just drop it off, get back here and try to get some sleep.”
“What about all this?” Chance motioned to the tin and its contents but his worried eyes stayed fixed on her.
Lilith ran a hand through her hair and scratched her nails at the back of her head. “Let’s pack it up. It may not be useful to most people, but if I’m right, and one of the players in this little drama is from Gregor’s time, he would be able to read these and I get the feeling that he wouldn’t like them. Maybe what’s right here is what started this thing in the first place. He was looking for something in that house when we showed up.”
Chance started placing the pieces delicately in the tin, closed it up and handed it to her. “You should put it somewhere safe. I think it’s best if I don’t know where that is.”
Lilith frowned at him and grabbed the little box. “Why do you say that?”
“Just a precaution. Extremely valuable information is best kept to the smallest number of people possible. Call it a habit.” He shrugged gracefully, but there was real worry beneath the surface.