He’d just about lost it when she admitted she’d never even been to the Olive Garden, or had a real cannoli. As part of her ‘procedural requirements’, he began to insist that they have dinner after an evening of work. He started off with the easy stuff, like Ethiopian, Greek, Southern Chinese, Indian, Turkish, and gradually moved on to the more adventurous like Japanese, Peranakan, North and Western Chinese, Malay, Nepali, Sri Lankan, French. Cyrus also had a love affair with food and seemed to know all the best places in all of LA and never balked at the words, the ingredients, or the prices.
"Honestly woman, what do you eat?” he’d asked after she’d devoured a bowl of gumbo and rice as though she’d never had a hot meal in her life.
“Pop tarts and potatoes,” she answered with a mouth full of cornbread.
Cyrus’ eyes grew wide and he pretended to choke. She laughed and swallowed her bite.
“Not really, but not that far off. I love baked potatoes. I don’t know, I pack a sandwich and fruit for work, and at home I mostly have soup and crackers.”
“Oh sweetie, who hurt you?” he said jokingly.
She looked somewhat taken aback at that and lowered her cutlery down to the table.
“No one,” she said quietly and looked away.
“Anthea,” Cyrus said quickly, alarmed at how immediately she seemed to be curling in on herself, “That was only a joke. It’s something I heard on a reality show. I thought it was funny, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have recycled someone else’s joke. And you know I’ll never, ever pry into your personal life.”
She didn’t answer, so he continued, “Although I do consider it a personal achievement that you’ve elected to have me as your captain on this culinary voyage of adventure. Tell me, have you ever had fried ice cream?"
She looked back to him, forgetting the thoughts that troubled her. Her face was glowing and her eyes were round as she leaned in and said, “They can fry ice cream?"
Chapter 11
Vital Energy
The summer was approaching, bathing the city in long, dreamy twilights. School was out, kids were free, grownups were more relaxed, and California was showing off why she was called the golden state. Golden sunlight bathed the mountains in warmth, drawing people out to play and explore. Golden grass waved in the gentle inland hills, golden sands buffeted the coasts, golden lights shone upon the Hollywood studios welcoming summer blockbusters. It was a time of golden opportunity, and Cyrus had an event scheduled nearly every evening with Anthea.
He was watching her now with approval from behind a curtain as she welcomed the seance attendees, answering their questions and offering information of her own, all in a warm, matter-of-fact voice. He could almost believe her himself and wondered again why he didn’t tap her to invigorate his particular life force. But he quickly banished the thought at the softness of her smile, and the mischievous glitter in her eyes.
He wasn’t entirely sure what long-term effects his power had on other people, and he tried very hard never to extract so much that it caused any visible changes to them. He’d been alive for more than a century and was beginning to recognize other people in the world with his particular gift, even befriending one in Europe during the second Great War, the next war that was supposed to end all wars.
The man had recognized him, actually, and had approached him in a small town somewhere in France to chat with him. Cyrus hadn’t truly known much at that time, and was grateful to hear another person talk with assurance about immortality. The man was charismatic and warm, and Cyrus had believed every word he said, much to both of their amusement.
All around them, the countryside was ravaged and burned, but this town remained under Allied control, for now, and life moved on in its steady rhythm. Shopkeepers bartered for imported goods, bakers grumbled about the price of flour and baked their breads, innkeepers grumbled about the price of bread and rented their rooms, and everyone in the town attended Mass to pray for the end of the war. It was a strange time and a strange place to enjoy a meal and a glass of wine at a candlelit cafe, but this was still France. There was still time for good wine, good bread, and good conversation, war or no war.
“You, my friend, are burning steady and true like a candle,” the man had said to Cyrus after seating himself unannounced and unceremoniously on the cafe patio, “You are no longer in danger of destroying yourself in your own flames.”
Cyrus had been taken aback by the man’s echoing of Trickster’s words concerning candles and flames, but he’d begun to sense something emanating from the man, like the warm, quiet glow of a candle in the darkness. He had learned a great deal from the mysterious man about the consequences of their power on their own lives, but not very much about the consequences for others. Cyrus preferred to work his charms on those who were nearing death with the belief that that final, pure belief was more vitalizing that one which could be poisoned into cynicism over time.
The man himself was cagey about his method and simply said, “I find that I am often correct, and that is enough.” Cyrus had been intrigued but respectful, and the two friends remained in contact long after their warm meeting amidst a terrible war.
Back in the present, Cyrus was resolute in his decision not to bring any potential harm to Anthea. She was so very young, and so very afraid. After her meeting with Curiosity, she was beginning to trust him, but she still did not approve of his business. She seemed capable of only the smallest kind of faith, the faith in that which simply cannot be refuted; faith in what you see with your own eyes, and not what your senses and experiences suggest. He admired her for it.
“Please place your mobile phone in this protective chest. Oh no, don’t worry. Here’s your number. The seer cannot evince a vital energy unless the calculating ones are tethered,” Anthea was explaining to new arrivals, and then began to read out the runes on the exterior of the wooden box.
He smiled again in admiration at how easily she played the role with so little direction from him. As ever, there was an element of truth to what he told her. That box was indeed covered in powerful spells, and they did indeed disrupt certain energies. As a result, anyone who had covertly set their cell phone to record any video or audio would be disappointed find a snarling, crackling record, which would frighten many of them and permanently secure their belief in Cyrus’ magic. Except in this case, the magic responsible was that most elemental and docile energy—electricity. And the box simply acted as an open circuit, welcoming any exposed phone to its raw power, temporarily ruining its recording capabilities.
“Before we begin, we must purge any malingering aether in your own spirits and align you in the safety of diamond light. I will begin the embrocation, but I ask you all to join in when your heart and mind are at one and prepared,” Anthea said once everyone had arrived and was seated, “It is divine providence that our numbers equal eight this evening, since Grae and Zanna cancelled. It is a powerful portent.”
He smiled again at the fake names that rolled off her tongue so easily. She was correct about the number eight, and he marveled again at her insight. He hadn’t taught her that.
Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, he moved into the room slowly wearing a serious face.
Over the weeks and months that they worked together, Cyrus had begun to understand and admire Anthea. From that first night that he met her, something had initially attracted him to her, but it was a quiet feeling, like very slight static. He felt absolutely certain that he was not the first of his kind that she’d encountered, but he was extremely careful not to let on that he knew this.
From Trickster and from the man in France, Cyrus had put together a loose idea of what sorts of other people like him existed in the world. The ‘sparks’, as he thought of them now, were those who discovered the power by accident as he had, but were somehow invigorated by a massive, unstable influx of vitality all at once. Dizzy and addled, they hadn’t been able to process the true nature of the power and grew frightful when it dissipated quickly. T
hey were constantly seeking to return to the early highs by recreating their actions, either in more extreme versions of the same deed, or with a new population. But, every time they found that the could only harness a small portion of the wild, bright-burning, desperate belief they created.
Over time their actions became more and more extreme and ended either in utter madness, like David Koresh in the Waco incident, or depression and suicide, like Jim Jones and his Guyana kool-aid infamy, or a drug-addled frenzy toward death, like the Bagwan in Oregon.
The publicity was always worrying to Cyrus, who took great pains to avoid any exposure above the local level, but eventually he realized that the glittering cult celebrities and televangelists and their ilk would never expose his secret. Their lives were cut unnaturally short by their power, not prolonged as his and the man in France’s had been.
Apart from that man, there was only one other person who Cyrus knew personally that carried the flame (as he sometimes poetically thought of the gift), and she was not someone that Cyrus felt he could befriend. The man in France had spoken of her exploits in hushed tones after they’d shared several bottles of wine. He spoke of how he’d met her during the plagues, but wouldn’t elaborate on her methods either (Cyrus was beginning to wonder if this was some sort of professional courtesy), only her appearance. He described a young, handsome woman with long, dark waves of hair down to her waist and a deep, husky voice. Cyrus thought back to that fateful evening in Wales, when he met Trickster for the first time at Lady Lamia’s botched, dark summoning.
Because the two men were heartily drunk, Cyrus allowed himself to speculate aloud if this had been the same woman.
“Wales? 1880s?” the man had slurred, “Merde, my friend, it is very likely.”
He’d crossed his fingers in a ward against evil that Cyrus had found amusing at the time, but he didn’t say anything.
“I don’t, I don’t understand her,” the man had continued, “She’s more spirit that woman these days, and even these thousand years she has been this way.” Cyrus gasped at the casual reference. A thousand years? Just how old was this man? And which plagues had he been referring to?
After that night, Cyrus had not encountered another person like himself in the flesh, but he’d watched the rise and fall of potential flames on the world’s media with something like brotherly grief. When the world calmed down again after the wars, Cyrus attempted to find out what became of Lady Lamia, but all references to her in the London papers halted abruptly in 1899, and he could find no further evidence of her having been in England.
Instead, Cyrus turned to history to try and pursue the fearsome, dark-haired woman. He felt certain that her dark presence lurked behind some of histories’ darker tales thanks to a slight twinge in his power. The feeling was as though he had spotted someone familiar just as they rounded a corner in a crowded street and therefore couldn’t be sure. As his life extended and his power grew, this feeling was easier to discern, but he grew bored with the historical exploits of the deranged woman (for he was now quite sure she was deranged) and let the matter drop.
In the present, Cyrus again considered Anthea’s background. That she’d grown up in a cult was obvious to him, but he couldn’t work out the particulars, or even the religion. He gathered that she was nearly completely alone in the world, and that anyone from her past was firmly unwelcome in her present life. He was surprised at her resilience, as he’d seen firsthand the aftermath of cult programming and it certainly didn’t look like Anthea. She was astonishingly strong in spirit and mind, exceedingly brilliant, but fiercely loving and compassionate. Cyrus often wondered if the people in her past had any idea what a power they’d tried to mask in Anthea, and if she’d forgiven them. But, as ever, he couldn’t ask.
Lurking beneath her hard-won confidence in herself was a shivering fear of the world around her. Cyrus would never do anything to make Anthea afraid of him, and that included prying into her past. He was going to cast a light on the shadows around her heart. He was going to give her the nourishment she needed to grow into the power that she was. He was going to show her the world. He was going to show her everything.
Chapter 12
Farmer's Markets
The air was cool and quiet as Anthea and Cyrus hauled their equipment to the curbside of a local warehouse parking lot. Farmers and volunteers milled around, setting up canopies, moving boxes of vegetables and other goods from truck to tent. The sun had not yet risen, and the people were speaking to one another using that reverent whisper reserved for the dark. Carefully tended grass surrounded the parking lot, covering shoes and pants legs in cold dew. On one end of the lot, the grass rose in a pleasant wave to the top of an artificial embankment where, Anthea knew, a musician would be setting up a makeshift stage.
Somewhere in the center of the action, a generator hummed. The power it provided was largely focused on the two large coffee percolators that had a magnetic pull on the workers. They stole away for a quick refill and a chat with their stall-neighbors and friends. These people had all known each other for years, and while they weren’t exactly friendly to outsiders, they were at least collegial.
Anthea, too, stole away from helping Cyrus set up their small stall on the pretense of refilling their empty travel mugs with the steaming brew. She smiled shyly at a few people that she recognized, pleased when they returned her smile with a ‘good morning’ or even a nod of recognition.
While the sun was making inroads into the June gloom, that peculiarly thick air that embraces LA in late spring, Anthea felt safe. The parking lot was a jumble of poles and boxes and people, but it was quiet, open, and organized. Once the canopies were set up and the tarpaulin walls were in place and the market was bustling with families, she would not venture far from the safety of her and Cyrus’ stall. But for now, she was calm.
She reached the coffee tent and waited her turn behind two young, shaggy (and very smelly) farmhands, turning this way and that to see who else was around. Some of these people were her regular customers, after all.
It seemed to Anthea that farmer’s markets were some of the strangest places in LA. They seemed to attract a huge diversity of humanity, both as customers and as producers. The lean and scary Organic Only™ mothers with their blank-eyed and scary toddlers called Aydyn and Ayshlyn; the conscientious and self-conscious middle-class couples shuffling along, internally aghast at the price of tomatoes but determined to improve their habits; the hard-line environmentalists in their skintight bike-wear, overpriced cycling shoes clicking along the pavement with regimental authority; the sickly thin 60-something pseudo-guru, buffeted along by his patchouli-scented acolytes several decades younger.
And the children! Once the market was truly underway, it seemed that 100 iterations of the same child surged through the crowds, all limbs and energy. They gathered in the square of grass to dance to the music, to cartwheel for one another, to roll down the small rise. They darted about asking mothers and siblings for money to buy fresh lemonade or carob cookies or handmade knick-knacks. And sometimes they stopped by Anthea and Cyrus’ stall.
Cyrus and Anthea had few things in common, but one was their tendency to treat children with the dignity and respect that most adults only reserved for other adults. The difference was that Anthea could not lie to children, whereas Cyrus had no such scruples.
They argued about this often, about the difference between a trick and a lie.
“Can you really see the future?” curious kids would ask, arms folded across their chests, leaning back a little bit, noses wrinkled up and eyebrows cocked. It made Anthea smile every time.
“Of course!” Cyrus would answer with a confident flourish.
“Sort of,” Anthea would wink to them quietly.
Today, a jittery mother and skeptical daughter were loitering about the stall while the mother prepared to have her fortune told.
“Close your physical eyes and open your mind’s eye! Reach out with your consciousness! Use the power
of your senses to cast your turbulent existence into the smooth stream of time! Concentrate the essence of your awareness on integrating your expectations to the ever-pattern of possibility! Everything is known if everything is expected!” Cyrus would continue to prattle on like this until the young girl got bored and turned instead to Anthea. Cyrus grinned and held the curtain open for the mother.
“What he’s saying is that grownups forget how time works,” she confided in the girl. “You kids know that any problem, any situation, any choice could lead to infinite possible consequences. Sometimes you open an ordinary closet door and find a winter forest in your bedroom. Sometimes you chase a rabbit and end up in a wonderland. Anything can happen! Nothing surprises you kids, because you know to expect the unexpected.”
The girl smiled, wide-eyed at the very obvious logic this. Of course!
“What Cyrus the Seer does is help the grownups remember how to accept that anything at all can and does happen. And try not to worry about it. Make sense?”
Most kids would smile and nod when they heard this. Then they would either run off in smug self-satisfaction at having their superiority to grownups confirmed yet again, or they would turn to the objects on the table and ask about whatever had caught their eye.
Anthea had spent more time explaining the medicinal properties of plants, the way that the lines on your palm were formed, and what the placebo effect meant to these kids than she’d spent talking to her coworkers over the last few years.
It felt wonderful to be the designated explainer, a tireless authority. She satisfied their every curiosity until their parents pulled them away or they drifted off to think things over. And she was certain that she encouraged even more curiosity in most of those children.
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