The Collector of Dying Breaths

by M. J. Rose

  She’d left her own consciousness and disappeared for what had seemed like days. Jac had memory-lurched into René le Florentin’s life almost five hundred years ago.

  She’d thought his thoughts and felt his love and his frustrations. And this wasn’t the first time she’d done it since she’d come to the château. There was no denying it now.

  Jac fingered the red silk tied around her left wrist—the connection to the present that kept her tethered to her own time and place during lurches. She rolled the thread against her skin now and tried to focus on what she’d seen and learned. This episode hadn’t been as frightening as some in the past had been. Was it because of the bracelet?

  “Jac?” Griffin sounded worried. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We should stop. It’s almost nine o’clock, and I think we’ve found out as much as there is to know about these ingredients without going inside of le Florentin’s head.”

  She didn’t say anything. Just looked at him. But he guessed.

  “Is that what just happened?” he asked.

  “I think so. Or my overactive imagination acting up.”

  “Resistance is futile,” he said, laughing as he quoted the Borg line from the Star Trek episodes they used to watch when they were together. “Were you seeing another of your past lives?”

  Jac hadn’t yet told Griffin about Malachai’s theory that she was a memory tool, able to tap into other people’s past lives. But she told him now. He listened and halfway through, when he heard her voice crack, he took her hand and held it until she finished.

  “So you think that I’m the perfumer? And you’re the woman he was in love with? Isabeau? And you are remembering his life?”

  “I’m afraid to think it,” she whispered as she nodded.

  Griffin put his arm around her. “Let’s get out of here, go into town and have a late supper. We’ve done enough for one day.”

  Jac went up to her room and got her handbag. She didn’t see Melinoe or Serge and didn’t look for them. She just wanted to leave the house and clear her head.

  They ate at a lovely local restaurant, Le Relais de Barbizon, and afterward took a walk through the village, pausing to examine the well-preserved stone buildings.

  “This is a little confusing for me,” Jac said. “Even though we’re not at the château, the sense that I’m still in the past hasn’t quite dissipated.”

  “Maybe it’s because the town itself is so steeped in previous centuries. René le Florentin walked these same cobblestone streets. Passed many of these buildings.”

  They walked back to the Hôtel les Pléiades, where they sat side by side on a banquette in the darkened bar and drank cognac that the barkeep had poured from an old crystal bottle.

  For a while they didn’t talk. The fire was crackling, and there was no one else around. The companionable silence was soothing. After a while, Griffin reached out and brushed a lock of Jac’s hair off her forehead.

  “I always miss you when I’m not with you. And when I’m with you, I always feel we belong together.”

  Jac heard the words and wanted to respond, but she was still plagued with fear. If her hallucinations were past-life memories, she was his poison. And if the fugue states were not past-life memories, what were they? An aberration? Insanity?

  It was the conundrum of her life. One way, she was the incarnation of Griffin’s destruction—and the destruction of all the men he’d been. The other way she was delusional or victim of some kind of brain anomaly.

  Leaning forward, Griffin kissed her. For a moment her confusing thoughts fought against the embrace. She needed to figure this out once and for all. And then it didn’t matter. There was so little she could count on. At least there was this warmth searing through her. This actual want. This unquestionable urge to be with this man.

  The kiss was tender and determined at the same time, it tasted of cognac and desire, and when it ended, they separated and were silent, overwhelmed by its power, by its pull.

  Jac reached for her drink and took a sip. Was Griffin her fate? she wondered yet again. And then she heard her brother’s voice answer:

  You are fate. Once you were Moira. The woman you dream about. That’s why you can remember other lives.

  No, she almost said out loud. Greek gods and goddesses are myths. Jac had spent her whole adult life finding the seeds of those myths to prove that man had created these stories in order to explain away what they otherwise couldn’t understand or process.

  She looked at Griffin. He clearly hadn’t heard anything. Of course not. Robbie’s voice had been in her head.

  “It’s been such a long and strange day,” she said. “I’m going to ask the waiter to call me a taxi. I should go back to the château.”

  “No, you shouldn’t,” he said hoarsely and took her hand. “You should come upstairs with me.”

  Griffin’s room was on the second floor. A large corner room decorated with tapestries and heavy damask curtains in gold and blue. There was a fireplace already lit, a couch, desk, chairs—Jac saw it all in a blur as they fell onto the bed.

  Slowly, carefully, Griffin undressed her. In the golden light, his expression showed the same determination that she’d felt in his kiss. He wasn’t rough, but there was a force to his actions. As if he were anticipating that she might protest.

  And she did think about protesting, but her body fought her mind. She knew where they were headed was dangerous. Once they made love, once he held her naked in his arms and slipped inside of her—she would never be able to walk away from him again.

  “Jac . . .” he whispered as he traced the outline of her lips with his finger. “Stop thinking. This is right.”

  He kissed her. For a moment she held back, and then she pushed her lips hard against his. She wanted to stop thinking. To just be here with this man, who for better or worse she never had been able to break away from. It seemed she never really breathed deeply except when she was with him. Never really felt everything fully unless she was feeling him. Jac didn’t need a man to complete her. But he was the only man who she completely connected with.

  He pulled back. For a moment he just hovered above her. Looking down. Not moving. She didn’t move either. Didn’t say a word. Just watched him watching her.

  He smiled. Then stood up, unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged it off. Stepped out of his jeans and underwear. The fire outlined his body, and she sucked in her breath. Her first sight of him naked always astounded her. There was a Greek sculpture she often visited in the Metropolitan Museum that reminded her of Griffin. Long and lanky and graceful, it was a perfect expression of sexuality. But it was cold marble. Griffin was warm flesh.

  He came to her on the bed and undressed her, and when she lay there, as naked as he was, she reached out and touched his mouth, traced the line of his neck. His Adam’s apple. His collarbone. She stared at him. Griffin was everything she thought of when she thought about sex, about release, about desire. All her life, no matter who she had been with, it was this man she was staring at now who she wanted, who she never had to tell what to do to her or how to move or how to touch her. It was this man who understood how to hold her and move her and move in her and what to whisper to her and how to bite gently in the space where her shoulder met her neck and how to put his hand under her and touch her while he went inside of her, who looked at her with an expression that turned her into liquid. They generated heat. They built fire. They created alchemical gold.

  Above her, Griffin’s eyes closed. And then René’s opened.

  Rather than being frightened, she was heady with the experience. Two men. Both different. Both the same. Her insides were on fire. Her heart was opening. Breaking. Healing. They had been apart. They were together. Joined. In the past, in the present, in the future.

  The feeling was so overpowering there were moments whe
n Jac was sure she wasn’t herself any longer but the French lady who was the perfumer’s lover, and as René, Griffin was rougher. Taking her not as an act of tenderness but as something desperate. As if this was the last time they would ever make love. The last time they would ever be together. Isabeau felt it, and Jac suffered her fears.

  René thrust up inside her, more deeply, and she clenched around him. She smelled lust and honey, woods and desire. Smelled magic. The magic of what he was doing to her.

  Then Griffin was back.

  She was on her stomach now, and his hands were under her, teasing her as he slipped in and out, and she was lost to the rhythm of the ride. Lost to the time and the place. Swirling on herself, down and in on herself, feeling the tension building, tighter and tighter, growing in intensity, blocking out all reason and sending her into a vortex of emotional and physical response that she hadn’t felt in so long, so long, so long . . .

  “René.” One word from her lips. Soft. A whisper. Jac orgasmed, or Isabeau did. Who was she? It didn’t matter. Who was he? He was her all. And he always had been. This man who had been so many men to the many women she had been. This man—her fate. Toth, an Egyptian perfumer, and René le Florentin and Giles L’Etoile, another perfumer in revolutionary France. All these men. These lips and hearts and cocks and fingers and legs and eyes. All one. All the same.

  “Griffin.” Another word from her lips as she became lost in the waves as they washed over her and she emerged in the luxurious ebbing. She was shaking. Sinking deeper into exultation. Her womb was vibrating. He was playing her like a musical instrument, and every movement he made set off another trill of quivering and trembling.

  “Jac . . . Jac . . .” He wasn’t just saying her name; he was taking her and giving her and being with her as profoundly as he ever had.

  She had lost all ability to speak, to say his name, to say any name, to know her own name or place. She only knew that she was alive with him, through all time, and this was a celebration that they had found each other like this over and over and over again and would always and then . . . she burst.

  Colors. Lights. Smells. Shuddering. Tremors. Alive with him . . . alive . . . and then even somehow more alive.

  Chapter 26

  THE PRESENT

  SATURDAY, MARCH 22

  UPPSALA, SWEDEN

  Two days later, in Sweden, Melinoe, Jac and Serge began their search for samples of the ingredients in René le Florentin’s formula. A black limousine with tinted windows picked them up from the small airport in Berthåga. While they drove to Uppsala, Melinoe regaled Jac and Serge with stories about the wunderkammerns of the Middle Ages, the most famous of which they were on their way to visit.

  “The Augsburg Cabinet of Curiosities was a gift to King Gustav II from the German city of the same name. In 1632 it held over five hundred precious objects both artistic and natural. It was the age of exploration and the beginning of the scientific revolution. Trade routes were open and merchants were bringing strange and wonderful things back to Europe.

  “I’ve always been fascinated with these cabinets. They really were the precursors to our museums. Man has forever thirsted for knowledge and needed to examine the world in order to understand it. Dissect it in order to comprehend it. These cabinets are the era’s depositories of knowledge. Some cabinets were devoted to science, some to nature, others to the arts,” Melinoe said. “I read Peter the Great’s was filled with teeth that he had pulled. He thought he was a dentist.”

  “I’ve seen the one in the Getty,” Jac said. “It’s really a work of art, but its contents were gone. Is the Augsburg cabinet more complete?”

  “It holds about twenty-five percent of what it once had. Few cabinets weathered the tides of time very well. And when you think about the oddities that were collected along with the precious stones and artwork, it’s not surprising so many are gone. But imagine—once it held a mermaid’s hand, salt made from tears, a hatband of snake bones, a two-headed cat, a decanter of everlasting sadness, virgin’s milk, and the horn of a bull seal.”

  “The milk would have certainly spoiled by now.” Serge smiled.

  The fifteen-minute drive passed through fields and forests: lush countryside with long stretches of rolling hills dotted with picturesque houses and picket fences.

  Jac thought of Griffin, whose plane was flying over the Atlantic. He had left for America that morning to be with his daughter for her birthday. Before he left, he’d finished translating Florentin’s papers, as they’d come to calling them, and started on the bells. But the silver containers were proving a more complicated task since so many of the symbols remained a complete mystery. He said he’d be coming back within the week to keep working on them. She wanted to believe him, but at the same time she was afraid to. The two nights they had spent together had shaken her. What tragedy was yet to come?

  “Here we are,” Melinoe said, interrupting Jac’s thoughts. “The museum is just up ahead.”

  Jac looked out the window at the Gustavianum, a stone two-story building facing a cathedral, nestled in the fifteenth-century university town.

  “The museum houses one of the last astronomical theaters, lit by the natural light from the cupola.” Melinoe pointed up.

  The copper cupola, now green, sat on top of the graceful rectangular building like a well-designed onion.

  “It is one of the city’s landmarks and has a disturbing history since autopsies and vivisections were performed here in the 1600s, before they were commonplace and acceptable.”

  It was not the first time Jac noted the woman’s fascination with the gruesome. What was it about disturbing events that ignited Melinoe’s interest?

  “Have you been here before?” Jac asked.

  Melinoe nodded. “With my father when I was a girl. We came to see the very object we will be visiting today.” Her voice hitched when she referred to her father. She looked over at Serge, who gave her a sympathetic glance.

  The driver opened the door. As Serge got out and offered Melinoe his arm, Jac thought that Melinoe was very much like one of the objects she collected. Rare and unusual. Created, it seemed, out of base materials but greater than the sum of her parts. Intense, intrepid, determined—and sexual in an almost predatory way. She’d seen how Melinoe touched Griffin’s arm when she talked to him. Leaned into him. Serge had kept his eye on her when she did that, clearly not happy about it. And now he was watching her like that again as Melinoe spoke in the same seductive way to the gentleman who had come out to greet them.

  Melinoe introduced Dr. Aldrick Ebsen, who then took them up to the room where the cabinet was on display.

  “Philipp Hainhofer was the architect of this amazing gem,” Ebsen said. He spoke in English with a strong Swedish accent. He was in his early sixties, with a thick head of white hair and sparkling brown eyes that he didn’t take off of Melinoe. The museum director was falling for her charm.

  “Hainhofer himself called this cabinet the eighth wonder of the world, and in the first third of the seventeenth century it was probably true,” he explained.

  They were ascending an old stone staircase with a simple handrail leading up to the second story, and the curator continued to regale them as they climbed.

  “It was a time capsule of its day, wasn’t it?” Melinoe said. “A symbol of the art, culture and science of its era. And it says much about the class system. Today museums are open to everyone, but then only royalty and the aristocracy had the time or the finances to indulge in studying the natural world.”

  “Exactly. In examining the cabinet’s contents, you can literally travel back to the Middle Ages and see what enticed and enchanted the learned men of that time.”

  Since she’d come to stay at La Belle Fleur, Jac had gone back to the Middle Ages a different way—taken a much more upsetting route. She was sure she’d prefer examining a cabinet.

 
They walked into a large light-gray room that glittered with dozens of different size cases holding antique globes, shining brass telescopes, rare books, silver and mapmaking instruments.

  In the center, enclosed in a large glass cylinder, was the item they had come to see. The ebony, warm golden woods, semiprecious stones and gilt trim glowed. Over eight feet tall and half as wide, it was an imposing piece that seemed to soak up all the light in the room and outshine all the other treasures.

  Jac’s eyes were drawn to the top of the cabinet. A dark-brown textured cup was encased in gilded silver and decorated with iridescent mother-of-pearl, twisting coral branches and crystal, all held up by an exquisitely sculpted silvered sculpture of Neptune, god of the sea, with his trident.

  “That is a Seychelles nut,” Ebsen said, noticing Jac’s fascination with the crowning arrangement. And then he turned back to Melinoe.

  “I’ve closed off this room so that you can view the cabinet in private. If you will allow me . . .” He gestured to the center of the room. Melinoe followed him, Jac went next, and Serge held back. He was acting strangely. Jac wondered if he was jealous of how Melinoe was treating the curator. Surely he’d seen his stepsister act out before. So what was bothering him?

  “Your request was quite unusual,” Ebsen said. “We haven’t returned all the items to the cabinet since we took them out and put them on display.”

  “And I do appreciate you doing it for me now. I just really wanted to be able to experience this marvel the way its maker intended,” Melinoe said.

  Ebsen opened the glass case. The door swung out, and he was able to slide the cabinet forward so they all could stand around.

  “It really is an architectural marvel,” Ebsen said as he rotated it. “This upper section of drawers and compartments rests on a ball-bearing device so those who came to view the cabinet could sit and watch it move. Down here . . .” He pulled out a drawer, which turned into a small stepladder. “This enabled visitors to reach the uppermost parts to view them. And here . . .” He pulled a fold-out table from the undersection. “A viewing table complete with a cushion. A luxurious respite for your arms if examining the masterpiece exhausted you.”