by Smith, Skye
Back to the immediate problem. In Windsor, all she did was walk down the high-street to the CopyCentral storefront and have them create the DVD's for her, and ship them via FedEx to Vancouver. Erik would sign for them within two days. She included a 'miss you' kind of note, and a separate 'what's going on' kind of note that ended with the question, 'Why would a ring made of bog iron transmit auras as if it was a quartz crystal?'
She was gone from the hotel room for less than an hour, and Wendy did not even miss her. Actually, Wendy had been spending a lot of time with Sir Nigel, presumably paying her debt for the trouble in Cambridge, or maybe just working off some of her horniness.
Unfortunately, Maya still had the problem of who to get to type up some translations of the Olde English scrolls. Translating the complete works could be months of work. It had soon become obvious that finding a translator was not much of a problem. Finding a translator who she could trust was the real problem. Anyone who knew Olde English that well would be connected enough to the field to steal a copy for themselves, and then make themselves famous or infamous within the History Faculties of England.
After much long thought, she decided that she must give Jacob another chance. It was only fair. The original scrolls were in his care. He should reap any benefits. Besides, he already knew Maya and her situation. If necessary she could use sex to convince him, well maybe, if necessary, but only if necessary.
This thought stayed in her mind for hours. Sometimes it made her smile, you know, just the thought of being naughty and seducing an older man. Sometimes it made her frown, you know, having to be mauled by a dirty old man. Sometimes it made her eyes well up, you know, the thought of cheating on Erik and Karl.
She saw Jacob every day at the interviews, and she knew he was watching her, watching her a lot, but every time she tried to catch his eye he would nervously flick them away. After the last interview, he would be first out the door and away down the halls, which would force her to wait for Wendy to escort her through the campus.
In a few more days they would be finished with the interviews of the new applicants to the schools. As this meant she would no longer have call to see Jacob again, she convinced Wendy to escort her to his office. He wasn't there, but his computer was still on. Wendy watched her sit at the computer and curse. "He locked it."
"Do you want me to unlock it for you?" Wendy asked.
Maya looked up at her. She really was a showoff. "Yes, please."
It took Wendy less than a minute and then she handed the keyboard back to Maya. "I know the Admin password for all the school's computers."
It took Maya mere moments to find the folder that had contained the scanned image files of the scrolls. She took a deep breath. They were still there. Jacob hadn't destroyed them after all. Not only that, but now there were more files in the same folder. She opened one. It was the beginnings of a translation of Saint Margaret's scroll.
She skimmed through it. It wasn't a translation of the full volume, but the translation of specific paragraphs. Oh, the dear man, he is still looking for provenance for her ring. Each of the scroll files had an associated translation file. She pulled her tiny USB stick from her purse and plugged it in and started copying the new files. Being text files and not images, they were not large. The copy wouldn't take long.
While the copy was working she opened a file called 'For Maya'. She blushed and gasped. It was a love poem. Wendy looked over her shoulder and snickered.
"He may be an excellent historian but he is a terrible poet," Wendy whispered. "What have you been doing with him?"
"Nothing, honest, well, maybe one kiss. I mean, like, read it. He is an old-fashioned romantic. He has me, like, on a pedestal to be adored." The copy had finished, so Maya closed all the things she had opened and ejected her USB stick and locked the screen. "Come on, he's not coming, let's go." She felt a bit guilty slinking away with his secret, but she couldn't wait to get back to the Inn so she could read the files.
* * * * *
Back in the room, she read the translations, all three, only once, but she read the silly poem over and over. Nobody had every written a poem for her before. She sighed again and again every time she read it.
This did not escape Wendy's attention. "You are just as silly of an old-fashioned romantic as he is. If he were to walk through that door right now, you would be all over him kissing him and hugging him."
"Has anyone ever written a poem for you?" Maya spoke lazily, as if she was stoned.
"That's not the point," Wendy was quick to explain. "You can't go getting yourself romantically involved with that dusty old professor just because you are in love with the romance of a poem."
"Why not? He's a gentleman. He's awkward. He's innocent. He's not in bad shape for someone over forty. Why not?"
"Because," Wendy searched for words. "Because the moment you bed him you will be knocked off the pedestal and he will treat you like snot."
"Oooh, touched a nerve, eh?" Maya reached behind her and pulled Wendy close. "Who was he?"
"My Spanish teacher. He was tall and dark and Guatemalan, and I was sixteen and a fresh flower very ready to be plucked."
"And did he? Pluck you, I mean?"
"No, I encouraged him, and teased him, and we went dancing a lot, and the whole time he paid court to me he was polite, and adoring, and non sexual." Wendy knelt beside Maya's chair and rested her head against Maya's chest. "It all went bad the day I got tired of waiting for him to seduce me, and seduced him."
"This sounds familiar. I have Latina friends in California."
"Yeah, well, they probably knew what to expect. I didn't. To a Latin man there are two types of women. The Virgin Mary and her image in his mother, sisters, wife, and daughters. All other women are Mary the whore who must be used harshly to punish her for making him sin."
"And you..."
"And as soon as I shagged him, I morphed from the Virgin Mary to Mary the Whore. It went from the most perfect romantic love affair, to something cruel and ugly, like, almost immediately." Wendy rubbed the first swelling of tears from her eyes by pushing her face between Maya's breasts.
Maya stroked her friend's hair gently, slowly. "Gee, it sounds like our relationship. I mean, admit it. Romantically we are so connected, but if we take it to the carnal level, it will get weird and we will break apart and lose both friendship and romance."
"I will lose more than you." Wendy nuzzled closer to enjoy the waves of goodness radiating out from the breasts.
"You mean my aura?"
"That and, well, look at me. I am a glamour tart. I swirl in a world of men's men, always being the trophy woman. When I am with you, I am the young knight. I am the champion, vigorous and commanding. You are my trophy."
Maya stopped touching the silky hair with her hands and began hovering them instead. Wendy sighed deeply and gave herself over to the delicious sensations. Maya whispered, "My time at this school is almost finished. The interviews will end soon."
Wendy twisted her head so she could look into Maya's hypnotic eyes. "Hasn't Sir Nigel told you? He wants you to divvy the entire senior class." She regretted saying it immediately because Maya pulled back and pushed her away. "I thought you knew. The results of your divvying of the new entrants have disturbed him. He expected a 'gifted' rate of about fifty percent. It is barely twenty percent. He needs to know if the rate is the same in the older boys."
"I have a life, you know." Maya was angry, and trying to keep it under control. She wasn't angry with Wendy, far from it. She was angry with that darker than dark, psycho executive headmaster, Sir Nigel. "I have a career in the movies, and the studio wants me to sign a new contract."
"Oh, give me a break," Wendy pulled away from her. "You dare compare being an extra in silly vampire movie to what is going down around here. Think about it. Think about what you did in Cambridge. In what world are silly vampire movies more important than actual, real, witches, or being involved with some of the most powerful families on ear
th?" She regretted her words immediately, despite their truth.
* * * * *
* * * * *
MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith
Chapter 20 - Saving the Angel
Whatever was to become of a romance with Jacob, or with Wendy, or the divvying of the senior class, which all seemed so important Thursday night, dulled to nothingness by Friday, the last day of interviews. On that day, everything changed.
Maya's first movie was released on DVD on Thursday (one of those emails that Maya had marked as read and had filed without reading). That night half the boys in the school watched the pirate copy that had immediately gone viral on the web. By Friday morning, some students had made copies of the promo poster and had plastered them throughout the campus.
'It had to be THAT poster', thought Maya grimly to herself. The one showing her terrified and pressed against a chain link fence, with her heaving bosom covered by a strategically tattered, almost diaphanous white school girl's blouse, and with a school girl's mini kilt hiked up high enough to almost, but not quite, show everything.
That afternoon Maya had to be escorted off the campus by a phalanx of school masters, because every boy in the school had skipped their last class to watch for her. Sir Nigel was not amused.
She was left alone in the room at the Inn because Wendy had been called to an emergency Board of Directors meeting along with the Sir Nigel, the Black Knight. She was ordered not to leave the room under any circumstances, so as soon as Wendy had gone, she packed her things, rented a car and drove to Cambridge.
Or rather she took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, or was it Hatfield, and found herself lost in the hilltop town of Saint Albans. Maya had never been able to figure out the GPS in her phone, and the freeway signs in England always seemed to stand directly after the critical turn, rather than directly before it. Very confusing, to her, anyway.
Not that she was angry about being led astray into Saint Albans. It was a fabulous place and as different from Cambridge as day and night. Well, of course. One was on the top of a steep hill, while the other was on the flats. Even the architecture was different. One thing they did share in common was a total scarcity of parking.
After circling the monstrously huge and spooky cathedral about four times, she beat five other cars to a just opened up space, and did a textbook parallel park on the wrong side of the street, which was the right side for her. The man in the vacating car had liked her looks, so he had blocked the other cars so that she won the race for the spot, and even gave her his parking ticket for her dash. It had an hour left on it.
She ignored the angry beeps of the other would-be parkers, grabbed her map, locked up the car and marched up hill to find a tourist office. Surely they would know how to get from here to Cambridge. Near the top of the steep hill, a bitch in her sling-backed pumps, she had to choose between a short road that seemed to go to the ancient cathedral and another that seemed to go to an ancient bell tower.
She chose the cathedral. When she got near to the door and looked up, she gasped. It was as high as a mountain and yet clumsy-looking and stout. It must have been built before grace blessed the architects. Inside was just as huge, and very spooky. All the tourist information was about the church so she didn't linger longer than it took to stare at the stained glass windows. How did they do that?
The other road, the one to the bell tower, brought her out at a market square. This was more like it. She was standing there reading all of the signs hoping for one that said 'tourist office' when she spotted the one that said 'Bigbucks Coffee'. Right, always time enough for a sit and a drink.
She took a just-vacated window seat and waited for her frothy coffee. She was amazed. Well, first that Bigbucks prices here were identical to the ones at home, but you paid in pounds, not in dollars. She didn't even want to think of the converted price. What really amazed her was that at home Bigbucks usually had a view of a mall or a freeway off ramp. Here you got a view of a fourteen hundred-year-old tower with a backdrop of cutesy medieval shops. It was the best Bigbucks coffee she had ever had. She liked coffee best when she could stir in a breathtaking view.
It turned out that she didn't need the tourist office anyway, because the local cops were having coffee at the next table, and one of them offered to lead her out of town and back to the freeway. It seemed like a simple solution until she tried to keep up with him as he whizzed around roundabouts, but sure enough, bingo, soon she was back on the freeway and he was waving goodbye.
In Cambridge she decided to stay at the new Travel Motel at the closest freeway exit so she wouldn't have to figure out the town's one way streets, or endure the continuous trial of finding parking. The place was more like a new freeway motel in California, the ones called 'express' something-or-other where you don’t park directly in front of your room's door, but instead had to enter through a lobby and haul your stuff down a long hallway.
She turned on the light and sighed with relief. It was new and clean and spacious. It had lights that worked and a shower that spewed out endless amounts of hot water in a torrent, not a trickle. It even had the German-style bedding where the top sheet was actually a sheet bag containing a comforter. All very clean, and very easy to keep clean. Ooops, the TV still only had four channels. Gee she missed having a hundred cable channels, even if there was never anything worth watching on any of them.
Still, since her arrival in England she had been staying in rooms in buildings which, how would real estate agents describe them? Oh yes, 'oozing with charm' or 'reeking of tradition'. It was so pleasant to stay in a room in a building that did not ooze anything or reek of anything. Especially not cabbage and spaniels.
After an endless hot shower, she dressed for hiking, which just meant she swapped her sling backs for her cross trainers, but kept the same sundress and shawl. On her way to the car she stopped at the front desk to find a tourist map of Cambridge, and some directions into town and to parking.
There was no need. A sister hotel in the center of town used this hotel's parking lot as overflow, and therefore there was a 'half-hourly' shuttle between the two. She caught the very next shuttle, forty minutes later.
* * * * *
She had set many tasks for herself here in Cambridge, but the first and most pressing was to find Angelica and the girls and tell them that they needn't fear about the police investigation. They were off the hook. The sister hotel where the shuttle parked was the other side of the market from the college where she had last stayed, so she first tried asking around at the college. That was a lost cause.
She sat down and thought about where young women would hang in this town, and decided to follow the next bunch she saw. They led her to an ice-cream parlor. They turned out to be Italian tourists. She tried again, this time choosing a group of Goths. She checked the time in a watchmakers shop window. Seven PM. The Goths were out of bed early today.
Discretely, but not so far back as to loose them, she followed them through some archways and some narrow alleys, and eventually to a coffee shop down some stone steps in a damp dungeon of a location. The tobacco smoke billowed out of it every time someone opened the door. No way. She didn't want to smell like an ash tray for days.
Across the alley was an ancient stone horse trough planted with flowers. She perched on the corner of it and waited. She would ask the next young women she saw if they knew Beatrice. Beatrice was pretty recognizable with her quickly flushing face and was a local for sure, because she still lived at home and borrowed her mom's car.
The next girls were two more Goths. No, they had never heard of Beatrice. "She runs with some friends," Maya held one of them back with a hand. "Fiona, Katy?" The girl was shaking her head and pulling away. "Angelica?"
"Why didn't you say so. Everyone in Cambridge knows Angie," one of the girls piped up. "Everyone who counts, anyway. Six months ago two guys tried to mug and rape one of her friends. She beat the crap out of them. I mean, literally. One of them shit himself. I heard the
other was rushed to hospital with balls swollen to the size of oranges."
"I heard grapefruits," piped in the other girl. "She's every girl's hero. She laid those bastards out good and proper."
"Where can I find her? It's important."
Both girls looked at each other and shrugged and whispered to each other secretly. Maya looked at them both and knew they were hiding something. Hiding. Of course. "Look, I know she is hiding from the cops. I have some good news for her. She doesn't need to hide anymore."
The girls looked at each other again. They both nodded. "Okay, come with us." They started walking down a side alley, a very narrow side alley. Maya followed. They didn't go far. They took a fire escape up the back of what looked like an old riverside warehouse and tapped on a window. There was no room on the landing for three, so Maya stood on the rusted steps.
The window opened and there was hurried whispering. Then a face peered down at her. Angelica. She looked ghastly, like she hadn't slept for days. The two girls were dismissed by Angelica and squeezed by Maya on their way down. Maya stepped up to the window and climbed through. Inside was a pigsty.
"It's condemned for humans cause of the risk of fire and the rats," Angelica said. "I sleep in that tent over there so that I don't get creepy crawlies all over me." She shivered involuntarily. No wonder she looked like she needed sleep. "What's this news you've got for me?"
"You don't need to hide anymore. The police aren't looking for us anymore. They've even shredded us from their investigations."
"You're joking. When did this happen? The others too?"
"Our carload only. Last week. Uh, you were hard to find." Maya said to explain the delay.
"That was the idea. I even turned off my phone. You ever go a week without texting? I usually do a text message every ten minutes. Well, thanks for keeping up the search." She looked around at the horror of where she had been hiding. "Fuck, let's get out of here." Angelica climbed through the still-open window.