High Stakes Trial

by Mindy Klasky

  It shouldn’t have mattered—three cases against me or two. But seeing that new filing stripped something from my soul.

  I really was an outsider. The Empire truly considered me a threat.

  The wheels of justice were grinding forward, and I was going to be crushed.

  And the awful irony was that the amulet no longer held magic. It no longer connected me to my past, to the father I’d never met, to my unknown imperial nature.

  I longed for someone who could teach me, a guide who knew more about the amulet than I did. The sphinxes weren’t going to help me. Vampires kept lousy records.

  But staring at the court files, my eyes were once again drawn to one name: Mohammed Apep.

  Chris and I had already done research on the man. I’d read about his generous gifts, his love for his adopted country, his absolute refusal to be seen or photographed. Better investigative journalists than I had tried—and failed—to track down the elusive philanthropist.

  Nevertheless, I started typing away. This time, I used court-specific databases, relying on the high-powered search engines of Westlaw. Without hesitating, I billed my searches to Angelique’s administrative account.

  The subterfuge was worthwhile. My screen was immediately filled with more articles than I’d been able to find by searching the Internet at large, and at first glance every one of them seemed relevant.

  Before I could study the results, though, the business center door opened. This time, Samuel didn’t surprise me with his “Ma’am.” This time, he wasn’t cautiously polite.

  “Yes?” I asked, forcing myself to give him a neutral stare.

  “I’m going to have to insist that you finish your work.”

  I looked pointedly at the empty workstations. “Does someone else need this computer?” I asked.

  “The business center is a privilege we reserve for Grand Duke guests,” Samuel said. “Paying guests.”

  “Which is precisely why I’m here,” I said.

  “If you could just give me your name, Ms….”

  “Smith,” I said levelly. “Susan Smith.”

  The exasperation on his face would have been perfectly clear in German, French, Italian, or Spanish. “And if you could show me your room key, Ms. Smith?”

  I flashed him my decoy piece of plastic, adding a deadly smile. I was typing before the door closed as he went off to check Ms. Smith’s mythical reservation.

  I didn’t have time to read articles about Apep’s familiar gifts—his restoring the buildings on the Mall, the American University professorship focusing on the history of civilization. I flew through the databases, keeping one eye on the door. It wouldn’t take Samuel long to discover that Susan Smith wasn’t registered at the hotel.

  I almost shouted out loud when I hit pay dirt.

  The article wasn’t in a newspaper or a glossy magazine. It wasn’t an academic inquiry into the nature of war.

  It was a school kid’s class project, collected in an obscure journal about early childhood education. The article discussed the ongoing value of having children write essays about What I Did Last Summer.

  Kayleigh Sanders had taken a trip to Washington DC. She had to visit the National Cathedral “because everybody in my family gets to choose a place, and that’s what my sister wanted to see because the Cathedral looks like a castle in The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or something like that, but I can’t watch those shows because they’re too violent.”

  Kayleigh was bored by “rows and rows of benches inside.” But she warmed to the cathedral’s gargoyles. And she was absolutely fascinated by the stained glass windows. “There’s a moon rock in the center of one, and there’s a scarab in another, which is a beetle that lived in Egypt centuries and centuries ago. It’s in a window called The History of Civilization, and it was given by a really rich man named Mohammed Apep.”

  She included a picture of the scarab window. The tiny image wasn’t very clear. But one thing stood out immediately: A dark oval shape, centered in the field of glass.

  The fingers of my right hand drifted over my left wrist. I remembered the new insignia Sekhmet had shared with me, the oval, bisected by a solid line. If I squinted at Kayleigh’s project, I could imagine that shape in her report. I could believe that Sekhmet had marked me with a scarab.

  I glanced at the hotel front desk. Samuel was talking to a man in a dark blue suit. Both of them were looking at the business center. Blue Suit raised a hand, waving over a uniformed security guard.

  I plunged my hand into my jacket pocket, ready to fish out my bogus room key and try one last bluff. My fingers brushed against the amulet, though, and I felt a tingle.

  The faience didn’t ignite with the same power I’d felt in the museum. It didn’t send energy coursing up my arm, threatening the very rhythm of my heart. But it did hum, just a little, just enough to let a hyper-vigilant woman on the verge of detection know that something was afoot.

  I needed to see the National Cathedral’s scarab window. Now.

  The glass door opened. Samuel glared at me, his face flushed dark with victory as he let Blue Suit precede him into the business center. “Ms. Smith,” Blue Suit said.

  “Thank you,” I answered, as if he’d offered me something of value. “I was just leaving.”

  Blue Suit gave a curt nod to the security guards, who fell in beside me. Neither one touched my body, but they force-walked me to the hotel’s massive revolving door. I only had a moment to glance over my shoulder and see Samuel’s gloating smile.

  Then, I was out on the street. In the open. With less than a dollar to my name and a million-dollar price tag on my head.

  33

  I felt like a thoroughbred racehorse parading around the paddock before the start of the Kentucky Derby. For the moment, I was free to go anywhere. I could circle around. I could buck off my pursuers. I could take a power walk around the block.

  But any minute now, I’d be forced into the tight confines of the starting block. And when the pistol fired and the gates opened—when I actually used my credit card—I’d be forced to run for my life.

  These few minutes were the end of my life as a normal person. This was the moment for dramatic last words. If I’d smoked cigarettes, now was the time to light up.

  I didn’t smoke. I didn’t have a family to receive my final words of wisdom. Here, at the end of the road, I didn’t have anything to say to anyone, to the Den or to Chris or to James.

  As I blinked in the late-afternoon sunlight, I realized that wasn’t completely true. I did have someone to talk to. I had the friend who’d stood beside me before I ever discovered my paranormal life. I had Allison.

  My cell phone had long-since died; it was entombed in James’s Prius three levels below ground. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a pay phone in DC.

  But I was standing across the street from the Convention Center. Surely, a meeting place as large as that one would have pay phones. Someone who visited DC on business had to arrive without a cell.

  I crossed at the light and sauntered up the ramp with a group of conventioneers. It looked as if the International Brotherhood of Amalgamated Associations was having their annual meeting. I slipped past the giant posters announcing a full week of panels and workshops.

  It only took a minute to find the international symbol for Telephone, displayed next to directional signs for restrooms, escalators, and a nearby subway station. I descended to the Exhibit Hall and walked the length of the floor before I found a bank of four black-and-silver phones.

  I dug in the pocket of my jeans and pulled out my last two quarters. They clanged as the phone ate them, and a loud dial tone demanded my attention.

  It took me a moment to remember Allison’s number; I was accustomed to tapping the icon next to her name. The phone rang four times, and then a recording answered—Allison’s somewhat harried plea for me to leave a message, as Nora gabbled in the background.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s me. Sarah. I
just wanted to call… I wanted to say…”

  I thought about the last time I’d talked to Allison, about how I’d asked her for information, asked her to help me. It seemed like I was always asking for something, always taking. That wasn’t the way things used to be. That wasn’t the way our friendship had started.

  “I just wanted to find out how you’re doing. You and Nora. I think about you, both of you, a lot. I hope you’re well. If we were getting together for dinner, I’d bring string cheese and baked sweet potato and a handful of Cheerios.”

  Those were all of Nora’s favorites.

  “And cupcakes!” I added quickly. Then I said, “I miss you. I hope I can see you soon.”

  I hung up before my throat constricted my words into a sob.

  I settled my palm over the amulet. I could still feel something, a low-level, expectant hum. It was time to head to the National Cathedral.

  The Convention Center offered a convenient entrance to my underground parking garage. I found the Prius without any problem, and I started the engine. When I slipped my credit card into the fare machine, I half expected alarms to go off, complete with flashing lights and a portcullis dropping across the garage entrance.

  Instead, the machine spat out a receipt and wished me a mechanical good afternoon. I barely refrained from laying down rubber on the exit ramp.

  Fighting the urge to run every red light in the city, I worked my way out of downtown. The cathedral sat on high ground north of Georgetown, allowing me to cruise past some luxurious neighborhoods. My route took me along Embassy Row, and I found myself studying the various official buildings and their brightly colored flags. I wondered which countries had no extradition treaty.

  For that matter, I wondered which of the embassies had security cameras trained on the street, focused at an angle that would pick up my vehicle. I considered each major intersection, wondering if my presence was being monitored by traffic cameras.

  My eyes shifted constantly to my rear-view mirror, and I strained my ears for sirens in the distance. The EBI’s jurisdiction was limited; the Empire took most of its enforcement actions under the secrecy of night. But mundane authorities had no such scruples.

  I ditched the car a few blocks from the cathedral. Technically, I needed a residence sticker to park in the neighborhood, but I was willing to risk a ticket. Only as I passed through the heavy iron gate to the cathedral grounds did I realize that any ticket would be billed to James. He’d be responsible, once again, for my shortcomings.

  I should care. But every time I tried to muster a sense of guilt, I pictured the rage on his face as he shredded Chris’s Welcome the Night brochure. A parking ticket was nothing, compared to the affront of the New Commission.

  This time, though, my familiar twinge of guilt about Chris’s plans melted into another emotion: Anger. I was angry that James had lurked in my home. I was furious that he’d raided my nightstand. I was enraged that he’d confronted me in my own kitchen without giving me a chance to explain, on the very night when I’d destroyed my professional and personal life for him.

  He’d asked me to trust him, to destroy Richardson’s court records because he, James, said that was necessary. Well, I had trusted him. But he hadn’t trusted me, not enough to listen to an explanation of Welcome the Night.

  For the past week, I’d believed my emotions didn’t matter. I could force an orderly solution to the chaos my life had become. I’d thought there was a way for me to escape, to make things right with the Eastern Empire and the mundane authorities. I could believe my lie as long as I was hiding at the Grand Duke, as long as I was removed from the everyday world.

  I’d even held on to the fiction that I was somehow still a sphinx. I’d had a child’s naive confidence in the Empire, an Easter-Bunny-Tooth-Fairy-Santa-Claus certainty that the Den and the Sun Lion would somehow intervene to make my problems disappear.

  Now that I was on the run, I had the clear-eyed certainty of prey. The Den and the Sun Lion were part of my past. James was out of my life forever.

  But I still had the amulet. I still had Sekhmet. I still had the secret of Sheut, a secret that—judging from the increasing hum emanating from my pocket—was inextricably linked to the scarab window in the mighty cathedral before me.

  Find the Seal, Sekhmet had said. And save my children.

  Nothing else in my life had worked out as I’d planned. But I still had my charge from the goddess. I still had the goal she’d set for me. The amulet told me I was closer than ever to finding the Seal. Maybe I could still serve Sekhmet, still save her children, even though I was lost and outcast and alone.

  I walked through a stone doorway, ready to face my destiny.

  And I came up short, in front of a ticket window. The kiosk would have been perfectly in place outside a movie theater or a theme park. The woman behind the glass window was a dead ringer for Mrs. Claus, complete with twinkling eyes and spun-cotton hair.

  “Are you here for a tour, dear?” she asked.

  “Um, yes, please.”

  “Which one?” she asked with a laugh.

  The one that goes to the scarab, I thought. But I didn’t want to call attention to my quest, so I rephrased. “I’m interested in the stained glass windows.”

  My answer earned me another bell-like laugh. “You’re in luck, then! Geordie McIntosh is leading a roof-top tour in fifteen minutes. That’ll be twenty-seven dollars.”

  “Twenty-seven—” I cut myself short. The fee sounded exorbitant, especially for an unemployed former civil servant.

  But my day-to-day expenses would plummet as soon as I was incarcerated. And I needed the ticket so I could track down an ancient Egyptian artifact that spoke to the very fiber of my soul.

  Twenty-seven dollars was a small price for magic. I took out my credit card.

  And then I had another moment of hesitation. It had been one thing to use the card as I left the parking garage. The EBI and the police might identify where I’d been, but they’d had no way of guessing my ultimate destination.

  If I charged the ticket now, it would be like sending a flare from the cathedral’s bell tower.

  “Dear?” the woman asked, her apple-doll face starting to crumple into a frown.

  As if in response, the amulet buzzed. Not like my cell phone, nothing that pronounced. Rather, I could feel the charm’s…presence. Its expectation.

  I handed over my credit card.

  Geordie McIntosh turned out to be a spry man, dressed in wide-wale camel-colored corduroys and a bristly green-wool sweater. A flat tweed cap covered his greying red curls, and he had a Burberry scarf knotted around his throat. He looked overjoyed to be leading our group of eleven dedicated tourists.

  “All right, then,” he said, and I caught a whisper of a Scottish accent underneath his words. “We’ll be climbing a few hundred stairs on this tour, and we’ll work through some stone passageways that are a wee bit tight. We’ll be on the roof too, where ye can look down on the courtyard, from the base of the bell chamber. Anyone here weak in the legs, or claustrophobic, or scared of heights?”

  We all attested that we could handle the challenges ahead.

  “Let’s go, then!” Geordie exclaimed, leading the way into the cathedral’s heart.

  My fellow tourists followed close behind our guide, whipping out phones and taking countless photos as Geordie gave us an architectural overview of the magnificent stone building. Narthex, Geordie proclaimed with relish, pointing to the covered stone anteroom behind us. Nave. Transept. Apse.

  I heard the words. I followed Geordie’s pointing fingers, nodding as if the world around me was making sense for the first time in my life. I craned my neck to study the groin vaulting, with its load-bearing boss stones that weighed up to five tons.

  As fascinating as the stonework was, though, I was focused on the glass. Geordie obligingly told us that the Te Deum windows were sixty-five feet in height. They were cleaned and restored after the 2011 earthquake that had damaged t
he cathedral, sending stone finials to the ground and severely damaging a turret on the south side of the building.

  Other windows had been removed after the earthquake. After much prayerful debate, stained glass depictions of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson had been taken down. The gaping holes were covered over until suitable replacements could be devised.

  A moon rock was enshrined in the famous Space Window. The stone was sealed between two pieces of tempered glass, preserved in a nitrogen environment to keep it from deteriorating.

  “Any questions before we begin our climb?” Geordie asked.

  I raised my hand, the left one. My right fingers curled around the amulet in my pocket. In response to Geordie’s gracious nod, I asked, “I heard there was a window about Civilization?”

  “Aye,” Geordie said. “The Scarab Set. We’ll get a good view of it from the roof.”

  The amulet jerked beneath my palm, a single hard contraction that mimicked my upstart heart. I held the faience close and tried to wait patiently while the other people in the group asked their own questions. Or, to be more accurate, made their own comments, extensive explanations of which windows they liked the most, and when they’d first seen vaulted ceilings, and how they used to think the phrase was “flying butler” instead of “flying buttress.”

  Finally, mercifully, we began our climb to the cathedral roof.

  The stairs rose in stages, taking us first to the clerestory aisles, then to a massive storage area that arched over the nave’s ceiling. We passed a rehearsal room where the cathedral’s musical staff could practice playing the carillon on a full-size keyboard that was not attached to actual bells. We saw mammoth statues, two times the height of a man, waiting to be cleaned and returned to the elements. And in one room, perched on a shelf high above the floor, we saw a row of dusty bottles, each labeled with a year, to celebrate another twelve months of labor from the expert stonemasons who had carved the building’s gargoyles.